Through a Glass Darkly

“Yet it was strange that after knowing her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was...  As for facts, it was a fact that she was a spinster; that she was rich; that she had bought this house and collected with her own hands - often in the most obscure corners of the world... the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets...  In each of these cabinets were many little drawers, and each almost certainly held letters, tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves... 

At last there she was, in the hall...  She stood perfectly still.  At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth...  And there was nothing.  Isabella was perfectly empty...  As for her letters, they were all bills.”

From “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” by Virginia Woolf

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Dear Alex,

How could letters turn to bills when seen in the looking-glass, through peeping windows, the stare of reflection from the wilderness to the cupboard of mind?  Who or what might be responsible for this madness of mistaking written conversations as contracts?  

Today’s Wintry aura felt like glass for looking into letters and bills, play and process, dance and duty.  Soon after dawn, I drove my daughter to her first fundraising event of the year for special olympians.  She told me she had sought a few donors who would sponsor her polar jump into an outdoor pool at subzero temp.  I don’t want to just watch others, she said.  I want to do it myself.  It’s more fun that way.  

At the parking lot, I watched her unlatch the car door to forge ahead with her way of fun, her arms swinging a bag of clothes and towel she had prepared for herself.  In a swoop of breath, she was out of my view.  Raindrops on my windshield became tiny glasses reflecting rigid facts and tender truths, every drip a tango imperfect, each spill of rays intimately more violent than a hockey game, all past, now and then meshing in and gushing out of an enclave on guard for her.  I looked through glass without a sight of her.  

A few hours later, she returned to the car, bringing along her buddy.  At the back they giggled over the polar jump before snapping silly selfies and recording words in reverse to hear back forward.  The sky shifted from showers to sunshine, clouds receding to expose bald mountain tops with snow caps.  Winter was sloughing off its dead skin to bask in the youth of morning light.  The girls chattered in heavenly hysteria.  My rearview mirror flickered with nostalgia, the evanescence of my teen years remotely wavering in their eyes.  

For a while on the road, I lost count of mileage and froze perfectly still in the light, suspended in the magic of reading bills as letters, jumping into a pool of shadows and sunlight, looking away from my past in the looking-glass to live more in the gleaming present for the future.   

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I shall resist my worst instinct and not turn this letter into one about Woolf and her writing.  One thing I must say is she's now turning in her grave over our shortening her short story into a quote.  So here I read her story in full again and encourage everyone to do the same, lest troubling her avenging spirit tonight.

This past weekend I've started my first volunteer shift on my own, talking and listening to residents in a long term care center.  I am not going to speak about the specifics because all the conversations are not only private as bound by the law but really sacred as guarded by angels.  I will just talk about my general feelings.

First I am very happy that I've taken the plunge and started off.  There's a fear in me that I almost excused myself by blaming the snow and slush: it's only a volunteer position, no one is losing anything for my not showing up, and the road was indeed slippery, blah times three.  But I was determined to not let my fear grow, to silence it, to kill it for good.

I didn't expect joy to take fear's place right away, assuming from history at least a three-day wait in the tomb.  Yet graciously resurrection came early.  To go up to strangers and engage in meaningful conversations is not easy, especially when words are seemingly powerless in a situation.  You are risking the worst: rejection.  The Word became nailed-on-a-cross flesh.  But when you strike gold you know it is gold indeed, shiny, substantial, and precious.  Now I am looking forward to the next visit.  God is kind to me, knowing my fear and weakness.

"As for her letters, they were all bills."

Much of the conversations is about the past.  When money doesn't make any difference any more, health a dubious contingency, and youth a spring sprung and spent, the only inventory of life, the treasure box from which one resources, re-traditions, even renews a call to life and living, is memory.

This point might seem trite and obvious, but no, I don't think many of us actually get it, not merely very far from getting it, but really not at all.  The first line of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" goes like this: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Let me reshape it for my purpose without betraying, I hope, the truth it conveys: "All secure and comfortable existence are alike; each precarious existence is precarious in its own way."

We would rather live a homogeneous life than to risk losing control.  We would rather Tolstoy not write about us.  One day when I am in a long term care home, what sort of memory, my final treasure, my only stocks and bonds and life saving, is going to be my lasting deposit for me to resource from, to bridge me across, carry me over to eternity?

When my daughter, my first child, was still very young, I was in the habit of spending hours in the mall every weekend for grocery and etc, in the name of good homemaking, and part of that would have to do with lining up to get a refund for emptied juice bottles, full the week before, a cycle of purposeful existence, the bottles' and mine.  I thought juice is good for my child, so I paid my dues faithfully, did what I was told.  Then one day it dawned on me that my life was slip slidin' away in a prescribed cycle of existence that I needed not to bow down to.  From that day on I would get my family fresh fruits and no more recycled bottles and recycled life.

I was determined to gift myself and my family a different memory.

Letters, not bills, we are exchanging here.  Our deposit, investment, inventory, insurance, treasure.  Gold.

Thank you.

Yours, Alex