The Fine Print

Back in the spring, I was writing a sermon that referred to the concept of pattern recognition, the thing our brains seem hardwired to do in order to learn from our experience, create symbols to carry meaning, use language and math and music. As I was looking for examples to explain this phenomenon, I happened to read a short piece in the New York Times magazine where a Nashville record producer, Callie Khouri, was asked about her Easter Brunch playlist, and among the cool music she singled out was the sentence: “I would definitely have some pop staples.” Now in the article, the words “pop staples” are lower case, implying they mean standard songs of the pop music genre, which, depending on who you are, might mean The Beatles or Smokey Robinson or Lady Gaga.

But I had a hunch that is not what she meant at all, having lived in Nashville for a while I believed that a hip Nashville record produced would not be recommending music so imprecisely. No, I suspected that what she actually was  referring to with the words “pop staples” was a proper noun, a person, Mr. Roebuck “Pop” Staples, the patriarch of the Staples Singers musical family, father of Mavis, a giant in the gospel world and the kind of staple you do want on your Easter morning ultimate playlist, maybe in their classic song, “I’ll Take You There,” which, if it does not make you glad to be alive, you might just better check to see if you really are.

And sure enough the next week after Easter, I just happened to notice in the Errata section a little notice correcting what they were calling a transcription error—the reporter recorded the interview and the person who transcribed the notes did not know the difference between pop staples, lower case, and Pop Staples, proper noun. And aside from pointing out to you what a terribly close reader of the NY Times I am, there is something there about this practice of examining facts and errors, setting the record straight, being willing to admit mistakes, that corresponds nicely with spiritual practices that help us sort out our actions and intentions, our values and our context, the pattern recognition of the inner life.

Add to that the following paragraph I noticed, back in the Times just last week:

A letter to the editor on May 5, about “Red Doc>,” a book of poetry by Anne Carson with some lines that refer to the velocity of a falling cow, misapplied the notion of a constant acceleration due to gravity near the Earth’s surface. The rate, 9.8 meters/second, refers to the increase of velocity per second, not the velocity itself.

It charms me and encourages me that we live in  a world where poets write poems about the velocity of falling cows, and readers write letters to the editors, and those editors try to keep the math and the poetry in balance. Surely, as long as we can give ourselves to such fancy and accuracy, creativity and precision, we have not unalterably wrecked the creation we were put here to make a garden of, or forever lost the pattern of its maker.

You're Doing What?!

Some families have traditions of owning property for centuries, legacies of membership in Ivy League clubs or family pews in certain old churches. My family is pretty much the mirror image of that—we have traditions of upheaval and change. So we are never much surprised when one of us announces that she is leaving her job to start a business, or writing a book, or going back to school. Especially the going back to school part.

And one reason why has to do with what my father, Bill Tidwell, did when he was almost forty. He left the military after twenty years of service and went back to college. The university worked with my Dad to transfer some of his military experience into college credit, but as a general studies student, he was required to enroll in the basic classes in literature, history, and science like any other college freshman. These classes became part of our family experience as my father struggled to make the transition from soldier to student. Most people can barely imagine their parents as young people, much less imagine how they responded to reading Virgil’s Aeneid or Spenser’s Faerie Queen. But I am one of the rare people who can tell you about my Dad as a college student, because I remember it. I was there.

I can remember a Sunday afternoon when we took a family drive in the country from our house in Anniston, exploring the small communities of Webster’s Chapel and Reed’s Mill, an area where my Dad would eventually buy some land and build a house. On this drive, my mother read aloud, as she sometimes did on long car trips (this being in the days before audio books had been invented). The story that day was the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” an eerie tale of a minister in a small town who literally hid his face in shame over secret sin. The story left us all little spooked, and maybe my Dad wanted to make a joke to break the spell. Later that day, when my mother was holding my two-year old sister, Beth, in her arms, Dad snuck up behind them and presented himself with a handkerchief tied over his face. Beth shrieked with alarm and wouldn’t come near him for hours.

I had the sense of how my father’s  studies were affecting how he looked at the world as we sat and watched the evening news about civil rights, antiwar protests and the moon landing. How deeply my father’s those lessons were integrated into his approach to life became very clear to me in an incident that occurred after his graduation, when I was a high school student. There was a misunderstanding and subsequent disagreement between my parents and I about permission to attend a rock concert on a week night. This story gets retold in my family now as The Night I Ran Away, but that is pure hyperbole. All that really happened was a dollop of adolescent rebellion: I was denied permission, but I went to the concert anyway. (A double bill of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Black Oak Arkansas—a southern fried rocker’s dream show).  I knew there would be some kind of punishment for my disobedience, and I nervously awaited my Dad’s verdict—how long would I be grounded?

But my father surprised me with a novel approach. He had remembered some readings from his political science classes about civil disobedience, and he assigned me the task of reading and then writing him an essay in which I compared the positions on civil disobedience of Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. Wondering what mad parental mind trick this might be, I read the short assignments. Gradually,  I saw what my father was trying to teach me: Socrates had broken the law of the land and willingly drank the poison that was his punishment, believing it was a just verdict he must accept. Thoreau, on the other hand, had resisted paying a war tax for noble reasons, but had let wealthy friends pay his fine and get him released from jail. My father wanted me to be willing to accept the consequences of my behavior, and when I told him I did, he replied that if I truly understood that, then I was not a kid anymore, and I didn’t need the rules governing my curfew to be quite so tight.

Socrates and Thoreau changed the quality of our family life, because my father was able to let his education be more than a hoop he was jumping through on his way to the next thing. I didn’t maybe grasp that then, I just thought my Dad was kind of quirky in his disciplinary methods. But now that I am a student again, at midlife, I so admire what he did then, and hope I can let what I am learning work its way into the texture of my life, so that it enriches who I am and how I relate to the world. If so, I’ll just say it’s family tradition.