The Joy of Revising

I began last week to reread and revise a manuscript I finished two years ago.  When I finished writing,   I was thoroughly exhausted.  Apparently, even before that I looked as done in as I fwas starting to feel, because one evening, after a class I was taking with him, my rabbi said, You know, you could finish your book and drop dead. The other day, I told him that he'd been more right than wrong about what that manuscript was taking out of me. He did not know, for example, that the only thing I did besides work on the manuscript was to take that class. Oh, I brushed my teeth every morning and showered every night--at least one of which I neglected when I was writing my first novel several decades ago.

So tired was I when I finished the book, that I put it away without making any changes or even reading it through. 

Last week, I decided it was time to print out the manuscript and see if time had lent me enough distance to decide if it was good and, if I thought it was, to revise it productively. Some years ago I heard my brother, who is also a writer, say that it was important, in revising a manuscript, not to "dis-improve" it. The word's not in my dictionaries, but it is a fine word. And in reworking any of my writing, I always keep it in mind, just behind the forefront. For it has to be there, or one may start to fiddle too much with what works. Mostly, to me, revising means cutting out the flab I notice, and moving some phrases around so the reader doesn't have to read sentences two or three times to understand them. Because reading a book shouldn't involve manual labor.

I've read and revised 129 pages so far. And the experience is giving me joy. I'd forgotten that part: how it feels to do the actual work of making something you wrote, better. Joy--one word I won't need to revise.

A Resolution

I need to make a resolution. Otherwise, I will continue to squander my days instead of spending them as carefully as I spend money.

I don't want to phrase my resolution so tightly that it chokes off other possibilities; but I don't want to make it so fluid that my work hours will drip away into a puddle at day's end.

So here it is: instead of looking for projects that pay--which feeds my lifelong fear of ending up in genuine squalor--I will spend some money on things I want and/or need  (or both) and spend my time revising my spiritual manuscript until I feel it's entirely free of self-indulgence and therefore ready to show to an agent. And then show it.

So help me, God.  Please?

Father Lloyd and Me

Yesterday, I had a morning appointment at Cornell-New York Hospital with my neurologist. He's an unusually pleasant man,  whose only fault in my eyes is that he's so laid-back that I sometimes fear he'll tip his chair  over backward.

Afterward, I met Father Lloyd for lunch. This is a ritual I observe whenever my hospital appointments are on a weekday. Seeing one another pleases us both. I think my visits please him because I remind him about his good will and patience toward me when, as a reluctant catechumen, I took the Paulist Center conversion class three times. I must have asked a thousand questions--only because I controlled my desire to ask more. The visits please me because, at ninety-two, he remains the most open "dinosaur" (his word, not mine). I enjoy his enormous pleasure in my ongoing love for the Church, and how he examines and re-examines the meaning for him of his own father's Jewishness. Most of all, though, what bonds us is how visceral our faith is in God.  The same. The One.

Louis Stein - An Anniversary

This year, I was lucky. Most years, the Jewish calendar, Jewish tradition, and my heart lead me to observe the anniversary of my father's death three times: on the date of his death according to the Jewish calendar; in synagogue on the Saturday preceding the jewish date or, if I cannot make that one, the Saturday after; and on the "American" date.  The fortunate part this year was that the date according to the Jewish calendar fell on a Saturday, the first two dates melded into one.

I lit a Yahrzeit candle on Friday evening, before lighting my Sabbath candles. It would burn throughout that night and into the following evening. I said a few words, aloud, addressed to my father rather than God, because there is no prayer to accompany the lighting of a yahrzeit candle. I find this absence of a "set' prayer very strange, for Judaism is dense with prayers for even the most commonplace of quotidian activities. On the other hand, I like the freedom to address my father rather than God at this singular candle-lighting.

At services the following morning, I was given an aliyah (called "up" to the Torah to say a blessing and stand beside the Torah reader as he chanted a portion of the day's reading). Somepeople say the prayer both before and after their part quickly. Some even mumble. I do not hurry through it. I say it slowly.  I try to share it. I feel the honor. But not my father.

Because, yesterday as every year, it's on the "American" date, that I "felt" it. "It" being my father's presence in my life--and his absence. The latter has been far longer than his presence. Louis Stein died when I was nine, and he was fifty-two. As years went by, missing him became more and more replaced by questions about him and the sort of man he was aside from being my tateh (father). In recent years, the questions have faded, though they remain unanswered. And, overlaying them, is a kind of acceptance. That Louis Stein was a complicated man, like most of us. And that, even if I am blessed to encounter him after I die, I will probably not tarnish that moment by confronting him with my questions. Chances are, I will love him then, unquestioningly, even as I did when we both were too young for him to die.

For isn't it possible that that's what heaven is, freedom at last from all our questions?

Boston: Not So Fine

Like almost everyone I know, I was magnetized by the coverage of the Boston marathon on tv. No matter how many times I saw the same pictures, I didn't leave the set. My emotions were many, and I expect that that, too, I shared with millions of other Americans.

But now I find myself dismayed by the repeated announcements that Boston is back to normal. After dutifully staying inside as instructed, Bostonians jammed the streets in joy that the second bomber was in custody; baseball came back; this morning,  the second bomber is even communicating (in writing because he cannot speak). God's hanging out above Boston again. 

