A little lower than the angels
When my daughter Marigold loves a song, she will insist that we listen to it on repeat, again and again. I am very, very familiar with the Lil Nas X song “Old Town Road” and the Rokia Traoré song “Laidu,” for instance. You never know what it will be.
On repeat, Dada, on repeat. Cyndi Lauper, over and over when Marigold was not yet two years old. Daddy dear, you know you’re still number one. “Is this song about you?” she asked.
When she was younger, playing DJ for her could be a guessing game. “Diner,” it turned out, meant Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend.” “Brandi,” after lots of guessing, turned out to be a song that Brandi Carlile sings on that I had shared with her a year earlier and forgotten all about.
One night, when I was having trouble getting her down to sleep, I put on Danzig’s “Mother.” On repeat, she said. And she finally went to sleep. Calmed her right down. We kept playing it at bedtime. She called it the mama song. Not recommending this as a strategy, parents of America, merely reporting.
At some point, right before she turned three, she was fixated on the Kacey Musgraves song “Rainbow.” Musgraves is a very charming singer who writes clever songs and has a pleasant mix of gritty honesty and pop sensibility. She’s great. But sometimes she goes a little corny, and “Rainbow” has a Disney slosh to it that I can’t quite take, even though Musgraves’ charisma just about saves it.
But it’s what Marigold wanted so it’s what Marigold got. This was during the early months of the pandemic. At one point at the dinner table, I remember we were all eating, no one really saying anything, and Marigold leaned forward and whispered, “Coronavirus.” Later, in August, a tropical storm hit and knocked our power out for the better part of the week. Marigold looked around and said, “First there was the sickness. Then there was the darkness.”
Anyway, this would have been maybe early May 2020 when Marigold got hooked on “Rainbow.” Strange time. Every day was still so vivid. I say that for context, but I want to add that the strangeness was in the foreground sometimes, but also in the background. It had been long enough by then that when things got hard, as they always do, it was not the isolation or the closed preschool that was hard, though it was that, too—it was just life. Sometimes the sentence feels like a lifeboat: “It’s been a hard year.”
My life has been pretty good, and pretty easy in the grand scheme of things. I think I can also say that some extreme things have happened in my life in the last five years or so. But what are those things ultimately made of? What is the stuff of the hard stretch of days? Just life. Sometimes I am really swimming. Sometimes I am just floating along. Sometimes I am drowning: Toss me the lifeboat.
We only remember so much, and I don’t remember why, precisely, that was a sensitive time—in May, listening to Kacey Musgraves on repeat. I don’t remember why, precisely, we might have said that sentence then, every so often: It’s been a hard year. What I remember is that at a certain point my wife, Grace, had to ask us to stop playing the song, because it was making her cry. It was kind of funny, and she knew it, but about two thirds of the way she would start to tear up and would be on the verge of losing it.
“Are you sad?” Marigold asked.
No, Grace said, sometimes we cry for other reasons. Marigold sang a Daniel Tiger song: “It’s okay to be sad sometimes/Little by little/You’ll feel better again!” Sometimes, Grace said, even something beautiful can make us cry.
Marigold, in a rare moment of toddler compromise, agreed that we could retire the song. She asked if we could listen to it one last time. Of course, her mother said. We listened to it the whole way through.
“If you cry when you listen to a song,” Marigold told us, “that means you’re crying with the light.”
Of few days and full of trouble
When it all went down, no one would answer the phone. When it all went down, they decided they would try exercise first, before they resorted to medication. When it all went down, the cherry blossoms bloomed in Jersey City. When it all went down, it was midnight. When it all went down, she noticed that the rain had a funny taste. When it all went down, a baby roach crawled across their body in the night. When it all went down, the storm took our playhouse but spared our house. We left the remnants of the playhouse by the side of the road, like a miniature mockup of the less fortunate’s trash.
Suddenly, the egrets left the area. Suddenly, the sky above Montana contracted. Suddenly, the crabs stopped hiding in the York River mud. Suddenly, the tourists fell asleep in Galveston. Suddenly, the neutral ground in New Orleans seemed menacing. Suddenly, the buildings on Princeton’s campus seemed ready to collapse. Suddenly, the buffalo in Payne’s Prairie felt like they belonged. Suddenly, the manatees could no longer find warm water in winter. They gathered in an unfamiliar place. Their backs were covered in scars from boat propellers. They nestled each other’s noses. Suddenly, the earth shook. Suddenly, the storm surge got too high. Suddenly, we began packing our bags and said we were heading to Los Angeles. We began packing our bags and said good riddance. We sat on the wood floor surrounded by boxes and knew we would never finish packing our bags, that we would just sit here forever in this cardboard jungle, die here, and that was funny. So we laughed.
