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17 August 2026
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To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding, the US Catholic bishops organized a Eucharistic procession from Florida to Maine. (In a Eucharistic procession, Catholics walk behind a priest holding the consecrated host—the Eucharist— aloft in a monstrance, a vessel whose name derives from the Latin monstrare, “to show.”) I joined the nine “perpetual pilgrims” traveling the whole route when they came through Richmond on June 4. The pilgrims wore t-shirts printed with the procession’s theme, “One Nation Under God.” For The Lamp, a delightful Catholic literary journal, I wrote about marking American unity with a walk through the secessionists’ capital, where those who believe what the pilgrims do have always been a small minority:

The procession began on Church Hill, across the street from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, where in 1775 Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. In the shadow of that famous church is Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, built in 1860 for Irish immigrants, who would join the Confederate cause as enthusiastically as anyone else in the South. I joined a small crowd milling around on the sidewalk outside Saint Patrick’s, where weeds grew up between the bricks. When the door opened and the priest appeared on the porch with the golden monstrance, a cloud of incense wafted out and mingled with the florals of early summer and the garbage and exhaust fumes of the city. Everyone knelt. As the priest stepped carefully down to the street, the only sound was the house sparrows chirping in the gutter.

Read the rest at The Lamp.

Monk drives jeep

14 March 2018
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“Yesterday Father Cellarer lent me the jeep. I did not ask for it, he just lent it to me out of the goodness of his heart, so that I would be able to go out to the woods on the other side of the knobs. I had never driven a car before.  … I drove the jeep madly into the forest in a rosy fog of confusion and delight. We romped over trestles and I sang ‘O Mary I love you,’ went splashing through puddles a foot deep, rushed madly into the underbrush and backed out again.

Finally I got the thing back to the monastery covered with mud from stem to stern. I stood in choir at Vespers, dizzy with the thought: ‘I have been driving a jeep.’

Father Cellarer just made me a sign that I must never, never, under any circumstances, take the jeep out again.”

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

 

 

The whole country seemed somehow to be running

10 October 2017
2017 Reading, Uncategorized
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Willa Cather draws such a captivating picture of the tall grass prairie — the worlds contained in what looks like empty plain — before it was plowed under that I want to drive to Nebraska and see what remains of it, in the old cemeteries where the first homesteaders are buried.

“The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.”

I found O Pioneers! more satisfying than My Antonia, which I read years ago. We see Antonia through Jim Burden, and once he grows up, he makes her into an archetype: “a rich mine of life,” the raw, fertile land personified. We get Alexandra Bergson’s story unfiltered by anyone except her creator.

As much pleasure as O Pioneers! and My Antonia brought me, I could not get past the first chapters of Song of the Lark, the final installment of Cather’s prairie trilogy, set in Colorado.

 

 

Hemingway in Africa

7 October 2017
2017 Reading, Uncategorized
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“It was a country to wake from, happy to have had the dream.”

“All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.”

I picked up Green Hills of Africa this week. It apparently was not much appreciated at the time nor especially valued by later Hemingway scholars.

“Evenly divided between big game lore and salon controversy,” in the words of one 1935 New York Times review*, about sums it up. Of the big game lore, two-thirds is specifically about Hemingway and his friend Karl’s pursuit of kudu, a kind of antelope with exotically curling horns. Karl is lucky and shoots a beautiful kudu the first day. Hemingway is jealous. The next morning, he is not jealous. He will get his kudu. And so he does, many pages of fine country later.

The salon controversy is a fun guessing game with even a little knowledge of Lost Generation writers, though I don’t know and don’t care to look up which female writer got under Hemingway’s skin so thoroughly. But there are conversational asides and stream-of-consciousness meditations about writing and living well that are more and more interesting than “salon controversy.” The accounts of the evenings after a day’s shooting, where most of these asides occur, are a pleasure in general. Fireside conversation between Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and their white guide Pop returns frequently to war, to Pauline’s amusement: “Say, were either of you in the war by chance?”

I can see why one could be put off, by the pile-up of dead animals, the expectation that “Karl shot a larger rhino than I; now I am sad” be taken seriously, the rapturous communing with colonized land, etc. But if you like Hemingway at all, and you’re willing to skim where it gets repetitive, it more or less goes without saying that his safari chronicle will be enjoyable. Green Hills of Africa makes a decent case for the appeal of big-game hunting, despite its being so thoroughly out of fashion now.

