Fear of Flying Part III - The Cure (Really!)

The irony did not escape either of us – a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist, sitting in the consulting room of a cognitive-behaviorist. Penny appreciated the irony as well, but pointed out that symptom relief could be a good thing. I found that hard to argue with. She spent the first session taking a history of my specific experiences with flying, and interrogating me about my specific fears (the plane dropping like a rock out of the sky!) She taught me a breathing technique I had not heard of before, called “square breathing.” Breathe in for 2 counts, hold for 2, out for 2, hold for 2. Do this twice. Then increase to 3 x 3, and 4 x 4, etc. As a singer and a therapist I could buy this – it would help control the autonomous nervous system, and keep my diaphragm from rising up into my nasal passages. So, feeling a little silly, I tried it while she looked on. I’m a perfectionist, and always was a bit of a teacher-pleaser (read: suck-up). I got to 6. She said “Wow, you can stop now.” I tucked the information away. I might not be cured, but I sure knew how to breathe.

Next session I told Penny that I would have to fly again in about a week. I was scheduled to accompany Michael on a business trip to Santa Fe. Santa Fe requires two, if not three flights to reach from Philadelphia. My frugal husband, of course, chose the three-leg trip. “OK, then,” she said, “We’ll have to work fast.” She asked me where I lived, where I routinely drove and walked, where I worked and what I did on a daily basis. She said, “statistically flying is a very low-risk activity for you” and gave me some stats to back it up. I was much more likely to die of a car accident, being run over by a truck, mugged, exposed to a fatal disease, or struck by lightning, than I was likely to die in a plane crash. Michael rolled his eyes when I got home – she had told me pretty much the same things he had said about the redundancy of safety systems, etc.—but coming from someone other than a loved one I was able to hear it more objectively. She told me it was in the airlines’ very best self-interest to keep me and my fellow passengers alive no matter what. And it was needless to say in the pilots’ self-interest to land the plane safely. (Therapy à la Ayn Rand?) She told me (and this is the big cognitive-behavioral moment) that I had come to believe something that was entirely false—that flying was unsafe—and I simply (hah!?) needed to learn a new message. She sent me on my way and I prepared for the Santa Fe flight with my usual anxiety, but now also just a bit of…well, curiosity. Would these 2 measly therapy sessions be enough to help me?

The flights to Santa Fe were relatively uneventful. I did my “square breathing.” I told myself over and over that I was safe. And suddenly, the penny dropped (really, no pun intended). It wasn’t anything Penny had said specifically, but armed with her confidence, and attempting to take on the attitude of “fake it ‘til you make it,” I had actually remained calm. I had relinquished my efforts at superstitious control and lo and behold, I didn’t die. Even more surprising, this didn’t even feel especially momentous. What I realized was that all my life my body had been going into panic mode, with shallow rapid breathing, sweating palms, the whole bit. And I had believed my body.

All my life I’d been taught the message “Trust your body.” In dance class and movement class: “Trust your body.” As a professional singer, “Trust your body.” In yoga: “Trust your body.” And in my therapy training, especially working with abuse survivors whose bodies remembered traumas their minds had never even stored: “Trust your body.” But at least in this one situation, I needed not to trust my body! My body had been giving me false, panicky information—and had been reinforcing one bad experience after another. My body took the scraps of mis-information I had in my brain about flying being unsafe, and turned each flight into the feeling of a death trap, in which the body’s instincts to fight or flee could not be activated.

No wonder nothing I’d tried before had worked. All those remedies masked my body’s response, but did nothing to change my firmly held false belief, that I was going to die. Because my body was telling me so. My body was telling my brain: “We’re gonna die we’re gonna die we’re gonna die” and no amount of meditation or medication would mute that repeated message of doom.

This time around, I was able to send communication in the opposite direction. My brain told my body “We’re OK we’re OK we’re OK.” I breathed to help the body relax and take in the message. I remembered the statistics, and the self-interest of the airline and the pilots. I shelved my normal democratic socialist ideas for the duration of the flight and took Ayn Rand to heart—enlightened self-interest would keep us all safe. We landed. Three times. By the time we got to Santa Fe, I was positively congratulating myself on my newfound calm.

The flight home was a different story. We boarded the plane while the sky piled higher and higher with thunderheads. We waited, and waited some more. We finally took off. The turbulence was unbelievable. The plane bounced above the clouds like a puny basketball with flapping wings. (How do those metal wings flex so much!?) We landed once. (Actually, we hit the tarmac about 3 times before we officially “landed.” I think that counted for 3 landings all in one.)

After sitting in the plane for a while, breathing re-processed air and waiting for Air Traffic Control to send the signal, we took off a second time and banged around in the sky some more. The pilot came on and told us that the storms were building so rapidly in the Philadelphia area that we would have to circle some place in Ohio until we were cleared to land. We did this for about an hour, banking vertiginously over clouds that seemed to reach up and grab at the wings of the plane. Nervous chatter had subsided to a somber silence in the cabin. Finally, growing low of fuel, the pilot came on again and informed us that we would have to divert to Norfolk, VA. There was a collective groan among the passengers. It was about midnight when we landed in Virginia. The flight attendants came on and informed us that the pilots and crew were now at the legal limit of their flying time, and we could not go on. We all settled in on the floor of the near-deserted Norfolk airport. Some of us curled up and attempted to sleep.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity at our gate. One of the flight attendants got on the microphone. The pilot and crew had been granted an extension of their time. The weather was clearing enough for us to go on to Philly. In minutes, we were all up and being hustled on the plane. I saw two flight attendants grappling with one of the airplane’s heavy door, and slamming it shut. We barely got our carry-on’s stowed and our seatbelts fastened, and we were taxiing once more. The flight attendants hastily babbled through the safety message as the plane was approaching the runway. We were off once more, and again we were being batted up through the roiling heaps of clouds, and then quickly bouncing back down on our final descent.

