November night, driving through town in ink-dark rain.
Stoplights unfurl twin glistening rivers of green, then red,
a hundred yards down the wet street into my headlights,
just as the moon reflects upon water.
I still sleep on one side of the bed. I don’t know how many previously coupled people do this. Presumably some of us move to the middle and stretch out. I was curious about that tonight, for no particular reason, and tried to Google an article or two or a survey on the subject. I’m not sure what it means that I still sleep one one side, four years out from divorce. Sometimes I say that it’s easier to get out of bed at night if you’re not so far from the edge, and that may be true, but that’s probably not the heart of it. I think I’m just not ready to say that there will not be someone, someday, sleeping on the other side. Google, for once, didn’t turn up one relevant thing. I did learn about romantic feng shui for the bedroom, but that wasn’t what I was after.
I knew an elderly woman a number of years ago who lost her husband after a marriage of well over half a century; theirs was a real marriage, the sort where two people become a part of each other instead of merely cohabiting or enduring. She had tears in her eyes when she explained, “Until Bill died [not his real name], I had never slept alone.” As a girl, she had slept with a sister through the years, until her wedding day. She had never spent a night apart from her husband. Ever. So there she was, well over seventy, and she had never slept alone in a bed. She did learn to sleep alone. She learned to lean more on friendships. I did see her smile again. I don’t know whether she sleeps on one side or in the middle, if she is still alive today.
What I did find on the Web, fifteen minutes into a Google search, was a batch of stories about going to bed, from the June 2001 edition of The Sun magazine. These are accounts sent in by readers; they are varied - poignant, arresting, amusing, lovely by turns. They make wonderful bedtime reading about a subject which deserves more attention than we give it, wherever we sleep in our beds.
I just bounced downstairs to check on something. Through the oval cut glass that forms the center of the front door, I could see flashing colored lights across the street. An ambulance? The police?
No. Christmas. Christmas has come at the neighbors’. A tall tree lights the front window, and two artificial trees twitch in perpetual spasms of light - blinking colors and white, colors and white.
I am fond of Christmas, I really am. I used to mark its coming by lighting a candle at midnight, looking out my window at the starry sky and the darkened fields, and listening to the night as if it might whisper something to me. I remember my father taking us to find the perfect Christmas tree from a lot. This took hours, and the tree was always too tall when we got it home, and there was great trouble in shortening it and setting it up. Decorating my father’s Christmas trees took three days and more than 600 ornaments, some of them far older than I am, now boxed in the eaves at my mother’s house. My father loved trains, and model trains were a staple gift for years during my childhood. Partly for that reason, I love the fact that train tracks lie just below the bluff at the back of my yard, and trains rumble by. They do not keep me awake at night. They bring me memories.
I remember my mother reading us Christmas stories - of the nativity, of Santa’s workshop, of the ghost of Christmas past. I can see the picture in the books, even now.
My brother and I were always horribly spoiled at Christmas with too many gifts, yet somehow we were not spoiled at all, because neither of us is greedy or self-centered now.
When my children were small, I made them the magic of Christmas, too. We made Christmas cookies with cookie cutter shapes and decorated the cookies with colored icing. We gave them as gifts. Sometimes I’d cut big ones freehand, too, rocking horses or angels or Santas. When my son wanted a Superman figure and Superman figures were, remarkably enough, not being made at all (we were between movies, I guess), I sewed a tiny Superman suit, with little red boots and a cape, virtually perfect. The Superman that could not be bought in any store stood twelve inches tall under the tree, looking dashing, though remarkably like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid dressed up, a resemblance duly noted some years later. I made a tiny elf shoe with a turned-up toe and a bell, to leave behind in the fireplace. When they asked about Santa, I told my children that Santa was the spirit of love and giving; I was careful not to lie, not really. I never changed my answer.
Now their two half sisters, still just an infant and a toddler, are growing up in a house where there will not be elves and such, or Santas or sleighs. This is a religious household. I asked my children, “Would you rather have known that there was no real Santa from the start, or were you glad you had the magic while you were young?” They think for a minute and say they’d choose the magic all over again. Perhaps they’ll understand through their lives that love can always make a little magic.
