Dinner

"People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is being established or their lives are being broken up." - Chekhov

Off Again

It’s my last Sunday afternoon at home before I take off on a month-long voyage abroad.  These adventures have become a bit of a routine – I haven’t had a summer without an extended solo trip overseas in six years.  I woke up this morning with what has become the familiar pre-trip feeling: so excited about the adventures ahead, but a frightening and frantic need to peel back the sheets to embrace the family I will soon leave.  The chaotic urgency of my need to love them is oddly silenced the moment I actually see a member of my family, the same way a huge horse can soar across a pasture in a frolicking, bucking gallop and bounce to an instant halt with its forelegs just inches from the fence.  I instantly default to playing it cool, often erring even on the side of appearing distant.  And yet my entire chest cavity seems to swim with heat and tightness as I deliver an intentionally half-hearted good morning hug, ensuring that I guard the terrible, shameful secret that my heart is breaking with love and longing. 

 

Right now I am sitting on one of the loungers by the pool in the backyard.  It’s 75 degrees outside, cool breeze blowing, ambient noise of water flowing around in the pool, occasionally the lazy and distant chug of a radial airplane engine traversing our sky space.  My brother is on the lounger next to me going through a test prep book for the entrance exam into the National Guard.  My dad is on a chair behind us (he recently crossed over to that side to follow the sliding shade from the umbrella) reading Steve Forbes’ new book that compares modern corporations to great empires throughout history (I gave it to Ian for his birthday, and dad – who reads about 50 pages a minute – swiped it up first, as he often does).  The cat is crashed out in the shady grass next to him, lying on his back with his white fluffy cat-tummy bared to the breezes.  There’s a pile of silenced iPhones and Blackberries on the table between the three of us, as well as small silver trays with empty dishes from brunch.

 

Ian just stood up and said, “Will you be sad if I go sit at the table?”  The table is about 15 feet away.  I smile and answer, “Of course not.”  But it does make me sad when he goes and the chair beside me is now empty.  I swallow it, however – I think my impending voyage for a month-long stint in the Middle East divests me of my right to keep him from his 15-foot displacement for the next half hour.  But I miss him somehow as I look over at his deeply concentrated little face over there. 

 

My mom and I spent a lovely morning together in quiet and easy conversation, intermittently confessing shy sentiments of contentment to one another.  We were geographically located in the epicenter of six or seven unfinished remodeling projects and countless others that had yet to be tackled.  We’ve had upwards of twenty people come out to give an estimate on the kitchen remodel we keep putting off.  I was sitting on a little sofa mother happened upon one day at the Jewish women’s charity thrift shop on Wilshire one day – it was used as patio furniture on the porch of the house I lived in my senior year of college and had settled in our breakfast nook when I moved back home after graduation.  Not the piece we imagined for so prominent a place in our home, but mother expresses our sentiments perfectly when she sits there with her laptop and a cup of coffee and pretends she’s on a cruise ship looking out at the backyard through the window next to her.  It’s a great little sofa. 

 

Mom says it well when she exclaims that we are “cursed with contentment.”

 

It has been a recent struggle of mine to try to examine the meaning of the phrase “full of life.”  Because of the fullness of the relationship I have with Him, I am satisfied to count the phrase “full in Christ” a synonym.  But to explore that, to give it gravity by giving it words – ah, I am inept. 

 

I look at it this way: here I sit in the same backyard I’ve sat in since I was thirteen.  From my vantage point, I see the patio table, the pool slide we were never really young enough to enjoy in this house, the now-empty flowerbed I once labored for an entire summer to fill with blossoms, and the back of our house.  As I take in the scene, my muscles twitch with the desire to dance about, swiping a mental butterfly net this way and that in an effort to capture and bottle all the memories that linger in the atmosphere of this 1/8 of an acre.  I can watch the countless backyard dinner parties like a movie montage, in addition to many anguish-wrought nights writing by candlelight at the table or in the wrought iron chairs by the ivy covered wall.  I watch myself finishing Somerset Maugham novels, flipping through Vogue, sitting in the middle of the line of all the cousins at my grandmother’s memorial service, refilling the punch bowl at my brother’s Eagle Scout ceremony, coming downstairs for lavish brunches (nobody can pull these together like Judith Whittinghill) on special or just normal Saturdays.  I can spread my arms wide and splay my fingers and somehow grab the jasmine-scented air, pulling downward and wrapping it around me like a blanket. 

 

These long summer sits in the backyard are like jumping on a trampoline.  Usually they are the scenes of dreaming, planning, building, preparing – altogether springing up and out.  But every once in a while, my bounce matches up with my fellow jumpers’ bounces just right (they have changed nothing about their bouncing pattern to bring this about), and instead of soaring up over the rooftops my knees buckle and I’m sucked into the floor with black-hole strength gravity.  I land softly, cushioned and cradled, and all upward and outward momentum is, for a millisecond, sucked out of me completely.  And then I am content, filled to overflowing with the fullness of life as I take a little break from the jumping, lying on my back as the trampoline settles to stillness and looking up at the sky.  I see that I do these adventures because I do them, not because I need them or because I am searching for something.  This little house here is teeming with life – it’s a wonder the roofbeams can contain it.  It drips out of the windows, pours out the front door.  It is life and life abundantly.  It is love that both cradles and launches, love that simultaneously crushes your heart inward like an empty coke can and bursts forth in an explosion.  Love that forgives, hopes, gives, and does not fear.  Oh, how content am I.  