And I realized I was completely OK. Calm, even, give or take a couple of quick inhales. (Michael of course was sleeping the sleep of the blasé.) I looked a couple of rows ahead of us where one of Michael’s colleagues was seated. In the orange spotlight of his reading lamp, I could see him sweating. He looked like a wreck. He looked, well, like me on previous flights. I am a good person. I did not gloat. (Much.)

Ever since that acid test, I have built on subsequent successful flights to reinforce the message: “We’re OK.” If my body gets a little stirred up by the speed of takeoff, or a lurch in-flight, I remember my square breathing, and I go back to practicing my nonchalance. I can board a plane now with almost as much sangfroid as I feel on a train or a subway car. I can drink caffeine and not get wired, and I can get work done. Occasionally, I can even sleep.

Needless to say, I am very grateful to Penny for her intervention! I do not feel the need to abandon psychoanalysis, however, and throw myself entirely over onto the cog-behavioral side! It’s my conviction that both have their place. Nothing replaces the quick and effective symptom relief of CBT. I am living proof. But who is to say that all the in-depth exploration I did previously in therapy and analysis, and in my continued reading and teaching of psychoanalytic theory, did not and do not continue to make such “cure” possible. I was already ripe for a new way of thinking and feeling – and living! Let no good introspection go to waste – that continues to be my mantra. Nor do I believe that any of my prayers during my phobic years (or since!) have gone to waste. No God worth his or her divine salt would fail to pour solace and courage on my times of terror, and perhaps even to open the way for healing to begin—slowly, subtly, and at last surely.

We will be landing soon. There is an orange sunset mist over the gentle, tree-covered hills of Virginia and the Carolinas. A few lights have come on in the miniature houses below. There will not be any fireworks on this November night. But I have finally regained the excitement I once had as a very young woman. I am flying, and my heart beats just a little faster, not in fear, but in anticipation. Soon, once again, there will be things to do down on the ground, and loved ones to greet. My prayers tonight will be filled with gratitude—not for surviving a deadly ordeal, but for living, yes, and all its wonders—even the wonder of flight!

No Fear of Flying (Part II – don’t worry, things get a LOT better in Part III!)

I’m still not sure what set me off, but it was sometime in my mid-20’s that I started down the slippery slope into a true phobia of flying. A friend at the time described waiting in line to board a plane that blew up right in front of him on the tarmac. (I now believe this was one of his many grandiose, made-up tales, but at the time I swallowed the story with shock and awe.) I had a couple of “bad experiences,” including one flight that inexplicably (I thought) took a sudden drop of about 1,000 feet in midflight. People screamed and a few held hands across the aisle. The pilot’s terse command, “Flight attendants, take your seats!” and the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated until we know what this turbulence is about,” did nothing to comfort us. Eventually the flight attendants all got up again and started maneuvering their carts in the aisles, but we were never told what happened. It was only years later that my pilot husband explained the phenomenon of “clear air turbulence,” and the likelihood that we were never in any danger, except maybe someone bumping their head on an overhead bin.

I began to do all the things phobics do to try to control the situation that causes their fear. I prayed. I tried to meditate (no good – every bump shook me out of any possible alpha state). I recited a mantra given me by a Jesuit friend: “Love supports the universe and love supports this plane.” In my 30’s and 40’s I asked my spouse Michael to visualize a pink blanket around my plane, and gave him precise takeoff and landing information so he would be sure to do it on time. I tried drinking wine (no good – I was still terrified, and fuzzy-brained on top of it). Just once I tried a Xanax. Not bad during the flight – but the adrenaline that had been pumping during the flight stopped flowing, and the drug really kicked in just in time for me to almost fall on my face as soon as I walked off the plane!

I eventually came to identify deeper roots to my fear. I made a connection to the sudden death of my grandfather when I was seven. He had gone on a trip to Denver for an American Legion Convention and never came back. He died of a heart attack while boarding his plane home. I came to believe, deep down, that travel was dangerous.

Realizing this, however, didn’t stop the phobia. With apologies to Freud, insight was not followed by cure! Anxiety had by now carved a pathway in my brain. Every time I boarded a flight, I felt absolutely certain that I was walking the gangplank to my death. Every subsequent scary experience (which could be as simple as a funny vibration or an unfamiliar whine of an engine) reinforced the sense of danger. Turbulence taught me the literal meaning of one’s knees knocking in fear. Benign experiences did not serve to reassure – in my twisted logic, a good flight simply meant that I had been miraculously spared, but a grisly and terrifying death still awaited me next time I took to the air. When I would land safely and begin to gather my belongings I would almost experience a kind of shock – I lived! Now I would have to go ahead and do the thing I was there to do, and for which I had skeptically planned (in the improbable situation in which I would survive the flight!) The relief I felt the moment the plane’s wheels hit the runway was like a stay of execution. I could hardly believe my luck had held one more time.

