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Jack Gilbert, Our George Bailey
A month ago I had milestone birthday, one of those digits that officially disqualifies you from making another youthful blunder, like wearing a miniskirt or growing a hipster beard or thinking you have forever to live out your dream.
I have terrible timing. I left the Groundlings comedy troupe, to pursue an MFA in screenwriting so I could learn to write stories beyond the “three-minute sketch with wigs.” Right after I left, several of my cast mates got hired on Saturday Night Live, as actors and writers. Yay! But I finished my MFA at age 34 … whereupon a writing guru told me that if you don’t make it as a comedy writer by 30, you’re considered over the hill. I moved to New York to pursue a writing job that promptly fell through. Years later, I moved back to LA to revive my acting career, just as the movie Searching For Debra Winger was released – a documentary featuring a bunch of A-list actresses who couldn’t get work after age 40. I had just turned 41.
And I just found out that the year my book came out, 2009, was one of the worst years for book sales. (Wall Street meltdown, consumers didn’t have the money to buy and publishers didn’t have the money to publicize). Ah, so maybe THAT is why my book made only “respectable sales” and why my publisher passed on my second book. It’s not enough to be respectable; you need to be a hit. I’m considering taking a nom de plumeand writing Amish fiction. Or Amish vampires.
Regret can destroy you. You will spend your life like Lady Macbeth, trying to wash away the evidence of your guilt and failure. You will look for others to blame or blame yourself. You will tell yourself you’re a loser.
I have been able to teach. It doesn’t replace your longing to DO the thing you’re teaching. But you get out of your own drama, you get to help and encourage others. And actually your own work gets better in the process. Everybody wins. Over the years teaching, I’ve gotten to know Jack better – that writing guru who sounded the post-thirty comedy death-knell. Jack wanted to be a screenwriter and never made it; but he became a well respected teacher and mentor. At one point he ran the Warner Bros. writing workshop. Two years ago I started teaching at the same Christian college where he had become a fixture. And I started to catch a glimpse of the scores of hopeful writers he taught, prodded, mentored, and loved.
The day before my birthday, Jack emailed to say he couldn’t make my party; he’d come down with pneumonia. I decided to visit him the following week. I’d had plenty of casual encounters with Jack, from church retreats to writing seminars to group lunches in the college cafeteria. But this time I could sit with him a while, share stories, and pray for him. And it might be the first one-on-one conversation I’d had with him in years.
The day before I was due to stop by Jack’s place, our mutual friend Jan texted me to say she was taking Jack to the hospital. I couldn’t visit him there, his immune system couldn’t risk much exposure to bacteria. Over the next few days Jan sat vigil at the hospital, keeping his friends updated, getting out the word to pray. By the end of the week a thousand-member facebook group was praying for Jack to get better.
But Jack got worse. I asked Jan if I could come to the hospital to visit her: she’d been there nearly 24/7 the past five days. She and her husband were on a writing deadline, shuttling kids to and from school, and trying not not fall apart.
I arrived on a Sunday afternoon during a downpour. Jan’s husband arrived a while later. Jan was pacing the halls, trying to unlock the password on Jack’s phone. She needed to call Jack’s friends, she said. They needed to come to the hospital. They needed to say goodbye.
We prayed for a miracle. The world needed Jack – the world and all the young hopeful writers who needed someone with Jack’s wisdom and decency, who’d tell them the truth about their work, and how not to miss those deadlines and how to be a decent human being in a field where decency was scarce. But sometimes you don’t get the miracle you asked for.
It was my turn to go say goodbye. I told him how I was angry at myself for the time I’d seen him in the cafeteria, sitting alone reading, but didn’t go sit with him because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say. I asked Jack to go fin my father and my mentor Les, a comedy writer who’d come to Jesus just a year before his death. I know they would have a lot of laughs together. I also asked Jack if he would go find my cat, Honey and pet her, and tell her I would see her soon. Well, soon on their timetable. Forever on mine.
If you’ve ever had to do this, to say this kind of goodbye, it defines the meaning of “surreal.” It is above and beyond normal reality. It’s shocking, yet it is the very definition of what is solid and true: this is where life ends and your faith begins. Either you’re going to see this man again, or you’re not. If these precious moments ideas we have about heaven are just that? Ideas? What if there is no resurrection from the dead? Then we are all screwed. And even the happy stories of the world end in tears.
I touched his hand, turned and left.
The ICU waiting room began to fill up with Jack’s friends. I knew some of them fairly well, some not at all. But we recognized each other: we shared that same face: slackjawed with shock and impending grief. And we had Jack in common. We’d all been mentored or taught or befriended or loved by the same man.
Jack died Monday night. I was teaching at Pepperdine when I got the call.