When it all went down, a friend came to visit. It was the cusp of a new year. She asked me how it had been, and I said that one way to answer that was that it had been a precious year of my daughter’s life. And she looked away and said that it was beautiful that I could say that and she looked back at me and said it had been the worst year of her life.
When it all went down, the Lord sent locusts. When it all went down, she swore she would not leave to her children what her parents had left to her. When it all went down, he tightened his muscles. This made him feel like he was protecting something, it always had. When it all went down, they could break down a little, but they couldn’t break all the way down. Because they had children. They had read a joke somewhere, in a novel maybe, that you couldn’t break all the way down if you had kids. It was in the fine print on the birth certificate.
When it all went down, the hopeful light of morning came through the window. When it all went down, my friend wept. Just wept. I won’t mention his name. I asked what I could do but there was nothing I could do. When it all went down, it was the Year of the Rat. It was the Year of the Dragon. It was the Year of the Rooster. It was the Year of the Snake. It was the year the cicadas buzzed again after seventeen years underground. It was before you were born. It was just the other day. When it all went down, the pre-school tried to keep doing classes on Zoom. The children would sing, staring at the screen: “The more we get together the happier we’ll be.”
When it all went down, my father told his favorite joke: “Every silver lining has a cloud.” When it all went down, the rabbi gathered his disciples for supper. When it all went down, the president telegraphed his mother. When it all went down, the moonlight was the strangest shade of red. When it all went down, I was only a child, and didn’t understand.
Tomorrow it will be summer. Tomorrow it will be tomorrow. Tomorrow, the boys are back in town. Man, I still think them cats are crazy. Tomorrow, someone I’ve never met will drive to Cocoa Beach just because. Hulk Hogan used to be in a rock band there. Tomorrow we will cling to trivia like decorative beads. We will line our houses with these beautiful, trivial beads to let the Lord know we are listening. Tomorrow the rains will come. We will be ready.
When it all went down, I held my family close. I called my friends. I telegraphed every stranger. I wrote down words on a sheet of paper that was so blank I could hardly look at it. We sang a song. No one could remember the lyrics, so we hummed the tune. It all went down. We hummed the tune together all night, until it was dark, until it was light again, until it was tomorrow.
As we look not at the things which are seen
It is so peculiar. The way this life, our gifted time, takes place in a body.
My maternal grandfather was 97 years old when he died. This was nearly a decade ago. I went and drank some salty water from the York River, down below the bluff at the house where my grandfather died and my grandmother was still living with caretakers, about at the end of her own life. My grandfather taught me to fish there. It used to be a big beach, but by then it was just a strip of sand even at low tide.
At the funeral, the Episcopal priest read from Second Corinthians—this light momentary affliction. Life, he meant—or the life we have in our body at least.
Before the funeral, one of his buddies told me a story I had heard lots of times before, though never with this much detail. It was from my grandfather’s time in the Navy in World War II. He was captaining a little sub-chaser. The word “captaining” is doing a lot of work there. He was just a clueless kid who happened to have some sailing experience back in Tidewater Virginia. Now he was in charge of a small wooden boat in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese dropped some bombs nearby and popped the boat up out of the water. My grandpa bit his lip in fear, so hard he was covered in blood. He saw all the blood and yelled “I’ve been kilt!” Later he would tell this tale and joke that it was his Purple Heart.
The man who told me the story at the funeral was probably getting up in his 90s. I can’t remember his name now. He was cracking himself up telling the story. Then he got serious and excused himself. He wanted to go look at my at my grandfather's embalmed body in the coffin, he told me. He wanted to check the lip—to see if he could still see the scar.
The story of Noah, for my daughter
Once upon a time, Marigold, people lived to be very, very old. There was a man named Lamech who lived for 777 years. He is not the main character in this story. He is just the father.
When Lamech was 182, he had a little baby named Noah. He said, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” Or something like that. It’s hard to know, precisely. Things get lost in translation.
For around 500 years, Noah romped around, childless. Little is known about this period. He was fond of wine. But there wasn’t any wine yet. Wine would come later.
In those days, giants roamed the land. That is neither here nor there.
Eventually Noah had three children of his own: Shem, Ham, and Japeth.
There was something wrong in that era. Something mistaken in the equation of the universe. There was an ill way in the world. You could feel its invisible wickedness. You could sense the sourness in people’s hearts.
The Lord was a tinkerer by nature. The things we create are sacred, but there is always more beauty in possibility. Do you know how satisfying it feels to shake the Etch-a-Sketch? It is like that.
