The Saluda Homecoming

I note this week I've taken a shine to baking cookies. When the green landscape transforms to the bleak gray suffusion of a Virginia countryside winter, left to my own devices, it's soft oatmeal raisin, not plumbing the depths of theology or politics, that comforts the soul.

Basic training requires slamming open a tube against the counter to free a squidgy slab of dough(?); then slice and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 9 minutes. Feeling, at times, more confident, I graduate to: blending one egg, one tbsp water, 3 tbsp canola oil and mix; then bake on a greased pan for 14 minutes. Brimming, other times, with the sure to be proven false pride of past success, I download a 'scratch,' that requires mysterious bottles of strange elixers called vanilla extract and powdered nutmeg that stand in rows amongst armies of fragrant spices like a regiment of red-helmeted soliders guarding a female skirmish line in the wife's territorial cupboard.

Is this whimsy or practicing to be old? Lennon's, 'Watching the Wheels lyrics, 'surely you're not happy now you no longer play the game,' keeps playing in my mind. I've also taken to dusting, vaccuuming, swiffing, perhaps obeying the triggered concept of nesting: as you age, you organize, or forget everything. That could be it, or maybe not.

Whenever we're driving at night, the glow of lights within the passing houses make me wish I was home. I don't think I'm alone in this growing awareness. I note an article in the local rag on how mixed-use development is thriving; where a new town is built from scratch, resembling best what we idealize about small town life. My favorite ball park, Camden Yards, the archetype for stadiums erected in the last decade, is built new, to resemble old.

The local hardware store still carries the original name, but sells only crafts, instead of the black and white speckled notebooks and text book covers with university seals, like Dartmouth and Brown, that I miss. Whenever the choirmaster at church entertains requests for long forgotten hymns, I always ask for 'Church in the Wildwood,' even though I never attended the 'little brown church in the vale.'

I note a report in the NY Times that the 'Latin Mass Draws Interest After Easing of Restrictions.' One woman is quoted, "I have no memory of the Latin Mass from my childhood, but for me it's so refreshing to see him facing the east, the Tabnernacle, focusing on Christ." Is her non-existant memory of a Latin Mass the same as my non-historical nostalgia for a Church in the Wildwood?

The day I actually attended a Latin Mass, the ancient stone church was damp, dark and cold. The priest faced forward so all that could be seen was a shadowy black presence. I couldn't hear anything as I suppose he prayed quietly in Latin. Was this, indeed, the same kind of experience attending the little brown church in the vale? Rather than a communal ritual experience, there's no corporate existence in the Latin Mass of a beloved community; each parishioner "looked instead to their missals or prayed on their own."

One windbag in the Times bellowed the all too wearying diatribe that "the Mass was like this for 1,500 years, and it was changed by subcommittee in the 1960's; when you can change the liturgy, you can change anything." So, you stand for an hour in a damp dark space; no clue as to what's happenning; no connection with another human being; yet you've made your point. This spiritual equivalent of a civic 'bowling alone,' leaves me as cold as a church built of stone. I'd rather bake cookies every Sunday than ever attend another Latin Mass.

A letter writer to our local rag, making another sort of point, wrote he'd never make a donation to the shelter, since as he was driving by, he observed children wearing new shoes. In despair, after reading it, I re-examined the file of papers that held essays composed by children who'd stayed there. One child wrote, the hardest thing wasn't that her father had abandoned the family, that they'd lost everything and were living in their car. The hardest thing, by far, was when they'd moved into the shelter, she'd had to give her dog away.

On the day after Thanksgiving, Connie and I are driving down east to tag the last of seven affiliated libraries within our rural system. Every time we drive onto the peninsula called the Northern Neck, we end the journey at land's end, in a tiny place called Saluda, just as when I write, I always end the literary journey at what will count at life's end: compassion was more important than making points.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to drive fifty miles. It won't accomplish much to call on seven librairies. The Saluda Homecoming only seems like the right place to be for no good reason at all. Sometimes life doesn't need to make a point. It's just about baking oat meal raisin cookies in a warm kitchen on a cold winter's day. It's about connecting with another human being, reclaiming meaning in life, even if it's part of what looks like an otherwise pointless journey.