Gunmen in the Park

The last words you want to hear at a public park, out with your children, especially these days: "Put your hands in the air."

It took me a moment to register this. I'd heard the sirens--they aren't that uncommon--and I'd been watching my boys play on the "fort" some fifteen feet away. The policeman's voice came from over my shoulder, and I turned my head to look.

"Hands where I can see them," he repeated. The officer was big, and more sirens were screeching behind us. I followed his gaze and then I saw them. My children were between me and three young men in black and fatigues, standing with their arms raised. I stood and walked to the play set.

"Boys, come on down from there," I said, calmly. Maybe too calmly. I didn't want to scare them. But the park, a bustle of happy cries a moment before, had gone quiet as a museum. My boys were transfixed, too. Then my youngest slid down, while the other stood his ground, watching it unfold.

"Come down. Hurry up," I said. The reality of the situation was starting to set in. The tallest two youngsters, boys really, wore long black trench coats, and they were not thirty feet away. And my oldest was still between me and them. I tugged him off the play set, corralled his younger brother, and crouched down behind the laughable protection of a chain ladder countless children had used to climb into the "fort."

The police officer had raised his voice again and he was now nearer the youngsters. I don't remember that he had a gun drawn. I don't remember a taser. I do, though, remember the moment he reached them and took their guns. They were long, assault-rifle-looking guns. And he said something like, "You scared people."

Image from http://moretoyguns.com/MoreToyGuns/product/4GUNDT.html

I don't know what happened after that. The guns, I think, were toys, or maybe BB guns. The tallest kid should have known better; he might have been in eighth grade, and he had a long, blank face--maybe surly, maybe annoyed, but not obviously sorry. The middle child was maybe in fifth or sixth grade; he was the one with the fatigues. The youngest was only a small child, maybe a year older than my second-grader.

It took a long time for the situation to dissolve, though, I do know that. The police cars sat for several minutes with their flashers pulsing, and more still without them. The arresting officer took the young men behind a building and, presumably, to his cruiser parked out of sight. He was carrying their guns, and I was left with the boys, wondering how soon was too soon to let them play normally.

Meanwhile, as I held on to them, reassuring them, explaining that it was only a mistake, keeping my voice steady because … oh my God, it could have been something a lot worse … I realized something I hadn't before: only after the crisis had passed did I understand what could have happened. Like most people, I assume more innocence in the world than evil, even after all I've watched unfolding on the news. I just don't have it in me to expect mass murder. Neither did anybody I saw in the park that day. Nobody fled in a panic. And I can't say I'm sorry for that. In fact, I think it's those of us who don't expect it or think it's normal who will ultimately press for the real changes that are needed: an end to bullying, an end to hate-speech, to stock-piling and paranoia, to the glorification of violence. Sensible gun regulations. Kindness in public places. Care for outcasts. These are the kinds of changes that could make for a world where I won't have to do more than I did in the park that day.

And, as it turns out, when you think about it, I was right, wasn't I? Those boys weren't bent on killing us all, now were they? So maybe believing the best about people isn't such a bad place to start after all.

One resolution is enough

I hate making resolutions, because I find that the more I tell myself not to do something, the more I want to do it. Whereas, the more I tell myself I should do something, the harder it gets to do it.

This led me, already at about 18 years of age, to resolve never to make New Year’s resolutions.

Fortunately, that resolution expired a long time ago. And now I’m ready to try a new one. It’s about envy. I hereby resolve to try not to envy other peoples’ success so much.

You see, I’ve spent almost my entire life feeling like an underachiever. (Doesn’t seem to matter that people looking in from outside think I’m the opposite.) By this time of life, I should have … How did that person … while I haven’t yet even …?

That’s a soul-sapping way to live. I’ve tried, more than once, to be happy for those others. I just don’t usually feel it. Maybe I would, if I just kept trying. But one thing I can do, and I’m willing to try to do, is avoid the ugly green feeling, the jaundiced glare. I can at least withdraw from that feeling. I can at least try not to envy the success of someone else. I know well enough that nobody’s life is easy, however it looks from outside. I know that whatever they’ve gained, they have the opportunity—like me—to feel like it isn’t good enough.

But I hope they don’t feel that way. And I’d be shocked if the most successful people allow themselves to glut on that feeling.

While I’m at it this confession business, here’s the really humbling thing I need to do, and that’s learn from the success of others. Where did I get the idea that I had it all figured out? Stupid. I’m just stumbling along here like everybody else. Only I seldom succeed at things I most want to succeed at, because I shrink from failure. I don’t put myself out there for criticism. I don’t take the necessary steps.

So that’s another resolution, wound up in the first. Knock off the envy, one; and try to learn from the people who succeed. Imitate them if you like how they did it; don’t if you don’t. But don’t be all “Well I could have done it too if I had …” Don’t. Ever.

