New Bookshelves

My cramped apartment mandates a Spartan decorating style, with which my simple tastes have easily jived. The one challenge since I moved in was what to do with all the books. For years they lived on teetering bookshelves which one by one were removed from the apartment as shelves sagged or fell off and joints hinged at angles that were not right. Books migrated under the bed, out in the hall, in unused drawers – anywhere that I could fit them. I bought one new shelf for music, and kept one old shelf by the bed.

My brother helped me put that shelf together in the middle of the big room I had all to myself during my volunteer year in New Bedford (I would later find out that enormous bedroom had once been the upstairs unit’s living room when our house was a two-family). It was cheap and flimsy when I bought it, and even my dear brother’s best efforts could only make it last for so long. Like most things in my life, I stretched it way beyond it’s life-expectancy, and every morning I opened my eyes to see a wobbly, dusty bookshelf topped with a row of language books on top of which my alarm clock (more than a decade old, natch) was uneasily perched.

Last summer I took a course in arts and worship that was not at all what I expected, which aggravated me at the time (and, to be honest, still aggravates me a bit). It was a lot more talking-at-collages and a lot less liturgical-theology than I hoped, but in the course of all the quiet time it offered us I gave a lot of thought to hospitality, particularly the hospitality I offer myself. I love beauty but surround myself with unbeautiful things. I try to be a person of good quality, but I content myself with an atmosphere of poor quality. My bookshelves sag and I leave them be.

I wrote many reflections on that over the summer, some of which are too personal to share [Sidebar: Yes, there are things I consider too personal to share, despite my aggressive oversharing.] One I found today offered this: To what am I being invited? To simplify and beautify. I deserve beautiful things in my life. I deserve cleanliness, neatness and health. What holds me back here? Am I too lazy to care for myself even though I find energy for a million other things? Is it that self-care doesn’t build me up in peoples’ eyes the way accomplishment of other kind does?

And today I wonder too – when I have been acclaimed or praised, when I have accomplished what I set out to do, does coming home to an ugly bookshelf satisfy the corner of my heart that knows that the praise is bullshit? When people tell me that I’m good or smart or beautiful or kind or talented, and I don’t believe them, does an ugly apartment give solace to the part of me that feels like a fraud? At least here, where I’m alone, I get what I truly deserve.

Two days ago I remembered the promise of hospitality I made to myself over the summer and replaced the stupid bookshelf. Now I just have to do something about those ugly walls.

The new shelves

DISCLAIMER: This was written under the influence of a Tori Amos CD
 

The Can Lady Consortium

Any BC alum who was paying attention (or who ever set foot in the mods) is well aware of the Can Lady, who trudged around campus on Saturday and Sunday mornings retrieving our empties from bushes and sidewalks. Even the most justice-oriented undergrad (and there were plenty vying for that award) could use her activity as an opportunity to feel self-righteous about littering, of all things.

In retrospect this was probably not good for the moral development of BC's privileged students - and before you get all huffy, fellow alums, let me remind you that anyone who can go to a school like that is privileged one way or another, either with family influence, wealth, or simple academic inclination. So what if we had small Asian woman cleaning up the debris of our attempts at bacchanalia? We were doing her a favor, or at least that's what we convinced ourselves.

With due respect to my Boston College roots, there is a new can lady in my life. She lives around the corner from me and her back deck leans out over the path to my backdoor. I can remember one evening out with a friend of a friend who happened to live down the block who started talking about our charming can lady. "I give her all my empties and she calls me her angel!" the young woman effervesced. I am sure I shocked her when I started complaining about the cute old Lithuanian lady in the babushka.

In fact, I probably came off like a complete shrew. But on Tuesday night, the night before garbage day, I was repeatedly awakened through the night by her rattling through her empty bottles. I really don't know what she does on that deck with all the empties, but it involves relentless clanking all through the night. I am getting the urge to type all in enraged caps just thinking about it.

I have also seen her going through my garbage bags. I don't know which is more insulting, the violation of my private space or the insinuation that I don't recycle.

But what is most disturbing to me are all the moochers who have teamed up with her to use her space. There is a parade of people in and out of the gate next to mine, wheeling their suitcases and shopping carts up and down the street to see what they can get from our garbage. One of them sent her son who couldn't have been more than ten down the street to pick through the barrels looking for good stuff.

For what it's worth, I don't think that any member of the Can Lady Consortium is sinister enough to have been the person who burglarized the apartment last fall. I still could do without my corner being dumpster diving central.

Gifts

In case any of you worry that I don't have anyone looking out for me in Boston, you should know that last night my landlady knocked on my door around 6pm holding two boxes. She told me she had gone through her jewelry and found a few things she never wore and wanted to give them to me because she felt bad about the burglary and wanted to help me start refilling my jewelry box. A coworker of mine had also gotten me a few bracelets when she heard that mine had been taken.

I envy those people who can just accept gifts without a second thought. I think for most of us (and especially for the particularly neurotic, like myself) there's always that tiny feeling of unworthiness, even guilt, that someone should think of you and offer you something you haven't earned.

Her visit last night reminded me of a gift she gave me when I first moved in. I had made the mistake of moving while I was in the middle of a two-week intensive summer course on The Church of the Poor with none other than Gustavo Gutierrez (SQUEE!). When she came down with a gift for me while I was writing my final paper in my haphazardly decorated new kitchen, it made such an impact on me that I included the incident in my paper. This is what I wrote at the time:

Related to our need to be open to receiving God’s assistance is our need to accept God’s gratuitous gift. Discussing the preferential option for the poor and spiritual poverty, Gutiérrez states “God first loved us. Our lives should respond to this gratuitous initiative of God” (EW 146). God loves us – and all humans – because God is good, not because we are good.

