The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape

1.

MY FATHER taught me to love words, and my mother taught me to pray. In his case, it was patient and intentional. In hers, quite the opposite.

The house in which I grew up and in which my first subjective instruction was played out was a determinant in those lessons. Or if not a determinant, then at least a kind of text upon which my memory and understanding have recorded them and to which I have attached their intricacies. This is not to say that the old house was in any way a thing of beauty or even that it could lay claim to any pretensions. It most assuredly was not that kind of house.

Built in the 1920s just before the Great Depression wrought havoc on everybody including the house's original owner/builder, the poor thing was still not entirely finished when my father bought it fifteen years later from the man's widow. The roughed-in, but unfinished, portions of the upstairs that looked out through broad dormer windows onto a line of silver maple trees and then to the street beyond became mine within a few days of our moving in.

Phyllis's playroom was the way my mother came to refer to that near-sixth of her new house that yawned, dusty and inviting, at the end of the upstairs hall and just beyond my bedroom door. It was a phrasing that, once she had invented it, allowed Mother to live more comfortably with the notion that her only child was setting up shop on a loose-planked floor and sitting on cross braces nailed to open studs. With or without such euphemisms, however, my mother and I both knew that that unfinished space was my soul's home, just as my father and I knew that so long as I lived as a child among them, the space was to remain unfinished except by my imagination or my own juvenile carpentry. It was a kind of gentlemen's agreement amongst the three of us.

Almost as a result of that agreement, I came in time, subtly but surely, to divide the old house into theirs (the downstairs) and mine (the upstairs.) I found theirs considerably less interesting than mine for adventures, but rivetingly more absorbing for its revelations about adults and adult ways of living. I spent whole afternoons, in fact, just sitting on the upstairs steps and contemplating the complexities of what was going on below me and what, presumably, I was to become in time. But the house was so laid out that no one seat, not even my favored one on the stairs, was totally satisfactory as an observatory. No, ours was a house that required an inquisitive child to move about a lot.

The floor plan of the downstairs was hardly more imaginative or less phlegmatic than was the house itself. A huge (the most odious chore of my late childhood was having to sweep the whole thing every Saturday morning for the perfectionist who masqueraded as my mother) …a huge porch ran the entire front of the house. At the porch's western end was the front door. Made of heavy oak, the door groaned its way into an entrance room the size of most people's bedrooms and that, as a result, no one could ever figure out how to either appoint or use. Ultimately it became a kind of parlor-anteroom that just sat there and, according to my father, used up space and heat. The unruly parlor did serve one good purpose, however; it opened into a living room that was almost the size of the porch and many times more pleasing to me.

The living room ran from east to west paralleling the porch. On its south wall, which it shared with the porch, a bank of broad-paned windows looked across the front yard to the maples trees that, when one was downstairs, totally obscured the street beyond. On its north wall, the room was interrupted in two places. At its western end was the door to the downstairs hall and at its eastern, the double french doors that led into the dining room. The hall, which was far and away the house's greatest impediment to easy living, was a long narrow affair whose only purpose was to connect other necessary spaces in as narrow and dark a manner as possible. It had, I always suspected, been the builder's attempt to conserve the heat and floor footage he had squandered in the entrance hall parlor.

But for whatever reason, the downstairs hall was and remained a domestic bottleneck that led, straight as an arrow, north from the living room to the back of the house. On the way, it opened first onto my father's study—onto that sunny, book-lined room where, as a college professor, he spent so many hours at his desk and where he taught me how poetry could give body to the soul and how the voice speaking words aloud could give life to the printed page.

Just beyond the study door, the hallway accessed on one's left what has to have been the world's largest linen closet and on one's right the landing of the steps to my upstairs world. Beyond the closet and landing, the hall squeezed past my parents' bedroom door, pretended to terminate in their bathroom, and then abruptly bent around the corner past the basement door to actually terminate in Mother's industrial-sized, white-and-red kitchen.