The anxiety in-flight quickly spilled over into anxiety about the anxiety. I so feared flying that I could hardly sleep the night before a scheduled flight. I would take care to leave my will out on my desk before leaving the house. I would clean everything, so my survivors would not see any disarray or dirt upon entering the house after notification of my demise. I would call a loved one or two while waiting to board the plane – just to say “I love you” one last time.

Weather became a preoccupation. I would scan the Weather Channel for all national storms and wind conditions the night before a flight. I breathed easier if the skies looked clear, but dreaded flying through rain and snow. My phobic mind filtered all of what I had learned from my pilot husband, disregarding the reassuring facts like redundant systems and FAA safety rules, while obsessing over everything that could go wrong (and I knew way too much about wind shears, icing, flaps, retractable gear, and hydraulic systems!) A basically stoic person, I usually braved conditions I considered bad if not fatal, but on one or two rare occasions I did refuse to board a flight (both during blizzards), and I toughed out the massive inconvenience of finding an alternative route home. On more than one occasion, I would call my long-suffering spouse, and he would “talk me down” from running tearfully for the nearest car rental booth to embark on a 2-3 day drive in bad weather.

In the last few years of the phobia, I began to say no to things I wanted to do, chances to travel for fun, and opportunities to give lectures and workshops in my profession. I narrowed my flying to the minimum (which still, given my far-flung family and conference-oriented academic life meant getting on a plan at least monthly). It was dawning on me that this was not a good way to live. Rather than cure my phobia—what phobia? Why would any sane person think it makes sense to hurtle through the sky at 35,000 feet in a heavy metal tube!? In fact, how could such a thing really be possible? I imagined a day when the laws of nature would suddenly catch up with the fact that all these tons of steel were up in the air where they did not belong, and gravity would suddenly yank them all out of the sky. I felt certain I would be on a plane precisely when that happened. I began to fantasize about a simpler life, lived in one place. I began to romanticize life in a medieval village, or a yurt.

I continued to make do, to fly less, but still fly when necessary. I white knuckled it across the country for work and family trips, and looked forward to the day when I would be able to live life entirely on the ground again. Then 9-11 happened.

It wasn’t the fear of hijackers that grounded me that fall of 2001. But living through the grief and horror of 9-11 in the Northeast had already raised everyone’s baseline anxiety. And then an airplane crashed in Queens, New York—a crash that was exactly my own very specific fear scenario. Catastrophic engine failure. A plane flying along just like normal, and then, with no warning, falling out of the sky like a rock. That did it. I was grounded.

I’d been scheduled to present a paper in Denver at a November conference I very much looked forward to attending. But as the date approached, I found myself completely unable to imagine getting on that plane, or any plane. I went to my Dean and President, and said “If I don’t go present this paper, would you be OK with that?” They were already aware of my fear of flying—although I had never refused to go anywhere before. And to their everlasting credit, they said “These are times of great anxiety, and we understand. We want you happy and healthy. You don’t have to go, and we will pay for the unused ticket.” It was an astonishing act of kindness, a moment of real grace I will never forget.

I knew I had to do something about this. I could not stay grounded forever and live my life. But what? I thought I had already tried everything, to no avail. Then Michael came home from flying his Cessna one weekend waving a piece of paper. A fellow pilot at his small airport had posted a flyer: “Support Group: Overcome Your Fear of Flying.” It turned out this avid small plane pilot, Penny Levin, was also a cognitive-behavioral therapist, and she had conducted several such groups with great success. After a brief conversation with her, she determined that individual counseling would work better, and also be cheaper for me, since much of the group covered basics of aviation I already knew (but hadn’t helped my phobia one whit.) I scheduled my first session.

I have to admit, I had my doubts. For one thing, as a psychoanalytic therapist, I had been trained to be skeptical about cognitive-behavioral therapy as a “bandaid approach.” And having already made my psychological breakthrough about my fear of flying—to no effect—I wondered what more this therapist could do. Nevertheless, I was drawn to her expertise as a pilot, and I liked her straightforward manner.

I was cured with two sessions – and a 3-legged flight from hell! TO BE CONTINUED…

No Fear of Flying, Part I

I am writing this blog at 10,000 feet altitude and rising… There was a time when I would have been doing this just to keep myself distracted and pretend that I wasn’t absolutely, positively certain that I was about to die in the next 20-30 minutes. Today I am actually not only calm, but I am happy. There is a bit of turbulence right now climbing out over rainstorms in northern Georgia, and I am able to think. I am breathing normally. (OK, more or less normally.) This feels like a miracle.