There. That ought to last me another twenty years.

Here's some related reading, if you like: 

Contentment as a Spiritual Practice

John and Coonrod: A Tale of Two Pyles

Photo courtesy of http://www.geocities.ws/millyella/tombstones.html

So in digging through my ancestors (and sometimes successfully avoiding my difficult novel), I’ve come across two somewhat famous persons of the name “Pyle” / “Pile.” Both were born in Orange County, North Carolina (about 200 miles east of where I now live). One is related to me, and the other is not.

The first, the elder, is named (believe it or not) John Pyle. He was a grandson of Nicholas Pyle, who emigrated from England to America in 1683 for the Quaker colony (Pennsylvania). Born in 1723 and educated in England as a doctor, John Pyle grew up to become a famous colonel on the British side of the Revolutionary War (Google: “Pyle’s Massacre”). But when he had a falling out with General Cornwallis, he switched sides (betrayed his country?), and became a spy for General Washington—instrumental in the Colonists’ victory. After the war, Colonel Pyle settled in Orange County, North Carolina, where he died at the age of 81. (Learn more about him here)

The second, the younger, is named Conrad Pile (or Piles, as it sometimes is listed), more likely of German than British descent. He was born in 1766, evidently, and may have fought among the Colonists—as a mercenary. After the war, he and Mary Rich tied the knot: she was about 15 and he was about 17. Conrad grew up to become a kind of pioneer, crossing the Appalachians and building a log home, and later a toll road, in Fentress, Tennessee. He acquired the nickname “Coonrod”—and a lot of wealth. He died and was buried in Tennessee at age 84. (Learn more about him here)

Care to guess which is my ancestor? You got it: Coonrod. Though I was born and raised in the North, my great-ancestor traded slaves and dealt shrewdly with Native Americans and early American settlers, amassing lots of wealth. He made a life for himself in the new world, not always (I’m sure) with the best of intentions or outcomes. Then his wealth was lost during the Civil War. Two of his great-grandsons fought on the Union side; another of his grandsons was “a Confederate sympathizer.” But before that war, my branch of the family had already moved out West. According to one researcher, two of Coonrod’s sons, Jacob and Daniel, “were close and moved together to Indiana in 1818, then to Illinois in 1827, where they prospered.”

This bit of trivia just confirms again my deep-rooted interest in stories about “the rest of us”: people who don’t make the epic decisions that shape world politics, but whose lives and decisions are meaningful and dramatic enough without that.

Family Histories

One of my sanity projects last month—a.k.a. “insanity projects” (see last post)—has been to pick up an old interest in genealogy. I’m not sure what the appeal is, exactly, in knowing that you had an ancestor who lived in the Shenandoah Valley (true) or some south German castle (probably not true). But one thing is clear: It can be highly addicting.

It also has the power to change—and sometimes reinforce—my personal narrative.

As a lover and sometime teller of stories, and for that matter as a human being, I often tell stories to myself about myself. Who I am and where I come from. To take one example: Having grown up in the north (Ohio), I always told myself my ancestors weren’t slave owners (false). Living in America, I also told myself my ancestors most likely came here to escape religious persecution back in Europe (far, far from the whole story). I’ve shared with many other Americans of European descent a sense of guilt over the treatment of the native tribes (justified). I’ve also always been drawn to “little people”: misfits, powerless, indigent, the works. Good to know my ancestors are listed among their number (very true).

More surprising were the number of strands that (as far as I can discover) go back to colonial or Revolutionary War days. For reasons I haven’t yet discovered, my branch of these trees kept drifting West. From Virginia to North Carolina to Tennessee. Then to Indiana, to Illinois, to Missouri. Or from Pennsylvania to New York to Illinois to Missouri. Then on to Kansas and Nebraska. It was like a tidal wave, taking each daughter or son out to where the next generation should meet and drift yet further.

Only it stopped before I was born. After the second World War, when (I think) America was undergoing significant changes. And members of my family drifted back, as if on the changing tide, from Nebraska to Missouri to Ohio. And then (me now) to New York and Boston. And now, at last, by some strange magic unrelated to any quest for roots, to North Carolina. (I now live some couple hundred miles west of where one of my ancestors married his wife.) Who can say where my children will go?

What, if anything, is the meaning of such a story? It’s an American story, that much is clear. It connects me deeply to the land I live in—to all the lands I’ve lived in. And it makes me more a part of this rich history than my personal narrative had it.

It’s also a tale of movement, and settling on farms; of large families, and trying to make a life that’s better and more secure. However wealthy some fellow was, his fourth child (a daughter) marries someone with less wealth, less standing, who, after two generations, brings her offspring to a place as wild as her fathers once encountered.