If one wished to come at the kitchen from the other direction, one had to pass through the living room and then through the dining room doors, or more correctly, through the open doorway where they were. (I never remember the doors themselves being shut except on Christmas Day when they hid the coming feast, the better to tease my excitement.) Directly across the dining room from the french doors, positioned in its own kind of arrow-straight alignment, was our breakfast room. While there was no door at all, only a doorway, between the kitchen and that breakfast room, there was most definitely a door between the breakfast and the dining rooms. It was one of those somewhat antique, heavy swinging doors that allow the cook to move easily from kitchen to table while carrying hot dishes and full trays. It was a rule of the house that this door, unlike the glass double ones across from it, was always closed. Always, that is, except from about three-thirty until about four-thirty in the afternoon. That was when my mother prayed.

If we had, as a family, early reached the accommodation of splitting the house by layers between parents and child, so likewise had my mother and father managed early to split it by rooms between his and hers. The study was his, the living room hers. This is not to say that their division was as complete as was theirs with me.

My mother rarely if ever came above stairs except to clean or to deliberately visit for a while. Visiting was a great skill with her, in fact. She was a brilliant and widely read woman as well as a gifted conversationalist, and I remember those times in her company with quiet pleasure to this day. But when Mother came up, it was always purposeful rather than coincidental; and her presence was never actively enough a part of my upstairs life for me to feel her rhythms after she had left or to discover the faint traces of her perfume in my quarters a day later.

My father came upstairs only by my insistent invitation, frequently because I lacked some skill of carpentry that I needed and he possessed or because, almost as often, I needed his sheer strength to accomplish some construction or other. Many of those command visits, of course, were also close to trumped-up excuses; all too frequently I just wanted to show off something I had done and had assumed, in my naîveté, that my petite and very feminine mother could never fully appreciate.

In much the same way, below stairs there was a similar kind of arrangement. My mother cleaned and straightened the study very respectfully each morning, and every evening she sat in the rocker beside my father's desk and read or talked or listened as the case might be; but one never thought, even then, that the study was her room. It was his and, while she was clearly the life of his life and his most honored guest, she was still nonetheless in his space. The living room was an almost exact reversal of this pattern.

Though we all shared with laughter and gossip and deeply sensual pleasure the kitchen and the breakfast and dining rooms as well as the gardens and porch and even the cool basement where we dried produce and repaired everything from tricycles to chairs—even though we shared all of this seamlessly and unselfconsciously, it was understood that the parental bedroom was theirs, though I could visit if need be, and that the shaded living room with its cool, papered walls and its wine-dark drapes was Mother's.

Admittedly, when my father came in from the university just at dusk each afternoon, he as a rule came directly from the back door through the kitchen, breakfast and dining rooms to the living room, which by that hour was always empty. His favorite easy chair was there in the corner; and he liked to read the afternoon paper, listen to the early evening news on the Zenith radio, doze for a few minutes in the room's quiet before he began his evening. But even snoring lightly in his own chair, he looked to me, when I would slip in to watch him, as if he were there only in passing, so strongly impressed upon her living room was Mother's aura, her imprint, her perfume.

Just under the porch windows and parallel to the living room's south wall was a long sofa that my mother referred to during all my growing-up years as a long bench. I always found the term singularly appropriate in attitude if not in absolute accuracy. The piece really was a sofa—velvetcovered with seat cushions, substantial curved arms, and a tripartite design. It was also the most uncomfortable and unforgiving contrivance I have ever tried to sit on. Originally my grandmother's, the long bench must have had some associative or sentimental value for Mother, or maybe it just eased her constantly painful lower back. For the rest of us and for most of our friends and guests, it not only lacked emotional connectedness, but also positively discouraged any lingering. Not so for Mother.

Every afternoon at three-thirty and with little waffling on either side of that appointed time, Mother left the kitchen, went to the bedroom for her Bible, her current magazine, and her manicure kit. The process was so without variation that I knew without looking the exact order in which she would collect these three things and the exact gestures with which she would carry them to the front of the house, set the magazine and Bible on the long bench's middle cushion, the manicure set on its right arm, arrange the throw pillow for her back, turn on her reading lamp, and then move quite purposefully across the dining room to the swinging oak door. This she would push fully open, often even setting a doorstop under it lest the door should accidentally close and thereby disturb her. She then went back to her place on the long bench and sat down. There she would remain for an hour, impervious to every possible interruption or distraction short of an emergency.

