Reading, writing...that's what I do.

EUDORA WELTY….A Curtain of Green

When we moved back to Chicago, leaving our wonderful years in California, my daughter Christie sent me a book of collected short stories to read in those infrequent moments when I would not be unpacking, setting up a new household.

She sent me the work of Eudora Welty, a southern writer whose name I knew, but whose work I had not explored. But in time, I was able to quietly turn the pages of this author’s work, and thus be transported to her southern world.

Ann Patchett writes in her intro to the book: “When I first read THE COLLECTED STORIES , I thought Welty was a fabulist, a writer endowed with a superior imagination and love of tall tales. Those things are true, of course, but Welty, who spent most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house her father built when she was a child, was also telling the TRUTH.” (caps are mine)

Also, the amazing writer Donna Tartt wrote: “The reason it’s so impossible to write about Mississippi is that everyone thinks you’re exaggerating.” I LOVE THIS!

And thus, Patchett adds: “In the last 25 years in which I have been going to Mississippi regularly, I’ve come to believe that Welty was to her state what Joan Didion was to California: the clear eye of verisimilitude….There is no writer I know who tells the truth of the landscape like Welty.” 

LITERATURE RECORDS REAL LIFE 

So, if you want to take a trip to America’s south, keep reading. 

In the collection, A CURTAIN OF GREEN is the story of a southern garden. “To the neighbors gazing down from their upstairs windows it had the appearance of a sort of jungle, in which the slight, headless form of its owner lost itself….”  Foreshadowing? 

No neighbor dared go into this garden…

“Early that morning they had heard whistling in the Larkin garden. They had recognized Jamey’s tune, and had seen him kneeling in the flowers at Mrs. Larkin’s side. He was only the colored boy who worked in the neighborhood by day. Even Jamey, it was said, Mrs. Larkin would tolerate only now and then…”

BECAUSE…Mrs. Larkin’s husband had died the summer before, in an accident that echoes the fearful love of a southern garden: a tree, “a fragrant chinaberry suddenly tilting dark and slow, like a cloud leaning down to her husband, ” but crashing down on his car as he was arriving home.

And Mrs. Larkin had seen this happening, had strongly believed her love for her husband would save him. But it did not.

THUS, WELTY MUST ASK A QUESTION 

Why would a woman who loved flowers, trees, all growing things, why did she have to lose her husband this way? And what is Welty telling us? 

Then later  in the story, while the other women of the town sit inside “fanning and sighing, waiting for the rain,” Mrs Larkin is once again in her garden, where she chooses to be consistently, as again we feel the rules of the south having their say: “…since the accident in which her husband had been killed, she had never once been seen anywhere else.”

Yet hers is a fertile garden that needs “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back” to keep the plants from “overreaching their boundaries and multiplying out of all reason”. Yet Mrs Larkin in her deranged grief does none of this, instead she works incessantly, obsessively, planting more and more. 

And there is Jamey, a Black man who has helped her in this garden. Jamey kneeling in the soil and working, though the sight of him makes her so angry, that she finds herself lifting the hoe. “Life and death, she thought gripping the heavy hoe, life and death which now meant nothing to her…” And in then in this story Welty asks: “Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protect?”

“Pale darkness turned for a moment through the sunlight, like a narrow leaf blown through the garden in a wind. In that moment, the rain came. The first drop touched her upraised arm. Small close sounds and coolness touched her. 

Sighing, Mrs. Larkin lowered the hoe to the ground and laid it carefully among the growing plants. She stood still where she was, close to Jamey, and listened to the rain falling. It was so gentle. It was so full–the sound of the end of waiting.

One critic wrote: “A curtain of green” is a great read, for its exploration of how grief can derail you, making you, temporarily at least, a little mad.”  

THANKS FOR READING. 

GENERATIVITY WHAT IT IS & WHY IT IS Good FOR YOU.

This time of year we remember things we are grateful for, and families often top the list.  And our children, if we are fortunate to have some, are certainly most important.  Looking at them seated at the Thanksgiving table or hearing their voices on the phone, consciously or unconsciously reminds us: children are our legacy.  They satisfy at some level our desire for generativity: In the middle years of adult life we come to realize: “I am what survives me.”  We have the gift of creating and leaving in our culture, good people and their positive thoughts, ideas and even their art…books, paintings, films…. 

Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote, that in the middle years of adult life we come to realize: “I am what survives me.”  Though giving birth is the ultimate act of generativity, it’s the parent’s follow-through, his and her commitment to nurturing and growing this person, that truly counts. 

And it is comforting to know that we all can experience generativity by giving birth or by creating something: a business, a song, a piece of sculpture, a resolution of a problem, a scientific theory, a recipe, an article, a novel, a hybrid rose.  Generativity also means creating the very future itself…through teaching, nursing, volunteering, voting, forming and helping social institutions, like community centers, churches, schools and health centers.  In each of these created endeavors reside a part of us, the good in us. Bottom line: what we generate moves into the future and provides for those coming after us.  I am what survives me.

Psychologists confirm, that people who want to generate and create experience feelings of well-being and low levels of depression.  Once again, if you are feeling sad or lonely, the best cure is reaching out to help someone else. Though there might be some ego or need for power in our acts of creation, when we generate for future generations we cover over that power with love. Dan P. McAdams in his article about generativity, quotes an African Proverb to underline the positive aspects of our desires to leave something behind:

The world was not left to us by our parents. It was lent to us by our children.

