Love the World

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm eighty

When I write, there are days when I burrow into my heart to sniff around and see what’s moldering in there. Other days, I do battle with the hate merchants and try to make some sense out of the morass we’ve landed in. But my best work finds a lane where the language travels in both directions at the same time, resulting in surprising interactions, strange alchemies. When the lane is open, the traffic flows seamlessly from my earliest memories, snapshots of my father fooling around with his leatherbound albums of stamps from all over the world - Venezuela, Ukraine - to the piercing shriek of the woman in Minneapolis being dragged away by ICE. I can’t explain how this happens, the back and forth. It just does. I am blessed to hear a conversation unfolding between what is entirely mine and what I share with our collective experience in this moment. But alas just now, there is gridlock. I can’t get comfortable on either the inside track or the outside track. Almost everything I eat disturbs my digestive system as if my body is saying, do not bring anything from out there in here. It’s all toxic. Keep your eyes on the road and wait for an opening in the lane.

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

When they come for the Somalis, as they have been doing for days in south Minneapolis, it feels like I went to sleep and woke up in 1910. The Czar, the Kaiser and the Hapsburg Emperor are all lounging around in smoking jackets, lighting cigars, chatting about who should be in charge in which countries. The British and the French are comparing notes about their holdings in colonial Africa. Americans are relatively late to the party, but have learned in no time to salivate over the imperial trappings. We are enthusiastic masters of our plantations, very talented at keeping the races separated, the dark people in their place. Mussolini will take note when he invades Ethiopia. The Germans will look to us for guidance when they initiate their own extermination project. We can’t get enough of this stuff, this foul, bloody, degrading stuff. No wonder I can’t digest it.

It probably doesn’t help that it’s 3 degrees in St. Louis Park today so there are limits to how much out there I can tolerate. Still in the early afternoon, we being among the most fortunate, go down to the heated garage and take the car out in search of Italian pastries to serve guests later in the holiday season. In Nordic Minnesota you can’t assume cannoli. You have to track it down. This extreme excursion into deep freeze and deep-fried will either kill me or knock something loose enabling me to navigate the words, incoming and outgoing. The situation calls for a radical gesture. There is some sort of blockage. If it doesn’t work, I may get stuck for all eternity between self-preoccupation and the soapbox.

Back to the colonization of Africa, we find that the woman who makes the cannoli at Rebecca’s Bakery on Franklin is Ethiopian. She lived in Naples for many years and she knows her flour. We find ourselves discussing the sad fact that there’s no money in sfogliatelle. The clam-shaped pastry is so labor-intensive that there’s no room for profit. I am captivated. Her pastry cream is divine. I take a prudent small bite and it lifts my spirits without assaulting my digestive system. I am reminded of my love for the world. This is my new mantra. I say it out loud many times a day whenever delight rains down on me, but also when despair threatens to choke me. I say it on the way home when we drive past the encampments of unhoused black Minnesotans milling around on the freezing, garbage-strewn sidewalk. This too is the world. Love the world. I believe as an article of faith that the world needs my love. I also believe that it has an infinite number of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures to give in exchange. It’s a good deal for me, more than equitable. All I have to do is learn to be present to the world’s suffering, joy and beauty and we’re good. It’s like any other relationship, a marriage, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.