Unpunished Rapture

San Francisco: Part 2

When my husband and I moved to San Francisco, two weeks after getting married and a month after graduating from college, we lived in my dad's girlfriend's extra apartment. My dad, being an interior decorator hobbyist, had a new bed (beige) and couch (beige) carried up the 88 steps on Russian Hill that led to our newlywed bungalow. My dad's girlfriend had stocked the shelves with tapanade spreads from North Beach delis and exotic jellys and jams from the neighborhood specialty markets.

Six weeks later, we moved out and settled instead in a one bedroom box in a high rise apartment building in the Financial District. As I remember, the justification for moving was that we wanted to walk to work, which we could both do from the apartment building, but looking back on it now, our move was simply the first step in extricating ourselves from the San Francisco of my childhood and, specifically, my dad's San Francisco.

Even though our new place was hardly the heavenly perch of my dad's girlfriend's house and my dad himself had helped us pick it out, it was ours and ours alone. Although only 22, I bought some original canvases by local art students and hung them on the beat up walls. I strategically placed plants under the side tables in the living room. I entertained (or tried to) for Halloween and Easter and Thanksgiving. I tried to make it a home because it was our home and we were all grown up now.

Still, that tug of my childhood distracted us from reveling in all of San Francisco's charms. We had chances to explore the fabulous and hip restaurants with our young work colleagues, yet every Sunday afternoon my dad would drive up to our building to pick us up for dinner at the Burlingame Country Club where he had been eating and playing golf since he was a teenager. One evening, he sent me back up to our apartment to change clothes before dinner because I was wearing pants and the Burlingame Club didn't "allow" women to wear pants. 

It was hard for me to reconcile the social and professional success I was having at my ultra cool dot com workplace -- where not just pants but jeans and shorts were the norm -- with the other San Francisco my dad knew. It's true that in the '70s and '80s when I was visiting the city as a child that San Francisco was considered one of the most formal cities in the country, but the dot com boom changed all of that and Elliot and I were a part of that revolution. In fact, I wrote an article for Newsweek's My Turn column that described this tension I was feeling.

Three years later, Elliot and I moved to a new apartment, one that we chose completely on our own based less on practical considerations and more on simply what caught our fancy. The apartment was in one of the city's many pre-war buildings with a lobby of deep red walls, gold filigree and a wrought iron door. The apartment itself had huge walk-in closets (perfect for a crib), arched doorways and parquet floors. Strangely, it was nearer to my father's own apartment -- just a few blocks away -- and the home was still decorated with many of his cast-off pieces (what 25-year-olds have life-sized gold swans adorning upholstered reading chairs?), but I loved my home. As we gained more social footing in the city, we filled our calendars with work offsites in Napa, Settlers of Catan tournaments, church callings and evenings at the Metreon, leaving less time for my dad's demanding dinners at Harris' Steakhouse but allowing us more time to explore our own marriage.

Despite living in the city for seven years, Elliot and I never lost the sense that we were simply on our way to someplace else. We were desperately ready to leave by the time he got the letter from Harvard saying he'd been accepted into business school. Looking back, it's hard for me to calculate how much of our antsyness was the result of having a neighbor -- my dad -- who required constant work, and how much of it was simply the wanderlust of youth. I feel ashamed that I didn't love living there more than I did. It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Going back now, without the pressure of simultaneously living in my dad's San Francisco as well as our own, I appreciate it more than I ever did before. And, as it always has, San Francisco lives in both my past and my future: the memories of those sweet first homes will always coexist with the adventures that lie ahead whenever we return.

God In 100 Words Or Less

Can you describe God in 100 words or less? This challenge was posed to me by the editors at Patheos a few weeks ago, and my answer, along with about a dozen others, is now posted at Patheos.com

I took a quite traditional approach with my definition -- God is the literal heavenly father of my spirit -- because I know there is so much misconception about what Mormons really believe that I wanted to take the opportunity to share some basic facts. I love, however, that my fellow Mormon contributor, Joanna Brooks, took a more poetic approach by discussing the existence of a Heavenly Mother and the closeness she feels to this being. Many of the other definitions in the project are much more poetic than mine, but I think the balance of personal expression with by-the-book doctrine works well in this feature.