She read her magazine first. Never more than one article or story or, should one prove too long, never more than ten minutes. She next did the most astonishing thing of her day … or so it was for me as a child, hiding in the kitchen and watching her. She who was indeed a martinet of cleanliness and domestic order opened her manicure kit and began to trim the cuticles and file the nails that had somehow managed to escape the configurations she had laid on them the day before.

That Mother should daily attend to her nails was not unusual, and it certainly wasn't out of character. Not only was she fastidious; she was also inordinately proud of her hands. No, what was so disturbingly out of character was the fact that she daily laid down all around her and on the wine velvet of the long bench a circle of filings and clippings that, before my father's return, she would feel compelled to tidy up with the same Bissell sweeper that, in its pushing, further inflamed her back. Yet even this prospect in no way deterred her from her regimen.

Mother filed and scissored and buffed away for another ten minutes or until she ran out of material on which to work. She then put the instruments back in their case, set the whole on top of the closed magazine beside her, and opened the Bible where, for another ten minutes, she read and pondered the words she was reading. Once, long after I was grown,heard her say to one of my children that she had managed when your mother was a girl growing up to read through the Bible just in the afternoons once every ten months. It was, so far as I know, the only time she ever made any explicit mention of what happened on all those afternoons in the living room. Certainly she never spoke of, would never, ever have spoken of, what followed next.

Just as the hall clock struck four, Mother closed the Bible, setting it, too, on the sofa's middle cushion. She turned off the lamp, she crossed her short legs at the ankles, and she went somewhere.

This was to me the most curious of my mother's feats. It was also the thing I would on many an afternoon sneak into the kitchen to wait to see. Her eyes were as frequently open as shut, and I am very sure that had I opened a cupboard for one of my father's knives or even tried to spirit away a pair of kitchen shears, she would have seen me, but she was not in the business of seeing her house at that time in her afternoon. She was otherwise occupied.

After I had children of my own, of course, I understood that the swinging door was opened not to monitor my mischief so much as to assure my safety and her comforting presence if needed. Even as a young adult still at home, I understood that her choice of the living room for her afternoons had been dictated by the fact that from there she could hear me if I were upstairs and that only from there and with the doors opened did she have any chance of watching over me if I were downstairs.

I honestly don't know at what age it was, however, that I first began to wonder if my mother were praying on that long bench in the living room; but I do know the morning on which that suspicion was confirmed for me. It was the winter shortly before I was to turn nine.

Just after dawn on a bitterly cold and snowy mountain morning, I was suddenly, acutely and wretchedly sick. The snow outside was so bright that I made my way down the steps and through the narrow hallway without even bothering to turn on the lights. Too sick to care about domestic rules, I opened the bedroom door and went straight to my mother's bed. The covers were pulled almost completely over her head, and though only her eyes and forehead showed, she obviously had heard me enter for her eyes were open. When she did not stir at my approach, I shook her gently. Instead of speaking, she brought her right hand up from the mound of covers and just for an instant held it up, palm-side out, as one does who is trying to stop traffic or signal Wait.

In no more than half a breath later, though, she came out from the covers, her usual maternal self and filled with concern about my health. But all her attention and subsequent care—I was coming down with the measles—could not obliterate the memory for me of those few seconds and the raised hand. They were exactly like the thirty minutes each afternoon on the sofa; and my mother with the upturned hand was the same mother who sat on the sofa. I understood in some dumb way that wherever she was in the afternoons, she had been on the morning of my incipient measles. When I got to feeling better, I asked her about that morning.

When I came into your room to get you last week when I first got sick, what were you doing?

She was making biscuits—always a good time to talk together for she was a gifted cook—and turned her head just slightly away from the rolling pin to look me in the eye. I was saying my prayers.

In bed? I was amazed and my voice must have betrayed me. It is too cold in the winter to say them anywhere else, she said, returning her full attention now to the flattened dough, as if she had settled the matter by sheer logic.

Do you do that every morning? Logic is not known to be effective with almost–nine-year-olds.

