Eric McHenry: I Don't Want to Live on the Moon

Eric McHenry was commissioned by Hugo House to write a new piece on the theme of Truth or Dare as part of the first event of the 2009-2010 Hugo Literary Series. McHenry presented his piece at Truth or Dare on October 23, 2009 along side playwright and director Keri Healey, novelist Rebecca Brown and rap artist Macklemore.

I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon

“Blaise Pascal was a France philosopher. But what did he philosoph?”

Evan was buckled into his car seat, bumping along in the back of our Subaru when he suddenly said this. We were returning to our Seattle home from the airport after a trip to Kansas, which is where I’m from. That morning, it turned out, his grandfather had been reading to him from some sort of philosophy primer for five-year-olds. Evan has a gift for neologisms, and particularly for back-forming verbs from nouns—a hammer hams, a light-saber light-sabes and a philosopher philosophs.

****

This past summer I moved with my family from Seattle to my hometown, Topeka. My father and stepmother still live there, and my grandparents, but I never expected to go back and stay. In Seattle there’s an independent bookstore on every corner, and pho in every pot. Who would give that up for B. Dalton and T.G.I. Friday? Somebody pointed out that I was surely the first person since Dorothy to abandon the Emerald City for Kansas. In the months before we moved, I joked to friends that I was headed home for biological reasons beyond my control, “Like a salmon returning to the tributary from which it came.” It’s not a perfect simile, one of them observed, because, unlike a salmon, I was leaving the Pacific Northwest. But salmon do make their way to Kansas. We got to Topeka seven or eight hours before our furniture, and my parents took us out to a nice restaurant so that we wouldn’t have to eat pizza on the floor of our new house. The waitress recited the day’s specials, boasting that “All of our seafood was flown in today from Seattle.” We smiled. “So were we.”

Living in Seattle, I did not miss the mosquitoes, or the chiggers—microscopic harvest mites that leave itchy welts under your socks and waistband. But I did miss, profoundly, the cicadas and the fireflies. The 13-year cicada is the lawnmower of insects, producing a sound too plain to be music but too loud and modulated to be white noise—more like orange noise, or auburn noise. It is a sound the color of sunset. Edward Thomas wrote that he would rather “give up other [scents] more sweet, / with no meaning,” than the bitter but evocative smell of a common herb called Old Man. I would happily trade a hundred pleasant melodies for the abrasive near-monotone of the cicada, singing me to sleep in the summer dusk.

That first night back in Kansas, I watched my son and daughter chase fireflies across our new front lawn, trap them in jars, admire them. I understand that the firefly’s objective is to attract a mate, but he could not have been better designed to attract children, with his miraculous bioluminescence and the visual Marco Polo he plays. “Did you enjoy watching us?” Evan asked me afterwards. “Did it bring back lots of childish memories?”

Evan’s malapropisms are rarely mal, just as his neologisms are sometimes not so neo. He likes to truncate words he uses regularly, as though he and the word have become good friends and are ready to dispense with the formality of full names. A shampoo has been a shamp for a couple of years now. More recently, lullabies became lullas. “Daddy, will you sing us a lulla?” he asks, reviving the Old English word from which lullaby derives. According to Chris Roberts in his casual study of nursery rhyme origins, “Heavy Words, Lightly Thrown,” “lulla” may originally have come from an onomatopoeic Greek word describing the sound of lapping water.

“All right. What lulla would you like tonight?” I ask. “American Pie,” Evan says. “No!” Sage shouts. “The Boys of Summer!” It wasn’t always like this. For years they wanted children’s songs with names like “Snuggle Puppy” and “Way Long Timey Ago,” or a little masterpiece by Jim Henson called “I Don’t Want To Live on the Moon,” which I found impossible to sing in any voice other than Ernie’s. Staring out the window next to Evan’s bed, I always managed to find the resonant frequency of the glass when I sang the word “live” for the last time, and the pane would hum along with me for the note’s duration. But there are a lot of nights in a childhood, and after those choruses had come around a few hundred times I began to explore other options. The songs I added to my repertoire always seemed innocuous when they first occurred to me. Invariably, though, I’d get three lines into them and realize I’d picked a lulla shot through with sex or booze or death or overwrought romantic American male regret, or all four: “There’s an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin.”