Erik Erikson further states that in order to create and have children and build societies, we indicate a “belief in the species.”  We daily know the horrific things that can happen on our planet, but we also forge ahead believing in our own generative powers, the goodness that can still exist on our earth for the generations to come.

In McAdams’ article he includes a Self-Test. The items below are from the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS).

Read the following six items and mark:

O if the statement never applies to you;

1 if the statement sometimes applies to you;

2 if the statement often applies to you;

3 if the statement always applies to you;

Then add up your score.  Men, women in their 30s, 40s and 50s usually score 11.  Younger adults and adults in their 60s and older usually score slightly lower.

___ I try to pass along knowledge I have gained through my experience.

____I have made and created things that have had an impact on other people.

____I have important skills that I try to teach others.

____If I were unable to have children of my own, I would adopt children.

____I have a responsibility to improve the neighborhood in which I live.

____I feel that my contribution will exist after I die.

Thanks to Dan P. McAdams for the inspiration from his article GENERATIVITY:The New Definition of Success

THE MOON DOCTOR: Memories That Help Us Change

She listened to the steady pounding of her feet along the roads. And after a while, she could feel it running in her veins, something that turned backward to rituals of spring–Lent, events of her childhood, painting rain-washed colors on hard boiled eggs. The sky would scuttle from grey to blue to grey, rain spitting just as intermittently. But the air was becoming velvet, enveloping, warming the skin, and when she walked now, crunching spring detritus, a hollowness opened inside her, a sweet opening as if she were also ready to suffer, to feel pain, to live and embrace it all. (from The MOON DOCTOR)

When the son of a very close friend (I will refer to him as David) was severely burned in a house fire, I wrote a novel, THE MOON DOCTOR, to deal with my emotions concerning this horrific event. Watching how this child suffered and how THE FIRE changed all their lives…sent me to the keyboard to make some sense of it. But I struggled with the story, with the characters. And THE MOON DOCTOR has never been published. What started as a tight story, began to wander, as if I could not pin it down…too many characters, too many plot points, all that sorrow. Today, it sits in a drawer. (I did enter a hospital scene in a contest, but heard nothing. I guess no one was ready for a burn victim and his doctor, who simply appeared at his bedside to help him accept his changed life.)

But I glad that I wrote that novel, found empathy in my characters, and that in real life, David and I forged an even closer friendship when we both went through Nursing School… together. Being in a house fire and surviving, can make you intensely aware of the human body…its strengths and weaknesses. David’s empathy was unmatched, he calmed his patients, explained his scars, shared his life. 

WE LIVE OUR STORIES

But much later, as an RN in an inner city Chicago hospital, I had the privilege of working on the maternity unit with doctors, nurses, interns and patients of many different religious and racial backgrounds. We were a team, and there was NEVER a provoking incident due to racial or physical differences…until….

One Sunday, I received a patient, worked up her chart, drew blood, assessed the fetus, helping her through early stages of  labor. THIS, before her husband arrived at the hospital. He took one look at me and left the room. Moments later the charge nurse called me out, telling me I had been relieved of my duties with this patient. The husband had requested another nurse.

I learned that if he had his choice, no one would have been able to help birth his child, but now, faced with being in a hospital and having to choose the personnel available, he wanted an African American nurse. At first I didn’t understand, later being told that his choice had more to do with his Muslim faith, than whether I was a capable RN. The nurse who took my place was excellent. She had been in the trenches for years. My patient was in good hands.

ANOTHER DOCTOR…No Matter Our Skin Color, We All Need CARE.  

I had a wonderful friend, a doctor from South Africa, who worked during the time Black doctors couldn’t take care of white women. This made me remember a college text that dealt with racism. The author said right out that racism messes up our brains, and that how we are raised contributes greatly to racist feelings and reactions–locking a car door, avoiding getting in an elevator because of who is occupying it, the unaccounted for fear that lurks somewhere in the brain, because of a newspaper headlines or the words of some people you meet during life. 

Jim Grimsley, a white man, wrote a book about his own experiences: HOW I SHED MY SKIN. The Amazon Book Blurb read in part: What Jim did not realize, until he began to meet these new students, was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any Black people. Jim writes that the first time he saw Ebony magazine, he was astounded: “I had never seen Black people depicted in this way before, as if they were just like white people.”  Ah yes, they are!! We can be very slow learners. 

The Bill Cosby Show was genius. It showed us white folks that the Black family was not unlike the white family or the Latino or Asian etc etc. We all have struggles raising children, working and being there for our kids, knowing when and how to deal with various problems as they become adults. (So sad that Cosby’s mistakes pushed that show back into the film can.)

But the best thing I can take from thinking and writing about these issues is to always remind myself that empathy and understanding can fill up the heart. Fear, anger will only make a person hard and mean–and in the end, probably shorten that person’s life. Watch out for the stress that messes with your heart and makes your brain believe things that just aren’t true. Despite his scars, my friend David lives his life and now has children and grandchildren.

Final thought: Consider that one to one relationship wherever you go. Make a new friendships –HE or SHE just might be from the another country…but we learn and understand more, every time we meet.