Every morning. Is that why your clock goes off so long before you get up? Yes.

It was that simple.

What my mother had just taught me, of course, was the first two basic principles of prayer: It requires a disciplined routine and it is an art best practiced by a composed mind and spirit: for that, I came to understand, was what the magazine and manicure kit and Bible were all about. They were not the purposes of Mother's afternoon, only her preparation for it.

And one last thing …I shall believe for as long as I live that my mother had neither the requisite self-awareness nor the desire to articulate the details of her spiritual life; but she was, nonetheless, an accomplished traveler in those lands. As a result, her greatest gift to me was not some principle or other characterizing prayer, but the implicit suggestion that those lands were there to be entered into. I was to spend the rest of my life in their discovery.

2.

THE YEARS OF MY CHILDHOOD were the years of the playroom in the old house, but they were also years of outdoor play and across-the-alley play and of Can Marshall please, please, please, come over? play. There were children everywhere, a good, solid baker's dozen of us just on our end of the block alone. Because of some strange twist of fate, all the boys except one lived across the street from us and all the girls (plus the one beleaguered male straggler) lived on my side of it.

As children in that classically mid-century neighborhood, our favorite occupations were paper dolls for the girls, bikes and war games with toy soldiers for the boys, and hide-and-seek and kick-the-can for everybody. Paper dolls, or soldiers and bikes as the case might be, were for the morning and early afternoon hours. Paper dolls, for some reason I can't remember now, were usually played out at my house under Mother's huge dining room table. Hide-and-seek was an afternoon game for all of us, boys and girls alike, even in the hottest days of summer. And kick-the-can began after supper (Please, can I go now? I've finished everything on my plate.)

Kick-the-can was my favorite. Only an elaboration actually on hideand-seek, it involved one child's being It and closing his or her eyes while the rest of us hid before It's count to one hundred could end. As one by one It would discover us in our various hiding places, she or he would haul us as captives back to base, base being an upended, no. 10 can in the middle of our side driveway. The rules said that those of us who had been caught really did have to act like prisoners and stay put at base, wordless and impotent, until everyone else was caught. Or, of course, until a stillfree playmate could liberate us.

The trick in this was for some member of the not-yet-caught to sneak into base while It was out on patrol, kick the can so hard that it would go clattering and sailing down the driveway, and then holler, Go free! At that point the game would start all over again. Under such rules, of course, even a gifted player could end up being It for whole evenings at a time. And God knows, there certainly was no end to the inventiveness we exercised in our bids to escape. As prisoners, we routinely used extravagant charades and even complicated birdcalls to inform our fellows in hiding about where It was and whether or not one could safely change locations or—best yet—even attempt a raid on base to kick the can.

I think now that I loved kick-the-can so much because I was fairly good at it. For an awkward and definitely not athletically inclined child like me, physical games that require quick wittedness and audacity as much as, or more than, prowess are precious things and much to be encouraged among one's playfellows. The happiness of my April-through-September evenings depended in no small way on my ability to hide near enough to base to be able to kick that dratted can with some degree of regularity. Playmates left too long in captivity, I had learned, tend to become restive and eventually to demand a change of activity. Thus I was always on the search for new coverts that were nearer and nearer to the driveway where base was. And for one brief, enchanted fortnight in the August of my ninth year, I had the sine qua non of hiding places.

My father was a consummate grower of things. His vegetables, grown on some abandoned acreage belonging to the university, sustained not only us but also helped sustain half of our near-neighbors during World War II. (Gasoline rationing made the commercial distribution of fresh produce essentially impossible during those years while, ironically, the rationing of meat had rendered produce more and more necessary.) But food was one thing to my father, and flowers were quite another. Next to my mother and the joy I always assumed he had in me, the only nonprofessional passion in my father's life was his flowers and the backyard in which he grew them.

Running deep and narrow from the back wall of the house north to an alley that was more a private street than an access lane, the yard was defined on the east by our garage and broad, paved driveway and on the west by a dense hedge of tall evergreens that shielded us from view and, alas, from late summer breezes as well. Within that clearly scribed space, my father created a world. One went out the kitchen door, down five wooden steps to a small brick landing, turned left around a giant boxwood and entered … actually, one just entered.