The Lord grew sad. It grieved at his heart. “I will blot out from the earth the people and creepy crawlies and birds,” he said, to no one in particular.
But Noah was different. Noah was a bright light in the foul fog. And the Lord told him to build an ark out of cypress wood.
Noah did as he was told. And at the instruction of the Lord, Noah brought his family aboard, and then he brought a pair of every kind of animal that the Lord, in his wisdom, had created. One to be the mommy some day, one to be the daddy some day. A pair of lions, a pair of chipmunks. A pair of peacocks (the Lord, in his wisdom, was weird). A pair of every creepy crawly thing—caterpillars and termites and ladybugs. A pair of humming birds, a pair of rhinos. There was no need to bring aboard a pair of monkfish or a pair of manatees. There would be plenty of water.
There’s another version of the story where the math is different, on the number of animals and so on. That’s okay. It’s just the way of stories. We all have our own way of telling them.
For forty days and forty nights it rained, and the water swelled and flooded higher and higher, all over the land. The whole world was an ocean. Everything and everyone was smothered in the flood. Buried in water. Only Noah and his family and his animals were safe.
One day, the rain stopped. One day, they could see the tops of the mountains emerge from the water. One day, they sent a dove out and the dove returned with an olive leaf.
One day, about a year after the rain had started, they saw that the waters had subsided. They saw that the land was dry. They walked off the ark, Noah and his family and the rhinos and the peacocks and so on. They walked onto the land. Perhaps they stumbled, as their bodies would have grown accustomed to the bobs and waves of the sea. It would take some time to get acclimated again. To return to the old way of living. To reckon a new way of living. To make a covenant with Lord.
And the sign of the covenant was a rainbow.
Prayer
We used to live in DeLand, Florida, where Grace was a painting professor at Stetson University. One time, a rabbi named Mordecai Schreiber came to speak on campus. This was before we had children. The rabbi had written a book called Why People Pray. Good title. It was one of those desperate times in my life when it feels absolutely urgent to buy books called Why People Pray, and so I bought a copy, which he signed. He did not sign in cursive, he just wrote his name, which made me feel like he was writing his name because he owned the book himself rather than signing it over to someone else.
I took notes as he spoke, because I was desperate: I wanted to know how to pray. I still have the notes that I took, now in a stack of other notebooks, in a box labeled “Davey papers, to sort.” They served pizza at the event, but I didn’t eat any. I don’t remember what the rabbi looked like, or honestly, what he said. The notes I took are so disassociated from any memory that I could call my own that reading them now feels like eavesdropping. “A way of attention to the still small voice,” I wrote, underlining twice.
In the book, Schreiber mentions a woman in his condo building in south Florida. He sees her each morning walking her dog as he goes for his daily swim: “After we greet each other, she usually says to me, ‘Another day in paradise.’ This too, I believe, is a prayer.”
Color
I dreamed that a payphone rang on an empty street. I answered and it was my paternal grandmother—a painter, she died before I was old enough to form memories. “Isn’t my grandson grand?” she spoke into the phone. The cradle was sticky against my ear. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m a smidge, just a smidge, drunk.”
A theory: If our sense of normalcy—of the everyday experience of being alive—features a sudden rupture, then our lives become dreamlike and our dreams must become more dreamlike still to compensate.
I dreamed that I was dressed in a bear’s coat on a hot summer day.
I dreamed that everything was green, I was in a green house with green ceilings and green floors, green cats and a green toilet. I peed in the toilet and the pee was green. My green wife and my green daughter and another green daughter I did not recognize. There is some dispute over whether we dream in color, or how we could even know, but in the logic of this dream, there was color: There was green.
I dreamed that I was boiling a pot of hair. I dreamed that I had braces that became unraveled and penetrated my lips. I dreamed that Marigold and I were raising a baby bunny. I dreamed that I was much, much older, but I looked exactly the same.
The Golden Cicada
Imagine that you are walking on the sidewalk in Jersey City, in the general direction of downtown. The sidewalks and the streets are empty, on account of a highly contagious respiratory infection. You pass a bar called the Golden Cicada. You want to take a picture but your phone is dead. The bar is closed, everything is closed, but out front a red-haired boy is playing the recorder. It is a melody you know immediately, from your childhood, but you can’t place it. What is it? A lullaby?
And then you feel the gentlest touch of wind and a white streak appears before your eyes. For just a moment you think it is an angel. But then there is a splat near your feet. Bird poop.
The boy stops playing his recorder.
“Look alive!” he shouts.
