It’s Never Not Complicated, but There’s Always a Choice

Indulge me in a little more reflection from my recent European travel pilgrimage, this week about what we read while on a trip.  I treasure the ways I learn so much about my own nation, and my own self, when I am in other countries.  

I was trying to be a pilgrim on this trip, not a tourist, so I traveled light and tried to stay open to surprises.  That meant I did not plan ahead what books to take, even on my IPad. I pick up novels in airports and train stations and left them behind in hotel rooms.

I learned from my mother, who took Anthony Trollope to read on a safari in Kenya, how much fun it is to spend evenings reading about a totally different world than you’ve seen all day.  On this trip I found on a discount shelf outside a bookstore in Bloomsbury a good Colm Toibin novel about family and forgiveness in Ireland.  When I went inside to pay my one pound I discovered it was a socialist bookstore, and I spent an interesting half hour there learning about radical politics in London.  Thanks, literature, for opening more doors.  (I left that novel in my hotel room in Reims after the nice young staff guy there asked if I was leaving behind any travel brochures in English so he could work on his language skills; I hope he enjoyed it.)

But I did lug John Irving’s 839 page novel, Until I Find You, from the Aachen train, station (great selection of books in English) through Belgium and France, on my back along the Camino from Sermizelle to Vezelay, and finished it over the Atlantic.  The popular and praised American author of The World According to Garp, Prayer for Owen Meany, Hotel New Hampshire, Cider House Rules, and many other novels, Irving took me on a parallel trip through – again!? – family and forgiveness, helping me laugh and cry and think about America.

Big novel, big story about Jack Burns, begins as the 3 year old son of single mother tattoo artist.  Follows him through his odd and sort of kinky coming of age in New England, growing up to be a successful Hollywood actor and screenwriter, always seeking and finally finding his lost and mysterious father. 

Jack’s mother sends him off at age ten to a rigid all boys school in rural Maine, for reasons only explained much later in the book, and she has his teacher Mr. Ramsey drive Jack there.  They stop to get gas in the small town near the school.

It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries – mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer.  A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool…

“Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he’s even shaving,” she said, nodding in Jack’s direction. 

“Well,” Mr. Ramsey replied, “there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days.  There’s not always a choice.”   “There’s always a choice,” the woman said stubbornly.  She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter.

“For example,” she continued, “I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning - not that anyone would take care of a blind dog.  It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out.  What I’m saying is, it’s never not complicated – but there’s always a choice.”

Lots of ways to read this scene as being so very American.  Our nation has millions of hefty rural women and men with concealed handguns.  We love to tell other people they are bad parents and we often mock the children of others.

But this woman is also very unlike most Americans.  When it come to complications, we’re pretty stupid.  We think in black and white terms.  We oversimplify, either/or, not much nuance.  We assume there’s only one solution to most problems.  “Mission Accomplished.”  Live free or die.  My country right or wrong.  If you’re not a maker, you’re a taker. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.  Part of the solution or part of the problem.  All life begins at conception.  This is the only way God defines marriage.  American exceptionalism.  I’m the decider.  We are sure they will welcome us as liberators.

But rural gas station woman knows there are never no complications.  Even that phrasing is complex; Irving could have had her say, “It’s always complicated.”  But she says, “It’s never not complicated.”  I might want to end my life, but what about my blind dog?

She tells our hero and his teacher that they have choices.  Might not seem like much, when to shoot the gun.  But it’s a choice.

Irving writes some very funny scenes in Hollywood, and one can only imagine that he is drawing on his own experience writing the screenplay for Cider House Rules and winning the Oscar that year.  Maybe he too, like Jack, had a hilarious encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the men’s room while holding his new gold statuette.

Only near the end of the book does Jack realize he has some choices.  But to figure that out he has to leave the US. Maybe that’s why travel is so liberating.  We notice we really have lots of choices.  At home this seem to escape us, probably because we are so set in our routines.

Complications are, well, complicated.  I guess I understand why it took Irving over 800 pages to tell his story.  I’ll try to keep short one example from my trip.

Walking by Reims Cathedral I saw this plaque in the ground and took a picture of it, just because I was intrigued with the phrase “engagent ensemble contre toutes formes de misere.”  It seems that in 1987 the citizens and church at Reims made some public proclamation that those “condamnes a vivre dans la misere” have their “droits de l’homme violes,”  that it is a denial of their human rights, if one lives in famine, violence, all forms of misery.  And they declare they are in solidarity with such sufferers.  Pere Joseph Wresinksi seemed to be the author of this statement.

A week later I’m at a retreat about the Holy Spirit in Vezelay, Burgundy with 20 French folks, and a woman Elizabeth is friendly to me, but we don’t really talk much and my French isn’t great.  Then I see her in the back of the basilica during a concert rehearsal and she motions me to sit with her and I almost think, “It’s a lovely afternoon, I think I’ll go sit outside before our next session.”  But I say to myself, no, slow down, reach out, connect.

So we sit, talk about France, where I’ve been, how I’d been surprised the week before to find a Joan of Arc celebration in Reims.  I offer to show her my photos of the parade. I’m zipping through the photos, swiping my Ipad as fast as I can, looking for Joan, and she spots the photo of this plaque, barely was it in focus as I swiped it.  And she cries out, “That’s my group!  That’s Pere Wresinski!” 

And we go back to the photo and she tells me in very passionate, very personal French how he worked with people in poverty during the war and after, how he articulated the policy later adopted by France and the UN that social exclusion is a denial of an unalienable human right, how she heard about that and said to herself, this is right, this is what I believe in and she joined in his work for years….  On and on she went, I stopped trying to understand the details and just listened to the passion and compassion and pride in her voice and her stories.

I had a choice, when she motioned me over.  I could have smiled, pretended not to understand, gone out to see the hollyhocks and the view and stayed in the middle ages and a nice spiritual buzz.  But instead I heard a complicated story about a painful issue and a passionate man and how the life of this woman gained purpose.  How in the midst of deep complications, he, and she, made a choice.

Looking back on my trip, and Irving’s intriguing phrase, I remembered this encounter.

Life, and travel, can be so very complicated.  And I am so grateful for the choices.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter