Broken pieces

...the strength and hope of wholeness that are given in the Eucharist...

...On the other hand, the sociologist Richard Sennett speaks of poor men's wives, who know how hard the world's demands are on the men they love, women whose willingness to play such a role .9is not to be denied, denigrated, or despised...

...As I put the bits and pieces about Eric's Eileen close to my word processor, there flashed across the screen of memory a Longfellow poem I was called upon to recite long ago, with its final cautionary lines, "Lives of all great men remind us...

...but I am afraid that it is...

...Only love spreads such a feast...

...The action is very different from the situation as defined by the characters...

...There is also the possibility that Wives of some great men remind us-Those men whose lives are called sublime-"We are here if you can find us, Footnotes on the sands of time...

...No act of will, however Herculean, can transform my brokenness: no feat of time-management or jaw-clenched determination will ever turn my falling into rising, my mourning into dancing...

...I suspect that silent prayer of aspiration, repeated throughout my hectic days, might in fact redeem the time--not that the breaking and the pouring out might end, but that they might be revealed to be sacramental...

...Like Prufrock, I measure out my life in coffeespoons...

...I cannot do this alone, but God can do it in me...

...Perhaps each day, as well, is meant to be blessed and broken and given away...

...This final petition of the liturgy may hold the key: my life, my time, perhaps my heart, will be broken again and again, into ever-smaller pieces...

...Louis is the tough son, who learned from his mother and became a minor gangster, on the run from the bosses he tries to cheat...

...But perhaps--by a miracle of grace, by the grace of God--I can come to see myself not as meaninglessly disintegrated but as broken and given like bread, poured out like wine...

...to arrange special transportation for Emily's dance class because Katie had an extra choir rehearsal on the same day, and that the deadline for the article I had only begun to type was now immi- nent...

...Escalating my striving will not help...

...I can respond to all the myriad small demands each day presents only if I never stop moving...

...Early darkness closed down on the house by the time my searching and sifting were done...

...Gert is so upset in her mother's presence that she hyperventilates, fluting her sen- tences into hysterically altering vocal ranges...

...Grandma Kurnitz is an icy martinet of a woman who has pretty much wrecked her children...

...The evidence is that Eileen freely chose to give her life to another's needs...

...18:16...

...As I was on the phone in the kitchen, rescheduling an appointment, my six-year-old Emily wandered in and asked for a snack...

...When bread is broken in the Eucharist, we do not rush to mend it...

...His new play seems less a tragedy to me than a mishmash...

...Staring into the refrigerator, improvising a menu for four from its uninspiring contents, I heard Katie call, reproachfully, "Morn...

...I am old enough to have undergone as a child the forced mem- orization of many pious and admonitory lines...

...When, on that Galilean hillside, a multitude was fed with one child's picnic lunch, it was possible only because Jesus was there...

...There may even be such a miracle that I can come to see God present in the small moments as surely as I find grace offered in a crumb at the Lord's table...

...All of them fit into one legal-size envelope and grew into this essay...

...Bella is functionally retarded, a grown-up child slavey to her mother, whatever she might prove on an externally administered examination...

...All that was left was the little pile of notes and papers I had been looking for, allusions to the shadowy figure, the writer's wife...

...3May 1991:293...

...Eric's need, as she saw it, was for peace and quiet, fresh vegetables, hot tea, unquestioning encour- agement to be off in whatever direction his demon sent him...

...Even on good days, even the interruptions are interrupted...

...After I had untangled the knot of long division for Katie, I began again to change the ribbon in my typewriter when the phone rang again...

...For the most part, however, the comic bits----even when they are predictable and repetitive on the boys' part--work better for me than the touches of pathos, which are a shade too treacly, as though sugar had seeped upstairs from Kurnitz's Kandy Store on the first floor...

...English 282 was in the trash bag tied up and propped against the kitchen door...

...I can see that they are different--the weariness and discouragement at the end of my fragmented days...

...I believe, with all my heart, that God longs to speak such a word, but that like the great lion Asian in C.S...

...DEBORAH SMITH DOUGLAS IN THE FRACTIONING, WE ARE MADE WHOLE he other afternoon I was sitting at my desk, typing an article I was late in finishing...

...Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you, with gladness and singleness of heart, through Christ our Lord...

...The fractioning of my days is not likely to end any time soon...

...The ribbon in my typewriter expired, and as I began the inky process of changing it, my nine-year-old daughter Katie called from her room: could I help her with her homework "for just a second...

...The broken pieces of my time, may be (as in the sacrament) evidence not of failure but of love...

...By the grace of God, through Christ our Lord, "gladness and singleness of heart" can still be ours for the asking--and the giving...

...Anyone who grew up on Shirley Temple movies can recognize the taming-of-the-curmudgeon plot, even though Simon wants to plant it in emotional and ethnic reality...