True stories
At my father’s funeral, we did a ritual where we buried a portion of his ashes by his longtime church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville. Everyone had the chance to pour some dirt in to fill the hole, a sort of variation on the Jewish tradition. First, just the family came over to pour some of the ashes in. I was having trouble getting the bag of ashes open, trying to rip it open with a key. As I was fumbling with the key, pretty worried that the ashes would catch the wind and blow into everyone’s faces, Marigold fell into the hole. We all gasped. “I’m fine,” she said.
Our son Cosmo was born last February at a birth center forty-five minutes away from our house. Grace was in active labor in the car as we drove down I-75. I told her it would be fine, we’d get there on time. That was the right, calming thing to say. Later the midwife said she couldn’t believe how calm I was. But this was all a misunderstanding, I was just stupid. I was so calm and confident because I was really certain we’d get there on time, which we did. But then Cosmo was born twenty-six minutes after we arrived. It easily could have happened in the car. I didn’t know that, but Grace had a pretty good idea. At one point, she said, “slow down, baby.” So I put my foot on the brakes and slowed down. “Not you!” Grace yelled.
I once drunkenly fell into a canal in Venice. Another time, also drunk, I was in New Orleans and a big group of us were at a karaoke bar. This was long before we had children. Somehow we got kicked out. I don’t think I was to blame for us getting kicked out, but I was in charge of hollering at the bouncer as maybe a dozen of us walked away into the night after getting the boot. I believe this was on St. Claude Avenue. I believe we stayed up for many more hours because we felt good, and the good feeling did not dissipate, it just hung in the air around us until morning. My wife had been just about to sing at the karaoke bar. I was really yelling at this bouncer as we left. I was telling him, “Do you have any idea what you are missing? You’ll never have this again! Do you have any idea what you are missing?” I yelled, “You were about to hear an amazing rendition of ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’!” I was walking backwards as I kept yelling: “You’ll never have this again!”
The Ark
The Lord was precise in his instructions to Noah.
The first time I encountered the story as a child, I was upset to learn that God had commanded Noah to build a window. “A window shalt thou make to the ark,” per the translators of King James.
Out the window, Noah and his family would see the wrath of the flood. They would see the bodies. They would see the animals drowning. They would see the old world smothered.
This was no doubt a child’s misunderstanding of the purpose of the window, but it stuck with me. To insist upon a window. It seemed cruel, of the Lord.
But it turns out the translation here is tricky. The Hebrew word, transliterated as tzohar, is different than the word used for a “window” mentioned later in the story. Many have speculated that it may have been a skylight, or perhaps a mechanism to let in sufficient air without becoming overwhelmed by rain. “It was evidently a means, not merely of lighting the ark, but also of ventilating it,” concludes Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers.
Another theory is that it was a sort of sloped roof to let the rainwater run off. The New Revised Standard Version I read at home has it as: “Make a roof for the ark.” (A footnote says, “Or window.”) Others suggest “opening.”
Some have it as “light,” a more literal translation—the dual form of the Hebrew word is something like “double light,” the word used for midday. But the singular form used here occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. When a word is used only once—a hapax legomenon—it is hard to be certain about what it means. The medieval rabbi David Kimhi concluded that it had nothing to do with any structural feature; the Lord’s instructions to Noah, according to Kimhi, were to hang an oil lamp to illuminate the ark.
There is a more mystical explanation, in Talmudic tradition: that the tzohar was a luminous stone. Noah affixed or hung the gem, which emitted a spectacular light that mimicked circadian rhythms, so that that even in the darkness of the flood, they could know when it was day and when it was night. Some interpretations say that Abraham, too, possessed this stone. Some say this gem held the incandescence of the first day of creation. Let there be light.
The instructions from the Lord also included specific dimensions for the ark. According to Saint Augustine, these correspond to the proportions of the human body.
From the City of God, here’s the math: “For the length of the human body, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is six times its breadth from side to side, and ten times its depth or thickness, measuring from back to front: that is to say, if you measure a man as he lies on his back or on his face, he is six times as long from head to foot as he is broad from side to side, and ten times as long as he is high from the ground. And therefore the ark was made 300 cubits in length, 50 in breadth, and 30 in height.”
The ark’s door, writes Augustine, “certainly signified the wound which was made when the side of the Crucified was pierced with the spear; for by this those who come to Him enter; for thence flowed the sacraments by which those who believe are initiated.”
So the ark was the body, the ark was the body of Christ, the ark was the Church.
I do not have a sister, but sometimes I imagine that I do. If I told all this to such a sister, she would say: When the rains come, trust in the body. The body is our vessel in the flood.
According to our calendars, it has been forty-three years and seven months or so since I was born. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard.
Open the windows. Let in the air and the light. Hang up a glistening stone.
Beautiful, David.
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