Tickets Home and Back to Quoting Welty

A couple nights ago I bought one way tickets back to my midwestern homeland.

Not staying there forever - just hit a fare sale that was too good to pass up. We couldn't drive to Indiana for the cost of these tickets for 7 of us. Travel won't take place until late June and return fares weren't published for July yet; hence, the one way option.  I was hesitant to hit the purchase button, but my husband sat down with me to do some calculations on drive-time/cost of gas/various options for return travel, which convinced me to commit to flying out to Indiana for our summer vacation.  We also plan to visit his family in Oklahoma, like we have done for all but one of the past 17 years.

Options for the return to CA?  If cheap fares show up, we may fly, but the most likely option is that my husband will drive out. He can't be gone from work as long as I would like to be gone (although he's still planning to be gone over a week, which is longer than some husbands are willing to leave their jobs), so we'll fly ahead, and he'll join us for the Fourth of July holiday and the drive home. Yes, this means that we will still have pay for the gas to drive out, but his food and hotel stay will be cheaper than ours. And for him to spend three days alone in the car will be like a vacation, compared to three days in the car with 7 kids, one of whom will only be about 3 months old.

The idea is a little convoluted and still not the least expensive option, which would be driving, nor the most expensive, which would be flying everywhere.  My practical conscience wants to question why we are committing to this trip when we have other expenses looming (tuition! car repairs! college!), while the voice of my romantic self asks, "Why the same thing every year? Think of the places you could visit instead of going to see family..." These locations aren't destinations featured in travel magazines in articles about places to see before you die.

That voice was sympathetic to the discussion we had last weekend over one of the best dinners I've had in a while at a fish restaurant with my brother- and sister-in-law.  Eating good food seems to make good conversation flow more easily.  I had wild California halibut and roasted brussel sprouts, which thinking of now makes me hungry. So often we go to a restaurant and leave slightly disappointed, but this was not the case. I only sampled the wine, but it was good, too, and no one offered to share another sip of their glass with me.

The discussion? One we've had before (and one I've written about a few times): The in-laws' argument was that travel makes you a better person; my husband and I maintain you don't need to travel in order to have an understanding heart and a curious mind.  The talk came up based on our experience in Guam.  As much as we loved our island life, I don't know whether I can say it made me a better person.  We couldn't get a handle on what "better" means, for one thing. Better than we were before? Better than someone else? Better in what way?  There are saints who never went anywhere and villains who have circled the globe.  There are people who are kindhearted and understanding who haven't left the community they grew up in.  And then there's the lady down the street who has been on 79 cruises, but you wouldn't guess it except she has a great tan. The missionary and the hedonist both travel.

Certainly the tourist industry wants you to believe that going to Bali will make you a better person, or a happier one, at least. But I remember feeling absolutely miserable one night when we were in the Caribbean after my husband and I had had an argument, where we supposed to be having this wonderful bonding time and I never felt more distant.

At the dinnertable, we played devil's advocate and argued long and hard against the notion that you NEED to travel to appreciate the world and its people. It's a falsehood to think you can understand a culture after a visiting a place for a few days, a few weeks, even a few months.

On the other hand, I do understand the desire to experience places and people first hand. I'm drawn in by Travel magazine's 10 Most Fabulous Places Ever.  As much as I love going to the airport and getting on a plane, I also have felt the letdown after arriving someplace far away and finding out it isn't so different after all, not as foreign and exotic as I had hoped.  But then I've also been surprised to find out how foreign some places that aren't really so far away feel (New Orleans?).  Dissonance is a part of the pleasure of vacationing.

And I agree that travel does change you.  How much more meaningful our trip to Rome for Mother Teresa's beatification and Blessed John Paul II's 25th anniversary as pope was compared to the trip to Japan.  In Rome, we were pilgrims. The focus of the trip was on sharing our faith with the thousands of other pilgrims in the city, but we also visited and prayed at sites and paintings and churches we had studied and read about.  We had a purpose for the trip, and it changed the way I feel about Mother Teresa and the former Pope.  In Japan we were tourists.  I had my guidebook handy at all times.  We didn't understand the significance of much of what we saw because we didn't understand the history.  We didn't know who many of the shrines we saw we dedicated to.  But I have to admit that trip did alter my imagination of Japan. It made me more curious about the place and its people.  And as a family vacation it was unforgettable.

The problem is that there are just too many places and not enough time.  And conversion - and good conversation - can happen anywhere - no need to travel to change your life.  Stepping away from the everyday is useful, but you don't have to go far, especially where we are located, with mountains a few miles to the east, an ocean minutes away to the west, and giant sequioas waiting for us a few hours north.

But our first priority is to spend time with people we love.  That time grows shorter as our kids and parents age.  Sometimes vacationing with family can be an emotional drain, but no one we met in Japan on our week's vacation is going to come to our funerals and pray for our souls.  My kids spend more time looking at photo albums of time with their cousins than any of our vacations. Surely to be known and loved is better than to be well-traveled, if you have to make a choice.  So again we adjust our compass by the lodestone of "home."

