A friend for the end of the world

The sky is falling.  So say those who  think the Mayans had an inside track on the date our world will end.  Here it is.  Plan your seasonal shopping and winter solstice celebrations accordingly:  December 21, 2012.

Harold Camping disagrees, but the Chicken Little of doomsday pronouncements scores below even Congress on the credibility scale.

Why am I thinking about end times on the longest day of the year?  Blame it on the movies.  Last night we saw Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a rom-com of sorts starring Steve Carrell and Keira Knightly.  The premise of the film pushes the boundaries of credulity, but no matter.  An asteroid is headed towards Earth and life as we know it will end.  As with most apocalyptic tales, the means of destruction is subservient to the human stories leading up to the event.  Predictably, some people (and in this case it is American people) in the film spend their final weeks in debauchery, others join angry destructive mobs, a few choose suicide, even fewer hunker down in titanium-walled shelters with survivalist intent, ready to wait out the physical catastrophe and maybe someday start human life anew.  But most just go about  business as usual, showing up for work, mowing the lawn, organizing a garage sale.

The main characters, Dodge (Carrell) and Penny (Knightly), are thrown together to play out their version of the question, What would you do if you knew that today was your last?

Dodge's wife literally runs away from him as fast as she can at the start of the movie.  He is left in a daze, but we figure out quickly that his current daze is an extension of a lifelong blur.  Like his name, Dodge spends his time avoiding emotional commitments, both to other people and to a past that we slowly discover has left some pretty deep scars.  Penny's lover runs out as well, something she admits is long overdue (although he returns for one of the funnier scenes in the film).  When a mob approaches their apartment complex, Penny and Dodge escape in her Prius only to run out of gas shortly outside of the metropolis.  From there, they buddy up and try to help each other reach the people who each has decided is most important to spend their last days with -- a sweetheart of his youth in Dodge's case, her family in England in Penny's.

Although everyone knows the two of them will find love and solace in each other before the final credits roll, Carrell and Knightly invest their characters with enough  emotion and personality to make that journey interesting and believable.  Their conversation in the final scene (spoiler alert), lying next to each other as the earth begins to shatter, sticks with you long after the movie is over.   Penny says, "I wish we had found each other when we both were younger."  Dodge replies, "It's not important.  We have each other now."  Fade to whiteout.

The Leftovers, a novel by Tom Perrotta I read several months ago, takes a slightly different tack on the question of how to behave when end times are imminent.  The book's sardonic title let's you know you're in for a slightly different take on the Apocalypse.  The novel begins three years after millions of random people all over the planet have suddenly disappeared.  Just as in A Friend for the End of the World, everyone is fair game for the forces of death and destruction -- and disappearance.  The fact that the vanished millions are gone under neutral circumstances makes their "end times" seem almost benign.

There is no culling of the faithful or punishment of the wicked involved.  Clergymen and criminals, devoted parents and debauched criminals, Christians and Muslims and Jews, everyone from the Pope to starting centers in the NBA are vanished.  One minute they are baking cookies, answering the phone, standing in line at the store, sitting in church, dribbling the basketball.  The next minute they are simply gone, vanished without cause or reasonable explanation.

Not that people don't come up with all sorts of wild explanations, all of which, like Harold Camping's predictions of the Rapture, turn out to be false.  In the novel, many simply can't let go of what they have held as firm beliefs up until the disappearances; the religious and philosophical, intuitive and rational, generous and self-centered answers that humans cling to in a world without intrinsic meaning.  One good reverend groans and moans in despair, unable to understand why the Rapture he had so faithfully anticipated has left him behind.  To make his personal peace, he alters his view and begins publishing a tattler's sheet of all the faults of those who were taken, thus proving that the real Rapture is yet to come.  Others, such as Kevin's wife Laurie, gravitate to a cult, The Guilty Remnant.  Members wear white robes, take a vow of silence, smoke cigarettes in public and lurk ominously outside homes and businesses, hounding people into becoming converts like buzzards glaring and daring the weak-willed get it over with and die.  The Barefoot People (Kevin's son joins this group) make like 60's hedonists; it's all drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

Kevin stumbles about, not really sure what to do or think.  He's the mayor of his town and so those duties give him a meek sense of purpose, but not any kind of fulfillment.  He is in some ways like Dodge in End of the World, adrift and disconnected.   What ultimately sparks him is a growing affection for a neighbor whose husband is among those gone.  Caring about her trumps his despair about the world at large.

Different stories, but similar conclusions.  These stories seem to be saying that on our last days, what will count most is loving and being loved, the least rational and hardest to explain element of human existence.  Although love is of the romantic variety in these stories, there is a broader view.  As he was approaching the end of his long and adventurous life, my 95-year-old neighbor, Griz, told me , "The only things that matter when you get old are family and friends."  Friends for the end of our world.  In the heat of summer, or the darkness of winter, that's a truth that gives us strength to face every day, whether it is just another one of many or our last.

