A day of reading, writing, reflection and recuperation

Yesterday was a quiet day, a day for reading, writing and reflection. And recuperation.

The day after a babysitting day is always a day for recovery. Watching now nearly 13-month-old Baby takes a lot out of a 69-year-old body. She’s full of energy and curiosity but alas, lacking in nearly all judgement. Even though I split time with Kim — who, in fairness, carries a heavier bit of the load — I sleep the sleep of the just afterwards, and still feel the effects the next day.

But, yeah, otherwise reading, writing and reflection. Read a big chunk of a dog-eared (May 2023) Atlantic, including the cover story, “American Madness,” about how the author’s childhood best friend ended up killing his girlfriend at Yale, due to largely untreated mental illness. The story outlines, in detail, our failures to meet the needs of those with severe mental illness and the need of society to be protected from people (a tiny percentage of those with such illnesses) who can’t function without adequate supervision. Good intentions and bad ones combined to make a true mess. A harrowing read.

As was another story, “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse,” which explores ways in which one-dimensional, context-lacking education about the Holocaust has left young generations with a wafer-thin understanding of how and why it happened. An ignorance now, in part, playing out on the streets and college campuses of America.

After that, I escaped to “Bless Me, Ultima,” a novel by Rudolfo Anaya about New Mexico — perhaps the greatest novel written about New Mexico, based on my as-of-yet perfunctory research. (D.H. Lawrence doesn’t count.)

Only about half-way through, but it resonates with my own experiences of a place soaked in Catholicism and steeped in multi-cultural history — not a melting pot but a spicy stew of conflicting and often contradictory tastes, beliefs and traditions.

This book sat unread on my bookcase for years, after I “borrowed” it from my sister Rebecca, intending to read it and quickly return it. But my first “go” at the book ended abruptly. The first few pages seemed too “purple-prosey” to me when I originally opened it and I gave up on it too soon.

This go-around, though, I started reading it on the plane as Kim and I headed to Albuquerque, and ultimately Santa Fe, for a reunion with my siblings and their spouses. The time was right, somehow, and I swam through the early overwrought passages and made it through to moments that truly sparkled with magic. It won’t be everyone’s thing — lots of Catholic mysticism and even older layers of mythic visions and superstitions— but it speaks to me this time around.

Perhaps the most jarring thing about the novel has nothing to do with its content, just its packaging and marketing.

Blurbs from the 1972 paperback edition harken back to what now seems an ancient time. “Anaya is in the vanguard of a movement to refashion the Chicano identity by writing about it,” said the National Catholic Reporter. “Full of sensual dreams, superstitions, unexplained phenomena and the dark might of Latin American theology,” helpfully noted the New York Times.

I’m not trying to be critical. I certainly wasn’t in any position, back then or maybe even now, to fully understand or value the importance of a Hispanic writer writing about his (or her) own experience in ways that made sense to him and resonated within his culture.

And I still have no idea what is meant by “the dark might of Latin American theology,” long-gone New York Times reviewer.

But now, when many think one should only write about one’s own narrow sphere, perhaps we’ve come full circle, tossing out one set of overly narrow expectations only to replace them with other ones, equally narrow, equally constricting.

At a time when few seem willing to suspend disbelief long enough to consider, truly — not just in harsh, rhetorical terms — the lived experience of others different from themselves, “Bless Me, Ultima” and the Atlantic articles I mentioned above, are good examples of how very important it is to read (and otherwise experience) widely and deeply, to try to grasp the actual reality of people’s lives and the “trends” that rock our nation and the world, to immerse oneself in those realities enough to see, as through a glass darkly, a world with many facets and complexities.

I hope my now-small grandchildren grow up with the ability to do that, attempt that. At nearly 70, I’m only now beginning to understand how hard and how important it is.