It was beautiful—at some seasons breathtaking, in fact. Controlled in the rife way of an English country garden, his yard always had some plant or other in colorful bloom even if, as in winter, that meant only the hawthorns and the Japanese lanterns that burned orange upon their ungainly stalks. We children hated it, of course; for the end result of such perfected creation was that children, especially rowdy ones shrieking through the half-light of dusk, were not welcome to race about, much less to hide among its summer flowers and beds. In fact, we were rather emphatically forbidden to do so.

Paradoxically, the yard was the safest place to hide just simply because we were forbidden the use of it in our play. It could not afford to go on a search-and-destroy in that one place; the price was too great. I gave many a summer hour to the study of this situation during my sixth year, which probably means that I was born devious. It also meant that despite all my best efforts, I could find no safe way to secrete myself inside that backyard. But within the matter of three growing seasons thereafter, my father was to inadvertently solve the problem for me.

The north end of our yard, which bounded and was bounded by the alley, had been a problem for him right from the first day we bought the old house and for weeks before we actually moved into it. He fretted with it constantly. There were suppertime conversations before we moved about the problem with that alley. And once we had moved in and settled down a bit, there were genuinely serious ones with the neighbors about the various ways in which each of them had solved the alley problem before our coming.

In all fairness, I should say immediately that the problem truly was one. Not only was an uninterrupted view of the alley's cinder-paved and well-rutted roadbed less than aesthetically pleasing, the thing itself was a bit of a hazard. It opened right into our yard and, as alleys go, it was so well trafficked by every sort and condition of humankind as to be a positive thoroughfare at some hours of every day. Many of the traffickers were those whom we would regard today as the homeless or the mildly deranged. In those less politically correct times, we called them bums or hoboes or gypsies. By whatever label, they afflicted the neighborhood with a kind of constant, though low-grade, thieving and, in winter, with a constant threat of fire in garages and outbuildings. They were also notorious for engaging us children in conversation whenever possible, mostly as I remember it, trying to commandeer us into stealing food for them from our mothers' kitchens.

The alley, in short, was a problem that had to be solved, and sooner rather than later, especially since ours was the only yard that had not yet erected some kind of fence or gate or outbuildings to prevent vagrant access. Yet all those obvious solutions seemed to my father to be likely to detract from the natural integrity of his yard. He simply was loath to diminish the beauty of his landscaped flowers with any of them.

While he was busy being frustrated with the open stretch of alley that bounded our yard, he did manage to seal off the small section of equally open boundary that ran between our garage and that of our next-door neighbors. He simply hung a gate between the two buildings, a resolution that was without offense because the garage was not in the yard and the gate in no way visible from it. None of this addressed the real problem, however. Then, in March of our second year in the old house and just as I was turning seven, my father solved it.

On a still-cool Saturday morning, he came home from the campus with a university truck, six male undergraduates, and twelve huge bushes of mountain forsythia. Looking at that season of the year less like bushes and more like mutilated willow trees that had had their trunks excised, the poor forsythias each had a burlap-bundled rootball that was bigger than it itself was. Within a matter of that one Saturday, though, the balls of root and university dirt with their spindly, truncated tops were planted deep and evenly along the back width of our yard. One could still see the alley, of course, but clearly one had to trespass now to leave it for our yard.

The high hill country of upper East Tennessee is Mother Nature's own garden spot. That, combined with my father's native genius for horticulture, meant that in less than a full year the forsythias had grown enough to touch one another. By the end of the next summer when I was fully eight and already bored with most forms of agronomy, they had begun to fill in their own interiors. And by late August of the next year, just at the peak of the kick-the-can season, the forsythias were an impenetrable bank of heavily leafed fronds that rose lithely up from their centers toward the sun and then cascaded over and down to the earth below in one long, continuous curtain of whispering green. The end result of all of this was not just an effective but pleasing alley wall. It was also (and more significantly) a tunnel that was about four feet across from frond tips to frond tips and as dry as our basement in a summer storm.