To accept gifts freely can be a challenge. As I was writing this, my landlady unexpectedly knocked on my door. I opened the door to find her bearing two sets of curtains. She told me her daughter had left them with her, they matched my kitchen, I had two kitchen windows, and I didn’t have curtains yet, so she was giving them to me. Her action was so unexpected that my thank-yous felt inadequate, and I shut the door unsettled. If it is difficult to accept free curtains, no wonder it is a challenge to accept divine love and the gift of eternal life.

But I don’t physically need curtains any more than poor Andean girls need dolls, or an adolescent Gustavo needed ice cream, or Jesus needed three hundred denarii of oil poured on his head. Yet in the Markan account of Jesus anointing by an anonymous woman (Mk 14: 3-9) Jesus chastises those who would criticize her gratuitous act. In fact, he links the proclamation of the gospel with her act.

To receive God’s love gratuitously and to know that love is not conditional upon our striving, is an act of submission, of giving up control. We find validation of this acceptance in the pericope of Jesus’ anointing, and also in the story of Creation. According to Gutiérrez, we were made in gratuity, and “to be loved gratuitously is the greatest human aspiration”.

Forgive this soprano's detour into her other life of preaching and pontificating. Can't hurt to be reminded of the free gift of love once in a while, though.

more news from the crime scene

The first time that I went to Europe was in the summer of 2000 when I spent three weeks in Parma studying Italian. I returned shortly after that to go to Rome, and kept lira in my wallet for a long time after that as a reminder that I wanted to go back to Europe as soon as possible. In a biting instance of dramatic irony, you all know that lira are worthless now as Italy has switched to the Euro, so I had put my pretty little lira in a tin that read “Baseball: America’s Favorite Pastime” into which I also tossed pennies and Euros. I discovered yesterday that was taken in the theft also. Did the thief know that my brother gave me that tin?

Everyone keeps saying “You are handling this so well!”, but I don’t really know how I am supposed to handle it, or how they expected me to handle it. I cry about once a day over losing my Add-A-Pearl necklace, and I was a little creeped out to discover that all of my clean cloth rags had been put in the bin labeled ‘dirty’ and vice versa. Other than that, I haven’t had much emotional turbulence about the whole thing. Until yesterday that is…

Just before I was about to embark on my training run I realized that the radio I use when I run had been taken. That’s right, I listen to a Sony Walkman radio when I go running, and I hope the fact that it attaches to an armband makes other runners think it’s an Ipod. It cost about $40, and that creep who broke into my house took it. Congratulations, you’re just a jerk for stealing something that is worth next to nothing, the theft of which only serves to inconvenience me, not benefit you. That, combined with my recent discovery that my chapstick was also stolen because it was in the top of my jewelry box, set me off, and I screamed and shouted alone in my apartment. Then I went to Target and bought a new radio and chapstick.

last night

Usually I can think of a clever zinger or hook to start these things, but for some reason today one is eluding me. So let’s start with the headline: Religion Teacher’s Apartment Burglarized: Only Losses are Gifts from Dead People.

I can only imagine how disappointed our intrepid thief was as he or she rifled through old shoeboxes filled with cards from my mom, old pairs of glasses, stacks of headshots, useless keys. Searching for ipods and flatscreens, what he or she found were an old “boom box” and a 15 year old TV with bunny ears.

So what do you take from the girl who has very little? The handful of jewelry she keeps on top of her dresser. They’re just things, I keep telling myself. But there are reasons we become attached to things. They remind us of people who gave them to us, of times in our lives, of memories. The only jewelry I had were items that had been with me for what feels like forever.

That silly red box (on top of a piece of furniture which is worth more money than anything else in the house) held the Christmas morning I got my cross in my stocking and the 10 years that I wore it every day. It held my high school ring dance, and the weeks of having classmates turn my ring 98 times. It held a student’s parent telling me that graduation mass was the most beautiful mass she had ever attended and that she wanted to give me a thank you. It held singing at the wedding of friends (and laughing over the fact that they also gave me earrings even though my ears aren’t pierced). It held birthday after birthday of little gold boxes from Lux Bond & Green and trips to the jeweler to have the pearls added to my necklace. It held a high school friend telling me that a rosary ring had made him think of me, just before he told me it only cost a dime.

They took my camera, off of which I had already downloaded the pictures from Italy. They took an old wallet (which they probably thought was a big score – hope they enjoy my DSW Rewards Card).

What initially tipped me off that the unlocked door wasn’t a random thing was that I couldn’t find my phone charger. I have been using a hand-me-down phone with a weak battery, so I knew I would have to go back to using the cheap Best Buy phone I had been using before. Except they took that phone (which explains why they took the charger). Way to go dummy, now you have a $15 phone and a charger that doesn’t go with it. Thanks for ruining my day.

The officers who came were very nice and told me where the local pawn shops are. When I told them that I had renters insurance they were astonished. Apparently no one they ask ever has it. I called the family to commiserate (sorry to upset you guys so late at night!) At that point I needed to hit the hay. I don’t know what made me think that I would just be able to go to sleep, but half an hour later I was still wide-eyed and shaking. I’ll blame it on the cold.

So I got up and watched Conan. And rifled through all of my drawers to make sure my passport and old credit card were still there. They were.