Among Mormons, there is a diverse range of fact, speculation, and belief regarding Heavenly Mother and her role among us earthbound spirits. The fact that she exists is a fact supported by our doctrine (Joanna points to Eliza R. Snow's 1845 hymn "Oh My Father": "In the heavens, are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare.  / Truth is reason; truth eternal / tells me I've a mother there.") Why She is not discussed in greater length is a subject of speculation among many members. Reasons I have heard range from the idea that She is too sacred to be subjected to earthly abuse (think of how Jesus Christ has been trampled) to the idea that the doctrine subversively silences the role of women, even the most powerful ones (even though Eve is revered).

Unlike Joanna and many thoughtful women I know, I have not taken the same time to learn about and develop a relationship with my Heavenly Mother, partly because it is not facilitated in the orthodox structure of our meetings and communications, but mostly because I have never felt the need. I know this lack of effort at even a simple scholarly inquisition may seem irresponsible to some, but I attribute this to the fact that I am very close to my earthly mother. It is she who fills, for me, most every nurturing need I've had, as a child or as an adult, and her spiritual example has been an effective beacon for myself. Because I did not have that same intimate relationship with my own early father, my Heavenly Father has always been a needed and important figure in my life. I recognize that this parental dynamic doesn't exist in all families and that the search for a maternal spiritual nurturer is real. 

In reading the other definitions included in this Patheos feature, I was struck by how often thoughts of God bring out the poetic or creative side in people. There are many abstract concepts, such as hope and love, that are universal themes, yet each writer searches for a creative means by which to express those concepts in a way that means something to them. Even the exercise of thinking and writing about God asks us to tap into the part of us that is most like him: the part in each of us that aspires to something outside our mortal bodies.

Dear Facebook Friends: I'm Sorry

In this week's article at Patheos, I ask whether or not a person can walk away from a regrettable past -- an essential step in forgiving ourselves and being forgiven -- in the age of social media.

San Francisco: Part 1

We took the girls to San Francisco last week for their spring break. My history with the city goes back generations, and extends into my adulthood when my husband and I spent our first seven years there. The next few posts will be reflections of my relationship with San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Grandfather and Pucci lived in a pink house, tucked in a sunken lot at the end of a cul-de-sac. Only the pink double garage was visible from the road, and a wrought iron fence leading down into the blooming canyon of their garden. Living in Burlingame, CA meant that Pucci's famous roses would grow all year round, and the honeysuckle hanging from the planters down the walkway to the front door were a perennial air freshener.

Despite the apparent vitality of the expansive lawn and effusive bloom of the garden, the house itself seemed to give me only a cold embrace. As a little girl, visiting my father's father and step-mother, I was a guest in a different generation with different expectations of children and a different level of propriety than was exercised in my own home, despite my father being cut from the same cloth as his own dad. I was always uncertain, nervously self-conscious about my actions and words. Would I seem dumb? Would I seem ill-trained? Would I get my parents in trouble? It seemed the only child-like touch in the house was Pucci's silver turtle bell which she rang whenever she wanted Payo, her cook, to swing through the door from the kitchen and attend to a need at the dinner table. 

Despite my child insecurities, I knew the house was gorgeous and I felt torn by my desire to spend more time there. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out from the living room to the garden, and Pucci's immense production of needlepoint adorned everything from the rug in front of the fireplace to the glass coasters on the side tables. The garden grew in that living room too, coming right up to the wall of glass and continuing in the floral fabric of the couch and the needlepointed flowers of the pillow cushions.

I also felt torn by the fact that my cousins, who lived in San Francisco and thus saw my grandparents much more often than I did, called my grandfather pet names and acted much more casually in the house, while I could barely stutter a formal greeting upon entering. Even at a very young age, I understood that my relationship with my grandfather was different than my cousins', and that I wanted to know him the way they knew him. I never got that chance, since he passed away when I was thirteen.

But Pucci lived on, and when my new husband and I moved to San Francisco after graduating from college, Pucci was still sitting in her parlor room with her dog Blackie on her lap, although a stroke had prevented her from playing bridge at the country club and smoking her two packs of cigarettes a day. I'm not certain of Pucci's actual history, but pictures of her as a young woman with Zsa-Zsa Gabor suggest to me she was something of nobility in her native Hungary. 

