A wind in the door

I was sitting in St Matthias Church, which is compact and rather lovely, waiting with younger daughter for a production of Jesus Christ Superstar to begin. This was an interpretation by "Company P", who, I gather, are affiliated with the Canadian College of Performing Arts on Elgin Street, just a few doors up from one of our frequent house-sits. The school has been around for twenty years, and they have a "Company C", consisting of Third Year students who put on productions. "Company P" is probably an alumni group?

The actors strolled up and down the aisle and on the periphery of the sanctuary, dressed in garb that was supposed to suggest Jazz Age, while music was tapped in - numbers by Louis Armstrong, "I Wanna Be Loved by You" performed by Helen Kane, and, rather more incongruously, numbers from South Pacific, which, as younger daughter pointed out, is not the right era.  There was no programme to explain the concept being aimed for; the names of the performers were looped on a slide presentation, made to look rather like the credits for a silent movie.

I gazed out the stained glass windows, as the afternoon sun shone in. One window reminded me of Proginoskes, the "singular cherubim" who figures in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time.  I thought about how those books are about different kinds of time, of being outside of time.

This didn't help much.  The performers congregated at the front of the church, swigging from bottles and pulling biblical robes over their suits and drop-waisted dresses, as the music changed to the unmistakable electronic twangs of the overture.  It is a rock opera, after all.

The score was sung to a pre-recorded cyber-orchestra, with the exception of Mary Magdalene's "I Don't Know How to Love Him", accompanied on piano - very well - by the performer playing Jesus.

The singing and the acting were, on the whole, very good - especially Gabriel MacDonald as Jesus, who had great depth, range and projection.

Judas was played by a young woman called Sadie Fox, who sang and acted well, but ended up shouting quite a bit.  (I was also keeping in mind that this was the first of two performances for the day.)

Other featured singers and chorus, very good.  (Dancing, not.)

Younger daughter was nonplussed by the roles of Judas, Simon Zelotes, and Pilate being performed by women.  She's quite literal that way.  I explained that in community and school productions, male roles are often taken by women, reminding her of a production of Hamlet we saw at Camosun College a few years back, which featured a Lady Hamlet.
"But did you enjoy this?"
"Yes.  It was different."

That's my girl.

Another wrinkle

Yesterday morning I woke early, after a late night, unwilling to get up and dress just yet, but not wanting to wake my husband.  I padded down to the living room to retrieve my laptop, because I've been deliberately keeping it downstairs to discourage myself from going online before the day has properly begun.

However,  I had gone to sleep with the briefly glimpsed corner of a mystery on my mind.  It seems that the Disney corporation will be attempting to bring A Wrinkle in Time to the big screen.  There have been attempts before, including an adaptation to the small screen, an unsatisfactory televised version.  I'm wondering if a satisfactory version is possible, but I have a daughter living on the autistic spectrum, and thus have acquired an appreciation for movies, television specials, and graphic novels based on classics, so I tried to find out a little bit more.

In doing so, I noticed a sentence fragment in a Google search just before I went to bed, something about her son's death in 1999.  Madeleine L'Engle herself died in 2007, but I do not ever recall her writing about Bion Franklin's death; she devoted nearly a whole book to the final year of her husband Hugh. It was late, and I was working on something else, so I set my puzzlement aside for the morning.

With the covers over my head to block the dimmed light from the screen from the sleeping Resident Fan Boy,  I went back to the link --- and learned that Bion Franklin had died in his forties from the effects of alcoholism.  Bion?  The little boy who was the model for Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin?  I entered a few more search terms and stumbled on a 2004 New Yorker article, which said, among many other things, that Bion and his adopted sister Maria loathed the cycle of books about the Austin family, and that L'Engle's children and grandchildren alike detest L'Engle's Crosswick Journals series, especially Two-Part Invention which was L'Engle's memoir about her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. Hugh Franklin drank quite a bit and had at least two extra-marital affairs.

Their eldest child Josephine read it and apparently thought: Who the hell is she talking about?