I cannot even imagine now what audacious flight of imagination first prodded me to try the tunnel as a hiding place for kick-the-can. I certainly don't remember on what August twilight I first dared it. I do remember very, very well, however, that I was shrewd enough to slip through the new gate between the garages, sneak down the alley, and then crawl in from the alley side rather than from that of the forbidden yard. The advantages to be gained by this derring-do were immediately apparent. Not only had I found a spot where even the archangel could not have found me, but I had also accidentally stumbled onto the one place from which I could actually see base for myself without being in any danger of detection. Simply by crawling to the center of the tunnel's length. I could sight through the forsythia branches straight to the gleam of the can's tin surface in the dusky twilight.

My increased performance record after this discovery turned me rather quickly into a neighborhood wonder woman, though I wasn't about to share the secret of my sudden success with anyone. It was at about that point—that is, at about the end of the first week of my unfair advantage— that it dawned on me that if the tunnel were good for kick-the-can, it would also most surely be good for hide-and-seek, even though the latter was considerably less of a challenge.

Thus there came the day, also forgotten in terms of the exact date, when for the first time I wiggled into the forsythia tunnel in the middle of a sunny August afternoon. I crawled easily through its now-familiar thickness, entered the shady tunnel, and made my way to my new observatory near the center of the long row of bushes. Then I lay down on the cool earth of the tunnel floor to wait for that satisfying moment when, in hideand-seek, It has to say, I give up. Come out, I can't find you.

I was lying there contemplating this delicious inevitability when I decided I owed it to the game and my playmates to at least act like I was playing. I decided I would sit up and see if I could see It anywhere near the driveway. So I did. I sat up, turned toward my father's yard, and looked out not on a yard, though it was certainly still there, but upon an experience.

Forsythia blooms early in the calendar year, so early that it can almost not be called a spring bush at all. For us in East Tennessee, its lushest bloom often came in January during that first hesitation of winter which people in the mountains call, somewhat erroneously, the spring thaw. The misnomer is that there's no thaw to it, just two or three days when the sun shines lemon, but not yet orange, and everybody takes the gesture seriously. The most gullible of Nature's creatures, the one most susceptible to this blink of winter's, traditionally is mountain forsythia, which sends dozens of small, yellow, trumpet-shaped blooms up, over, and down dozens of leafless fronds in celebration.

Forsythia in bloom is hardly as thick and impenetrable as the forsythia that will come later when the bushes are in foliage; but the yellow of those myriad January blooms is so creamy and intense against a winter landscape as to obscure everything else from view. It is as if the forsythia in bloom compels the eye to total loyalty, and all else lies beyond one's visual ken. The petals, while hardy, do drop off in the due course of things, and the lanceolate leaves come in equal profusion. Being larger, they of course are also thicker. But there is a strange thing about those leaves. While they appear at a distance to be regulation green, they are actually a kind of yellowgreen when one looks through them, almost as if they, too, remember, and are reluctant to let go of, their powerful January glow.

I knew all of this already, after having lived with the bushes for two and a half years. So it was no particular surprise to discover that my father's flower beds, seen through a scrim of forsythia leaves, glowed more or less golden in the mid-afternoon sunshine above them. The surprise was the perfectness of, simultaneously, both my presence within and my safe removal from those beds and that yard. The light with its goldenness certainly must have exaggerated the effect, but it did not cause it. I had unwittingly stumbled into what the Celts call a thin place and Alice called a looking glass.

I was totally of the world I was watching. In fact, I was so intimately engaged in it as to make watching a poor choice of words. I was and I was watching comes much closer to the truth of the thing. Through the windows I could see the faint shape of my mother bent over her kitchen sink and then could follow her shadow as she left there and went into their bedroom. I could see the outline of Mrs. Thomas, our next-door neighbor, as she came out onto her back porch and then her whole form as she shook her dust mop out the door. I could see the hummingbirds gathering seeds from the poppy pods and the bugs crawling up the scored bark of the apple tree. I could even see the skink that was sunning on a protected rock within two yards of me. What I couldn't see was any space or separation between me and all these things. The forsythia leaves' natural yellow blended so completely into the natural yellow of the sun that there were no stopping and starting places for either, only one continuous spectrum of being … which was what I had stumbled into: a being place.

