Page 2 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 4 Summer 2013

Lorene Cary ’74: Updrafts of Memory
Time during Anniversary
Weekend feels very much
as it does when I write; we
swim and float and march
through it; it buoys us up
and threatens, now and
then, to choke us.
We’ve changed. Bodies
rack up the years, while
spirits wheel on sudden
updrafts of memory. I hadn’t heard my roommate’s deckle-
edged voice in 40 years, but I knew it from across the road
even before I could see her.
At the Alumni Service of Remembrance, a tall, delightful
woman says, “It’s me, Maura!” and introduces her graduating
son, taller than both of us. During the reading of the Lessons,
her pixie Third-Form face comes back to me, and with it a
teaching memories slide-show: Chris, jumping out from hiding
behind the drapes in our Schoolhouse room; a round-faced boy
screwing up courage to ask to borrow my blue suit for his Fiske
Cup play; the father whose teacher-conference monologue about
his own football days blots out – and explains – my concerns
about his son.
To Holst’s regal Thaxted hymn tune students and alumni sing
thanks for “the discipline of logic, the struggle to be clear,” and,
in a special verse for St. Paul’s School, “the knowledge that con-
tinues in heaven as on earth.” At the Intercessions, I pray for the
soul of gentle Vanessa Bowens ’75, who died this past year – we
called her Marian – and I hear her clearing her throat as if we’re
back in Simpson House.
Then the Rector, a student during my teaching time, refers to
a Chapel talk delivered the year I was born by theologian Paul
Tillich – yes, the very Tillich whose initially unreadable essays
told us all those years ago to “accept that you are accepted.” Now
his “Theology of Education” explains the crazy hope I have taken
from the luxury of St. Paul’s back to my old/new life. The mission
of a Christian school, says Tillich, is to be “a small laboratory in
which the large questions of Church and world can be studied
and brought to a preliminary solution, a solution which could
become an inestimable contribution…to the larger problem.”
At the Alumni of Color Reception, we fellowship over the larger
problem. How could we not? I think of “The Case for Reparations,”
an Atlantic Monthly cover story that lays out brilliantly how
the American economy has stymied black wealth creation from
slavery to redlining. It complicates the School Prayer to think,
each time one prays it, that our “goodly heritage” has been built
not only “through the love and labor of many,” but also the unpaid
and unsung labor of many more. It complicates one’s “future hopes.”
PERSPECTIVE
Sitting in a wide circle in Sheldon, we meet as partial, but not
impartial, heirs.
On Sunday, I stop to visit the former Rector and his wife, Cliff
and Alina Gillespie, with whom I shared Corner House as faculty,
and continue north for a shiny blue afternoon on a lake with my
older daughter, who lives and teaches snowboarding in Vermont.
Driving home to Philadelphia, all of it splices into a lifelong
wonder poem. The large questions ask me how I have used these
40 years since the gift of my education at St. Paul’s School. I look
back at merciless perfectionism and relentless drive to be worthy,
to earn it – and the ever-present mercy of divine love.
Mercy
Driving to the mountains my daughter loves,
like her father,
I listen to podcasts while dairy cows
whose swelling udders know no sabbath
range black and brown and white over grass so green,
that all summer and into the fall
it will give the lie to what we call Ordinary Time.
An Old Testament scholar with a wide-open Nebraska voice
says that “mercy” in Hebrew
implies care like the care of a mother for an unborn child.
It has the same letters as “womb,”
But with different vowel points.
I once named a woman Mercy.
Not my daughter, but a character in a book;
rushing, because I was pregnant again,
rushing, to get the merciless world of chattel slavery
out of my mind:
To make room for the baby in my body.
What does it mean?
My husband asks this in his sermons, and I get distracted,
remembering him studying for seminary, a man in his 50s
finally answering a long, insistent call.
The smell of coffee came up the stairs while the laptop played
Hebrew letters to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
If these were God’s favorite people,
he’d ask in exasperation,
Why would he give them vowel points?
My body and mind have been plowed up and planted.
Lord have mercy, look what has grown!
And even though I’ve let so much topsoil blow away,
Wanting more and more and more,
still, mercy comes fresh in the morning.
Lorene Cary ’74, the author of Black Ice, is a writer, educator, and activist.