Eight Months, Three Jobs, New Steps

Over the course of eight months, from October 2003 to June of 2004, I held three distinct and very different jobs.

Since the beginning of 2000, I had been an independent communications consultant, after 27 years of corporate life. Then, in October of 2003, I became director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, an urban school district in the throes of extreme crisis and reorganization. In June, I was recruited back to corporate life to manage a bankruptcy issue and some related environmental issues.

Three jobs. Eight months. My head was spinning with new steps.

In the case of the school district, there was not time to take a breather and learn. My first day on the job was a total immersion in learning on the fly. I walked in the door, and hadn’t even made it to Human Resources to fill out paperwork, when the secretary informed me that Channel 4 and Channel 5 were in the lobby for a statement.

“A statement about what?” I asked.

“About the district-wide teacher sick-out,” she said.

Oh. (By the way, my first day on the job was probably my easiest day on the job.)

I went from a job with five or six major crises a day to one where it was calmer, more measured – just a mega-crisis, with large financial stakes, happening over a long period of time. No one I worked with had actually done that kind of job before, and my colleagues were thrilled to death that I was there to deal with it. So my world became lawyers and finance people and outside consultants and environmental experts and more lawyers (lots of lawyers).

For all their differences, and the culture shock of going from an urban school district to a Fortune 500 corporation, both jobs represented a kind of renewal in my working and professional life.

I was stretched far beyond points I had ever been stretched before.

I had no peer or colleague or mentor who could guide me in what I did.

I had to create new, and sometimes controversial, ways of doing things.

I moved into situations for which I had little direct experience.

In one situation, I knew what I had to do – but had no budget to do it. In the other, I had a more-than-sufficient budget – but no one had any real notion of what to do with it.

And in both situations, I had to rely less and less on myself, and often from hour to hour, and more on my faith. God knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t.


Bonnie Gray, who blogs at Faith Barista, is hosting a blog party on “new steps” – how new steps and renewal can influence your faith walk. Check out other blog posts here.

Rouault, Fujimura and Hearts and Minds

I will be honest. I had never heard of French artist Georges Rouault (1871 – 1958) before I read Rouault/Fujimura: Soliloquies by Thomas Hibbs, which includes a “refraction” or essay by Makoto Fujimura (1960 - ). Soliloquies was written to accompany an exhibition of Rouault’s and Fujimura’s art at the Dillon Gallery in New York City in late 2009. I started reading it, and felt somewhat cretinous for not knowing about Rouault.

I bought this book because Makoto Fujimura tweeted on Twitter that it was named a “best book of 2009” by Hearts and Minds. I had read Fujimura’s Refractions and posted on it in January.
What a gem this little book is. Not only do you gain a sense of whom Rouault was and what his art was about, you also learn just how important this artist was to contemporary artists like Fujimura and the idea of expression of faith and belief through art and in art.

Thomas Hibbs, who wrote most of Soliloquies, has provided what is almost a spiritual meditation on the two artists, art and the idea of “soliloquies” as almost a kind of dialogue. He reaches out to and pulls from sources as diverse as St. Augustine, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil.

Rouault is important in understanding Fujimura’s work because the French painter, who died two years before Fujimura was born, has had such a significant impact on Fujimura's thinking and understanding. Here is Rouault as described by Fujimura:

“Like the Rembrandts he valued and imitated as a youth, and the Cezanne he celebrated in his letters and poems, Rouault paintings capture not a mere reflective, descriptive light, but Light behind the light, Reality behind the reality. They are generative and seem to grow more and more pregnant as they age. Rouault may yet prove to be the first twenty-first century painter, bringing synthesis out of an age of fragmentation.”

Soliloquies is a small book, all of 63 pages, with reproductions of some of the paintings exhibited and photographs from the exhibition. And it is a beautiful small book, a gem that contains so much understanding that I’ve read it three times, and still find new things to appreciate and ponder.

I also feel a little less cretinous than I did before. At least I know who Georges Rouault was, and perhaps is.

An Aside:
I bought the book through Hearts and Minds Bookstore’s web site. Physically located in central Pennsylvania, Hearts and Minds’ web site is – to me – exactly what it should be. The store specializes in books about faith and Christianity, and the web site includes a blog about some of the books it sells; book reviews; and news. I suspect that visitors to the web site receive the same kind of care and attention that customers in the store do. When I placed the order, I received an email confirmation and a second email (from a real person) asking me how I had heard about their store and what I was interested in reading.

