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Belonging Matters

Belonging Matters

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We will never understand evil and yet, since last Friday’s horrific event in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, we have been trying. Alleged mass murderer James Holmes amassed a large cache of weapons and ammunition, all of which he acquired legally. How can we use existing laws and safeguards to stop such madness? Should we reinstate the ban on assault weapons that expired eight years ago? Is there a way to catch incipient insanity through a more rigorous and well funded mental health network? And what about the culture of violence; to what extent did that lead to Columbine, Virginia Tech and now Aurora?

There is one potential cause I’ve heard little about, though, one that might be considered with the others. Holmes was a native of California living in Colorado. Like many of us (and in some places most of us) he wasn’t living in a place he knew well or that knew him.

“The news reports you hear about him, it’s as if people are talking
about one person in San Diego and one in Colorado. Who he is now is not
who he was in San Diego,” said William Parkman, 19, who went to school with Holmes’ younger sister, in USA Today. 

This, of course, doesn’t provide an immediate explanation for Holmes’ actions, but it does provide an underlying one.  The “lone wolf” exists on the fringes of society; he is not part of a community. The people he kills aren’t known to him; they are characters in a movie, props in his own demented play.

Holmes sought notoriety. He wanted to be known, to set himself apart in a society of malls and mega-theaters and anonymous, empty suburban bustle. He wanted to set himself apart as a scientist, too, but that accomplishment was apparently eluding him.

We have only begun to plumb the mysteries of his psyche, of the mental illness that may have driven him to such unspeakable acts. But even patients with schizophrenia seem to do better when they are part of a family and a community. The World Health Organization’s International Pilot Study on Schizophrenia tracked 3,300 patients in a dozen countries and found that patients in poorer countries did better than those in more well-off ones. Families and communities in countries like India and Nigeria are more likely to care for patients, to give them jobs, to include them in day-to-day life. The human touch, it appears, is more important than we think. And it seems to be more readily available elsewhere than in the U.S., where individual autonomy and accomplishment trump social and family connections.

But what happens when we fail? When accomplishment isn’t enough? When autonomy forces us deeper and deeper into our own misguided thoughts?

Tragedies force us to take stock of ourselves and the world we have created. The random violence abroad in this land (and which, unfortunately, we seem to have exported) makes me think there is more to place than how we feel about where we live.  For the more than the last half century, moving up has often meant moving out.  We’re beginning to see what a culture of anonymity looks like. Yes, we are free. No one knows our business. But what have we become?

Belonging matters.

Moderation in Motion

Moderation in Motion

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I begin the morning on foot. Down the suburban street, across a tiny wooden bridge over a culvert and through a parting in the trees. It’s where we walked last night, a short and winding path that leads to the wider rail-to-trail that runs between Baltimore and Annapolis. The spiders have been busy overnight and I brush the sticky webs off my arms.

Once on the main trail I hit my stride. I haven’t walked to work since I lived in New York more than two decades ago. And I’m not really walking to work now. Only making my way to the commuter bus. But there is no car involved, and that means I start the day in a calm and ancient way. With movement and foot fall and time for thinking as I stroll.

The downed trees I see make me think of our recent storm, our erratic weather, of global warming and what we’re losing with it, which is moderation. I ponder moderation for a minute, the peace it brings and the difficulty of achieving it these days. Walking is itself a moderating activity, isn’t it? It’s not the stop and go of vehicular locomotion but something that — because it’s limited by blood and bone and muscle — keeps us true to ourselves. Walking, then, is moderation in motion. It’s the temperate response to these extreme times.

What I used to see when I started the day on foot: the East Side glimpsed from the reservoir path.

Whistle and Wheels

Whistle and Wheels

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Early morning, twenty degrees cooler, I’m out early before a long drive.

The day is moist and full of bird song. In the distance, the sound of a train whistle, long and low. I can even hear the clatter of wheels on rail.

It’s the sound of leaving.

Walking to Bedtime

Walking to Bedtime

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It stays light until almost 10 here on the western edge of the eastern time zone. Which means that if you take a stroll after a late dinner, you are walking until (almost) bedtime.  Cicadas give way to katydids and bats dart from tree shadows into a still bright patch of sky.

It’s cooler now, only 95 (!) with a hint of a breeze.  The hum of air conditioners is punctuated by the shoosh-shoosh of sprinklers. Roosting birds chirp as they dip into the short-lived puddles.

The evening is so calm and inviting that I stay out longer than I’d planned. Longer than my shoes are meant to go. But I’m drawn farther by the sight of orange-lit houses opening their windows to the street and by tree trunks darkening into nightfall.

I walked from day into evening; I walked to bedtime.

The Brown Grass

The Brown Grass

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Lawns are parched here in Kentucky, the grass crunches underfoot. I get thirsty just looking at the scorched fields, as if in hydrating myself I can somehow freshen the air. “We’re not the Bluegrass anymore,” Dad jokes. “We’re the Brown Grass.”

While the Independence Day fireworks display wasn’t canceled, the Lexington mayor banned everything else.  No firecrackers, sparklers or Roman candles. It’s a hot, mean summer here, 99 degrees in the shade.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but the storm that’s been teasing us for hours seems more likely now.  The sky has darkened, and, at their higher elevations, the oaks and maples bend with the wind. Will we soon be drenched in sheets of rain, will rivulets run down the driveway and into the streets?