...But I cannot see how to get there from here, how to bridge the gap between this disintegration and that integrity...

...Sometimes it feels as though it is not only time and strength and order that 3May 1991:291 to feed the faithful...

...I wanted to apologize to the woman I had failed to see in those years when I taught the Orwell course...

...In the sacrament, only the real presence of our Risen Lord makes it possible for us to "keep the feast...

...The life I have chosen makes demands that fracture and splinter the days...

...The boys, standard clever stage kids, win the old woman's heart, and her harsh exterior becomes simply a mannerism that no one any longer takes seriously...

...not so that my work will change to leisure, but that I might find God in the midst of it...

...she was one of them, wife of a working writer poor most of his life...

...Eddie is the soft son, the wimp marked for failure...

...Only grace provides in such abundance...

...With Rilke I want to protest that "my life is not this steeply-sloping hour in which you see me hurrying...

...She kept her husband alive, at great personal price, alive to do the work he was impelled to do, calling his countrymen back to some mythic past and warning them of some awful future, an extension of the evils he observed in the world he experienced...

...10:14) and"draws us out of many waters" (Ps...

...Maybe God will so "enlighten the eyes of my heart" (Ephesians 1:18) that I will come to see that all my time--no matter how broken and scattered---is in God's hand (Psalm 31:15), a loving hand that also "takes up troubles and vexations" (Ps...

...Grandma Kurnitz is finally less interesting to me as a character than as a role that allowed Irene Worth, one of the most elegant actors on the American stage, to transform herself through makeup and through performance into an ugly, angry old woman...

...The celebrant does not attempt to fit the broken pieces back together again like Humpty Dumpty...

...In my own life, in my long days of breaking time into ever-smaller fragments so there will be enough for every need, I can only hope for unity and peace if Christ is present...

...There is no unbroken moment...

...Mercedes Ruehl makes an effective and affecting moment out of Bella's speech about what her mother has done to her...

...As part of the general if minimal happy ending, Bella grows up enough to assert parity with her mother, Eddie proves a success after all, and Louis finds in the army the proper setting for his learned aggression (it is 1942...

...A feminist reading of her life might insist that she had intemalized, unfortunately, a totally self-abnegating, supportive role for herself...

...And so it goes...

...To understand everything may be to forgive every- thing (although I doubt it), but it certainly does not make for tragedy...

...But even the broken pieces may have meaning, may give strength...

...It is "in Christ"--perhaps only in Christ--that "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17...

...Eddie, whose wife has recently died, leaves his sons with Grandma Kurnitz while he goes off on an extended business trip through the South (funny letters, voice over...

...No iron-fisted act of will can help me, but an act of faith might accomplish much...

...I left the ribbon half-changed and had no more than bent over her notebook when the telephone rang...

...Why bother...

...And what did she accomplish...

...The burdens may be light, but they are many: like Gulliver, bound by the Lilliputians with innumerable fine threads, I am immobilized by small things...

...On the way out of the kitchen I wiped cracker crumbs off the counter, put milk on the shopping list, and made a note of the changed appointment time on the calendar...

...What about my homework...

...In Grandma's big speech in the second act, we learn that she is a widow, a refugee, trapped in Yonkers and the candy store which she hates and which fed her family, and that the death of a beloved child taught her to wall herself off from all affection that might make her vulnerable to new pain...

...Grandma Kurnitz comes closer to being a case study of a self-created victim and begetter of victims...

...Sometimes I am afraid that all my hours will steeply slope, that I will always be this hurried, this distracted...

...If we cannot fully understand her motivation, we may appreciate BROKEN PIECES it, and even applaud the generous spirit that guided her...

...O Lord, I am unworthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be whole...

...The calendar reminded me that a dozen books were overdue at the library, that the school rummage sale was this weekend, that I needed DEBORAH SMITH DOUGLAS has degrees in literature and law, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband and daughters, and has written previously for The Other Side and Emmanuel...

...STAGE DOWNSTAIRS, UPSTAIRS 'LOST IN YONKERS,' 'STEPS' & 'FRIENDS' ome of the more enthusiastic admirers of Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers have suggested that he fmally found his tragic figure in Grandma Kumitz (I think he came closer with the drunken protagonist of The Gingerbread Lady back in 1970...

...I can hold chaos at bay only by breaking each moment into as many pieces as possible, hoping almost desperately that there will be enough to go around, that I can spread myself thin enough to cover it all...

...The bread is meant to be broken, to be given and received, new each day, like manna in the wilderness...

...We do not see enough of Gert to know whether or not she gets her voice under control...

...Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, God "likes to he asked...

...I hung up the phone, sliced an apple, poured milk, found crackers, and realized I had forgotten to thaw anything for dinner...

...Carolyn Heilbrun, in her Writing a Woman's Life, talks about women who transform their need to be loved into a need to love, a pen- chant that tidily, housewifely serves their husbands...