Old Books

Growing up, there was a long, heavy, somewhat ugly bookcase in the hall filled with books inherited from my grandfather's library, including his dusty (but smelling of that delightful old book smell!) Yale Shakespeare.



I really wanted to be smart. I wanted to prove I was smart--smarter than other people, smart to a superlative degree--one of the smartest.  To my nine-year-old mind, Shakespeare was the epitome of intelligence, so naturally I decided I had to try to read it.

I wanted to begin with a play I had actually heard of, so naturally I chose Romeo and Juliet.  I still remember some of the confusion I encountered trying to trudge through Elizabethan prose.  It was so clearly beyond me, but I persevered for a surprisingly long time.  I still remember reading the scene beginning "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds."  I was confused as to how she had ended up racing away on horses--I imagined her driving a chariot and running off somewhere, obviously in desperation to be with her true love.  I must have given up not long afterwards because I don't remember much of anything else.  I went back to my Madeleine L'Engle and L.M. Montgomery novels after that.

My mother got rid of the bookshelf a few years ago, and with it, most of the books.  She felt no one was reading them anymore, and with all of the kids out of the house, likely no one was.  But I miss it.  I miss the rows of old books and wondering who had read them before.  Their dated covers and crumbling pages seemed to hearken back to the richness of a past age, where I imagined people read with greater regularity and less distraction.

It Takes a Village and Other Clichés

Life can be a pretty dreary thing at times: wake up too early, work, exercise, eat, run errands, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Joyful moments are rarer than I would like, and sometimes the dreariness seems to overshadow them completely.

A week ago, my sister gave birth to her fourth child and first daughter, and a joyful vista opened up again.  This photo of my six year-old nephew cradling his baby sister expresses the happiness of that moment better than words ever could.

Within minutes of being born, the baby was whisked off to intensive care.  Two or three times in quick succession, she turned slightly blue and stopping breathing.  It was a frightening and tense time.  So that my brother-in-law could stay at the hospital, my parents drove to the hospital, picked up the older kids, drove them home, put them to bed, and woke up several times in the middle of the night to check my oldest (type 1 diabetic) nephew's blood sugar.  My father drove the kids to school and packed their lunches.  Neighbors watched the house.  Church members brought meals for days--the family was even double-booked on a couple of nights.  Support and prayers poured in from friends and family on Facebook, by phone, and by email.

Their family would no doubt have survived without outside help.  My brother-in-law would have had to leave the hospital and take care of the kids on his own, my sister could have looked after the baby in the hospital, and they would have made it through without messages of comfort and support.  But what a bleaker, sadder world that would have been!  I don't know precisely what it is that we are made of that makes us yearn for contact with one another, but I am heartened by the goodness in other people and by the compassion that moves them to reach out.  This is the stuff of minor miracles: just when life began to seem too dismal, I found unexpected joy in the mysterious warmth of human connections.

Oscar Pistorius

In the last Olympics, I was taken with Oscar Pistorius for his inspiring drive to compete despite having had his legs amputed below the knee as a child.  I got sucked into the media machine and loved hearing stories about him: how he met with a young girl who had lost her arms and legs to meningitis, how a fellow competitor asked to swap numbers with him in recognition of the historic nature of his success, even though he failed to make the final of the 400.  It was a dream come true for the media outlets, the ultimate feel-good human interest story in the Olympics, which have really become more about creating heroes than the actual sports.





When news broke that Pistorius had shot his girlfriend to death, I shared the horror of the rest of the world--and also the sense of betrayal.  But why betrayal?  Who was Oscar Pistorius anyway, except someone who wanted to be a star athlete, who also happened to have no legs below the knee?  His qualifications for fame had nothing to do with character.

Even those who are elevated to hero status based on their good deeds reveal themselves to be fallible human beings.   Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the bestselling Three Cups of Tea, a tale of utter selflessness in the pursuit of improving the lives of the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan, seems to have fabricated sections of his book and misappropriated donor funds for personal use.  His demise was documented on 60 minutes, he was eviscerated by Jon Krakauer, and the public outrage likely led, at least indirectly, to the suicide of his co-author.

Herein lies the trouble with hero worship: it elevates people beyond the status of human beings to demigods.  We expect them to live better lives than we do because they have inspired us--they should not give in to lust, greed, laziness, self-promotion, addiction, envy, because we conceive of them as somehow superhuman--and when they fall, we cannot excuse it.

We imagine those in the spotlight, who have accomplished extraordinary things, to be made of different material from the rest of us.  The truth is that there are no demigods--just people like us.  It can be frightening to acknowledge, but it can also be liberating, for instead of relying on others to fulfill our demands for greatness, we can recognize the same power within ourselves.