See a Palace Rise From a Two-Room Flat

It astonishes me to imagine the way my life will change when the time comes to bind it with another’s.  I just returned from seeing Up – a movie that, like all Pixar flicks surreptitiously do, caught me off guard with the profundity of its sweetness.  Pixar is the one company of which I am aware that can fill our hearts and televisions with purity, make us reflect on the deeper things, challenge our imaginations with creative nuance, and still rake in millions at the box office.  Ah, world, there is hope for you yet. 

The movie was about marriage.  It was about men and what they deeply want, women and their hidden longing, and the human need to – as George Bailey described to his blushing Mary – “lasso the moon” for his spouse. 

The film begins with a quick and silent montage that tells the story of an entire marriage, from beginning to end.  The couple meets as children when the gap-toothed redheaded girl steals the boy’s heart with her vivid imagination and thirst for adventure.  As the two marry and age, about ninety seconds of footage chronicle all of the dreams the couple shares through the decades.  Some are realized, but most are not.  The man seems not to notice his wife age a day until all of the sudden she is expiring, and he is caught unawares by her sudden inability to realize the adventures they’d imagined in their youth. 

He is torn to pieces because he could never seem to make the adventure come together for her.  She had dreamt as a girl of building a house in the jungle of South America, so he sets out to grant her childhood dream after she has passed away.  He will stop at nothing to accomplish this for his bride. 

And this is the characteristic common to all men.  It is manifested in myriad ways, but men all ache to build and create, travel and accomplish, see, do, climb, and conquer – but all for the sake of the queen whose heart they covet, worked for, have sworn to protect, and, above all, love with every fiber of their being.  Men want the world for their wives. 

I saw the movie with my brother and father.  They grimaced as they watched as the husband in the film had to spend their waxing “adventure fund” on automotive repairs, to fix the leaky roof, etc.  It killed them to watch this man finally decide to take his wife to the Amazon, only to find she was unable to make the trip.  What marvelous men I live with. 

And now to women.  After he has finally accomplished his goal and physically transplanted their house to the specific place in the jungle his wife imagined as a girl, he finds a notebook of hers with new pictures inserted in the “adventures I’m going to have” section she began as a kid.  In it are pictures of their wedding, little road trips they took, nights in the family room, mornings reading by the front windows, weekends doing yard work.  These were the adventures she dreamt of.  Loving him, building a life with him, putting personal touches on their quirky house – that was the adventure of her life.  She liked to let her imagination run wild on the precipices of rushing waterfalls and in the verdant roots of steamy jungle floors, but her heart was not tied to these. 

And this is what women give: they deal tenderly with the dreams of their men.  They give him a soft place to land after he spends his day climbing, striving, building.  Don’t get me wrong – women certainly do these things too, often to a greater degree, but this is how I perceive the roles when the workday is over, the front and back doors are locked for the night, and the household is quiet.  Women see the fulfillment and adventure in building things that sometimes appear quiet and plain, but hold all the meaning our blink of life can contain.  A man wants to give his wife the world.  But a woman knows she already possess it because she has a man who will labor for a lifetime to give it to her. 

It’s stated well in that beautiful song from Cabaret:

“How the world can change

It can change like that,

Due to one little word: marriage. 

 

See a palace rise

From a two-room flat,

Due to one little word: marriage. 

 

And the old despair

That was often there

Suddenly ceases to be. 

 

For you wake one day,

Look around, and say,

‘Somebody wonderful married me.’”

 

Perhaps this will be for me someday, perhaps it won’t.  This discussion interests me as it concerns the comparison in the Bible between a good marriage and the relationship between Christ and man.  The bride-groom relationship is just like the man-God relationship in this respect, and in many others. 

The male and female roles described above coexist perfectly within the person of Christ.  On one hand, Jesus is the comforter, the one who reminds us of our constant fulfillment within his love for us.  When our dreams don’t pan out and the world disappoints us (as is nearly always does), Christ is there to present the eternal truths of love, joy, hope, and peace as reminders that all is well in spite of our frustrating circumstances.  And yet he is also there with us as we cling to rocky mountain faces, racing toward our high-dollar dreams.  He encourages us to take adventures, he blesses our petitions, he created this endless universe for us to explore, dominate, enjoy, and use.  And he longs to give it to us, to grant us our every wish, to love and nurture us, his bride. 

In Christ, as in a good marriage, we inherit the palace of God’s kingdom, be it indeed a castle on a cloud or, simply put, a two-room flat.