Hence, the poignancy of Eudora Welty's words from her essay on place I quoted last time, worth recopying since she is more eloquent than I.  If I had had the book handy at the restaurant, perhaps I would have pulled this out:

 "The open mind and the receptive heart -- which are at last and with fortune's smile the informed mind and the experienced heart -- are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways." 

So the reason why we touch base with our blood ties - the place and the people -  when we can: those blood ties define us and teach us to find meaning.  We have to love those people and places, even if they aren't the most beautiful in the world or the easiest to get along with. If love is always easy, we can't really know what it means to love. Welty quotes Faulkner in her essay on time in fiction to explain why we need our memories and need to understand our past and our ancestors:

"Remembering is so basic and vital a part of staying alive that it takes on the strength of an instinct of survival, and acquires the power of an art. Remembering is done through the blood, it is a bequeathment, it takes account of what happens before a man is born as if he were there taking part. It is a physical absorption through the living body, it is a spiritual heritage. It is also a life's work.
 "'There is no such thing as was,' Faulkner remarked in answer to a student's question as to why he wrote long sentences. 'To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment in action , is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him; and the long sentence ... is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something...'"  

And so I think that returning to see our families is an imperative, despite expense and inconvenience. I want my children to know who their people are, to know more about themselves.  I can't tell them all the stories.  If because of our transient life, they don't have one place to call home, they will have these blood ties. 

...  "There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes -- closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed."

There are many beautiful places in the world, many places we daydream about visiting or living after retirement from the military.  But the familiar is what is most beautiful.  When we move around, it sometimes takes me weeks and months to become fond of a place. I have to learn to know it.  And perhaps that's why going away/traveling is valuable; it allows us to appreciate the known more when we return and return and return - the ongoing conversion.

Reading in review 2013

'Tis the time of year to turn again to the review of books. I know this isn't especially interesting to anyone but me, just like the last post, but I'll do it again out of a desire for keeping track, for trying to measure some accomplishment or use of time that wasn't necessarily useful or productive, but not wasted either, or some accumulation of knowledge or wisdom, or for exercising my weakening memory.

 Books read: 53
Of these, YA books numbered: 23, at least
Of the 53, at least 14 were written before 1950. (Weil was published in 1951.)
16 or so were written in about the last 5 years.
37 were fiction.
The Hobbit, Skylark, the Ramona books, and Homer Price were read alouds. Most of the other YA books were newer ones that we read for our little mother-daughter book club in Guam: a brief source of joy for me and her, I like to think (although I'm sure her happiness came from sharing snack time with friends.)

The harder job is to pick a favorite book of the year.  The top runners:
Anna Karenina, A Passage to India, and Grapes of Wrath
  - What can I say? The classics remain classic for a reason. All three of these had fascinating characters, lyrical writing, haunting imagery, and timeless themes.  All three are very different.  Plenty of reasons to love these books that I don't have time, the eloquence, or the need to go into.
Least favorites are easier to choose. None of these were horrible books; they just were forgettable to me:
The Marriage Plot - bloated
Ship of Fools - boring
Language of Flowers - thin

Very little spiritual reading done this past year. Enjoyed reading Thomas Merton and want to read more. Didn't enjoy the Weil as much as I thought I would, but perhaps my situation was a distraction.  I just didn't have much appetite for mysticism at the moment.

Best non-fiction? Enjoyed my uncle's self-published memoir Leaf of Mine for personal reasons. Keep coming back to A Geography of Bliss in conversation with other people. One reason for reading non-fiction for me is to figure out what people are talking about and to have something to talk about in awkward social situations.  And a second reason is to stay somewhat informed/inspired about reading/teaching reading just in case.  So I have to say I really enjoyed the Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing both as a book about reading and about writing, and the same goes for the collection of Welty essays The Eye of the Story. Both of these were Christmas vacation reads. I have to admit I skimmed some of the Welty essays, so technically I didn't finish the book, but the essays I did read were so meaty, I didn't have the energy to read the whole thing, which includes author studies, essays on fiction, reviews, and some more personal prose. Her essays on Jane Austen and Willa Cather were especially good, as are the essays on fiction. For example, here is a paragraph from "Looking at the Short Story":
               "And we have observed that the finest story writers seem to be in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests - or what would be in another writer their best interests. It's a strange thing. And what is stranger is that if we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how often do we not find that is seems to be connected with this very obstruction.
    . . . We are speaking of beauty. And beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality; indeed, it is associated with reticence, with stubbornness, of a number of kinds. It arises somehow from a desire not to comply with what may be expected, but to act inevitably, as long as some human truth is in sight, whatever that inevitability may call for. Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form to aftereffect."

Or from the essay "On Place":
"Through the story's translation and ordering of life, the unconvincing raw material becomes the very heart's family. Life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believable, more inevitably so."

