Last night on the F train I rode with my back to the places we rushed towards. At 10:15 the car was neither full nor empty, couples mostly. We were scattered, parallel and perpendicular as is the way with the F train seats. We came into stations and left them; I read, using the door-closing chimes as my cue to check our progress. The chimes sounded, the doors closed. Behind me, unseen, a voice opened in song, Schubert’s Ave Maria. A young woman in jeans and a jacket, walked slowly through the car, a wool cap puddled in her left hand, her studded handbag in the crook of the bent arm. I pulled my heavy wallet from its place in my pocket, and a dollar bill from its place among receipts and stubs. I folded the bill in lengthwise halves. Turning my shoulders toward her, extending my hand slightly, looking towards her face – physical cues a wordless baby might use to signal her mother - I held my offering up like a small candle. My face was full of thanks, more full than a dollar bill can be. She stayed on our car past the next stop, to finish the song. My tears rose up, I kept them close, closed my eyes and pressed the spilling drops, with finger tips, back along the seams. The song was done, the singer stood, fading from our notice, face to the door through the panes of which the black tunnel shone by.
Early in my life as a teacher, early one winter, as Christmas approached, I was seized by the idea of Mary. Seized again, I should say. My deep, intermittent, thoroughly idiosyncratic love of Mary began many, many years before. But one winter, that year, surrounded by the illuminated plastic crèches of our old neighborhood, and passing every morning a flower-decked shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, my thoughts circled Mary. Mary full of grace, her face a downward blossomed lily, gazing at the earth. Mother of God, her child both vulnerable and transcendent, as are our children, after all. We are the subject, really, of the story of Jesus’ birth: the acknowledgment of divine presence in human being. I wanted to beg Mary’s help to remember that, to embody it. I knelt at the shrine briefly, two evenings at the end of Advent, in the snow, scared, a trespasser. The church stood by me, a night sky of stone; I touched my heart to my hands, not knowing how my knees should go (on the ledge, on the ground.) Parishioners passed to my right, bitten by cold, greeted by warmth as they entered doors to some basement place. I didn’t know how long to stay there and felt like a child risking a great deal pretending or intending something very ardently. I asked for discernment, for a way towards seeing and speaking to the lively divine spark in my child and the children I care for. I asked to be a good mother and to discern who I should be as a teacher. What should the ratio be, how many parts tender mother to how many parts engaged stranger. Every day, still, I need to work out how much a yielding and how much a hard place to be. This question entices, moves, and troubles me: how much heaven, how much earth.