No one on TV has said that nothing will ever be quite "normal" again for the people who lost a limb (or two) last Monday. Would someone please tell me why?  is there a chance that would dampen the mood just a tad?

Where Was God?

April 17, 2013.


Whenever a horrifying man-created act occurs, one hears someone ask "Where was God?"  Meaning: if God exists, why did she allow this to happen? Why didn't She stop the perpetrators before they had a chanace to complete their terrible deed?  Why didn't God see to it that there was a warning?  There are many possible versions of the question.  Many.  Often, the question is asked calmly by non-believers, the current devastation yet another proof that God does not exist. Because if a God existed, surely she would intervene in the plans of terrorists--or tragically demented teenagers. But believers, too, grief-stricken for victims they never met, may whisper, "Where was God?"  Their belief in God's existence not shaken, but their "faith" in God's power and love may be.

In the two decades after the Shoah, a bookcase filled with books arguing these points appeared.  I myself was overtaken by the question a week before a Yom HaShoah service at my synagogue, the first I would ever attend. I was new to synagogue life--and, indeed, to practicing Judaism. For four days, I sat on my bed and sought an answer to "Where was God"  during the Jew-killing? When Jews were cremated in the death camps by the efficient Nazi murder-machine, where was God? That particular question pushed at me, pushed inside me, pushed me to the limits of my mind's strength to use reason to come to an answer that didn't immediately shrink to an excuse.

As I sat, I wrote, filling page after page of a yellow pad with phrases, thought, twigs of ideas, solitary stark words. I didn't mean to write something--a piece of writing. But whenever I am faced with a mental or emotional or spiritual hurdle, I know that, if there's any way I can vault over it, my only pole is made of words. Back then, finally, on the fourth day, I leapt at this possibility: that, when Jews were marched into the crematatoria, God went in with them.  And because the God who is central to me cannot die, she had to emerge alive--only to repeat that devastating process of companionship, over and over and over. That possible answer stayed with me, seemed to me a way God might have "lived through" the Holocaust.  And later that day, I pieced together some of the bits I'd written and began to write the meditation which emerged from my odd version of meditating. 

When, a few days later, I read what I'd written at the Yom HaShoah service at my then-synagogue, it caused some angry responses--as though I had said that God died and was resurrected. Many of my fellow members knew that I had, for some years, been a Catholic. Was I not saying--claiming!--that God died in the crematoria and was resurrected? The next morning, I stopped by my synagogue, and found that the quick anger of the night before wasn't over: the rabbi was getting indignant phone calls.  As I sat near her desk, bewildered and saddened by what people heard--but that I had not said--a member I hardly knew poked his head into the rabbi's office. She asked him what he thought my meditation was about. He hesittated only a moment or two, then said : "a singed God." His gift of insight a gift to me and, I hope, the rabbi. 

Day before yesterday in Boston, Where was God? I think she was lying in the street, one of her legs shredded.  Of course I don't know where God was, precisely, and my anthropomorphic image may be very off-putting to some; but if we are made in God's image, does not that mean God also has arms and legs a home-made bomb can wound? Maybe not.

What I am sure of is that God was in Boston Monday, perhaps yet again berating herself for having bestowed free will on her creation. But, then, perhaps, seeing all the people who ran to help the victims, God sighed with relief because they, too, were exercising free will. 

An Anniversary

April 12, 2013


In the candy store, the man behind the cash register was talking with a customer about a horse that just died. People talked about horses often there, and I didn't pay attention. I paid and headed home.  The walk was a long block to Fort Washington Avenue, then three more to my house, which was on the corner of Haven Avenue.  A few girls were playing potsy out front. They were singing something and laughing at how they were managing to keeping time as they jumped. I barely caught the words: "Roosevelt kicked the bucket, Roosevelt kicked the bucket."  I must have misunderstood. Could there be  a horse named after President Roosevelt? And why would they know about a horse dying, anyhow? They were just kids a year or two older than I was. I was nine. I hurried upstairs to get the story straight.

My father was seated in the wheelchair he occupied since returning from the hospital a few days earlier. My mother sat in a chair pulled up near the wheelchair. Both their heads were bent toward the radio. As I came in, my mother turned, motioned me over, but put her finger over her mouth, so I would be quiet. When I got close, the took me onto her lap, as though I was a baby. I listened with them, as the radio made plain that it wasn't any horse but President Roosevelt himself who had died.

A statement from Mrs. Roosevelt was being read. She asked that everyone support President Truman, who had just been sworn in. 

President Truman?  I always thought President was President Roosevelt's first name.

The rest of that Sunday was very sad in our apartment. My father took the news especially badly.  The next morning, he had to be taken back to the hospital. Eighteen days after President Roosevelt, on April 30, 1945, my tateh died.

So did Hitler.
 
Years later, when newspapers made a point of noting that it was the 40th anniversary of Hitler's death, I joked about that coincidence. Surely, I said, anyone else who died that day got into heaven one, two, three--because God must have been very busy with Mr. Hitler.

Jokes are how I get by.  But I know that there are still people in this world who miss Hitler. 

Maybe almost as much as I miss my father.