The playroom was a doing place. It was a space made almost holy and certainly personally sacred for me because it protected from interruption my active absorptions of building and enacting. It allowed me to move into them with complete impunity. But the playroom was that perfect concentration of activity which in adults goes under the guise of entertainment or rest and recreation or hobbying. I did in the playroom.

In the tunnel there was nothing to do. Yet the experience of being alive in a world that I was invisible to was an absorption beyond any I had ever known before, even in the playroom. My amazement was ended only by hearing all my playmates and my mother begin to cry, Phyllis! Phyllis! Where are you? Apparently I had failed to hear It declare the end to our afternoon game.

After that, I never used the forsythia as a hiding place, for it seemed to me to be a kind of sacrilege to do so, though I hardly had the words for that decision or even the thought processes to grasp the concept itself. Instead, I returned to my former hiding places, got caught just as frequently as I had in the past, and suffered terribly from my diminished status of being just an ordinary player again. But I went often to the forsythia tunnel. I went, in fact, as often as I thought I could safely absent myself from parents and playmates, though usually I dared not stay there for more than ten or fifteen minutes on any one occasion. But on each of those stolen visits, the sensation of being alive in the womb of the world held. It was not as intense as the weeks and then the summers passed, but it was as constant and unvaried. Nor did the tunnel ever degenerate into a dreaming place. It kept, instead, its edge of vitality, of active, involved engagement in stillness.

Cradled as gently still by the unities of childhood as by the gold of the forsythias, I was two or three years away from the rush of hormones that casts all of us out of Eden. More to the point, I was at least seven or eight from the academic lectures and assigned readings that would furnish me with tools for articulating the life of the self to myself. It was sufficient in-stead, in those last years in my father's garden, that I experienced beyond all forgetting life in a being place and that I learned to know it as distinct from life in the doing place of my playroom. Of the three great gifts of my childhood, the second was this naîve discovery that doing was one place and being an entirely different and other place. As a talisman, a locative understanding of the spirit would serve me well; for soon I would stumble across, or into, other places of the interior. Soon I would begin to feel that, like Balboa, I was no longer a visitor in pleasant spaces but a voyager on strange seas.

3.

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in the mountains of East Tennessee, the folklore surrounding me was a sympathetic mixture of two cultures—the Native American tradition of the Cherokee nation who were indigenous to those primeval hills and the Celtic one of the Scotch-Irish who had begun to settle the Appalachian and Great Smoky ranges in the early eighteenth century. By the time of my coming, the two traditions had blended into a number of shared conventions. Not the least among these was the belief that for every child there was an appointed narrative, a story that would unlock life for him or her. Like a totem, the story would be for one's whole life an identity, an explanation, and an enduring tool. Without such a narrative, one would be forever confined to a stumbling confusion and a wearying poverty of spirit. The work of childhood was to discern one's narrative, and the work of the adult community was to provide an abundance of possibilities from which each of us might choose.

The process was, admittedly, far less formal and explicit than my retelling makes it sound here. Rather, the quest of the totem-story was so suffused into the culture as to be a daily, but inconspicuous, part of our rearing. Cherokee and Celt were both storied people, their mysticism and earthbound theologies naturally compatible not only with each other but also with the environment of the hazy, cloud-wet hilltops in which we all lived. No child could possibly have grown up there in the 1930s without understanding the role of story, and no adult could have parented there without storying. There were always a few of us, of course, who never found our narratives or our lives; but most of us, me included, were more fortunate.

Some of us met our futures in family anecdotes that combined the old Celtic values with those of hardtack endurance in America's hill country. We learned young to see out of the corner of the eye. Others of us found our definitions in the sagas of Appalachia's woodsmen-heroes or Cherokee stories of the Corn Mother and in the nimbus of the Great Spirit. Most of us, being as we all were the products of unending hours of public but still classical education, stumbled unwittingly into other paradigms. There was, for the greatest number of us, that one snippet of German fairy tale or that one bit of Norse or Greek mythology that would come out of nowhere to grab the world by the hair of its head and then turn it just enough to put the whole, emerging concept of patterns into register. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I was not of so romantic a disposition even in those days of innocence. Nor was my totem to be a gift from the mountains or my parents or even from my education, at least not directly.