The New Yorker article, which has become quite notorious amongst L'Engle fans and which somehow I'd managed to miss, is not a hatchet-job.  It also reflects the love L'Engle's family had for her along with the exasperation.  But I, huddled under the covers with my glowing laptop, was fighting back my shock and a sense of loss.  I've read everything L'Engle wrote, with the possible exception of her poetry.  I grew up with the four books that begin with A Wrinkle in Time, and of course, I loved the Austin books which were about the sort of family I'd never had.  It turns out that L'Engle may not have have had that sort of family either.  The Crosswick Journals were the sort of books to which I'd turn again and again for comfort, wisdom and perspective.

As the shock wore off, an odd sense of relief took over.  I felt consoled by all this dysfunction somehow, and besides, I recognized something about her children's feelings -- anger, bewilderment, and the sense of having no say in the story.  It was the same feeling I had when I read the biographical essay featured in my father's order of service.  I wonder if they too had the cold sweat when they read the matriarch's version of their family?  Coincidentally, Alan Jones, L'Engle's ex-son-in-law, was the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when my dad's service was held there.  Possibly he still is.  Speaking of L'Engle, he refers to the "confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative" which could also be a charitable way of describing the legend my father built up to support his life in California.

I don't know what I'll find now when I revisit L'Engle's books, particularly the Crosswick Journals, but I've been rereading many of my favourite books this past year (no L'Engle ones, as it happens), and I'm rediscovering that no book will ever be the same, anyway. That's probably true of most things.

The authority song

When something like this hurtles out of left field and clobbers me, I go back time and time again, trying to remember if there were any warning signs.

It's probably a futile exercise. You can't plan for everything, although heaven knows I try. I tried this time, but the awful thing is, the planning may have been a factor.

During March Break, I've adopted the practice of making a list of possible outings. The idea is to a) get younger daughter out and about once a day; and b) give her some choice in the matter. This year's selection included Kenneth Branagh's Disney directorial debut: Cinderella. I had checked ahead for showtimes and discovered that the IMAX version had pre-booked seating. Well, I thought, that's probably a good idea. The city is full of parents - and gawd help us, day camps - searching for things to do with their kids.

So, on the morning younger daughter had chosen to attend, I got up early, booked our favourite seats online (narrowly missing choosing seats smack in the front row), and carefully plotted the buses that would get us there on time to get to the washroom, purchase popcorn and drinks, and find our seats. (Trickier than you'd think; OC Transpo cuts back on bus service during March Break.) Then I gave younger daughter timely warnings and got her out to the bus stop.

It worked beautifully. Washroom first, and no line-up at concession.

That's where things began to fall apart. When I asked younger daughter if she could take her bag of popcorn, she scooped it up impatiently and snapped, "I'm not a kid anymore!!" Quite a bit of the popcorn went flying. She stomped over to get a straw for her pop, leaving me a little startled.

We made our way to our seats in the centre of the topmost row. The aisle is well-lit, but the middle seats aren't and I realized that I couldn't read the seat numbers. Normally, this isn't an issue, but this was a reserved-seating show, so I asked younger daughter, who was juggling her food and coat, to tell me the number of the seat next to her. She spent some time working out where to put her coat, then sat down. I asked again. She grumbled at me and stared ahead stubbornly. That's when I made the fatal error. I should know better, but it's been a while, and I thoughtlessly muttered: "Oh, please don't act like a bitch." Younger daughter may have deficits in certain categories of memory and comprehension, but her hearing is superb.

It happened so fast that it seemed she had disappeared and reappeared in the distant aisle, leaving me in a shower of popcorn. She was screaming at me at the top of her lungs: "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU YOU IDIOT!!!" Then she stomped down the stairs, and left the theatre.

The family sitting in the row ahead of us moved down several rows.

A few minutes later, she reappeared, grabbed her coat, and exited as I called after her, keep my voice level, "You don't have a ticket with you." She was watching me from the corner of her eye, holding her coat in front of her body when she vanished from my view.

I sat, fighting down the embarrassment and panic, knowing pursuing her would only start another scene. What if she left the building? What if they didn't let her back in? She had her bus pass with her; would she try to go home?