I do find some comfort in the knowledge that I’m observing a centuries-old tradition. Lullabies and nursery rhymes have always been subversive, bawdy and bleak. “How adult songs such as ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘Goosie, Goosie Gander’—often highly sexual, often politically satirical—came to be rhymes read to children is almost a book in itself,” Chris Roberts writes. “Some were clearly adult rhymes that were sung to children because they were the only rhymes an adult knew.” Or perhaps, I would add, because the adult had exhausted his store of children’s rhymes, and an inappropriate song was the first one that came to mind.

But there may be a purposefulness to my song selection, too. Along with the impulse to soothe with a sound like lapping water, there is, I suspect, an impulse to trouble that water—to sing a song of ambiguity and complexity to my children’s half-conscious forms and half-formed consciousnesses. The world will make a liar of a lullabier, unless he’s willing to allow that the bough, one day, is going to break.

There’s a dark cherry dresser in Evan and Sage’s bedroom that’s about five feet tall, nearly as wide, and at least 150 years old. It was a wedding present to Stephen Gard Schenck and Elizabeth Jane Schenck, my great-great-great grandparents, who brought it to Kansas from Tennessee. They left it to their son, John, who left it to his niece, Elizabeth Schenck Bellman, my great-great aunt, who lived with her mother, Mary Hebbard Schenck, my great-great grandmother, in a Victorian cottage at 401 Woodlawn, which is three houses north of the house we now live in. I sometimes lean on the dresser when singing Evan and Sage their lullas. The windows are open. The cicadas are droning in the trees Mary Hebbard Schenck planted. “Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, ‘Don’t look back. You can never look back.’” I sing these words within earshot of their great-great-great grandmother’s ghost.

****

Our house is now full of heavy heirloom furniture. Much of it has spent the last few years locked in a storage unit on Topeka’s sketchy east side, after residing for most of the 20th century in that Victorian cottage just up the block from us. Ponderous, imperturbable, it seems less surprised to be back home than I am.

One piece that has moved with us from house to house is Deb’s table, a modest but hardworking little drop-leaf. In Seattle we ate on it, because it was small enough to fit in the “dining nook” of our Wedgwood home. But it’s best known for its service as an operating table. Lena Baxter Schenck, my great-grandmother, who became “Deb” when my father’s attempt to say “Grandma” came out “Deb-day,” had an emergency appendectomy on the table in 1905, at the age of 10. Her family lived in Dover, a tiny farming community 15 miles west of Topeka, and the doctor had to come from town on horseback. When telling this story to friends, I’ve sometimes observed that “if one of the table’s legs had been half an inch shorter than the other three, I wouldn’t be here.” We weren’t careful enough with Deb’s table when we loaded it onto the moving truck this summer. We left too much of the wood exposed, and at some point during the 1,900-mile drive, a long piece of metal wandered into contact with it and rubbed a deep, painful-looking gash in one of its legs. We badly need to get it refinished. I feel as though I’ve betrayed it. Demoted to a sideboard, it stands in our dining room with its leaves down and its wound to the wall. When I walk through the room, I feel myself looking past it, as though to avoid eye contact.

****

I grew up at 1211 Mulvane, about a mile south of where we live now. Our next-door neighbor, Peggy Greene, was a local institution, having written six columns a week for The Topeka Capital-Journal since 1933. Peggy was like a second mother to my brother and me, although she was seven days older than Deb. She took care of us when we were sick and my parents were working. In her living room we watched Royals games and the Royal Wedding, for which we roused ourselves at 3 a.m. Even in her late eighties, Peggy had more energy and hunger for experience than anyone I’ve known. She would run to answer the phone—literally run. On Saturday mornings, she wouldn’t sit down to breakfast until she’d served us all three courses of pancakes, including one customized cake poured into the shape of everyone’s first initial.

I realize now that Peggy was my earliest influence as a writer—not so much through her columns, which I was too young and distracted to appreciate, as through her example: the rapt attention she paid to the world, and the daily sound of her Olivetti keys clacking away through the open window of her study.

I wish I’d been precocious enough to appreciate her writing for its own magnificent sake. And I wish, intensely, that she could somehow know that I’ve become a writer, and that I’m saying this about her now. A couple of months ago her daughter asked me to help edit Peggy’s memoir, which had been languishing in a shoebox. It’s a reminiscence of her childhood and young adulthood in rural Missouri and Kansas, and is humblingly good.