The year I was six and going on seven, I managed to contract in uninterrupted progression every childhood disease known to humankind, save one. The German measles were to come later. Otherwise, I endured in order: chicken pox, mumps, inflamed ears, strep throat, red measles, and whooping cough. During this last affliction, I whooped so hard that I ruptured a vessel in my eye and spent another month in dark confinement waiting for it to heal. While none of this comedy of sorrows seems to have been life-threatening, it was a distinct nuisance, especially for me. There were, however, two advantages. Except for an occasional cold and the German measles of my ninth year, I was never sick again (there was simply nothing left to catch). And before the whole miserable winter was over, I had received my story.

My parents were Presbyterians in those days, that communion being the compromise they had struck when they married. My urban-Baptist mother deplored the ecclesial ways of my country-Methodist father, while he deplored the idiosyncrasies of her theology. He deplored even more vigorously, however, the incensed and chasubled Catholicism of some of the rest of his own family. So Presbyterianism it was, a bargain made and kept, but not always an easy fit. Fortunately, the Presbyterian minister during those years of my innocence was a rather accomplished theolog as well as a shrewd interpreter of people. Consequently, he spent a good deal of time either discussing Calvinism with my father or pastorally visiting with my theologically more carefree mother. As a result, I think I was comfortable with, but probably had never been alone with, the man until that winter of unremitting illness.

As one disease process followed hard on the heels of another, Dr. King began coming in to my sickroom to chat a minute at the end of each parental visit. Over the months I honestly began to look forward to his coming. For one thing, he was the only other human being besides my parents and the doctor who was allowed in, and for another he had a kind of huge gentleness and curious intelligence that appealed to me. We became friends of a sort; and thus it was that on my seventh birthday in the midst of a precedent-setting case of red measles, I received my first Bible story book—that is, my first real one.

My previous Bible story collections had been just that, collections. They were heavy on pictures, scarce on text, and highly selective, their stories having no discernible connection one to another. Dr. King's, on the other hand! Dr. King had given me a copy of Story of the Bible for Young and Old by Dr. Hurlburt. Hurlburt's, as my father called it, was long on words and no more than modestly generous with its pictures. Those pictures, moreover, were adult engravings, not silly drawings. And the stories! The stories began at the beginning and marched in lockstep straight through three hundred pages to the Apocalypse.

I might have been sick, but I was not too far gone to know my first rush of pride in ownership. The text was considerably beyond my reading skills, at least at first, and the level of vocabulary and diction were certainly not those of a seven-year-old, but none of that mattered. I had a book, an honest-to-john book book that was mine and mine alone. I pored over the pictures, struggled with the words, and demanded that my father read only from the Hurlburt's each night for my story time. It was during this process, some six or seven weeks into it, that I stumbled into the presence of my totem.

Mine obviously was and remains a story, at least more or less, about the Children of Israel. It concerns an event that took place in the thirtyseventh year of the Exodus, only months before that journey's trials and hardships were over. But like most good stories, mine has its roots firmly planted in earlier events.

The story of the Exodus is one of apostasy and human doubt as well as of impatience and despair on the part of both God and the Children of Israel. That was not how things had started out, however. In the beginning, Hurlburt's said, men and women who had known slavery and oppression in Egypt had followed a man named Moses out into the desert with hope in their hearts. A people who had felt the lash and known the shame of it had come to know as well the glory of the Red Sea's parting, of their own safe passage through it, and of Pharaoh's watery death in it. With a cloud before them by day and a pillar of fire behind them at night, they had trekked with their herds and their stolen Egyptian jewelry and their little ones across the Sinai Peninsula until they had come, within a matter of a few months of their leaving, to the borders of the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey. With the dust of Egypt still upon them, they had moved under Moses' leadership from the northern borders of Goshen to the western ones of Canaan.

Once encamped there on the eastern