My fear of flying came on gradually. Like many of my generation, I did not fly at all growing up. The word “travel” meant a trip in the car, and not very far. I was born a white girl in the optimistic suburbs, where cars were loved, polished, talked about, and represented the very best guilt-free toy: necessary for dads to go to work and moms to go grocery shopping and kids to be shuttled to school, yet fun. With their enormous porpoise-shaped fenders and shiny chrome fins and grinning grills, they were the necessary luxuries that in many ways shaped our entire lifestyle. In the postwar relief from rationing, and before the Puritanism of the environmental movement, it was commonplace to go for a Sunday drive. This was our frequent recreational outing—driving up just over the New Hampshire border to see the fall leaves, or visit Storybook Land, or just to look around and come back. At Christmas we would take a drive to see other people’s Christmas lights. “Long” trips were to New York City to see the Rockettes and go to the Bronx Zoo, or to North Conway, New Hampshire, to stay in the Eastern Slope Inn or the White Horse Motel, to go to Echo Lake, and to ride the Skimobile on Mount Cranmore. Once my dad drove my grandmother and me to Boston (just about 12 miles away) where the two of us stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights and I felt like a princess. My most distant adventure, again with my grandmother, was a trip when I was about 14 years old to Washington, DC, where I dragged her through every room of the National Gallery and the Smithsonian, and she showed me her favorite monuments and fountains. I don’t even remember how we got there, but I’m guessing somebody drove.

My first flight was at the end of my freshman year in college. I had fallen in love with a lanky boy from Baltimore, a sweet and innocent art major who made pencil drawings with the delicacy and technical precision of a Renaissance painter. He asked me to fly down for an outdoor 4th of July concert performed by the Baltimore Symphony. I have never forgotten that first flight. I flew in on the night of the 3rd, and as the plane came in over the Baltimore, we could see dozens of local fireworks displays, like tiny illuminated sprays of flowers spreading open and disappearing in the dark. I had no fear at all, just a sense of awe and childlike delight. Our starter relationship turned out to be as ephemeral as the harmless bombs bursting in air, but I still have one beautiful drawing of his fingers playing a flute, and the memory of that first magical flight.

My happy relationship with airplanes turned out to be as ephemeral as well. My next flight was several years later, as I hopped aboard the Eastern shuttle (a now defunct plane between Boston and New York). With all the aplomb and assumed sophistication of a 22-year old singer, I took the quick ascent and descent in stride. I affected the bored familiarity of an unflappable New Yorker, and assumed I’d be doing so for the rest of my life. But my equanimity was short-lived. TO BE CONTINUED…

Lingering on the Threshold

Sometimes, when I’m traveling, I am overcome with this sweet melancholy. I feel a faint welling of tears, so deep behind my eyes that they never fill. It’s not sadness, and it has no particular reason or focus. But just for a moment, I feel as if everything that ever happened in my life, and everything that ever will happen, are concentrated in the present, and I’m more an observer than a participant. I catch a glimpse of myself in the laptop screen or the airplane window, and for a second I don’t recognize the 54-year old woman I’ve become. My face doesn’t match the 20-year-old feminist full of wise-ass hope, the newly married 30-year-old activist/singer, the 40-year old mother of a first-grader/priest/therapist, or the octogenarian grandmother professor I imagine myself someday to be. All the loves of my life past, present and future circle around my head like butterflies artfully swarming a Disney princess.

I’ve always loved these liminal moments traveling from one place to another. As a child I loved the excitement of packing the big robin’s egg blue car with its enormous fenders, and heading out to the highway. In my memory, the road to New Hampshire is always sunlit, the asphalt light greenish-gray and shimmering in the late summer heat, and the woods along the side of the road are lush and mysterious. There is always a wide horizon visible through the big windshield, and the sky is always bright blue. I’m sure I must have whined as all children do on long car rides, “Are we there yet?” and “I need to go’t’the bathroom!,” but what sticks in my memory is not the confinement and boredom. But the sense of being in a space neither here nor there—where what comes next is all possibility, and not yet locked in to a certain this or that.

In college, I found my liminal spaces on the 4-hour bus ride from Boston to New York, where my best friend had already begun the hardscrabble life of an aspiring opera singer. I looked forward to sharing confidences in her tiny studio apartment on West 71st Street, eating at Fulton’s Café across the street (now sadly replaced by a fast food restaurant), and discovering all the wonders of New York as a brand new adult trying on her brand new sophistication. But the bus ride was a special time in its own right. (As a college music major I couldn’t afford Amtrak.) Jiggling along the highway in the dark, sharing space with an assortment of humanity and our raggedy luggage, I always sank into a philosophical mood. I pulled out one of the dog-eared spiral-bound notebooks that served as my journals in those days, and took a long, serious, and romantic survey of my life. As the bus put distance between me and my brownstone dorm room, I analyzed my relationships, diagnosed myself and all my friends and relations, plotted my artistic career, bemoaned a variety of things, and indulged in sweet fantasies about my dramatic and glorious future. By the time I reached Port Authority, I was ready to assume the world-weary, glamorous, hardened slouch I always affected to meet (and mimic) my gorgeous friend. I wore black, and identified with tragic or waiflike beauties of the past—Garbo, Piaf, Dietrich, Anaïs Nin.

As I got older, and was claimed by adult relationships and responsibilities, travel became a more serious matter. Flying was often related to career advancement, and my liminal time was swallowed up by reviewing a paper or grant proposal (when I was not preoccupied just with keeping my fear of flying at bay – but that’s the subject for another blog!) There were family visits, of course, and occasional vacations. But the travel itself became something to survive, or at least to get through, rather than a gift of time and contemplation.