Finally I made my way down, apologizing to a mum and her little girl at the end of the aisle as I squeezed by. They had just arrived and had missed the drama; most people had, the theatre was nearly empty when we first came in. The family who had moved had returned to their seats.

I looked in the washroom. I asked the woman who had taken our tickets, the one who takes hundreds of tickets for the eight large cinemas -- of course she didn't remember seeing younger daughter. I went to the entrance and gazed out at the grey and icy parking lot, out beyond the box stores towards the Transitway station. I decided to return to the cinema. As I was standing in the ramp between the risers and the doorway, scanning the seats, the trailers started and I saw her come in as an usher closed the door behind her. I walked quickly to the far aisle, up the stairs, and had to climb over another family to return to my seat.

As I sat down, I saw she hadn't followed me.

It was a morning show, and the seats were half-filled. I prayed she had taken another seat, and I sat alone in my row - thank God - with her untouched popcorn and drink wedged in her empty seat.

When the movie was over, I picked up her food and my containers and spilling a bit, waddled down the stairs to the garbage containers as the credits rolled. As I pulled on my coat, I scanned the seats again, still not finding her, but a minute later, the lights came on and there she was, in the front row of the upper level, gazing at the screen and listening to the closing song. I waited for her to finish in the washroom, texting her dad with the briefest of details. (Of course, my phone had refused to transmit in the middle of the crisis.) I told the Resident Fan Boy that I was bringing her to his office.

We didn't say a word on the long walk back to the station. We sat separately on the bus. We walked silently through the Rideau Centre. When the Resident Fan Boy appeared at his building's entrance, I handed him the music for her voice lesson, turned and left.

On the bus home, I realized I hadn't handed over my iPod which the voice teacher has been using for recording the week's lesson. I shuffled through my music, each title just a little too appropriate to be a comfort: "The Shelter of Storms"; no. "The Mountains Win Again"- oh God, no.

Finally I settled on a good old rocker. It's kind of appropriate, but not enough to put more salt in my wounds.

When I got home, there was a message from the RFB saying that younger daughter had thrown up. It was a timely reminder for me that this whole business had been every bit as traumatic for her as for me. I made the slow turn into beginning to let go of my hurt, although I felt chilled and depressed for another couple of days. I am, after all, a grown-up, and for all younger daughter's indignation, her road to adulthood still stretches out a long way ahead. The late Madeleine L'Engle quoted someone in one of her books: To love someone is to have hope in them always.

I'll have to look it up.

In the week that has followed, we have slowly returned to what is normal for us, anyway. I give thanks that these meltdowns happen so infrequently. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to run away myself.

Love's other side

Last March, I wrote a post about one of my favourite authors, Madeleine L'Engle, an author known for her children's books and Young Adult novels, who also wrote novels, essays, autobiographical pieces and poetry. (Never cared for her poetry much; loved most of the rest.)

One of her adult novels is called The Other Side of the Sun, a reference to "love's terrible other side", when you pass through the burning agony of love (and we're talking suffering here, the original meaning of "passion") and try to emerge alive and unwarped, though transformed and traumatized.

This is true of even the healthiest and most functional of relationships, because love, whether of a friend, parent, lover or child, always incurs loss, whether through death or estrangement.

Being the mother of a special-needs child, I seem to be moving through the heart of the sun time and again. However, this past summer, loss and the terrible sacrifices love requires were a central theme. Recently, one of my mother's favourite cousins died after a brief struggle with cancer, leaving her siblings and especially her bewildered husband, who counted on her for everything, bereft and adrift.

A week before that, my mother's only sister died at the end of a long, slow, agonizing decline into dementia. I've written about my aunt before, as she struggled to come to grips with her daughter's sexual orientation. (Coincidentally, that was my very first NaBloPoMo post.) As it turned out, she had a better grasp of the situation than I did.

It was easy to underestimate my aunt. Liberals tend to underestimate and categorize conservatives, just as much as conservatives label liberals. My aunt was conservative, no doubt about that. In my family search trawling through historical records, her name shows up as a fairly substantial financial supporter of the G.O.P. Back when Kennedy and Nixon were duking it out for the American presidency, my parents happened to be visiting my aunt and uncle in San Francisco. When my father returned to their apartment one day, sporting a Nixon button, my mother was appalled, especially as my father was a visitor to the United States. So she showed up with a Kennedy button. My aunt refused to let her in.