Illustrations:

Top: Christ in the Outskirts (1920-24) by Georges Rouault.

Bottom: Soliloquies by Makoto Fujimura

Place: Almost a Century Apart

I attended elementary school in a New Orleans suburb. Because we only had three seasons (summer, July and August), events like leaves turning colors in the fall or snow were theoretical concepts unless one traveled north. My only familiarity with fall and winter was a series of coloring books distributed at school, one for each month. The October one always included fall leaves, and either the December or January one would have pictures that included snow. I was always fascinated.

The changing of the leaves is one of the events that former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall describes in Eagle Pond, a collection of essays (and one longish poem) about New England in general and New Hampshire in particular, which I just finished reading. His mother’s family came from New Hampshire and it’s where Hall now lives, in a family farmhouse somewhat modernized but still close to what his ancestors knew.

As I read about the farm, the community and the state where he lives, I learned how important the sense of “place” is to him, and how it informs his poetry and writing. Place is as real to Hall’s writing as Port William is to Wendell Berry and Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner.

As I read Eagle Pond, I was strongly reminded of a children’s book I read almost 50 years ago, and which I’ve learned is still in print today.

First published in 1916, Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is still – remarkably – in print today, the latest edition published just last year. It’s the story of a 9-year-old girl from the Midwest who is sent to live with cousins in Vermont, the “terrible Putney cousins.” I was given the Scholastic Books paperback by my next-door neighbor, who had read it and wasn’t interested in keeping it. At the time, I knew it was a “girl’s book,” but it was about New England, with illustrations similar to those coloring books I worked on each month at school, so I read it. I didn’t tell anyone, but I enjoyed it.

That copy disappeared years ago during one of my mother’s garage sales. A few years back, I found a hard back edition from the 1940s at a used book sale and bought it, entirely for sentimental reasons (it was all of $1).

After reading Eagle Pond, I found my copy of Understood Betsy and read it. It’s charming, a product of its time that somewhat romanticized farm life and the one-room schoolhouse. (Little did I know, but the author is credited with introducing the Montessori Method into the United States and the schoolhouse scenes in the book are based entirely upon that approach.)

As I read it, the story came back, and vividly back. I began to remember and then anticipate the events of the narrative – how Betsy had been raised by fussy aunts and then sent to Vermont; how she got a kitten; her first day in school (“I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading!”); the wolf pit; and the county fair. I was surprised at how well I remembered the story, and its rather breathless prose.

I wasn’t surprised that it had made such an impression on a young boy living in a New Orleans suburb. It’s about a place, a specific place, and about the idea of place, in exactly the same way that Hall’s Eagle Pond is about place. Even when Canfield Fisher wrote Understood Betsy, the place she was writing about had changed forever (and to hear Hall describe neighboring Vermont, it’s now entirely inhabited by weekenders from New York and Boston who wear L.L. Bean plaid flannel shirts).

Hall says that it’s likely only native New Englanders and Southerners who truly understand this notion of place. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do know that when people ask me where I’m from, I always say “I was born and raised in New Orleans but now live in St. Louis,” even though I’ve lived far longer in St. Louis than I did in New Orleans.

But that’s what place does to you. That's what it does to Donald Hall, and what it did to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, writing almost a century apart.

Panes

Glance, leftward, from the screen, and
see, refracting through the pane, a
building, a wall of marble and glass; a
cloud of fog floating from
the smoker’s bench and
dissipating through a tree, an oak,
most likely;
a sky of blue beyond.

Another, leftward but different,
glance, different screen, past
my shelf of books anticipating being
read, to the pane, through the pane, to
holly, magnolias, river birch, cherry,
garden, across the fence to the
neighbor next door;
a sky of blue above.

Two panes, two skies: reminders of
the paned sky within.

"Eastern Washington," photograph by Nancy Rosback. Used with permission.

(This poem was written for the March offering of the Cunning Poets Society, led by nAncY of Poems and Prayers. The prompt was to write either about something you really like or about something happening around you when you are writing. I chose the latter; what's usually happening around me when I write -- at work and home -- is what can be seen through windows.)