Elliot and I started visiting her on Sunday evenings, sitting on the parlor couch with her while Payo, ever faithful, brought out plates of pork chops (bone in) which we would eat on TV trays in front of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". As a 22-year-old, I wasn't so scared of Pucci anymore, especially in her frail state, but it was my husband who really became her friend on those Sunday nights. Without the baggage of the childhood self-consciousness, Elliot was able to be himself around her and brought out the charm he shows so easily with all little old ladies.

"Why don't you be on this show?" Pucci would drawl in her thick Hungarian accent, when Elliot would call out the answer to a question on Millionaire before Regis had even finished reading it. I actually think she developed a little crush on him.

When Pucci died, two years after we moved to San Francisco and started our Sunday night visits, I helped my father and uncle clear out the house. Like Howard's End, E.M.Forster's famous house, the pink house on the cul-de-sac served as touchstone for my own maturing. In my earliest memories of the house, I loved it for what it looked like. By the end, I loved the people in it.

What Not To Wear: Mormon Edition

My latest column at Patheos is about one of my favorite topics: clothing! I'd love to hear any fashion adventures you've had in the LDS church or in other churches. What is acceptable in your church? Why?

My New Hero

When we decided we were going to move to Utah, one of the tasks I assigned myself was finding a good violin teacher for Esme in Salt Lake City. I had no idea it would be so difficult: Once I started networking into the best teachers, they were so full they could only teach Esme if I brought her to lessons during school hours. I ended up settling on a violinist from the Utah Symphony (who could see us after school) and I was simply relieved to have found someone decent.

That was before we met Eugene Watanabe. Then, all of a sudden, decent wasn't good enough anymore. Eugene is the only student ever to graduate from the Curtis Institute in both violin and piano, and he has studied with some of the finest teachers on both instruments. Now, he has returned to his native Utah and is dedicating himself to teaching, with the help of his wife Vera, who is herself a pianist and teaches at the University of Utah.

The first time I took Esme over to their home to see if Mr. Watanabe would teach her, I felt a familiar and yet buried feeling spring to life: That feeling of entering a home where music reigns. Where the whole life of the house revolves around not just lesson schedules and payments and competitions and repertoire choices but around the making of beauty and the exercise of supreme discipline. This was the environment in which I spent most of my childhood, partly because of my own piano studies and partly because my mom's profession created that atmosphere in our own home. Entering Mr. Watanabe's home made me feel like I was entering a factory where the product is sublimity.

Esme's been studying with Mr. Watanabe for about five months now, and she's barely put bow to strings. He's akin to a soccer coach who spends months with a new player simply on technique and muscle development. Somehow, Esme doesn't seem to mind. It's like she has this zen understanding of delayed gratification that keeps her going. That's not to say some (okay, many) of our practice sessions at home end in tears (which is probably mostly my fault. I'm definitely not teaching her to drive when she's 16!) but she's intrigued by orchestras and seems motivated by the desire to play in one.

This evening, I took Esme and Auden to the Libby Gardner Concert hall on the U. campus to hear Mr. Watanabe's Gifted Music School orchestra perform. As part of his commitment to teaching, Mr. Watanabe has started a tuition-free music school that aims for nothing short of redefining music education in America. We got to sit in the Choir Loft seats, behind the orchestra looking down on the kids ages 9 to 18 as they played Tchiakovsky, Mozart, Vivaldi and Shostakovich amazingly well and without a page of music. The encore, an orchestral arrangement of Elvis' "Can't Help Falling In Love" by Eugene's wife Vera, was the perfect confluence of beautiful melody with the sense of fun that is so often lacking in classical concerts. Even if Esme never plays in the Gifted Music School orchestra herself, Mr. Watanabe is teaching her -- and me all over again -- what it takes to be the very best.

PS From Last Night and BustedHalo.com Article

Well, I could NOT sleep last night thinking of all the books I'd left off my last list. It wasn't meant to be an all-inclusive list, but there were some egregious omissions:

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. I named a kid after her after all.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. 

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

Immortality, by Milan Kundera.

I'm sure there will be more as I think of them...

Also, I have an article today on BustedHalo.com discussing Cardinal George's recent visit to BYU. BustedHalo is an online magazine for young Catholics, and it's always an honor to appear there.

There Is No Frigate Like A Book

I'm having a very peculiar experience with the book I am currently reading: I love it so much I don't want to read it. If I read it, I get closer to the end, and it will be a sad day when I finish this one.

