Friendship and the delicate business of composing a self

The following paragraph from Megan O’Grady’s essay, A Shared Devotion, speaks to me. It was published in the April 18, 2021, New York Times Style Magazine as a reflection on the magazine’s theme—how friends who are creative people (or, creative people who are friends) bonded during the pandemic.

“I’ve come to believe that friendship—not the Facebook kind, but the real kind—is a kind of romance, and that its resilience to … unadorned truths is its test of strength. (“Better to be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.) At the same time, a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self—an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice—standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity—can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you. I think of Margery William’s 1922 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a young boy’s devotion makes the titular stuffed animal believe itself to be real—despite what the rabbits in the forest, the kind that hop nimbly about on their hind legs, might say. We all know the pain of having our dreams dispelled by pedestrian day jobs, student loans, family obligations and amiable philistines. An artist’s self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, our sense of the possible ignited by those who believe in it, and in us.”

A Prayer

 Last night, as my restless mind was wrestling with one of our world's many challenges, I picked up a little book of "Prayers for Peace," and happened across the following. It is captioned, "Those who frequented the air-raid shelters in Hull, Birmingham and Westminster (England) made wide use of this prayer." It is appropriate in our own time of testing: in seeking shelter, do not forget one another.

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in calamity serve one another, in suffering tend one another, and in homelessness, loneliness or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, till the disciplines and testing of these days be ended, and Thou does give again peace in our time.

Amen.

Guns, guns, guns, I'm so sick of guns

The peace and equilibrium of my home town of Grundy Center, Iowa, were terrifyingly upset last weekend when a 41-year-old man barricaded himself in a house near the center of town and began shooting. He was finally wounded and arrested after several hours.

During the standoff, the man shot and killed Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith.

That’s a short summary of a much longer story. I am telling it because you probably didn’t hear about it. I have not seen it in any national news sources, though I am sure it has appeared somewhere.

Who cares about one fatal standoff in a small town in the heart of fly-over country when there are so many other stories of gun violence for us to follow, right up until this very morning, out of Indianapolis? Even if a law enforcement officer was tragically killed? Maybe because both the murderer and the murdered were white, just like when Black people kill Black people? Who cares?

I care. I care deeply, but I fear we are on a train no one can stop.

That train’s engineers are the gun-rights’ crowd that never saw a gun it didn’t adore and thinks everyone has a god-given right to own. Their argument is that the only way to counter the danger posed by all the guns in this country is to have more guns in this country, an argument that flies in the face of facts and common sense.

And it seems quite clear that many law enforcement officers, who should be the best-trained among us in properly handling firearms, mess up with them, too. What confidence can we have a millions of armed civilians getting it right?

The Supreme Court’s (intentional?) misinterpretation of the Second Amendment provides unlimited ammunition for the gun-defenders. Not to mention that former president who encourages them every time he can. Or too many of our representatives, whether in Iowa, or Ohio, or Washington, D.C. Who or what can stop this run-away freight?

Don’t respond by telling me that I don’t know anything about guns, because I already know that. I don’t own one, and never will.

But here’s a thing I know for sure: I felt a lot safer out in the world when there were far fewer gun-toting “patriots” around than there are now. Will I drive home after our trip to the grocery store this afternoon, or will an ambulance take my body, bullet-riddled and bloody, to the morgue? I never used to have to think about that. Now I do, at least somewhere in my subconscious. Hell, I not only felt safer, I was safer.

And we are not a better nation because of it—whether we live in Indianapolis or Minneapolis or Grundy Center.