Saturday Good Reads

Many good things happened online this past week. Here are a only a few of them, including links to three videos and a painting.

Poetry

“Whispering Words,” by Shaun Masterton.

Louise Gallagher’s “Soul Dances.”

Two by Melissa at All the Words: “Redbeard the Pirate Cow” and “Nothing More.”

Kathleen Overby's "Sprouting."

“Dreams” by Susan Etole.

"Eternal" by Erin at Together for Good.

“Haunting” by Justinian at Discount Verbiage.

nAncY’s “On Top of the World” at Poems and Prayers.

Phoenix Karenee’s “Pray.”

Leslie Moon’s “Drowning My Sorrows.”

Prose

"What Keeps Me Here" (in the Catholic Church) by Jessica Griffith at the Image Journal. (For the record, I'm not Catholic, but this is worth reading by all of us.)

Thinking about Columbine, Sandra Heska King’s “Faithful to the End.”

What we often miss: “Life’s Great Tragedy” by Billy Coffey.

The need to be gentle with a son: Jeff Johnson’s “In Sickness and in Health.”

"Do I Still Get a Lollipop at the Doctor’s Office?" Matt at The Church of No People takes a look at the health care legislation debate.

How Emily Dickinson’s poetry speaks to leadership: "The Poetic Language of Leadership," interview of Prof. Roger Lundin of Wheaton by Christopher Benson at Evangel.

Learning, as an adult, that you have Attention Deficit Disorder. "Being me (and being you)," by Kathy Richards at Hey Look, A Chicken.

“Gardening as Autobiography” by Amy Sorrells.

Video

Every family has moments like this one, and they're priceless: "Nowhere Man Gets a Little Lost," by Sippican Cottage.

If this were a novel, it's title would be "The Rich Also Have a Sense of Humor." Slate V: Warren Buffett as Axl Rose in an ad for GEICO.

Set whatever feelings you have for the health care legislation aside, and look at the sheer creativity of this: "Something Wonderful: Patrick Henry Redux," posted at American Digest.

Artwork

"Across a winter field," oil on panel, Randall David Tipton. And Maureen Doallas has part 1 of an interview with Tipton on her blog, Writing Without Paper. (If you've never read her interviews, you will discover that they are works of art in and of themselves.)

Grandparent Fix

Travis, Janet, Glynn and Cameron Young

March 25, 2010

Uncle Andrew Young and Cameron Young

March 26, 2010

Athol Dickson's "River Rising"

I grew up in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in a suburb of New Orleans. Jefferson extends from Lake Pontchartrain on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. Below New Orleans and to the east, separated from Jefferson by the Mississippi River, is Plaquemines Parish. For a very long time, Plaquemines was governed by one man, Leander Perez, who was known for his less-than-liberal views on all things, including race.

It is the fictional town of Pilotville, set in 1927 Plaquemines Parish, that is the setting of Athol Dickson’s 2005 novel River Rising. As in all of Dickson’s, “place” plays a very important role, often becoming another major character in the story. And that is what happens in “River Rising.”

The Rev. Hale Poser guides his leaking pirogue (that’s Cajun for canoe) into Pilotville from New Orleans. He gets a job as a janitor at the infirmary for the town’s black people, and shortly thereafter performs a healing miracle for a woman in childbirth – or what is believed to be a healing miracle. Then her baby daughter is stolen, and the whole town, white and black, turns out to search. This stolen baby turns out to be only one of many others stolen over the years. Poser, compelled by something he doesn’t understand, keeps looking for her when everyone else stops. He canoes deep into the swamp, almost dying from lack of food and water in the process, and eventually finds the missing baby. And he finds a lot more: an almost unspeakable horror.

This is 1927, and something else is at play – the Mississippi River. The historical flood of that year serves an apocalyptic purpose in the story, and the river will both destroy and expose, and possibly help redeem.

This novel received a host of accolades and recognitions, including the Christy Award for best Christian novel of the year. But its appeal is much broader, for it is not so much a Christian novel as it is a very fine novel written by an author who happens to be a Christian. It is a grand story, and an honest one. And it ends up being a story of great beauty.

Related:

Athol Dickson writes on “Forgotten Beauty” at Novel Journey.

The Beauty of Athol Dickson, my post published Thursday at The Christian Manifesto.