Christmas was always holy, too, and it’s still holy somehow, even though I know now that it takes the winter solstice for the birthday of a child born at a different season of the year. No matter, it is a dark season, and we need light, and song, a tree in the house, gathering, giving, and the thought of divinity incarnate come midwinter. If Christmas didn’t exist, we who celebrate it would have to reinvent or borrow or revive something else, just to get through. Instead Christmas did all of these things.
But I’ll be confounded if it’s all supposed to start at Halloween or Thanksgiving, or if it’s all about the malls in the city on the river thirty miles away and shopping bags and going further into debt. I hid out all Black Friday and went nowhere at all. I will shop, such as I shop, mostly online. I’m hiding out from Christmas until I’m ready for Christmas to come. Twelve days was a good idea. More is like eating too, too many sweets, wrapped in shiny foil. I’d like to hang a sheet over the front door for a week or two, until I’m ready for a fresh green wreath instead and that trip to buy find the perfect tree, or close enough.
Every weekday morning, a student office aide brings me a newspaper in my classroom. Most days I don’t have time to look at it. If I manage ten minutes for a working lunch and two bathroom breaks, it is a good, comparatively relaxed day. I check the headlines online at home, and sometimes I drill down for more, but mostly I am behind. My favorite news source, NPR, is outblared, a lot of the time, by Jimmy Eat World, or whatever else my kids are playing, using the eMac downstairs for a boom box. (You have to give Apple credit; it’s a pretty effective boom box. If only the million dollars in funny money found in the dryer yesterday had been real, the teen tykes would have iPods and headphones for Christmas, and I would have NPR.)
A holiday, though, affords me a chance to catch up. I’m noting with particular interest the turning of the tide regarding Iraq. Early this year, Bush, upon direct questioning, indicated that, if the Iraqi government asked for a pull-out, he would honor that request. On January 28, the New York Times reported Bush’s remark in an interview:
[A]sked if, as a matter of principle, the United States would pull out of Iraq at the request of a new government, he said: ‘’Absolutely. This is a sovereign government. They’re on their feet.'’
Now that the elected Iraqi government is calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, I like to think that Bush is cornered by the demands of integrity. The whole world has him cornered. The LA Times suggests this morning that this is so:
President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces.
The administration’s pivot on the issue comes as the White House is seeking to relieve enormous pressure by war opponents. The camp includes liberals, moderates and old-line conservatives who are uneasy with the costly and uncertain nation-building effort.
It also follows agreement this week among Iraqi politicians that the U.S. troop presence ought to decrease. Meeting in Cairo, representatives of the three major ethnic and religious groups called for a U.S. withdrawal and recognized Iraqis’ “legitimate right of resistance” to foreign occupation. In private conversations, Iraqi officials discussed a possible two-year withdrawal period, analysts said.
The developments seemed to lay the groundwork for potentially large withdrawals in 2006 and 2007, consistent with scenarios outlined by Pentagon planners. The approach also tracks the thinking of some centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior representative of his party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Biden’s call for an Iraq timetable, published in the Washington Post today, lights the way forward. Biden begins,
The question most Americans want answered about Iraq is this: When will our troops come home?
We already know the likely answer. In 2006, they will begin to leave in large numbers. By the end of the year, we will have redeployed about 50,000. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 will follow. A small force will stay behind — in Iraq or across the border — to strike at any concentration of terrorists.
There’s more, of course. I feel somewhat better already just to read a plan by someone who has bothered to envision one. In a pinch (and the Iraq debacle is a mighty pinch), I don’t really care how we achieve the turn of the Screw-Up, I’m just glad to think that this may be occurring, even while I’m going about the business of my days and writing posts about the dog and the cat.