Hemingway’s assessment of his own failings is surprisingly affecting; maybe it’s knowing how his life ended. “I was getting the evening braggies,” he says after his triumphant shooting of the kudu; he tells us when he’s been “a four-letter man” and tries to overcome his trophy envy and be happy for his friend Karl’s luck.

The African people in this book do not get to be fully human, and the n word is used repeatedly; if this book is bad or hasn’t aged well, it’s because of those things.

I then read his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Had I read this in college I would have been mesmerized. Today I found it absurd. I like Hemingway, I think he’s worth reading even though women are peripheral and two-dimensional in his world, but there’s no writing good enough to redeem a plot like this for me. A man is dying of gangrene on a hunting trip. He is accompanied by a woman, who has ruined him with her money and her love. He thinks about all the other women who ruined him and forced him to squander his talent. The women have done this by having money, or needs in the bedroom, or simply by living a comfortable life in his view. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes a cameo appearance. Vultures and hyenas circle and the man informs his wife that “love is a dunghill.” Then he dies.

*which continues: “Sometimes dispensing with grammar, Mr. Hemingway decimates the fauna of Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo along with Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier and Thoreau. The carnage is frightful.”

A second review appeared in the NYT two days later. It’s less amusing, but comes to the more useful conclusion that “even if you do not approve very strongly of men who go out and blast innocent rhinos into kingdom come you can still enjoy ‘Green Hills of Africa’ for many other things.”

 

Reading, January-February 2017

3 October 2017
2017 Reading, E.B. White, Uncategorized
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At the beginning of 2017 I went on a White family bender. First I re-read E.B. White’s collected essays, which are among my very favorite written things. Then I read the Letters of E.B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth. What a task that must have been, assembling seven decades’ worth of letters to and from. Strung together they make a compelling biography. I stayed up late reading it, despite the small person who woke me several times each night. I was somewhat unsettled by how much I enjoyed diving deep into a real person’s life, consuming (that’s the word that kept coming back to me) decades of it at a time.

It led me to read about Katharine Sergeant Angell White, his wife, a legendary New Yorker editor, paragon of good taste, gardener, confidant of Nabokov and Updike (it’s unpleasant, describing women by their relation to men; let’s add “like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Austen,” from the linked New Yorker article, for counterbalance). By all accounts she was interested and interesting, a formidable, aristocratic New Englander; I imagine her speaking like Katharine Hepburn, sharing that early midcentury transatlantic accent along with the distinctive name spelling. The descriptions remind me a bit of my grandmother, also a paragon of good taste; a reader of Updike, the New Yorker and good fiction generally, though I don’t know about Nabokov; and an occasionally formidable figure who was by way of being from New England, though also West Virginia. There was always something aristocratic about her to me, even just her regally upright posture.

I checked out Katharine White’s one published work, Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of gardening essays that appeared first in the New Yorker. They initially took seed catalogs as the subject of more or less straight book reviews, without preamble or explanation. I appreciated the novelty and the brisk tone, but gardening has not yet captured my interest, and I returned the book unfinished.

Then I turned to the next generation: Roger Angell, noted baseball writer, retired fiction editor at the New Yorker, and Katharine White’s son from her first marriage. Let Me Finish is his memoir of his 1920s boyhood in New York City — a charmed time in the city’s life, in his telling (the Depression remaining on the periphery of his world), and what he calls a more or less classic, charmed American boyhood — except for his parent’s divorce and his mother’s departure, which he describes with remarkable generosity. He recounts without bitterness the certainly bitter proceedings that ended with his father having full custody, and him and his sister riding the subway down to Greenwich Village to spend weekends with his mother and Andy White. Is Angell fair-minded by nature (he notes that his sister found the divorce much harder to forgive), or is it the perspective that ninety years confers?

The boy Roger comes across as lucky and lighthearted, a talkative enthusiast interested in baseball, of course, but also snakes and a hundred other things. His tale of riding the subway to the Bronx Zoo with a snake in a box, accompanied by “my snakiest friend, Kim,” to present the animal to the surprised, but willing, keepers of the reptile house for an unscheduled check-up feels characteristic.

This Old Man was a more uneven read, collecting as it does letters, two-page reminiscences about Angell’s well-known departed acquaintances (William Shawn, Harold Ross), essays and New Yorker pieces spanning sixty years. It was worth reading for the title piece alone, though, which deals not with the rarefied literary world of his youth and career, but a bit of privilege that landed on him at random. (The essay appears in slightly different form here.) He describes what it’s like to reach 93, to outlive not only two spouses but some of your own children and most of your friends. The sentences I underlined note his surprise that the wish for physical touch, intimacy, never goes away and hardly dims. “Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love,” is the line in the online version.