California beauty

The Golden State still feels golden.  Not because I'm set on striking it rich, like the 49'ers of old.  For me it glows with the familiar heat and blue skies of summer, green oaks against toasted golden hills.  Just enough sea breeze making its way over the coastal ranges to keep from similarly toasting hikers and bikers who find their treasure in the outdoors.

I spent the past week just inland from the coast, in the east Bay Area hills hiking and biking with my brother.  The hills are golden now, although the transformation is not complete in places due to some May rains.  In the shade of the coastal and canyon live oaks, green spaces persist.  Stands of manzanita, maiden-hair ferns, coffeeberry, wild currents, hummingbird sage, poppies, and poison oak hug trail edges and weave among fallen branches along dried streambeds.  The brown hills are alive in the breeze, wild oats and grasses waving in whatever direction the wind suggests.

The death of my 90-year-old stepmom is what brought me back to California.  Such times always carry some sorrow, but Nancy would not have approved of teary eyes or heavy hearts.  She would have approved, I think, of a hike in the hills.

Her Christian Science beliefs guided her life and specified the terms of her death.  Mary Baker Eddy decried the contradictions of Christianity, the notions of a perfect God who held out the promise of forgiveness and a better life in heaven, but who would still somehow allow to exist the imperfections and evil people faced in the world.  The spiritual world is, according to Christian Science, the reality, and it encompasses all that is good, all that flows from a perfect creator.  What we experience in the material world is an illusion, something we pass through.  Prayer and thoughtful living connect us to the spiritual world.  They remind us that we, too, are all good, all a manifestation of a good God.  Birth and death are meaningless markers of our passage through existence, our journey as spiritual beings in all times and all places.

I'm sure I have missed or slightly mangled the nuances of the Christian Science worldview.  Nancy would have been glad to provide me with whatever reading material I needed to improve my understanding.  She was a faithful host at the Soquel reading room, every Monday for years, even into her late 80's.  And although I sometimes found it maddening--her insistence that "It'll be all right" in response to any and every illness, injury, worry, disruption, disappointment, or failure--I know that it was her faith speaking.  And she exercised it with the same stubbornness and determination in everything she said and did.

Her son by her first marriage (her only biological child) organized a small luncheon in her honor, even though she insisted that there would be no funeral service or other celebration of her life or death.  I'm glad he did.  It was a chance to meet her friends from church, the Masonic lodge, and the senior center; the handymen who helped her to tame a large garden and teetering old house; her grown children from 3 marriages (my dad being the last); and a few of her grandchildren.  Everyone told stories about her generosity, her good nature and (sometimes irritating) unflagging optimism.  Her only request of us in life was that we believe in the inherent goodness of all things.  In death she asked only that her ashes be scattered in the ocean that brought with it the cool weather and salty freshness she adored.

She was in my thoughts as I tramped through the oak woodlands with my brother a couple of days after the luncheon in her honor.  I tend to use the open spaces, the undeveloped bits of the natural world that we have thankfully preserved, as a means to reconnect with what I think is important.  The rhythms of the natural world always make more sense to me than the frantic comings and goings of our unnatural lives--the moments when we are driven by the need to earn and spend and cram our pleasures into what time we can squeeze between our obligations and worries.  As soon as I hit the trail, I feel my heartbeat slow, my shoulders relax, my stride lengthen.  My senses come alive, tuned to bird song and wind song and the smells of earth and plants and animals.  I feel a part of something bigger, something more important.

Nancy enjoyed walking by the sea, her "unspoiled place,'" not as a form of exercise, which she found silly, but as a chance to be next to the calming immensity of so much water.   She told me once while walking together along the path above the beach at Seacliffe Park that to her the ocean was "just beautiful."  At the time I thought the comment another one of her homely platitudes.  But now I understand it was a perspective compelled by her faith and its insistence that we live a life which celebrates goodness and beauty.  As the poet and philosopher Robinson Jeffers wrote, and as Nancy might also have said were she of a philosophic rather than practical bent:

"I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.  This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe.  But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him."

Some pretty humbling words.  Nancy was, above all, a humble person and in that a role model for us all.  Inspired by the grandest and most universal of things, she performed good deeds with an open heart.  That is probably why she and my father found each other, two good people whose very nature compelled them to do good for others without expectation for reward, a gift freely given.  That is how my walk in the hills felt on Saturday, a beautiful gift that asks for nothing in return.

James Madison and Montpelier

James and Dolly Madison lived and entertained at Montpelier, their Virginia estate overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Or more accurately, Dolly entertained and James avoided company most days but poked his head in at meals to take part in the conversation.  He was shy and sickly (probably less than 5' 4" and 110 lbs.) and absorbed with the work of fashioning a government for a new country,  reading and writing the documents that would provide the foundations for our federal system.  That's the impression given by Jim Walker, the docent who led a group of us visitors, my wife and I included, through the stately restored home of our fourth president.