Or is it like those tarmac puddles that shimmer on the summer highway and disappear as soon as you draw close to them?

Find a Place

Find a Place

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… I watch them, the creatures of a city I have dreamed, the flowering
of an ache to be at home …

These lines are from a poem called “The Flowering” by Glenn Shea, from a collection called Find a Place That Could Pass for Home, featured on today’s “Writer’s Almanac.”  The poem caught my eye because it’s about home and about London, where I’ve always felt at home.

I think of a city I have dreamed, and I see the canyons of Lower Manhattan, the hidden mews of the Village, the broad swath of Amsterdam heading north, the green lawns of Central Park, front yard of a nation.

I remember the grass there, its outcroppings of rock, the aroma of a summer subway, clanging of metal against metal, a fresh breeze from the river flowing across our roof. The haze of a summer Sunday, heading back to my little apartment, knowing I could never live in the city forever, that this place I loved would never be my home.

Castle in the Clouds

Castle in the Clouds

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I sit at a stoplight, one of several long ones I’ve already encountered on the way home. I’m running late and the light takes forever. I strum my fingers on the steering wheel, tap my feet, fiddle with the knobs of the radio and then fiddle with them some more. I look up, light’s still red. 

It’s then that I think that I have become Fairfax County. Its tempo is my tempo. Its impatience is my impatience.  I drive too close to the car in front of me as I listen too intently to public radio. I have come to believe that what I do every day is more important than it actually is.

What I need is a summer off. Humility Camp. In which people from the East Coast are sent to carefully chosen out-of-the-way burgs in the Heartland. Let us walk down empty sidewalks to the only store that sells the New York Times, only to find that there is no Times delivery today. The wireless in our rented two-bedroom will long since have fizzled. Our Kindle is out of charge.

There is nothing to do, then, but to lie back on the grass, look up at the sky and find a castle in the clouds.

The Toll

The Toll

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Last evening, a walk I’ve never taken: A path between two houses to a woodland trail, and along that to another neighborhood. From there to a busy road, left past the shopping center and left again down a street where we once looked at a house to buy. It was faux Tudor and smaller than it looked outside.

I was deep into nostalgia, what-ifs. The yards were edged and tidy with fresh-strewn mulch. I noticed  the brave annuals planted by the mailboxes. The flower boxes and hanging baskets. The lawns were a proud, chemical green; most were new-mown and they sparkled in the slanting light.

Beyond the house life and the car life lies the curb life, the walker’s view. This walker has become more sympathetic over the years. More aware of the toil — and the toll — of the suburbs.

Independence Day

Independence Day

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Even when I’m not looking for them, I find exhortations and excoriations about place. I picked up Richard Ford’s Independence Day, for example, because I read a review of his new novel, Canada, which raved also about his earlier works. I had no idea that Independence Day would be laced with thoughts on houses and towns and their promises and deceptions, nor that the narrator, writer-turned-realtor Frank Bascombe, would muse often about real estate and belonging.

Here Frank compares his current residence in suburban Haddam, New Jersey, to his southern birthplace. “(Of course, having come first to life in a true place, and one as monotonously, lankly itself as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I couldn’t be truly surprised that a simple setting such as Haddam — willing to be so little itself — would seem, on second look, a great relief and damned easy to cozy up to.)”

Later in the novel Frank totes up what he’s learned about belonging from “a patent lesson of the realty profession, to cease sanctifying places — houses, beaches, hometowns, a street corner where you once kissed a girl, a parade ground where you marched in line, a courthouse where you secured a divorce on a cloudy day in July but where there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air’s breath that you were there or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were. We may feel they ought to, should confer something— sanction, again — because of events that transpired there once; light a warming fire to animate us when we’re well nigh inanimate and sunk. But they don’t. Places never cooperate by revering you back when you need it. In fact, they almost always let you down. … Place means nothing.”

Frank doesn’t waver in his opinion at the end of the novel, either. No sentimental backtracking for him: “It’s worth asking again: is there any cause to think a place — any place — within its plaster and joists, its trees and plantings, in its putative essence ever shelters some spirit ghost of us as proof of its significance and ours? No! Not one bit! Only other humans do that, and then only under special circumstances…”

I don’t completely agree with Ford, but he makes a persuasive case.

Birds Take Flight

Birds Take Flight

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“Every day,  I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady.”

This is from Terry Tempest Williams’ new book When Women Were Birds. A few pages later, Williams writes: “I am a writer about place who is never home.”

I link these two passages. The walking and the writing about place.  Each essential to the other. One to prime the pump, the other to fill the jug with cold, clean water.

So where do the birds come in? Williams meets her husband at a bookstore, as he’s buying a bird guide. Williams finds her voice through a special teacher who reads to her about the winter owl. A peregrine falcon once slit the corner of Williams’ eye. Another time, Williams sees a painted bunting that arrived in a wintry Maine on the cusp of a fierce winter storm.

“When dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue and green. … I have not dreamed of white birds since.”

When I finished Williams’ book I flipped through the pages with my thumb — and saw the birds that illustrate the outer edge of each page fly back and forth as if alive.

Birds take flight. So do words.