Even better, though, was his 2012 essay “Over the Wall,” which begins with a list of things his recently deceased wife will never know about about: Obama’s re-election, the Giants’ World Series win. At the end he visits her in the Brooklin, Maine, cemetery: “All [the graves] are worn to an almost identical whiteness … some washed almost to invisibility. … What I noticed most, though — the same idea came over me every time — was that time had utterly taken away the histories and attachments and emotions that had once closely wrapped around these dead, leaving nothing but their families and names and dates.

It was almost as if they were waiting to be born.”

Notes from Astoria Park

12 August 2011
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Every time I walk through Astoria Park I’m struck by the diversity of activities and people pursuing them. There are dads in t-shirts with the sleeves cut off huffing and puffing and doing that dad-getting-back-in-shape type of jogging where the motion is largely up and down rather than forward. Dad is usually being outstripped by his three-year-old on a tricycle.

A young blond mom in yoga pants powerwalks with aggressive swinging of the hips, accompanied by her small daughter on a scooter in a Barbie helmet who is in the middle of saying “See when you scream at me I just get angry” and the mom is responding “See I scream at you because” and I really want to hear the end of that exchange but they are powerwalking and scootering too fast.

A group of kids are monopolizing the water fountain, filling balloon after balloon with water as a line of sweaty adults hold back their desire for a slurp of water and/or inability to see someone cut a line without barking “hey! you see this line?” because the kids are cute in their excitement about the water balloon project. The project turns out not to be a water balloon fight; they are using the balloons as vessels, filling them, carefully carrying them to a nearby bench, and emptying them into a plastic container, its purpose endlessly absorbing to these girls and completely inaccessible to the waiting adults. Eventually a smiling South Asian man rides by on a bike, assesses the situation, doubles back and asks the girls to let others have a turn.

Hot young things who walk in pairs, their leggings and skintight tops showing off hourglass shapes that would make Kim Kardashian jealous, their ponytails sleek, and their conversations along the lines of “but then Tyler came to her party, and he showed up totally drunk, and” but again we’ve walked past and we’ll never know if Tyler is a boyfriend, cousin, or what, and if his behavior is a serious continuing issue, or not that big of a deal.

50s-ish women with visors and fanny packs walk-and-talk, discussing the rise and fall of neighborhoods. 70s-ish men sit on the benches at the brow of the park, faces to the setting sun.

Inside the track, people do calisthenics and crunches. Some of them work in pairs. You can always borrow someone else’s partner’s encouragement if you need help getting to that 10th sit-up. “Ya feeling this, right? Ya always feel the sit-ups. How ya know they’re good for you.”

Inside the track, on the field, the “No Ball Games” sign is being disregarded with joyous abandon. There are at least five soccer games going on. To my delight I recognize a group of older men playing SPUD and I’m immediately transported to the field behind my grandmother’s house, my cousins and I spelling out giant steps, S-P-U-D SPUD, stretching one leg out until our shorts threatened to rip, pegging each other as hard as we could.

Mainly it’s soccer though, and there’s always some guys in striped cook’s pants, and some guys in undershirts, gym shorts and dark dress socks, their belt, suit jacket and pants folded neatly on the edge of the field. The ball games add a hazard to jogging around the track, because at any moment you could take a ball to the face, or to the stomach, or worse, to the behind, and then all the kids shriek with laughter and you hear “She got hit in the butt!” in four different languages.

But the hazard is worth it because the players kick the balls high high high, since they don’t have much lateral space to work with, and they arc beautifully, moving more slowly than would seem possible, and the evening light is so soft and clear that you can see the pattern of stitches turning over and over as the ball traces an elegant curve against the angles of the Triborough Bridge, gathers speed on the way down, and thwomps a helpless jogger. “Sorry, sorry!” all the players call out, and you can tell they are, but they can’t stop playing because they are having so much fun, this is so wonderful, the fresh air blowing off the river, the aforementioned evening light, the day ending with some light competition and vigorous moving about and camaraderie.

People of all shapes, sizes, races, income levels, are out of doors and breaking a sweat together. I have profound thoughts about America and melting pots, about neighborhoods, about community, about diversity, about fitness and fresh air, to the point that I think I should start taking a tape recorder with me to the park to preserve these observations, because they never sound as profound by the time I get home and write them down.

I feel a surge of affection for Astoria and for New York as I trot around the track, watching. This leads me to another profound thought, this one about New York’s boundless capacity for new life, new stories, its endless ability to absorb and embrace and make you its own.