One trip that stands out, though, is the plane ride from San Francisco to San Salvador during the horrific mid-1980’s in Central America. My husband and I were not yet married – or even romantically involved. I had recruited him on this trip, both for his fluent Spanish and his natural leadership gifts, to join a small group of church members who had pledged to accompany a Salvadoran pastor targeted by the death squads for his work with the poor in the countryside. The plane, owned and operated by the Salvadoran airline TACA (lovingly dubbed “take a chance airline”), had an unfortunate habit of yawing rhythmically from side to side because its engines, as my pilot husband informed me, were “out of synch.” “Is that OK!?” I asked him. “Yeah, sure,” he said, nonchalantly – but I noticed his jaw kept clenching as he peered out the window. I remember looking straight ahead down the tunnel of the center aisle, which was dark in the nighttime flight, and thinking we were all hurtling to our doom. Not from the flight itself, I fervently hoped (how humiliating and mundane to be on a serious mission, and not even get there because of some ordinary plane crash!) We were all very quiet, not knowing exactly what we would be facing once we landed, but knowing that we had it ever so much easier than the faithful people we were going to visit and hopefully shield with nothing more solid than our U.S. passports.

My habitual preoccupation with my little life was muted on this flight by the enormity of what we had undertaken. We felt like mice getting ready to stand up and roar at a monster—which was in many ways the truth of the situation. Our only security was the paradoxical and angering knowledge that the escuadrones de muerte were funded by our own government, and our deaths would put a crimp in the operations of the CIA-supported Salvadoran paramilitary. Whether we lived or died, we would throw a spanner in the works. If enough mice confronted the monster, and went back to the U.S. to tell about what we learned, the war might even end. To this day, I believe it was one of the most foolhardy, and important, things I have ever done.

Salvadoran pilots, mostly military-trained, don’t tend to take off and land according to the niceties of American flight. Sharp ascents and descents are the norm—especially over the volcanic mountains that ring Central American countries. As the plane jumped and then lurched into what felt like a rocky free fall toward the capital, I fairly leaped onto my future husband’s chest. “Calm down, Coop,” he remembers saying to himself, “She’s just freaked out by the turbulence.” True – but before the month was over, we had gotten to know each other in a deep way that maybe only happens in an extreme situation like that war zone. We sat on a bench under palm trees one evening after saying Night Prayers with our little group. We held hands to the sound of shelling just on the outskirts of the city, and the shrill whistles of the paramilitary thugs who extorted payments for “protection” from the local neighbors. I loved him for his courage and calm, and he loved me for my passion and loyalty to the cause and the people. The leap I took into his arms on the plane turned out to be a leap for life!

Almost 2 ½ decades later, my travel has become much more routine. But I have reclaimed the liminal space of being on that Greyhound bus to New York, or even the car ride to North Conway,NH. I’ve become a mother, a settled professional, and even a brand new grandmother. My fantasies of the future no longer center around the glare of bright lights, although I have not completely given up performing (either on stage or in a lecture hall). My fantasies are quieter now, but no less warmly lit. I still survey my life and relationships sometimes, especially on a longer trip, but by now I imagine I have at least as much life behind me as in front of me, and the future holds more predictable scenarios. Maybe that’s why there is the slightest film of tears at the back of my nose. There are losses to be mourned—deaths of beloved people, relationships that have petered out or just ended due to changing circumstances and interests, jobs finished and cities left behind, and even opportunities not chosen. But the melancholy is sweet, too, because the present is full of joy, and the future holds both further loss and further promise. I am certainly not too old for surprises. As my friend Sharline often says, the Spirit often comes to us by way of surprises. What are today’s surprises, and what gifts do they offer?

Worth Getting Up For

(Sunday, Nov. 1, 9:00 a.m., from Washington, DC)

“Not a morning person.”  One year, in about 9^th grade, my daughter decided this would be her Hallowe’en costume.   As a very non-crafts-y, non-seamstress type of mother, I was not likely to be whipping up an exact replica of a character from the musical “Wicked,” and Macrina’s creativity was not well satisfied with a something purchased at Wal-Mart.  So as was often the case, late on the evening of the 30^th, she resorted to assembling something unique from her own closet and growing makeup kit.   That year, she came down the stairs on Hallowe’en morning in a blue and white striped bathrobe, shod in fluffy slippers.  She had her hair up in two messy braids.  A smear of blue and brown eye color created deep shadows under her eyes.  She grabbed a coffee cup, and pinned a sign on the lapel of her robe that read “not a morning person.”   The costume was perfect.  And the costume was a perfect replica of me (sans curlers, but without any need for the makeup.)

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am NOT a morning person.  When left to my own devices (which means, not required by job or society to get up at a particular hour), I will go to bed between midnight and 1 a.m., and rise between 9 and 10.  I am a happy 10-hours-of-sleep person.  8 hours makes me feel spiky.  6 hours makes me incompetent.  And any time my sleep is terminated before the sun comes up makes me downright evil.

The weather is a big factor, too.  In my teen years I chose to think of my morning agonies as a kind of 19^th century-style romantic angst when the New England weather brewed up dark clouds and the trees wept for days.  Romantic angst had the consolation of high drama.   But as the years went on, I realized that angst didn’t cut it when one is required to get up for work – or to feed a baby – or to drive a child to school.  There were days when I literally had to hurl the lower half of my body out of bed, hope my feet hit the floor first, and get upright before the lights in my brain were turned on.  Over the years I have learned to cope with this mismatch between my brain chemistry and the demands of modern civilization.  But I don’t willingly witness the dawn’s early light if I can help it!