And later (this pertains to a discussion we had recently with my brother- and sister-in-law):
 "The open mind and the receptive heart -- which are at last and with fortune's smile the informed mind and the experienced heart -- are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways." (The conversation was about whether travel makes you a better person. More on that...)

And every transient person, military or otherwise, must sometimes agree with this:
 "There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes -- closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed."

It's a big book of essays; I could quote more. Instead, I'll look forward to 2014.  What are my reading goals? Number one is to continue the reading with the kids, but I'd like to get in another Dickens and Shakespeare - could those be kids' lit choices?  Also I want to reread some more of what we have on the shelves: Cather and Faulkner, Austen's Mansfield Park?  I walked past Henry James yesterday and thought maybe I should reread one of his. And I still have more Forster books I haven't read.  But the Navy wives book club pick is A Child Called It. Sure to be interesting even if not intellectually challenging.

Meanwhile, finding reading time remains challenging. My list gets shorter every year. And with no travel this Christmas break, I haven't even finished a book in 2014. Time to finish up something!

Why read about where you live?

From Welty's "Place in Fiction":

"It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight -- they are like the attributes of love. The act of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the act that continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry. Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world."

and

"Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course. These charges need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life that life needs.  Through the story's translation and ordering of life, the unconvincing raw material becomes the very heart's familiar. Life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believable, more inevitably so."

But sometimes, especially after long interstate drives past the same restaurants and billboards, I am afraid that places are losing their identities, paving over paradise, etc.

Then again, what place but the Gulf Coast would put a Walmart, Waffle House and Shell Stations on beachfront property?

Marriage musings

After a whirlwind weekend in Oklahoma for my sister-in-law’s wedding – the last of the siblings to marry – we have been slowed in the return to everyday life by frequent reminiscing about the weekend and about our own wedding. At both, we danced and laughed and ate and drank and enjoyed the party, which lasted all weekend long. This wedding was a reminder of how much we’ve grown up: at my wedding, this sister-in-law was the age of my oldest child. During the couples’ dance when the DJs call out the amount of time people have been married, we were one of the last 5 couples dancing. (OK, this was a small, young crowd.) We were the first of the siblings to get married, so at ours, like at this last wedding, everyone seemed to have a good time without sweating about details.



Blessedly, I didn’t have too many preconceptions about what our life would look like when we got married. A college professor, an emissary of Heaven perhaps, had assigned Familiaris Consortio around the time my dear esposo and I began dating, so my expectations of what marriage should be were elevated. I jumped into marriage without planning where we would live (the Navy would take care of that), how many children we would have (although I think I thought conceiving them would take longer), or caring how we’d earn our daily bread (again, the Navy); I had been inspired by the idea that self-gift was more important than any of these practicalities.

Numerous people told us that marriage was going to be work, that we shouldn’t go to bed angry, and that we’d have to learn to be good at saying sorry. For more than our fair share of years, we honeymooned, wondering what these people were talking about. Marriage was easy! Having babies was a little bit of work, but the marriage part seemed effortless. We owe a great debt of thanks to JPII for these happy years.

But of course, honeymoons don’t last forever, and eventually we had to roll up our sleeves and get to work. I remember reading somewhere during our marriage prep training that the 7 year point is a tough one for a lot of couples, and maybe it was around then that we started to hear about friends’ and family members’ divorces. Is it because people get tired of self-giving? Our biggest arguments haven’t been about large problems but over petty irritations. Does the heart begin to contract as we age? All those passions of youth fade among the dirty diapers and long hours. Maybe it gets harder to make sacrifices because more people are asking you to make them.


When I initially read JPII on marriage, I thought that what would carry our conjoined souls up to God was that euphoric wedding day love, which overflows onto everyone around and transcends all the muck of life to transform it into a mirror of that love. But as these working years stretch, I wonder if it is not also the humbling of self, the slow, chiseling away of selfishness, which, if we dwelled on it too much, could leave nothing but dust. Yet if we keep trying to give, eventually what is left beneath that crust of self will be raised up. Like the widow of the parable, if we keep giving when we have nothing, our sacrifice will be appreciated all the more than if we give of our excess.


In the car I read Eudora Welty’s short story “Circe” about Odysseus’ visit to the daughter of the sun from her perspective. Circe wants to keep Odysseus, alone, with her forever. She intuits that their lives are similarly grounded on passion, and she keeps him in her spell for a year. But then one morning she sees him in a circle of his men, preparing to depart. She begins to understand the mystery of fickle, mortal love. Odysseus will turn his back on a life of pleasure for the sake of his men – and perhaps Penelope? (my own romantic interpretation) Whereas Circe’s passion consumes, Odysseus’ is directed toward the good of his men.


My memory isn't serving me well but I think that Plato says something like this: Where passion turns lovers' eyes so they can only see each other, true friends learn to look out with the same eyes at others.