I wonder what she would have made of all this Tea Party shenanigans. Okay, I don't. This was a life-long Anglican (Episcopalian) who left the church when she thought it had become too liberal, then left the Baptist church for the same reason. She even told my mother that when she was in heaven she wouldn't be able to comfort her burning sister with a drop of water. She said this in an almost jocular fashion, but she meant it. When her daughter emerged from the closet, she was appalled and bewildered.

Yet my aunt was also a woman of humour and warmth. She had great fun gently teasing a very young and very indignant girl at the clinic where she was a nurse, by telling her that she too was African-American. She was, too: born in Kenya, becoming an American citizen not long after she married. Her hospitality was impeccable; a week's stay with her in California would spoil me for months.

She spent many years searching for educational resources for her hyper-active, learning-disabled son, long before such terms became commonplace. When her son became self-sufficient, her husband promptly came down with Parkinson's and she nursed him faithfully and competently to the end. We thought she might finally enjoy a less-burdened life, but a few short years after her husband's death, she was diagnosed with dementia.

And who harrowed hell for her? The daughter with whom she had struggled for years.

Madeleine L'Engle wrote: "It is when I am most monstrous that I am most in need of love." I don't remember which book this was (it is probably from A Circle of Quiet), but it was important enough to me that I wrote it down in one of my journals years ago. My aunt did become something of a monster as the dementia took over, all patience, happiness, and faith seem to flee, leaving her frightened, lost, and oh, so angry. Who could blame her? Yet her daughter persevered, took the verbal abuse, fought for better care, strained her other family relationships.

And some time during my aunt's final weeks, my cousin explained to a nurse that she was adopted. (Both my American cousins are.)
"Are you?" said my aunt, looking up in surprise. "I had forgotten. You....are my own."

And just for that moment, they emerged from love's terrible other side.

The Joys of Madeleine L'Engle

When Madeleine L'Engle died nearly three years ago, a little something shriveled up inside me. It was just a little dream, a fantasy of some day meeting this woman whose books stood out like hand-holds on the steep and slippery rock-face of Life: starting with (but of course) A Wrinkle in Time when I was ten or so, to the various "Chronos" and "Kairos" books throughout my adolescence, to the Crosswicks Journals that I returned to time and again during young adulthood, to the more overtly religious essays, dotted here and there with her adult novels.

It probably would have been a disastrous or at least disappointing meeting. Although I responded to the seeking and agnostic nature of her religious views, there was enough in her writings to tell me that she might have found my Unitarian Universalist (and quasi-Quaker) views dismissible. Still, I've been married for several years to a committed liberal Anglican; maybe Madeleine L'Engle and I could have found much common ground. I'll never know.

I've been thinking of Madeleine L'Engle a lot this week. I thought I'd read just about everything that she had published, so I was astonished to see a book entitled The Joys of Love turn up on a search for something else entirely (which is usually how things work for me).

The Joys of Love was published last year by L'Engle's granddaughters. This is a very early novel, based on a short story she wrote in 1942 at about the age of 24. She reworked the story into a novel in the early fifties and re-set it in 1946, which was the year she met her husband the actor Hugh Franklin.

As I'd read pretty nearly everything she wrote, including such nascent novels as The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, I was braced for a rather dated and slightly awkward book. L'Engle really hit her stride as an author in the early sixties, and The Joys of Love, being such an early work, only gives a hint of the skilled story-teller that L'Engle later became. At this stage, she was a very good descriptive writer; her scene-setting is an effective time machine, taking me back to a New England summer sixty years gone. However, although her granddaughter Léna Roy said in the introduction that L'Engle's dramatic training gave her "a keen knack for dialogue", this book is a poor example. Even as a lifetime fan, I found myself groaning inwardly (and sometimes out loud) at the painfully artificial conversations these characters have.