So this morning was a pleasant anomaly.  Setting the clocks back for the end of Daylight Savings Time helped a bit, but I was up – and surprisingly cheerful – at 5:30 this morning to accompany my spouse to Washington, DC, where he is preaching for All Saints’ Sunday at Reformation Lutheran on Capitol Hill.  The drive down from our home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania wasn’t much fun, as it drizzled all the way.  But I discovered, as I often do when forced to be conscious in the hours before 9:00, that there is a world of delights to be had in the early morning – even early morning in the rain:

Walking through just the slightest veil of rain from Union Station to the Capitol, I find my spirits lifting as I breathe in the cool, moist air.  The trees are mottled grass-green and wheat-yellow, and glistening in the heavy mist.  The sky is a gossamer gray-yellow.  Washington’s marble buildings rise up, dove colored, above green lawns strewn with brown leaves.  The asphalt shines like a woman’s patent leather purse.

It is Sunday and there is almost no traffic.  This feels like a miracle.  The streets are quiet.  The few cars go by with a muted shush.  It’s possible to cross the confusing diagonal streets without taking your life in your hands.

There is a Starbuck’s on Pennsylvania Avenue at 3^rd Street with a blissfully quiet 2^nd floor.  No piped-in music, no talk.  Just the occasional sound of newspapers rustling and laptop keyboards softly clucking.  I am seated at a window where I can watch people and their umbrellas passing by below, through a screen of emerald and gold Maple leaves.

My simple things are not everyone’s of course.  My favorite things are mostly of the urban variety.  I have my Venti black iced tea (unsweetened).  I have the New York Times (yes, I know, I should be reading the Washington Post here in DC like a native.  But these are my favorite things).  I have an electric outlet to plug in my laptop.  I have Wifi.  I have time to think, and a quiet, well-lit corner to think in.  I have a whole hour to myself, in which no one knows exactly where I am, no one needs anything from me, and I can be my own companion.

And in an hour I have another short walk to take through the silvered streets, where a beloved person awaits me.  I will sing hymns, and pray with good people, and listen to my husband preach (which almost always brings me to tears), and then we will go have lunch somewhere.  We will probably hold hands.  Solitude is wonderful, and all the more wonderful when you know you are loved, and there is someone so happy to see you when you are ready to be companioned again.

Maybe it’s a midlife thing, but I no longer need the Sturm und Drang of morning agonies or the late-night drama that I thought was so exciting in my teens and twenties.  Give me these simple urban pleasures.  An hour of solitary bliss, bounded on each end by seasoned love.  I will get up in the morning – any day – for this!

Read My Feet!

Next week, the New York Museum of Arts and Design will open a new exhibit entitled “Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection.” The exhibit is accompanied by the publication of the former Secretary of State’s book Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box (HarperCollins). In it, she describes how her choice of jewels sometimes communicated a nonverbal message as she went about her diplomatic rounds. The MuseumViews web site (http://museumviews.com/?p=851)
explains:

"Over the years, Secretary Albright’s pins became a part of her public persona, and they chart the course of an extraordinary journey, carving out a visual path through international and cultural diplomacy. A highlight of the exhibition will be the brooch that began Secretary Albright’s unusual use of pins as a tool in her diplomatic arsenal. After Saddam Hussein’s press referred to her as a serpent, Secretary Albright wore a golden snake brooch pinned to her suit for her next meeting on Iraq. Read My Pins will feature the famous snake brooch among many other pins with similar stories-some associated with important world events, others gifts from international leaders or valued friends."

I had a chance to hear Madame Albright three years ago when she appeared at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Washington, DC. She is a wonderful role model—smart, tough, and winsome. And her sense of humor is sharp as the business end of a brooch.

The news of this exhibit got me thinking how our various items of apparel speak for all of us—perhaps especially in ways that subvert our more obvious messages about ourselves. I, too, have some brooches. My favorites include a beautiful landscape cameo that belonged to my great-grandmother; a miniature black & white photograph of Central Park bought from a street vendor outside the Metropolitan Museum; and a tiny silver chorus line of exuberant dancing figures. But my pins don’t “speak” as Albright’s did. The accessories in my closet that speak the loudest, and perhaps the most impertinently, are not my jewelry, but my shoes.

There are the utilitarian shoes and boots, of course. These are the ones that carry me out into the garden or the gym. They’re not glamorous, but they get the job done. They don’t have much to say. They are a “give us the facts, ma’am” bunch. Some of them don’t even live in the closet. The plastic clogs, the Wellies, the shabbiest flip-flops, hang out in the garage. No interest in hobnobbing with the fancy numbers inside. They like to stay close to the action outdoors.

Then there are the workhorses who stay indoors—cozy fleece-lined slipper-boots stretched out on their sides on the floor like sleepy cats. These technically are not mine. I “borrowed” them from my daughter and then somehow just didn’t manage to get them in the box of stuff to go with her to college. On cool winter nights (yes, Atlanta does get winter), there is nothing better than putting on my jammies and padding around in these squashy moon boots, my feet toasty warm and cushioned. Slippers don’t get out much, so they have little to say. They don’t talk, they purr.

