The Emergence of a Priestly Agent

The portrait of a young couple with their first baby is still an elegant one. But the snapshot of a pair of beaten forty-five-year-olds surrounded, overshadowed and stymied by a handful of teen-agers and a clutch of elementary school pupils has less to recommend it on the level of intelligibility. Somewhere in between, elegance left by the back door. Around the end of toddling and the beginning of talking, a second and unnoticed pregnancy began; another and quite painless delivery was accomplished. A person was born. A piece of history began to distinguish itself and quietly proceeded to start a history of its own. A new priest was ordained sub rosa and sent back to his old haunts, with no collar and no letters of ordination, but with all the powers of the priesthood of Adam.

From there on, the story of childhood is the classic story of the unrecognized prince in his rightful kingdom. His poor parents are totally unprepared for his claim. With immense good will, they struggle like peasants and villagers to find out what is going on, but they are always several episodes behind the story. The pains of childhood—the agonies of the teens—are due precisely to the emergence of a priestly agent among beings that are not ready to have him arrive so soon.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 125-126.

Heartless

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

-Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, 4.

Teenagers

"So, Alvina...how old are you?"

She poured syrup into the cold remainder of her coffee. We hadn't allowed her a refill.

"Eleven and three-quarters."

"You sure it's not eleven and four-fifths?"

She shrugged. "Could be."

"Well," he said with exaggerated dismay, "that's too bad."

She took a sip of the cold, syrupy coffee, decided she liked it, and gulped down the rest. Then looked up at him, debating whether to ask the obvious question. She did. "Why's that?"

He wagged his head grimly. If you hadn't known my father, you'd have thought he had just come from a funeral. "Why? Because you're coming to the end of a beautiful, wonderful time. Your kidhood is almost over. You know what happens next, don't you?"

Experience had taught Alvina nothing—she rose to the bait again. "What?"

"Twelve. That's what happens. And you know what then?"

She didn't really want to answer such a dumb question, but she couldn't resist finding out where all this nonsense was leading. "Thirteen," she said.

My father snapped her a finger-point. "Exactly! In other words, you'll become a teenager." He sighed mournfully. "Such a shame." Alvina looked at me, at him. "Why?"

"Why? Because you know what they say."

"Who's they?"

I thought: Score one for you, girl.

My father ignored the question. "They say teenagers are rotten. They go from being cute and cuddly little kids to monsters who want to stay out late and walk a block behind their parents."

I was a little uneasy. I knew my father was just toying with her, trying to provoke her, but I wasn't sure if Alvina knew...She twiddled her spoon in the empty coffee cup. She shook her head. "Not me."

My father and I were both caught by surprise. The spoon twiddled in the cup. Finally my father prompted her. "Not you?"

The twiddling stopped. She stared into the cup. "No. I'm backwards. I'm a rotten kid now, but I'll be an amazing teenager."

-Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl, 174-175.

Childish Things

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," 34.

Wrinkles

His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

-L. M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe, 11.

Childish Things

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, quoted by Alan Jacobs, The Narnian, xxii.

Father Time

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly on those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

-Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (hat tip Terry Teachout)

A Quiet Chamber: Part IV

There, shedding a dim and varied light, was the Christmas tree my father had decorated alone, every single strand of tinsel hanging straight down of its own slim weight, since he hung them individually, patiently, and would not hasten the duty by tossing them in fistfuls (tradition!)—the tree he had hidden three days ago behind a knobless door.

There, in various places about the room, were seven piles of gifts, a pile for each of us.

There, in the midst of them, my mother sat smiling on the floor, her skirts encircling her, her own radiance smiting my eyes, for she verged on laughter. My mother always laughed when she gave presents, however long the day had been before, however crazy she had almost gone. I began to blink rapidly.

But there, unaccountably, was my father, standing center in the room and gazing straight at me. At me. And this is the wonder fixed in my memory: that the man himself was filled with a yearning, painful expectation; but that he, like me, was withholding still his own excitement—on account of me.

Everything else in this room was just as it had been the year before, and the year before that. But this was new. This thing I had never seen before: that my father, too, had passed his day in the hope that risks a violent hurt. My father, too, had had to trust the promises against their disappointments. So said his steady eyes on me. But among the promises to which my father had committed his soul, his hope and his faith, the most important one was this: that his eldest son should soften and be glad.

If I had grown adult in 1954, then lo, how like a child my father had become! The colored lights painted the side of his face. He gazed at me, waiting, waiting for me, waiting for his Christmas to be received by his son and returned to him again.

And I began to cry. O my father!

Silently, merely spilling the tears and staring straight back at him, defenseless because there was no need for defenses, I cried—glad and unashamed. Because what was this room, for so long locked, which I was entering? Why, it was my own heart. And why had I been afraid? Because I thought I’d find it empty, a hard, unfeeling thing.

But there, in the room, was my father.

And there, in my father, was the love that had furnished this room, preparing it for us no differently than he had last year prepared it, yet trusting and yearning, desiring our joy.

And what else could such a love be, but my Jesus drawing near?

Look, then, what I have found in my father’s room, in my heart after all: the dearest Lord Jesus, holy child—

The nativity of our Lord.

I leaned my cheek against the doorjamb and grinned like a grown-up ten years old, and sobbed as if I were two. And my father moved from the middle of the room and walked toward me, still empty-handed; but he spread his hands and gathered me to himself. And I put my arms around his harder body. And so we, both of us, were full.

This is the way that it was in the olden days.

-Walter Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 64-66.

A Quiet Chamber: Part III

...It was tradition, upon returning home, that we change our church clothes into pajamas, and gather in the kitchen.