Eventually I caught myself wondering if I'd somehow outgrown her other books to which I haven't turned in some time. This morning, having finished The Joys of Love, I seized half a dozen or so of my favourite L'Engle books, blew the dust off them and flipped through them. (Younger daughter is still on March Break, so there was no matutinal rush for the bus.)

You know what? They were as good as I remembered. I looked at The Young Unicorns, one of my favourites when I was about twelve. The gang-members that figure in the plot are a little "West Side Story", but the characters are whole and believable. I skimmed The Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time and still found relevance in the themes of "naming" and the need to slow down to put down roots and grow. Finally, in A Circle of Quiet, I browsed where I had underlined and bookmarked this non-fictional work about L'Engle's own meditations on art, faith and life. This was a book that I used to re-read whenever I was feeling lost and homesick. Today, I found this: We, as adults, often fall into perversity in other areas of discovery: i.e., some modern (and not so modern) art in all forms, where the artist is concentrating more on himself than on his painting or music or story. I would venture a guess that an artist concentrating wholly unself-consciously, wholly thrown into his work, is incapable of producing pornography. All perversion is self-gratification.

I think there's a key here to the problem with The Joys of Love, not that I'm suggesting for a moment that it was pornographic. It was, however, self-conscious, in the way something by a very young artist is. And for a blogger, this message about self-involvement and self-gratification may be very timely indeed...

I'm grateful for stumbling across The Joys of Love. It's not a fabulous novel; it's a green and naïve novel. It is however, a novel of promise, and it has led me back to the later, greater works of Madeleine L'Engle.

Define "all right"....

This has taken me several days to write. And it isn't very good.

I think I've mentioned this before, but the trouble with journals and diaries is that the keeping of them often involves writing down the sad stuff. I guess it's supposed to be more therapeutic, but often it only seems to make the pain more real. In the same (open) vein, I've been struggling to complete my yearly rundown and have run into a snag with last November, which featured a number of set-backs, failures, and heartbreaks.

Earlier in this past rather horrific week in April, I caught the tail-end of the movie Hilary and Jackie, the 1998 film about the DuPré sisters. Jacqueline, who went on to great fame as a cellist, eventually succumbed to a particularly nasty strain of multiple schlerosis, dying deaf, mute, and in pain. At the very end of the movie, she's an apparition, standing on a beach in the early 50's and telling her child-self: "It's going to be all right."

But it isn't. Just a tad later in that same rather horrific week, I strode up the hill to school with younger daughter, holding the words of "Ordinary Day" by Great Big Sea in my head and heart (I embedded a Doctor Who video to this song in my previous post): "At the end of the day, you just gotta say it's all right..." But it wasn't. Younger daughter was stressed out and more socially-challenged than usual. She was yelling at and physically pushing away her "guardian angel" each recess. She was refusing to join in at recorder practice. To top it off, the so-called student-led conferences were scheduled toward the end of the week, and after months of no homework assignments at all, they came tumbling down, like objects thrown to a juggler. The juggler being me, of course. A few balls got dropped... Here's an excerpt of an email that I finally got the courage to send to the principal and teaching staff: I must confess I've been in a state of bewilderment since last week's student-led conference. My husband and I arrived in (her) classroom at the appointed time, and it was almost as if we were unexpected guests. The other students were cheerfully showing off their portfolios, but hers was nowhere in sight. We killed time looking at photo displays, waiting for guidance, and not sure what to tell (our daughter). This was our seventh student-led conference, the third with (younger daughter), but no one seemed to have prepared (her) for what was expected this time. When the portfolio finally made its appearance, it had the oddest assortment of documents; some were assignments we had recognized from earlier in the year, but others utterly flummoxed us: a Xeroxed fairy tale written in language well below (her) reading ability; what we took to be a prototype of (her) locker shield, except most of the drawings weren't by (her) and it inexplicably had "Grade Three" written at the top; and a penguin project with Xeroxed references to Antarctica despite the fact that (younger daughter's) project appeared to be about penguins living in Australia. Our hearts sank. Is this portfolio reflective of (her) work this year? Perhaps (younger daughter) chose these things herself? The portfolio gave us the impression of a last-minute search to find things to put in it. We felt rather too dispirited to stay long and left at the earliest opportunity.