Usually, I'm a consumed reader: Once I start a book, I find every spare moment to plow through it at the expense of mothering, cleaning and all other work. I can be very annoying. I have no ability to pace myself. Hence, for the past few years I have actually limited my reading to designated vacation times (like the time I read five books over the week Elliot and I went to Greece, childless). But this book I'm working on now has very little plot, thus the need to find out what happens isn't driving my usual insatiable consumption.

What is this book? you're probably asking by now. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from French by Alison Anderson). It is written in a way that exactly speaks to my perception of the world, and I love that, in its French philosophical tone, it grapples with the concepts of beauty and art in a completely unsentimental way.

The negative reviews on Amazon, of which there are few, call the two narrators pretentious and narcissistic which is absolutely true, but that is exactly what makes me laugh out loud while I'm reading this on the treadmill at the gym. They are so darn funny! I have rarely met more complicated, unpleasant and yet completely consuming characters whose perceptions of truth and beauty resonate all the more because of the prickly (ahem, hedgehog-like) messengers.

Reading this book got me thinking about some of the other books that will forever hold a place on my bookshelf (regardless of how many others Elliot makes me donate to the library):

Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham. I read this book in sixth grade and it was the first time I felt like I'd read and understood something that was truly grown-up. I remember feeling like I understood something about the world that I would never get to learn through my own life experience.

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. My love affair with Wharton started not with House of Mirth, but with Summer, which I read in eighth grade. My first Wharton book, it dealt with some themes I hadn't explored in school books before: disillusion, loss of innocence, and most importantly, existentialism. I remember sitting in front of my Brother word processing machine with my mom, the World Book Encyclopedia open across our laps, reading together the explanation of existentialism and talking about how to best communicate the concept in my essay about the book. In tenth grade, I read House of Mirth and maybe it was the New York setting or the female protagonist, but it instantly became my favorite book. Mr. O'Connor, in my English class at school, pointed out a particular passage in which Wharton describes the jewels Lily wears during the "tableau scene" and assigned us to write our own passages in exactly the same grammatical structure: a noun where Wharton had a noun, a verb to a verb, exact same number of words in the sentences, commas in the same place, etc. I don't remember what I wrote about but I do remember that a whole new linguistic lilt came to my pen as I realized that putting words in the sequence Wharton had was truly an art and not something easily duplicated.

Howards End, by E.M. Forster. I make a point of reading Howards End every few years. After having first read it in high school, I read it again when my mom sold the apartment I had grown up in. The book helped me understand my dad better, to try to "only connect" with him, and when Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bohnam Carter stared in the movie, it became one of my favorite movies too. I have since read all but one of Forster's novels and I love the man deeply.

Crossing To Safety, by Wallace Stegner. This is a favorite among book clubs, and a book club is where I first read it myself. Newly married, its theme of adult couple friendships hit me so true at that point in my life and gave me a standard by which to judge future friendships. It also struck me that Stegner could write a whole compelling novel about... well, just life. No huge traumatic events or horribly dysfunctional families. Just a book about the friends we make and the jobs we have and the people we love. And yet it is still modern, meaningful and real. 

Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Ian McEwan has got a gimmick: He writes about choices. He explores how the smallest choices we make -- which direction we turn when looking out a window, who we ask to deliver a letter -- can determine our fates. Atonement was so startling to me because, in retrospect, I had the strange feeling that I could change one or two of those little choices the characters make and, like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, the story would turn out completely differently. I hated being trapped by the choices the characters make, but when we learn at the end that Briony has taken the liberty of rewriting the whole history of her sister and her lover, it's like she opens the door for each of us to rewrite it for ourselves. It was a strangely powerful feeling, and it's led me to many more of McEwan's novels. 

What are some of the books that will always have a place on your bookshelf? I would love to hear from any of you who read this so that I can start making a list for my next uninterrupted, child-free vacation!

My Latest on Patheos.com

Read it here: Quiche, Haiti and Suffering

I brought a quiche today to a friend who is suffering.

A few years ago, I would have balked at the value of such an obvious display of charity. An act like that smells so much more of the pity sort of charity than the love sort, and who wants to be pitied? Plus, I would have been disenchanted by the thought of looking like one of those posed church pictures where one white suburban woman stands smiling on the doorstep of another white suburban woman's home holding out something delicious in a casserole dish. Read more...