I've been running and running
toward that fearful joy,
and then away.
J. G.

“How can joy be fearful?” my neighbor at the table asks, pointing to the above stanza. The poem’s author and I exchange an amused glance. How indeed? How to explain “fearful joy” to one for whom it has never been?

A red car points up the hill like a lacquered nail. “Zest” proclaims its license plate, a commentary on the autumn landscape.

Were there a volume knob for color, it would be cranked high. Green leaves haloed by yellow or already fully ablaze reach from dark boughs. Tongues of orange fire lick the asphalt and gravel paths. As I walk, I extend my own branches and turn my palms upward, ready, with them, to ignite. A row of maples flames but is not consumed. God’s voice could rumble from their scarlet flicker, but instead I hear only the shh shh shh of scuffed leaves.

A few days ago, a cascade of parental compromises saw me off to the mall with my oldest daughter. I enter this consumer space so rarely that I feel all the shock of a tourist stepping out of the airport in Ulan Bator or Ouagadougou. If I weren’t so hell-bent on completing whatever transaction has sent me there and getting out as quickly as possible, I could be an anthropologist scrawling observations in my field notebook and documenting them with digital photographs.

This past week, I’ve once again been hanging Ben’s Bells (see http://www.bensbells.org). I’ve twist-tied them to tree branches on median strips, in parks, and in parking lots. I’ve tied them to UPS mailbox handles and public phone receivers. I’ve twined them around bus stop poles and bike stands. I’ve placed them in beautiful spots and ugly ones, hoping to offer the opportunity to find one to as wide a variety of people as possible.

“I am full of goodwill for my youngish…friend, but I have nothing precise to tell him—by which I mean, nothing that might not be construed as discouraging. And this is the one thing I feel sure about, that I am under a duty to not discourage; and I am visited by a shiver, because it seems that I have truly crossed into what one might call the largely exemplary stage of life, which may be a slightly tragic term for adulthood.” (Joseph O’ Neill from Netherland)

Today has been one of those days when every plan of mine was thwarted in some way. Not that they were very ambitious. I wasn’t trying to come up with alternatives to our 700 billion dollar financial bailout, a plan to extricate us quickly and painlessly from Iraq, or a way to reduce global warming. All I wanted was to check off some items on my to do list and perform an act of indulgence for my children.

I watched for the bus more eagerly than usual the other day. A large man, just around the corner from the stop where my daughter and I stood, was raving. He slashed his huge arms through the air and jerked his body this way and that, screaming imprecations as through a bullhorn. His yelling reminded me of how sore my throat had been from all my guttural vocalizing the day after I gave birth. This man’s cries were louder and deeper still and must have been lacerating.