I didn't tell them that both younger daughter's teachers had approached us and said pleasant things about her that sounded like grasping at straws. I didn't tell them that as younger daughter waded through the contents of this strange portfolio, I was struggling with despair, grief, and the voice inside me wailing: "My God, they think she's an idiot!" And I certainly didn't tell them that I staggered home, turned on the computer, put the earphones on with the Proclaimers full blast and wept while sorting through my family history files.

That night, I took 3 "Sleep Relaxes", but woke at 2:30 in the morning in a sweat with the opening of "Sunshine on Leith" running through my mind: "My heart was broken --- sorrow, sorrow, sorrow...." The thing is, "Sunshine on Leith", isn't about despair; it's about redemption, and eventually, despite the snaggle-toothed gremlins of worry besetting me from the dark of the early morning hour and the steady ache of my knee which is still slowly recovering from the sideways split of a couple of weeks ago, I eventually felt myself relax into sleep. Younger daughter had speech therapy the next morning, so I telegraphed my distress to her speech therapist and had a quick conference while y.d. played with the dollhouse in the waiting room. By happy circumstance, the developmental psychologist who assessed younger daughter five years ago was making a rare office stop-in, and led me into an empty office for a few minutes of compassionate listening and some dashes of perspective. When I left, I was no longer feeling quite so wounded (or murderous). I still diplomatically avoided seeing the teaching staff when dropping younger daughter off at school. It wasn't until Sunday (after some heavy Doctor Who therapy) that I summoned the nerve to compose the above-quoted detailed email which ended with: So, to sum up: May I be allowed to email? May I have notice of incoming assignments? Is it possible to have a regular idea of what (my daughter) is expected to learn? It took seven minutes for the principal to respond. To each point: "Absolutely". He also said he was stunned. I wondered anxiously what I had said to stun him. The next day, I had quite a long impromptu conference with younger daughter's homeroom teacher, followed by an off-the-cuff offer to include her in an after-school ecology survey that afternoon, and, oh Gawd, a sudden increase in homework assignments. Clearly, we're going to have to go over Point Number Two again... Miraculously, over the weekend, younger daughter's extreme anxiety seemed to melt away. Due to my own relief? Reinstating her vitamin regimen? (We'd been running low.) Even after a run-in with a rather notorious class-member during recess that day, her words didn't desert her. The boy pointed at the picture of Cruella De Vil on her teeshirt and (according to the guardian angel) taunted her: "Are you mean?" "Not as mean as you are, Adam!" Of course, now her guardian angel is being accused of putting the words in her mouth. Younger daughter's classmates evidently think such a comeback is beyond her abilities. And "Adam" is on the warpath, referring to her as "stupid". Still. For once we have a confrontation that has a ring of assertiveness to it. Here's younger daughter's take on the incident:

The human condition seems to entail a lot of singing hopefully in the face of inevitable decline, whistling past the graveyard. Is it all right? Reason seems to say not, but reasonability isn't always the best way to survive the day. The late (really late, she only left us last year) Madeleine L'Engle struggled with the "all right" question in several of her books, but I remember in particular the passage from the closing of The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, one of her many auto-biographical works, this one about the her mother's final months. A year after her mother's death, Madeleine is putting her grandchildren to bed and is confronted by the theological in the shape of her grand-daughter: "But, Gran, is everything really all right? Really? It is completely cosmic questioning, coming from a small girl in a white nightgown with a toothbrush in her hand, sensing the unfamiliar surrounding the familiar. It is warm and light in the house, but the greater the radius of light, the wider the perimeter of darkness. . . . I must answer it for her, looking down at her serious, upturned face, and I can answer truthfully only if I have my feet planted very firmly on rock. I think of the warmth of the rock at the brook, and that I will never know more than a glimpse of the ousia of the small green frog --- or of my mother --- or of the two little girls --- and this is all right too. "Is it really all right?" Léna persists. "Yes, Léna, it is all right." This is all I can promise my daughters, knowing that "all right" is a really, really relative term. But the Proclaimers sing: "I thank Him for his work, for your birth and my birth.."
And I do. Because, otherwise, all this seems terribly pointless.