Peggy had a preternatural memory, and a way of regarding the world that was, quietly, quite radical—a singular ability to see blessings where the rest of us would see deprivations: “People who have dining rooms,” she wrote, “do not know the sensuous pleasure of eating in the room where the food is cooked.” For Peggy, losing a year of school because of the whooping cough gave her the rare privilege of observing the daily routines of her parents; losing her home in a fire was, ultimately, a merciful simplifying of material existence. Even losing a child—which Peggy did, twice—was in its way liberating, she realized, because after a year of wanting only to die, she wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

****

I’ve taken breaks from writing this essay to drop Sage off at pre-school. She goes to University Child Development, which is across the street from my office and is, in fact, the pre-school I attended in the early 1970s. It’s housed in the University United Methodist Church, which was my family’s church when I was little. On the same block, at the other end of the alley, is the big colonial house my grandparents lived in from 1955 to 1986, still known in the neighborhood as the McHenry House. The snowy walks down that alley on Christmas Eve—first to church for the service, then back to Nana and Granddad’s for gift opening—seem, in retrospect, the happiest moments of my childhood, a perfect little snow globe in memory’s box of polished miniatures.

The church is a long, low-slung and not very handsome building of buff-colored brick. It was built in the ’60s, on the lot where the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon’s home and study previously stood. Sheldon was the pastor of Central Congregational Church and a national celebrity, having written the novel “In His Steps,” the story of a Congregationalist minister who challenges his flock to ask themselves the question “What would Jesus do?” when confronted by any difficult choice. According to Wikipedia, it’s now the 39th best-selling book of all time, more or less tied with Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls.”
 
The Sheldon home must have been stately in its day, but my Uncle Mark told me that by the ’50s it was dilapidated. The study was a squarish, brown outbuilding that Mark called “an interesting little anomaly off that old alley.” My great-grandmother, Deb, was a Sheldon parishioner and devotee, and before the house could be razed to make way for the church, she arranged to have the study moved to a nearby park. Well into her eighties, she would spend her afternoons in the study as a docent, giving public “tours” of its one room—telling stories about Sheldon’s rolltop desk, his eyeglasses and the fountain pen from which “What would Jesus do?” first flowed.

****

My reasons for resisting Christianity are various and banal: I dislike the idea that there’s one true faith and aren’t we lucky to have been born in a place where it’s practiced? A friend who remembers singing “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love” at church camp says she always thought it should’ve been, “And they’ll know we are Christians because this is rural Michigan.” I don’t share William Empson’s view that Christianity is fundamentally a “system of torture-worship,” but I understand why he called it that. I do see the love, the astonishing love, in Christ’s sacrifice, but not in the system that required it, with its insistence that someone had to suffer. And I distrust the Christian narrative for the same reason I distrust all just-so stories—because it seems like an easy way out of complexity and ambiguity.

I’m sure that my brother, Andrew, an evangelical Christian and a Congregationalist minister, has ready responses to all of these objections. And I’m sure that observers of a more liberal Christianity have very different and equally persuasive responses, which my brother might call heresies. And I’m sure that I could come up with some pretty good responses to all of these responses, if I looked into it. But these aren’t conversations I’m eager to have, because I don’t think that asking faith to bend to the rules of reason is any fairer than asking reason to stand down in the face of faith. We choose our belief systems intuitively, then justify them after the fact—the same way we choose a president. And I think that’s the way it has to be.

So what did Blaise Pascal philosoph, anyway? I remember the words “Pascal’s Wager” from some philosophy primer for 19-year-olds, but that’s about it. Again I turn to Wikipedia, which is second only to God in its omniscience and mystery: Pascal contended that “the wise decision is to wager that God exists, since ‘If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing,’ meaning one can gain eternal life if God exists, but if not, one will be no worse off in death than if one had not believed.”

Pascal was not arguing for any particular faith, I don’t think, but his argument does speak to my strongest—and, I promise, my final—objections to Christianity: that it is coercive, and that it coerces by appealing not merely to reason but to cynical self-interest, which is the last thing religion ought to be trying to foster. How does God feel, I wonder, about being regarded not as a transcendent good but as a safe bet? How does the “truth” feel about setting you free only from the less-desirable “dare”?