The talkers, on the other hand, get the shelf space. There are the 4” black Steve Madden stilettos (my only really high heels, but doesn’t every woman have to have at least one pair, if only to remember the glamorous nights of her youth?) They don’t get out much either, but when they do, they make a ferocious roar: “There’s a lot of life in me yet!” Never shy, they make a satisfying click-clack on the floor. They accompanied me to the one and only party I ever attended at the White House last year. (I brought along a separate pair of shoes in a bag to get me to the hotel and back. They are what my friend Barbara Borsch calls “taxi shoes” – not made for walking!) I may wear flats for a week after taking these babies out for a spin, but they are soooo worth the trouble!

Then there are the tangerine suede heels that I wore to give a scholarly paper a few years ago. I wore the requisite suit for the occasion, but while the rest of me did the required “talking head” work of the day, these little slides carried the message: “Refusing to be stuffy!” They were joined this year by a pair of dark red peep-toe slingbacks, and a pair of bright red patent kitten heels. These trotted happily along with me as I joined an academic procession in my veddy veddy serious Harvard doctoral robe. Nice match for the crimson “crows’ feet” embroidered on the robe.

My workaday flats are mostly of the pointy-toe variety. While my husband occasionally comments on their witchy character, I prefer them to my snub-nosed ballet flats. Quilted ballet flats say “I’m sweet and harmless.” My pointy flats say, “I may not be wearing high heels, I’ve still got quite a kick!” Female professors—maybe especially those who teach pastoral care, supposedly such a “soft” subject—need to be a little edgy now and then. Just as a reminder. Tough love is a good thing.

There were some shoes that finally had to be ousted. Two identical pairs of square-toed pumps, one black, one bone, with chunky 1” heels and patent toe caps—these were my “church lady” shoes. I wore them to church for years, one pair before Labor Day, and one pair after, as I went about my Sunday parish duties. They spoke of sobriety, duty, and good etiquette. They liked to be worn with pantyhose. They did not clip-clop, they hit the floor with a dull smack. As my mother likes to say, these little drudges “will never go out of style because they never were in style.”

It finally dawned on me that the very women I imagined I would impress with my good taste and conformity were showing up in church in very different footwear—including everything from orthopedics to sneakers to Manolo Blahniks! There was definitely some fictional blue-haired woman in my head, wearing a mink and pearls, who would never be caught dead in anything other than stockings and square heels. I finally figured out that it was she who put me up to purchasing these babies—on sale, at an outlet mall no less. I sat her down inside my head and we had a little chat. “I appreciate your input,” I said, as I started putting the boxy pumps in a bag to give away. “But times have changed, and we’re movin’ on.” “I see,” she intoned, and her image began to waver and dissolve. As she disappeared into the mists of my imagination, I saw that she had changed her shoes, too. They were bright turquoise. With rhinestones. Next Sunday, when I’m in the pulpit, I won’t go that far. But I’ll be wearing black kitten heels. Pointy ones.

I have come to a new realization in the last few nights as I got back into dance class after a very long hiatus. All those shoes are mostly speaking to other people. Their messages are for show. They tell the rest of the world what I’m up to, and who I am beyond whatever I might be saying at the moment. They complicate my persona, and I hope make for a bit of fun and a bit of mystery.

But dance class happens barefoot. In this exercise combining modern dance and yoga, my feet carry me unadorned. As the soles of my feet come into contact with the bare floor, I begin to feel my roots again. Shoes give messages to the rest of the world. But feet speak directly to me: I am here. Now. On this floor, in this place, with its foundations on this solid ground, on this earth. I live in a body made up of naked soft flesh and hard, strong bones. I can be still, I can be balanced, and I can move, slowly or quickly, in ways that echo the graceful dance of the entire universe.

Shoes are fabulous—literally, fabricated, made up, fanciful, the work of human craft and design. But my feet, my body, are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” These amazing, vulnerable feet bring me back to the mystery of my creation, and speak of holy things. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who speak peace.” I flex and point, flex and point, to the sound of the instructor’s voice, and give thanks for this life in the body—in-carnation.

Of course, there’s still the toenail polish to consider… “Bright Tropical Mango.” Read my feet!

I stand here ironing

Noon today, and I am standing in my kitchen with an ironing board, three chairs, a large cardboard tube, and a very, very long white linen cloth, warm out of the dryer and rumpled like the surface of a lamb's soft fleece.  This cloth, my sweet nemesis, is an altar cloth (or "fair linen") I just borrowed for the morning from the neighborhood Episcopal church along with several other small linens--4 napkins ("purificators"), a miniature tablecloth ("corporal"), and a towel ("towel") for the lavabo (handwashing of the priest).  It was my turn as an ordained member of our seminary community to celebrate the Eucharist, and since I am still relatively new here (just beginning my second year), I wanted to share some of the special things we would use in a typical Episcopal liturgy.

The day before, I picked up these well loved linens.  They were pristine, carefully folded and pressed, embroidered with white-on-white crosses and "IHS" symbols in tiny, eyesight straining stitches.  The small items were sweet and friendly, but the fair linen was another matter!  Yards and yards of bleached, crisply starched fabric were rolled around the large cardboard tube, taped down to keep from slipping, and swathed in heavy plastic wrap.  I lifted the package from its perch on a high sacristy shelf, and cradled it in my arms to take back to the seminary.  "I'll take good care of you," I promised.  The plastic wrap crackled a protective reply: "You'd better!"

