nyj62: lurching back to my lamp post


In C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the central characters first enter Narnia by way of a massive and surprisingly deep wardrobe at the back of which they find themselves standing in a strange and foreign winterland, next to a lamp post. That beacon becomes a kind of homing device, the red shoes they have to click together; the place where they find that portal between conjoined gaps in the skins of two worlds. The lamp post is the sign that they've left home and the wardrobe behind, but also the hope that home and the wardrobe are nearly theirs again.

My "lamp post" in New York has always been Columbus Circle, dating back to the very first, May 2002, visit when I emerged from an inbound V train to goggle at the Trump Hotel globe and then dash into the safety of a nearby Starbucks. I had flown into LaGuardia by night, and stayed in Queens, so that exit from the station, coming up out of the ground into Manhattan, on the southwest verge of Central Park, was a memory marked down vividly.

And sometimes, now, as the restlessness of time grown long and threadbare in this place weighs down upon me, I am drawn back there to wonder. Drawn to feel again the place that I first came from, as if fingering a geographic navel. "The omphalos," it was called in ancient cultures. It usually referred to the local mountain, believed to be a connection point with the gods or forces who brought that people to life. It was for them a reminder that they came from something else, just as our belly buttons are the long-healed wound of having mothers, drawing life from someone else.

Sometimes now I go back there, to my lamp post/New York navel as if it could take me back "home" again — wherever that might be — and transport me out of here, for good. Lately I've been temping near Rockefeller Center, a few blocks south and to the east on 51st and Sixth (Avenue of the Americas, as it's called in that section). The mandatory hour lunch break doesn't leave much time to linger once I've walked up to the park, but there's time enough to wander back to the other side of my wardrobe. Only now it seems the entry point's sealed up, that I won't be able to get back out.

And lately I want to, badly. Today my mom told me my brother will probably have to be reactivated in the fall, at which he'll be sent to the Middle East. Probably for 18 months. Only one or two months after my sister is deployed to Iraq. We were chatting over IM, and the tears just suddenly spilled out, like an overfilled water glass slightly jostled. "That's it. I'm out. I'm done. There's no way I'm staying here," I said a bit rashly. (A summertime move, after my roomie has her MFA in hand, and our lease is up, is a much-talked-about option these days.)

My lunch break came then, and I wandered up "Avenue of the Americas" to the park. A few blocks south of it, I remembered there had been a Schlotzsky's in that area. I knew the cross-street was 57th, but couldn't recall if it was at Sixth or Seventh. Schlotzsky's used to be one of the two places my family would eat out, when I was an Arizona adolescent. Raising a family of four children on the income of one worker isn't easy, so such restaurant meals were always a special splurge. The New York Schlotzsky's always had a weary feel to it, but I didn't go there for the verve; I went for nostalgia. When I saw the familiar sign across the block on 57th and Sixth, my heart eased briefly. I know it's bad to lean on food for comfort ... but today I didn't care. It wasn't about indulging in too much food after all, just going someplace I associated with my youth.

But Schlotzsky's had closed for good, a discovery that oddly seemed fitting to the strangeness of my afternoon. Sometimes you can't go back the same way that you got somewhere. And I'm not really "going back" anyway, just away, if things work out. if Arizona was my wardrobe, that's certainly not the place I would return to.

The Narnia kids found other portals in later books. And though I haven't found its lamp post yet I'm pretty sure my exit portal is out there. And come to think of it, if it's a "new Narnia" I'm in for, there's bound to be some struggle just before the breakthrough. After all, when that girl Lucy first entered the wardrobe there were lots and lots of coats she had to push through right before she reached the lamp post. Maybe leaving this city takes just as long and just as much work — if not more — as it did to get here. Because I'm not just leaving New York, I'm in the process of getting to somewhere else, somewhere that's new. I should remember, too, that just because the children reached the end of the first book did not mean their adventures had ended, or that their time with Aslan was up.

That out-of-business Schlotzsky's stood for many things, I guess. The nearing close of a chapter, perhaps a book, the close of certain kinds of security enjoyed by my family. But also, too, the retreat of a self that once faced pain and struggle with only self-pity. I remember some days after Berkeley when I imagined myself like Job, having everything stripped away. And then I had a steady, if small income! Then I had a structure to my life, provided by school. Then I found my faith in God a terribly painful burden. Now I'm probably pressed on a whole lot more, but less overcome. Lately I've been text-messaging with a friend out in California. And as I started to send a reply (about my brother), I realized that it was incomplete: "But even in this, I have to say God is good." Not because suffering and death are somehow God's goodness well-disguised in a crummy package — calling evil good is after all, in the Christian view, the heart of what is sinful — but because the character of God is constant. Though I may not understand what's going on, why the last several months have been a kind of "character bootcamp" (as I've dubbed it), that doesn't change the character of God. And if my hope and happiness is based on Him instead of changeable and volatile life events, I can take much more.

It turns out I didn't need a Schlotzsky's lunch to lighten my heart; I just needed to text that little sentence. "But even in this, God is good."

Update
Some forbearance, as of today. Apparently enough other Guardsmen volunteered that now my brother probably won't be reactivated (if he is) until next year. One sib at a time they'll go, I guess.

posted @ 01:08 AM on Thu - March 17, 2005 remark! Email |  as quoted:
before I said ...  but more recently: 

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