This probably made my people feel rootless. But rediscovering it makes me feel rooted.

The Consolations of Fantasy: "On Fairy Stories," Part 3

J.R.R. Tolkien argued, toward the end of his essay “On Fairy Stories,” that one of the gifts fantasy brings to humankind is a glimpse of joy, a sudden “turn,” an undeserved gift. It does this through an outcome he called “eucatastrophe.” (The prefix “eu-” comes from the Greek language and means “good.”)

Tolkien thought fairy stories bring us consolation from a “catastrophe” turned good, or (put the other way) happy endings tinged with sadness. Later fantasy, following in Tolkien’s shadow, has not always kept faith with this idea. Two trends in fantasy novels, though apparent opposites, both diverge significantly from Tolkien’s vision.

First is the (rightly criticized) tendency for fantasy-novel heroes to be invincible. Facing ludicrously powerful forces of evil, they come through unscathed. This quality, whenever we see it, fails to measure up to Tolkien’s perception of “eucatastrophe” because it overemphasizes the “eu” part and forgets the other: catastrophe. Something terrible has to happen, some irreparable damage has to be done to somebody we care about, or the good outcome loses its poignancy and joy. If you want an excellent illustration of this, just think of Frodo before he leaves Middle Earth. Frodo is damaged—irreparably so. His heroic feat costs him his “humanity,” if I can call it that.

That outcome is not accidental. For Tolkien, there can’t be any consolation where genuine suffering is not recognized. (Anybody who’s ever been handed a platitude in the face of real personal tragedy knows this.) If the hero of a fantasy story is, in effect, invincible, a person who never suffers real injury or hardship, then the tale will be incapable of giving us one of the gifts that is fantasy’s birthright—at least, according to Tolkien.

Many people—readers and writers and editors among them—have been unsatisfied with such invincible heroes. As a result, we’re seeing an opposite trend, a reaction that also, however, fails to fill the role Tolkien envisioned for “fantasy.” Bluntly: I’m talking about so-called “gray characters.” These characters are “human,” at our worst and most egocentric. They lie, cheat, avenge themselves. If they do something “good,” it’s for despicable reasons. There’s no “good” versus “evil,” no heroes and villains, just the soft, spongy middle.

This, we are told, is “gritty realism.” And it might be that, but it’s also not “eucatastrophe.” It’s not what you get in the fairy stories. It gives no consolation—far from it. The accent has shifted to the “catastrophe”—except that here there isn’t “evil” in the old sense of the word, either. Catastrophe becomes the constant, the uninterrupted state of existence.

The first departure—failing to embrace the existence of real suffering, so that consolation can be provided by the unexpected “turn”—might be relatively harmless next to this second one. Because a brutal insistence on only “gray characters” and death and mayhem may—I hope not, but it probably does—amount to a denial of the possibility of “joy,” of hope, of the dream of goodness, that the fairy stories sometimes offered. Certainly Tolkien’s work offered it: those of us who love it are left with a keen yearning to visit Minas Tirith under Aragorn’s benevolent rule, or (for us democratic Americans) a long stay in the Shire, among people (hobbits, that is) who are genuine if a little provincial.

No doubt, many and greater champions of Tolkien can be found than me, but I want to join my voice to theirs. His characters are not perfect, and they aren’t unrealistic or one-sided, either. The best example here is Frodo. Think of it: he starts out good, he wants to do the right thing—so far, I think that’s like most of us. Check one. He’s a “little person” faced with forces beyond his control or understanding or capacity to overcome. Check two—so are most of us. Frodo’s asked to do something extraordinary, and he reluctantly agrees. Some of us have done the same; many of us, for instance, faced with an invalid child or parent make the “good” choice, the “right” one, the unselfish one, to care for that child or parent ourselves. People make such hard choices every day. Yes, their motives might be mixed. But they embark, wanting to do the right thing. And don’t forget, Tolkien lived during an era renowned for self-sacrifice. So, check three.

But what happens to Frodo at the end of this story? Let’s fast forward to the culmination of his quest, when he stands at the cracks of Mount Doom and, after all his work and all his suffering for “doing the right thing”—he fails. He can’t quite bring himself to do the self-sacrificial deed he intended at the beginning. He puts on the ring and he, little exhausted Frodo, defies Sauron. Check four—most of us would have failed too, in analogous circumstances. Think of the dutiful person taking care of that invalid child or parent, day after day, year after year. And losing, in the midst of all that, the thread of why she was doing it. And maybe coming to loathe the child or parent, in small and maybe larger ways. Or maybe feeling cheated in life—and even acting out to restore the balance.

As fantasy should for Tolkien, the “eucatastrophe” comes as the result of an unexpected turn. Gollum bites off the finger; Frodo’s original resolve is brought about despite his failure at the end. That part doesn’t have to be “realistic,” because this is “fantasy”—it draws on the fairy tale tradition, where such a turn is part of the magic of the story itself. How does Cinderella win the day without that lost slipper? Or the magic that got her to the ball? If you want nitty-gritty (and who doesn’t, sometimes?), fantasy might not be the best place to seek or find it.

But the catastrophe isn’t over yet. Frodo is damaged; he can no longer continue in Middle Earth. He’s saved his world from oppressive malice, but he’s lost the world for himself. He exits the novel a wounded figure. The battle against evil takes a real toll.

No, Tolkien’s characters and realms aren’t perfect; they have their faults and weaknesses. But when it really matters, they normally do the right things, or at least they want to. I think that’s more like most of us, or at least more of us than some folks like to admit. But even if you think all humans are so hopelessly corrupt that no one would have done what the “fellowship” did, the role of fantasy is not to show us the world as we normally live it, but rather to offer us a vision of the world that’s touched by “faerie,” by a magic that’s not about grasping but dreaming. Part of that dream is for people, realms, choices, that are good, at least in part. Or at least they struggle toward being good. And in the outcome, as cliché as some people may find it, without the “happy ending” that Tolkien said was “essential”—a happy ending tinged with sad, real loss—fantasy might just turn out not worth the hard work it demands.

[Note: This is the third of three posts on Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories.” The other two are here and here.]

The Christmas Story

We may not think of it as a “fairy tale,” but the Christmas story is part of the story-telling tradition we’ve all inherited. And, as such, it has lots of the elements of a “sideways-in” story.

First, think of the main characters. Joseph is a carpenter—a man with little, if any, political sway, and probably not all that wealthy. Mary, his fiancée, is a traditional girl, faithful, reverent, maybe a little sheltered. Both of them are completely unprepared for what’s about to happen. Neither of them looks like they’ll have a major role in shaping world events. Kings, empires, political parties, are swirling around at what seem to be the distant “centers” of the real action. In other words, they’re like most of us.

And yet, almost in secret, they’re both descendents of an ancient, powerful king, the ruler of a golden age long since lost.

What’s more, they live in a very small town, days’ journey from any city that matters. They’re ruled by a petty king who answers to a much more powerful, foreign ruler. None of these rulers is authentic, and the kingdom itself is oppressive, with heavy taxes and abusive soldiers, and no regard for traditional values.

And then, something “magical” happens. An angel, a miracle, misunderstandings, a journey, hardship, portents, an evil king trying to kill the miracle child: flight and a narrow escape. All this unfolds, from the seemingly insignificant beginning in a small backwater town far from the centers of power. As if to underline this sideways-in quality, you have the famous crèche scene, with a stable and manger, and shepherds—peasants from the margins of society—coming to pay the newborn king his first homage.

Of course the story goes on. But it starts from the side, not the top—at least, from one point of view, though sometimes the narrator “knows” that things really are unfolding “from the top.” It’s not a perfect analogy, but you can see that this story, deeply embedded in our consciousness, touches themes we love to explore when we read (and write) fairy tales and fantasy.

And that could be a source of hope to many of us: that stories of ultimate importance share the notion that, in the end, it’s the unremarkable, small-town laborer or naïve girl-child on whom the restoration of our world really turns.

As the story puts it, “This shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

What is a “fairy tale”? Part 3

A fairy tale is normally about an average person who collides with this world of wonder, a world that actually dwells beneath or alongside the everyday one, or maybe is the "truth" behind the everyday one. (Magic in this context is part of the fabric of the world or “otherworld,” not an add-on.) Often this everyday person is the victim of powerful people. In the old days, when most fairy tales were first being told, that was usually a king or a queen, sometimes a wicked mother-in-law (who might be a queen) or an older brother (who might be a king). For whatever reason, the unlikely hero finds herself or himself crossing some kind of frontier. Usually a forest, though not always. That new environment is, of course, inhabited by outlandish or fey creatures. Sometimes the rules that hold there are just … different.

In one common kind of tale, the hero has to survive this strange otherworld through the goodness of his or her moral character, wits, cleverness, or some words of magic he or she somehow comes across. Heroes are rarely magicians or masters of magic, more often day-laborers, subsistence farmers, fishwives, or the like. Often help comes because of help offered to someone (or something) in need on the way. Hospitality is usually rewarded as much as skill. Goodness and luck are more important than physical strength.

The tales I’m thinking of aren’t moralizing. They aren’t always very sensible even, or easy to draw some simple meaning from. Their purpose is probably entertainment, though sometimes they have a moral in the sense that the good person tends to win the day, while the bad person tends to suffer some misfortune—not always in the same tale.