Duplicity

When I was learning about art as a child, I was fascinated with the Mona Lisa. I didn't think she was at all beautiful, even though that's what the textbooks insisted.  And I wasn't too interested in her relationship with Leonardo.  No, like most people, I was intrigued by her duplicity.  I would pick up a slip of paper and cover up half her face, then the other half.  Smile, no smile. Smile, no smile.

We do a lot of talking about authenticity and hear a lot of people championing "being true to yourself."  Despite the mantras, it's pretty obvious that most people have two faces, or even more than two.  One we show to the world most of the time, wearing it easily after the identity storm of adolescence is past, shrugging it on like a familiar sweater.  In fact, we may be under the impression that it is the 'real me.'

But then there are those moments.

The other self barges through somehow, shattering glass on its way into our world.  It comes when we're alone, or jumps into view in unguarded instants, like a sadistic jack-in-the box.  The event is usually embarrassing, as if you've suddenly had to admit that you have a man-eating monster chained up in the back yard.  And when it breaks loose (usually not in a spurt of heroic lovingkindness, but in a flood of anger or depression or meanness), you have to ask yourself,

Which one is really me?

Circles

When I was small, I thought that life was like climbing a mountain. It would be a hard but exciting ascension, pulling myself up rocky crags, all the while my blood pounding with "I think I can, I think I can," like the Little Engine in one of my favorite storybooks.  Eventually, I would reach the top and, exhilarated, survey my vast domain.  All that would be left would be to run joyously down the other side.

It wasn't too long, however, before the scenery on my climb began to look familiar.  Hadn't I passed that tree a couple times already?  And wasn't that vista uncannily similar to one I had seen recently?

I tell myself life isn't just a circle, spinning around fruitlessly like the backdrops in the ancient wild west movies that my dad bought us when we were kids. Instead, it must be like one of those tornadoes in the cartoons, spiraling in wider and wider circles until it eventually takes me up to the sky.

I hope I'm right.

Abounding Grace

So many times, so many countless times, you've heard the words uttered with such convicted fervor. Yet in your slightly padded chair, not even a whiff of Spirit-wind lifts a hair on your head. Despite the nicer-than-average clothes you have on, the mushy contents of your soul refuse to be stirred up by heartfelt prayer, by powerful music, by fervent testimony.  All you can manage to feel is tired, even though you had plenty of sleep last night and two cups of strong coffee this morning.  The exhaustion is like a living thing sitting rudely somewhere in the back of your chest, suppressing even the correct emotion that generally emerges in this context: guilt.  Guilt--repentance--forgiveness--renewal, that's the sequence, the prescribed agenda for anyone as unmoved and ungrateful as yourself.  And yet nothing happens.

Eventually, the service is over.  You turn off that side of yourself, zip it up into a suitcase until the next time you need to sit staring at your Bible.  A car ride home, a gray afternoon of normal activities, and all seems like a coma in your soul.

But this is not an existential movie and so that is not the final, tragic scene.  This is your life.  And at some moment, perhaps that evening, perhaps a year from now, a spark appears.  Brought on by the smallest of unexpected things, it bursts up in flame like a handful of pine needles.  And just like that, you're alive again.

Snow

People usually call me a pessimist.  OK, they always call me a pessimist.  Several times a year, however, generally between November and February (although also occasionally in March, and rarely and miraculously in October or April), I shed my dark cloak of general gloom and don an aspect that some would call downright infuriating. 

It happens on snow days.

Precisely 87% of the population of New England sees snow as some sort of pariah.  I know, because I did a careful and entirely scientific study via several forms of social media and word of mouth.   I’m not sure why they haven’t moved to Florida.  Rather than appreciating this rare and glorious phenomenon of Mother Nature, they act as if she took up smoking and was sitting at a dive bar in a skanky dress, blandly tapping her cigarette ash on our heads.  “Oh, sahry Hon, didn’t see ya theah,” she comments, as she tries to let off some stress about global warming.  And who could blame her, really?  If global warming means no more snow, then I might be forced to take up smoking too.

No matter what snow does to me, I find myself incapable of being angry at it.  While others rail at bad driving conditions and cold and the general unfairness of a white- clothed world, I am like an Israelite at the very first manna party.  I put my head back and let the white stuff fall right in my mouth.  While others see driveway shoveling as a special opportunity for a slipped disc, I look at it as a rare chance at a free workout that actually has a measurable result.  None of this treadmill-that-doesn’t-go-anywhere nonsense.  You have a clean driveway to show for all your effort.  And buff arms.  Many complain about the roads, but I love the excuse to have a legal thrill behind the wheel—beat the elements—show the world that I can manage an ’89 Thunderbird with rear wheel drive as well as any man.  In the snow, every cup of coffee seems more steaming and soothing, every warm sweater more cuddly, every fireplace more inviting, and every pair of slippers more like a small heaven for a set of toes.

I’m not sure why.

Perhaps it’s because snow is strangely isolating.

Since 87% of the population stays inside grumbling over their lost power or busted snowblower, the other 13% of us have the whole outside to ourselves.  When the snow is falling at night, you can take your dog out for a walk on your usually rather busy, but now deserted, suburban road.   With no cars in sight, you and he might traipse down the yellow line (which you can’t see, but which reason demands is still there), basking in pools of buzzing, yellow street light which illuminate falling particles and the very edges of sagging, sleeping branches.  The well-insulated world silences most of the normal, annoying, human noises.  Instead, you get the squeaking snow beneath your boot-shod feet, the cracking and groaning of aforementioned branches, and the strange swoosh of snow-laden winds.   Plus, you know when you’re truly alone, because footprints give away the presence of any trespassers on your privacy.  You step where no one has stepped before, like Lewis or perhaps Clark, on an uncharted drift or an unsure, iced-over pond.

Or perhaps it’s because snow makes us oddly companionable.

When you can’t get your car over the snowplow drift at the end of your driveway, the slightly zany and potbellied guy from across the road, who happens to possess a John Deere apparatus fitted with some massive snow-eating appendage, well, he suddenly becomes a chum.  “Would you look at all this snow!” you say to each other, for the first time having something in common to talk about.  “Would you just look at it….up to the top of my mailbox....how will the mailman get through…did you know Tom from down the road got a bit of collapsed roof….they said we were getting 6 inches, I’d say we’re up to 12 already…care for a cup of coffee?...thanks for getting me outta there, I owe you one.”  If you are one of the few who makes it into work in the morning, you and your colleagues trickle through the front door one by one, stamping and shaking and whooshing loudly through the mouth.  No one chastises you for being late as you pile your outerwear in a corner.  Instead, you look at each other with knowing respect, thinking “We are no delicate pansies, like those others who are currently pining and whining in their bathrobes back home.  We know how to drive in the snow.  We know how to live in the snow.  We know how to trail a snowplow and follow a salter (but not too closely), how to brake slowly and early, how to get up and shovel our driveways, and how to de-ice our windshields.  We know how to rig our coffeepot to our car battery if the power is out, how to build a good fire and make toast over it, and how to pre-warm our boots by said fire.  Heck, we define the term ‘New Englander,’ and no little snowstorm is going to make us go crying to the boss.” 

Even though you’ve made it to work, no one really expects you to get all that much done during a big downfall.  Your job is to hold the fort, to look hardcore, and to drink copious amounts of hot chocolate.  Instead of working, you trade stories about your morning commute and storms of your past.  The blizzard of ’78 is bound to come up, even if none of you are old enough to have lived through it. 

 And speaking of all this comradery, who hasn’t gotten a good feeling after shoveling out the little old lady two doors down?  We are all able to put aside a little of our “me,” a bit of our schedule, and a few of our differences in a big snowstorm.  We kibitz. We brandish our shovels. We help.  We actually see each other for once; dark figures against a stark and sparkling backdrop.  

Maybe that’s why I love the snow.