****

And yet… and yet… Here’s a little poem by Thomas R. Smith:

Housewarming

In my dream I was the first to arrive
at the old home from the church. Wind
and night had forced through the cracks.
I pushed inside, turned on the lamps,
lit a fire in the stove. Frozen oak
logs stung my fingers; it was good
pain, my hands reddening on the icy
broom-handle as I swept away snow.
On Christmas Eve, I prepared a warm
place for my mother and father, sister
and brothers, grandparents, all my relatives,
none dead, none missing, none angry
with another, all coming through the woods.

I return again and again to this poem, and to others like it: “The Rescued Year” by William Stafford, “Under the Clock” by Tony Harrison—poems that seem as obsessed as I am with the recovery of what has been lost. They sound a note that finds my resonant frequency, and I shake like a windowpane. They are my sacred texts. Here’s another one, a prose passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping”:

“[E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

I walk through the church of my childhood, agnostic, but animated by a feeling as irresistible as it is irrational. Some days it’s a hope, some days an intuition. “The arc,” Kay Ryan writes, “is part of a circle.” “What are these fragments for,” Marilynne Robinson writes, “if not to be knit up finally?” Surely home is where we are headed. Surely we are all going to be together again.

****

I’ve taken breaks to visit my grandparents, too. They’re in the assisted-living wing of the Brewster Place Retirement Community, down a few hallways from where we visited Deb 30 years ago, and where, the way things are going, my grandchildren will visit me. My grandmother, Elizabeth Schenck McHenry, is 88, and is the third and final Elizabeth Schenck in this essay. When my brother was born, she chose “Nana” as her grandmotherly name, so that she could be one of the first words he said. When my grandfather, James McHenry, Sr., turned 70, he decided he was done aging numerically and would begin aging alphabetically. In February he will turn 70-T.

Nana and Granddad move glacially and with great discomfort. Nana has had both hips replaced, and began using a walker nearly 15 years ago. In 1999, Granddad got out of their minivan to help her into a restaurant, but left it in neutral, and when it began to roll backwards he tried to jump in and stop it. The open door pushed him to the ground, and the front wheel rolled over him, crushing his pelvis. For a few weeks we thought we might lose him, but he rallied. Longevity runs in the family. His Aunt Pearl lived to see three centuries—she died just a few years ago at 110.

Granddad won’t make it to 70-Double-N, though. He seems to have a fall every few months, compression-fracturing some vertebrae each time. Then he waits in even greater discomfort for his appointment with the surgeon, who injects a kind of cement into the bones.

I’ve been reading Peggy’s memoir to them in the late afternoons. They both knew and loved Peggy, and the passages about her bringing water to the threshing crew or bringing in the chickens before a thunderstorm remind Granddad of the summers he spent on his own grandparents’ farm. One day he told me that our afternoon reading sessions were the only times he was without pain. I told him I felt privileged to have these hours with him and Nana, and that reading the memoir was like being in Peggy’s company, again, too. It’s an unsentimental book, full of pain and untimely death, as life was in rural Missouri in 1905. But Granddad does seem soothed by the stories, even when they take a dark turn. He pushes the button that reclines his easy chair as I begin to read:

“Funerals were held in the church. No undertakers served our community. … Neighbors came and ‘sat up’ with the sick and, when death came, washed and dressed the body. Sometimes a casket was purchased but more often Hugh Harper made one, a plain wooden box which women lined with cotton batting and covered with white muslin. Neighbors dug the grave and took the casket to church in a farm wagon. The minister spoke long and solemnly, picturing the person already in heaven, free from suffering and greeting those who had gone before. … The coffin was lowered into the fresh clay, unsoftened by mortician’s grass or florist’s wreaths. People brought flowers from their own gardens if any were in bloom. Family and friends stood by until the grave was filled. … If a child died the parents were told that Jesus needed another angel and how much better it was that the little one had been spared the pain and sorrow of living. But despite the pain and sorrow and the anticipated joys of heaven, people clung to life. It might be a vale of tears, but not even the most earnest believers want to leave it.”

I look up from the page. Nana is leaning forward in her chair, ready for the next passage. Granddad’s eyes are closed, his mouth open. I have sung him to sleep.