Across the hall the door was still closed—but its knob had been replaced. I saw that knob, and my heart kicked inside of me. So I chewed my bottom lip and frowned like thunder: No! It won’t be what it ought to be! It never is.

Adult.

And always, always the hoops of my father’s tradition: we lined up in the kitchen from the youngest to the oldest. I stood last in a line of seven. My littlest sister was clasping her hands and raising her shining, saintly face to my father, who stood before her facing us. Her hair hung down her back to the waist. Blithe child! Her blue eyes burst with trust. I pitied her.

My father prayed a prayer, tormenting me. For the prayer evoked the very images I was refusing: infant Jesus, gift of God, love come down from heaven—all of the things that conspired to make me glad at Christmas. My poor heart bucked and disputed that prayer. No! I would not hope. No! I would not permit excitement. No! No! I would not be set up for a second disappointment.

We were a single minute from entering the room.

And I might have succeeded at severity—

—except that then we sang a song, the same song we always sung, and the singing undid me altogether. Music destroys me. A hymn will reduce me to infancy.

Nine bare voices, unaccompanied in the kitchen, we sang: Ah, dearest Jesus, hold child—and I began to tremble.—Make thee a bed, soft, undefiled—The very sweetness of the melody caused my defenses to fall: I began to hope, and I began to fear, both at once. I began to wish, and wishing made me terrified. I began all over again to believe, but I had never ceased my unbelief. I began to panic.—Within my heart; that it may be—Dreadfully now, I yearned for some good thing to be found in that room, but “dreadfully,” I say, because I was an adult; I’d put away the childish things; I’d been disillusioned and knew no good to be in there. This was a pitiless sham!

—A quiet chamber kept for thee.

My father whispered, “Now.”

He turned to the door.

Little squeals escaped my sister.

He grasped the knob and opened the door upon a muted colored light; and one by one his children crept through the door and into that room.

All of his children save one. I lingered in the doorway, looking, not breathing.

-Walt Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 63-64.

A Quiet Chamber: Part II

Let me be more specific. We were living in Edmonton, Alberta, then. The year was 1954, and I was ten, the oldest of seven children. I’ve implied that we were all excited on that particular Christmas Eve morning, and so we were; but though my brothers and sisters could manifest their excitement with unbridled delight, I could not mine. I absolutely refused to acknowledge or signal excitement. They loved the sweet contractions in their stomachs. I was afraid of them. For I had that very year become an adult: silent, solemn, watchful, and infinitely cautious.

So my brothers and sisters laughed and clapped the day away. They spilled colored sugar on cookie dough and covered the kitchen table with a sweet mess, all unworried, unafraid. They claimed, by faster stabs of the finger, their individual treasures from Sears catalogs, and so they allowed their dreams to soar, and so they passed the day. I didn’t blame them. They were innocent; they could dare the dangers they didn’t see. These children could rush headlong toward the evening, recklessly. But I could not.

I held myself in a severe restraint. Because—what if you hope, and it doesn’t happen? It’s treacherous to hope. The harder you hope, the more vulnerable you become. And what if you believe a thing, but it isn’t true? Well, the instant you see the deception, you die a little. And it hurts exactly in your soul, where once you had believed. I knew all this. I had learned that excitement is composed of hope and faith together—but of faith and hope in promises yet unkept—and I was not about to let excitement run away with me, or I would certainly crash as I had crashed the year before.

Last Christmas Eve, in the midst of opening his presents, my brother Paul had burst into tears. I didn’t know—and I don’t know—why. But I was shocked to discover that the Christmas time was not inviolate. I was horrified that pain could invade the holy ceremony. And I was angry that my father had not protected my brother from tears. There was a fraud here. The traditions were as thin as a crystal globe and empty. I could do nothing but sob in sympathy with my brother, nothing but grieve to the same degree that I had believed.

But by ten I was an adult; and if Christmas gave me nothing really, and if the traditions could not protect me from assault, then I would protect myself.

No: the more excited I was, the more I was determined not to be, and the more I molded my face into a frown.

I’m speaking with precision now. None of us could stand the season’s excitement. But I was frightened by mine and chose to show it to no one, not to my father, not to my mother, and not to myself.

Adult.

-Walt Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 59-60.

Old Friends

Old friends,
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown though the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friends.

Old friends,
Winter companions,
The old men
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city,
Sifting through trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends.

Can you imagine us
Years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.
Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears

-Paul Simon

Time

One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

-Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 29.

Opportunity Cost

“Although [young people] would agree, if they thought about it, that they will realize only some of the (feasible) possibilities before them, none of these various possibilities is yet excluded in their minds. The young live in each of the futures open to them…Economists speak of the opportunity cost of something as the value of the best alternative foregone for it. For adults, strangely, the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all.”

-Robert Nozick, quoted by Alan Jacobs in Books and Culture

What David Remembered

If you think [Peter Pan] was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape, but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples, for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be. So David tells me.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

Untitled

As years come in and years go out
I totter toward the tomb,
Still caring less and less about
Who goes to bed with whom.

-Dorothy Sayers

Big-Kid Eyes

By the end of third grade, most of the kids’ baby teeth were gone. The permanent ones had arrived in their mouths. Around fourth grade something similar happens with eyes. The baby eyes don’t drop out, nor are there eye fairies around to leave quarters under pillows, but new eyes do arrive nevertheless. Big-kid eyes replace little-kid eyes.

Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop up everything they see and swallow it whole, no questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They notice things that the little-kid eyes never bothered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the way a kid dresses or pronounces a word.

-Jerry Spinelli, Loser

Do it Again

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy