Learn From It

I finished reading the third book, “The Devil Wears Prada : A Novel” (Lauren Weisberger) in less than a week and began to read the fourth on the way home from work yesterday. “The Lovely Bones: A Novel” (Alice Sebold). I asked Sam to pick up a copy for me because it was the inspiration for a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter. A lovely song I can't seem to stop listening to, even now.

The book has been sitting there awaiting my attentions for weeks now, and at this point, I can't honestly say it wasn't some passive-aggressive thing that kept me from picking up this book.

It's about a young girl who is murdered at the age of fourteen. It's written in the first person singular, postmortem. In the first few pages, she talks of “my murderer” and begins to map out the terrain of “my heaven”.

After the surprise to myself that there was hesitation in my even approaching this book, yet another surprise hit me when I finally got started. This book is not maudlin at all. At all!

There's a certain blunt candor to Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) that I think every fourteen-year-old has inside his or her head. For an intelligent young person, that goes geometrically worse (trust me, I know).

Most of all, I am only eighteen pages into it, and already Susie is a fully reified person.

I used to wonder about my grandmother “Ma” and my great-grandmother “Nanny” looking down from “their heaven”, when I was a very young boy—no more than seven or eight—and wondering how they could be where everything was supposed to be perfect but still looking “down” at us missing them, at my mother's illimitable grief, and feeling perfectly happy? Did they just not care about us anymore? Was god hiding them from seeing our visceral pain, our unwelcome vicissitude?

It was the first of many things that became simpler, more understandable, more abidable, more “perfect”, in walking away from the martinet lockstep of christian polytheism.

Or maybe we all do get to choose our own Heavens. And for me, like for Tony Kushner's characters and for Herb Caen, Heaven is a City much like San Francisco.

I've dallied too long. The book and whatever it may bring, await.

•••

There's neighbors, thieves and long lost lovers
Villains, poets, kings and mothers
Up here we forgive each other

In my heaven

For every soul that's down there waiting
Holding on, still hesitating
We say a prayer of.....levitating.

In my heaven

You can look back on your life and lot
It can't matter what you're not.
By the time you're here, we're all we've got.

In my heaven.

— Mary Chapin Carpenter, My Heaven

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