On another level, my concern is that, even if policy is redirected, we simply do not have leadership in place skilled and with-it and visionary enough to see us through - unless the Bush administration is willing to lay aside hubris and listen to wiser voices while simultaneously grappling with actualities instead of trying to crochet palatable perceptions out of lies. Leaving Iraq means leaving an Iraqi army to defend a nation, if we are not to fail Iraq utterly, and the formation of that Iraqi army remains a worrisome challenge. James Fallows, in the latest issue of The Atlantic, explores the obstacles to success. Having interviewed those close to the situation, Fallows writes:
What I heard amounted to this: The United States has recently figured out a better approach to training Iraqi troops. Early this year it began putting more money, and more of its best people, on the job. As a result, more Iraqi units are operating effectively, and fewer are collapsing or deserting under pressure. In 2004, during major battles in Fallujah, Mosul, and elsewhere, large percentages of the Iraqi soldiers and policemen supposedly fighting alongside U.S. forces simply fled when the shooting began. But since the Iraqi elections last January “there has not been a single case of Iraqi security forces melting away or going out the back door of the police station,” Petraeus told me. Iraqi recruits keep showing up at police and military enlistment stations, even as service in police and military units has become more dangerous.
But as the training and numbers are getting somewhat better, the problems created by the insurgency are getting worse—and getting worse faster than the Iraqi forces are improving. Measured against what it would take to leave Iraqis fully in charge of their own security, the United States and the Iraqi government are losing ground. Absent a dramatic change—in the insurgency, in American efforts, in resolving political differences in Iraq—America’s options will grow worse, not better, as time goes on.
By the end of the six-page article (in its online form), Fallows outlines necessary the level of commitment we must make to training an Iraqi army if we are to leave honorably. I, in my little house with my stack of essays to read this afternoon, simply do not know enough to weigh Fallows’ conclusions, which I’ve excerpted below, but I do know that I fervently hope the exit plan for this war and for the building of the Iraqi army somehow, behind the scenes, falls into extraordinarily capable hands.
In sum, if the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for “transformation,” and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters. It will need to create large new training facilities for American troops, as happened within a few months of Pearl Harbor, and enroll talented people as trainees. It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes. It will need to broaden the Special Forces ethic to much more of the military, and make clear that longer tours will be the norm in Iraq. It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq—and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years—before it is too late.
Postscript:
Now then, while we have George W. Bush facing the demands of reality, let’s please call upon him to note recent findings regarding the influence of human activities on the build-up of greenhouse gases tied to global warming (CO2 levels being 25% higher than they have been at any time during the last 650,000 years).
I have a handful of favorite blogs I visit daily. I know none of these people personally, though I correspond sometimes with a one or two. They seem something like friends, which is probably presumptuous, but I appreciate being a part, whether passively or actively, of compelling conversations, the likes of which I cannot duplicate off-line.
I’m cheating this morning, post-wise, because I just spent a batch of time replying to another incisive, artfully crafted post by Outer Life. He writes of a man he knows who looks no deeper than slogans for the meaning of everything, and consequently bears none of the burdens reflective people do, Outer Life among them. I will not excerpt it except for the end, because Outer Life’s posts should always be read whole (i.e., you have homework before reading on).
He closes with a question:
The unexamined life is not worth living. Ignorance is bliss. Which is it?
The post and the closing question sparked thought, and my reply follows. Beware: philosophizing ahead - part of the nature of the critter I am. I think I’m posting it here because I will need to reread it sometimes, too, because it’s something for all of us, because so many times, living life perceived just so has helped me to make it through.
Is it ever so simple as either/or?
Persisting in willful ignorance, however psychologically comfortable and safe (I won’t use the word “bliss” here), is less than being fully alive, no?
But being fully alive, comprehending complexity and contradiction, need not preclude our experience of bliss now and again.
To ignore bliss where it may be found is also to shortchange a life, for bliss is not really found in ignorance after all, but in perceiving beauty and good in the midst of everything else.
Life isn’t, at least for me, one thing or another. I can know bliss and pain and contradiction and incontrovertible trouble all in a single day. The big secret is that one doesn’t cancel the other out. Joy doesn’t cancel pain, and pain doesn’t cancel joy. They coexist in this mutable and mortal world, and one is as real and vital to knowing what there is to know of this life as the other.
I don’t think your life needs to be examined less, only lived more. Anesthetizing your brain, as does the man of whom you write, would help nothing at all and is impossible besides. You just need to acknowledge an additional dimension; you need to further complicate your life with joy. Be utterly present to it where it may be found, and don’t smush it with all the rest.
Life is not either/or - perceiving preponderance is oversimplification - it is all at once and this and that by turns.
Choose some bliss today, great or small, carve out of a space for it, and give yourself to it wholly.