Got the beast to the chapel.  Unwrapped the plastic.  Peeled off three tapes.  Found three more and peeled again.  Laid the tube on the altar, and realized that it was too wide.  Maybe it could hang over the front and back a bit?

Unfurled the cloth across the simple wooden altar, and centered it.  With about 6 inches hanging over the front, it looked like a hospital gurney.  Both ends rolled out and puddled on the floor - more than twice the length of the altar and quickly proving to be incorrigible.

The cloth slipped twice as I tried to adjust the front hem to sit neatly at the edge of the altar, skewing first left and then right, leaving creases in the starched landscape across the altar.  Dreading more creases, I folded the cloth in half lengthwise, then rolled one end back to the center of the altar, leaving a neat rounded fold on one end of the altar.  Before any more sliding could occur, I anchored both ends with hurricane candles.  (I know, candles should be beside the altar, not on it... but compromises must be made!)  Placing the corporal in the middle of the table hid the loose end, and we were more or less in business.  The view from the pews wasn't half bad.

The service itself was beautiful.  We had a wonderful, unusual instrumental ensemble comprised of flute, fiddle, guitar, banjo, and cello, playing a Eucharistic setting based on American agricultural folk tunes ("Of the Land and Seasons," written by my Gettysburg, PA friends and colleagues Steve and Beth Folkemer).  The candles shed a soft light on the snowy altar cloth, and the liturgy went seamlessly and gracefully.  I knew, though, that I  might be in big trouble with the neighboring church's altar guild as the pouring of wine and grape juice proceeded, and inevitably, red and purple stains began to bloom on the linens.  At the end of the service, I surveyed the wreckage.  It looked like a great, jolly picnic had happened, with the remnants of a rowdy family spilling droplets of wine from merrily tilted glasses, and napkins receiving kisses of grapes and berries.

So home I went, with the napkins, the altar cloth, the tube, and the plastic.  The plastic rustled ominously as I stuffed it in the back seat.  It was clearly displeased.  I crunched it into a place on a kitchen chair.  "Just watch," I said.  I'd never been on an altar guild, but I had certainly been trained over many years by a number of those holy women (and a few men), learning everything from getting wax off a tablecloth, to mending a patch in an embroidered cushion, to understanding how the handling of chalices, cloths, and other holy things can be a profound discipline of prayer.  I had been taught to fold, fluff, press, and most important, de-stain, from the best teachers!

Out came the "Wine-Out" stain remover, a toothbrush, a hairdryer, and the ironing board with a row of chairs upon which to stretch out the cloth.  As I sprayed on the Wine-Out, I watched in horror and fascination as the stains turned from watery purple to bright turquoise.  Oh, words-that-should-not-come-out-of-a-priest's-mouth!!  Visions of furious altar guild ladies danced in my head.  I had planned to simply wash the spots and blow dry them, but clearly that plan was no good.  So crossing my fingers, I put everything in the washer, and then the dryer.  Lo and behold, all the spots were gone, except for one faint circle of palest blue, like a contact lens resting on the white linen.  I decided to live with it.  The plastic shifted on its seat and merely sighed.


So I stand here ironing.  Balancing the cardboard tube between kitchen counter and chair back, I iron the first three feet.  Tape to the tube in three places.  Start to roll.  Move the ironing board under one side, and then the other until all the fleecy surface is flattened.  Gradually, there is more acreage on the tube.  The far end slips off the farthest chair, and then the next, and finally with more passes of the iron, more shifting of the ironing board, and more twists of the tube, the fair linen is rolled back up, a little more pillowy than the way I received it, but respectable.  It's no longer stiff with starch, but the old cloth is soft and smooth as silk.  The plastic opens its mouth and meekly receives the roll, ready for transport back to the church.

It's a humble task, ironing.  Meditative, even, if you're in the right mood.  Ironing took the essayist Tillie Olsen deep into reverie ("I Stand Here Ironing") about her life as a woman, a mother, struggling to make ends meet, dead tired on her feet, yet ministering to her daughter's dress with patience and grace.  I, too, am a mother, with a daughter, 19 years old, recently back at college.  I, too, worry sometimes about the kind of parent I've been, and want now to be.  As her college community grapples this week with the pain and fear of a murder of a young woman in a campus science lab, and colleges across the country cope with a growing flu epidemic, I yearn to wrap my daughter up in some kind of protective sheeting.  To hold her close, wrap her tight, and keep her from any fall of rain, of fear, of harm.  As I iron the fair linen, I am loving it, and, I realize, I am making good, and making reparation.  Making good, by gently caring for this cloth that received the body and blood of  Christ this morning in community; making good on my promise to the local church that I would return its precious linens in the same good condition I received them; making reparation for the stains our joyful feast left on the cloth; and perhaps even making symbolic reparation for whatever stains I have left elsewhere, with those I love, with the world.  I know we cannot perfectly protect anything - not linens, and certainly not our children.  The iron moving back and forth sends up chuffs of steam like prayers: Thank you, God, for the gift of your presence in bread and wine, in community and song, in mothers and daughters, and in the love we have together in this life.  Wrap us in your care, even as we do our best to care for one another.  Amen.