I already knew a bit about Madison's home.  I had been to Montpelier in 2005 when the private foundation which runs the estate was in the process of bringing the house and grounds back to their condition at the time Madison was president.  A trailer parked near the main house served as a visitor's center.  The main building was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheets.  Additions on both wings that had been added by the DuPont family, which owned the home for most of the 20th century, were being torn down to bring everything back to earlier dimensions.  Likewise a few walls and doors were being removed or relocated.

Most of those details I gleaned from a brief conversation with one of the volunteers, an elegant perfectly coiffed older lady who walked me through parts of the house that were open to the public.  Most rooms and large sections of the house were closed off for construction.  (An excellent account of the restoration process by Edward A. Chappell is available on the Colonial Williamsburg [website].  That site also contains a gallery of photos highlighting the stages of the renovation.  The opening photo below shows remains of the stucco facade.)

Since at the time I was still involved in remodeling and construction, my interest was about equally divided between the history of the home and its occupants and the restoration project underway.  When my host returned to her trailer refuge and left me alone, I couldn't resist peering into rooms and asking questions of the workmen.

In one of the upstairs bedrooms a mason and his son were eager to explain how the brick they were replacing was being matched in color and composition.  Their suppliers were trying to find what local soil had been used in the manufacture of the original bricks.  But, they pointed out, more than matching soils would be necessary for a solid reconstruction, since whole layers of brick in the building, when cleared of stucco applied by later residents, turned out to be defective.  They were so poorly made that they had essentially disintegrated.  Whole courses of brick would need to be carefully removed and replaced with something that looked the same, but was much stronger and lasting.

That kind of precision and respect for the home and its history is what produced the impressive restoration we saw this past weekend.  Its location, less than an hour and a half from DC and within 30 minutes of both Monticello and Ash Lawn-Highland (President Monroe's home) makes it an easy and worthwhile drive from the Capital.  Entry fees to the grounds are steep -- $19 per person -- but no more than those charged at Mount Vernon, which is across the Potomac from DC and also worth a visit if you want to see how our first presidents lived and understand the roots of pre-industrial American aristocracy.

A modern visitor's center stands about where the trailer was parked on my previous visit.  It contains the omnipresent gift shop, but also a couple of small museum displays.  The room featuring artifacts from the Madison's, some of which were uncovered during the restoration, help provide perspective for an exploration of the house and grounds.  Dolly's engagement ring of yellow gold and diamonds proves her suitor was a man of some means.  A walking stick of gold and rhino horn on display was a gift to Thomas Jefferson from a merchant, which he re-gifted to Madison (long before the Seinfeld cast made that term a part of the popular vocabulary).  These were men of means, who also lived beyond their means, as history reveals -- Jefferson more so than Madison.

A famous short biography -- A Coloured Man's Remembrance of James Madison --  by Paul Jennings, one of Madison's slaves, is also on display.  John Brooks Russell in the US Patent Office came to know and admire Jennings and helped to publish his reminiscences.  From our docent we would learn that five generations of the same slave families served the Madison households both before and through James Madison's lifetime.  Slavery was problematic for Madison and he treated his servants humanely, but like Jefferson and his other slave-holding contemporaries, he did not reject their labor on his own estate nor free them during his lifetime.

Perhaps because his personal life was quiet and his work more behind-the-scenes than the more imposing Founding Fathers, we do not hear or know as much about Madison's contributions to the creation of our democracy.  But, they were many.  For example, he is considered to be the predominant colonial voice in urging separation of church and state.  His "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," addressed to the Virginia legislature in 1785 makes clear this view:

"The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.  This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men. . . . We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance."

The tour of the house allows visitors to look out from the room above the entry portico that Madison employed as a library.  Madison's view from the windows of the Blue Ridge Mountains rising above an open field and hardwood forests must have given him a sense of the vast potential of the country whose government he was intent on designing.  According to Jim Walker, our guide, Madison spent the entire winter of 1786-87 reading and thinking about the shortcomings of confederacies and the potential benefits of a federal system.  He consolidated his thoughts into what he labelled "The Virginia Plan."  When he arrived at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he must have been no more impressive than a mouse upon first sight -- small and quiet as he was.  But, he came prepared, having studied the essential question of the day:  what possibly new form of government offers our new nation the chance to thrive and survive?  Once he began to speak and share his plan, he became the center of attention, the only member to attend every single session.


The ideas framed in the Constitution are largely those of Madison, just as many of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence originated with his Virginia colleague, James Mason, although in both cases others received more credit in history texts.  History books do always mention Madison's role, along with his colleagues John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, in writing The Federalist Papers.  Again, I discovered from my visit,  it was Madison whose influence was greatest, drawing from his prodigious reading on governments to build an argument for our balance of powers among states and the central government.  Madison was a brilliant man, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French.  His ability to digest sources in their original languages made it possible for him to access information that most of his contemporaries would never have known, had he not shared it in his public life.

I now have Ralph Ketchum's James Madison: A Biography on my reading list and hope to learn more about this influential early American.