Tuesday afternoon I had to go teach Jack’s classes. These were undergrad kids, some no older than 18. This may have been the first time they lost someone who mattered to them. We spent the time sharing what we’d learned from Jack. One student said that Jack could always find the thread of gold in the mountain of garbage that was his script. Another one said she didn’t know if she could write at all. But Jack told her she had talent and she needed to work at it – because she was worth it.
A few nights later a group gathered to share our memories about Jack. Two stand out to me.
The first was something Jan’s husband, Lee, said back at the hospital. “Jack was Best Man in our wedding…I don’t know if I was Jack’s best friend, because he had so many. But he was definitely my mine. ” He paused a moment. “Jack was George Bailey.”
George Bailey is Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” who sacrifices his own dreams for others, but without whom the world would have been a meaner place. Lee was right. Jack was George Bailey. Without him we’d all be living in Pottersville.
The other was shared by a TV comedy producer who’d known Jack when they were both at Warner Bros. Fred is Jewish and hadn’t had much exposure to Christianity. But as a child he’d seen the film, Green Pastures, a black gospel musical. God was played by William Warfield, the commanding baritone who sang “Old Man River” in Show Boat. “I met William Warfield years later. When I saw him I thought, that’s what God looks like! And when I met Jack Gilbert I thought, that’s what Jesus looks like.”
There’s an old short story by J.R.R. Tolkein titled, “Leaf By Niggle.” Niggle is a painter. He is obsessed with a tree he sees in his mind. The tree is magnificent and expansive, harboring birds, and through the branches he can glimpse the mountains beyond. But he can’t get the tree onto the canvas. He’s got bits and pieces here and there. One beautiful leaf he’s able to draw.
But he keeps getting interrupted by people who need him. There’s the farmer down the road who needs his help; his wife is sick and needs to be driven to hospital some miles away. And then the neighbor’s roof leaks, and it’s making his wife dangerously ill. So the government comes and takes Niggle’s canvas to patch up the neighbor’s roof. Time goes by, Niggle never gets the painting done. His neighbor dies and so does the wife. Niggle dies eventually. He never finished the painting. All that remains is one exquisitely painted leaf. A library has the artwork framed. But then it’s lost in a fire. There is nothing left on earth of Niggle.
But up in heaven, Niggle is there. So is his neighbor, who didn’t believe in heaven until he saw it through Niggle’s actions. They stand there enjoying a tree – the very tree Niggle imagined in his mind but could never realize. There it is, in all its magnificent reality: birds nesting in its branches and magnificent mountains shining in the distance. And it’s Niggle’s to sit and enjoy.
I imagine right now Jack is collaborating with Les on some screenplay soon to begin filming. Maybe my father is laughing along, adding a joke here or there, delighted to know his daughter made sure Jack looked him up.
Jack Gilbert was George Bailey and Niggle.
And we miss you, Jack.
Lent Is Not A Self Help Program
Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, when the faithful honor Jesus’ forty-day temptation in the wilderness by abstaining from booze, sex, and facebook; whereas on the day before, Mardi Gras, the unfaithful go to New Orleans to film Girls Gone Wild videos.
“Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday.” The Anglicans call it “Shrove Tuesday” and celebrate by eating pancakes. I wondered if “shrove” was Anglican for “fat.” After all, pancakes can make you fat; just look at the church’s founder, King Henry VIII. Man, that guy was shrove. He looked like he spent Shrove Tuesday at IHOP, slept through Lent, Ramadan style, then woke up and ate a few easter hams. Surely “shrove” meant fat. But when I looked up “shrove” in the dictionary, it said it meant “the past participle of “shrive.” Oh, right; how could I forget? Okay, so then I looked up “shrive,” which means to confess and be absolved of guilt. So there it is: pancakes eaten on Shrove Tuesday have been absolved of calories. Everybody wins.
My husband and I have attended an Episcopal church for four years. We had aged out of the hipster church model and needed something less prone to celebrity pastor flameouts. I grew up Lutheran, so the liturgy has felt familiar and even grounding to me. Of course it has its annoyances. One Sunday the choir sang a tortuously dull hymn whose sole value was that marked the 14th Sunday after Pentecost. I actually found myself longing for a Chris Tomlin rock anthem. But I do love the liturgy, and I’ve come to appreciate the church calendar. And my favorite church season is Lent, which continues through Holy Week and ends on Easter Sunday. You can read last year’s post on Holy Week here.
I started observing Lent a few years ago when I sensed God asking me to give up one specific thing: Driving While Righteous. Hey, I live in Los Angeles, a city crowded with überrich primadonnas and the resentful blue-collars who take out their trash. I’ve watched BMW’s plow through red lights and use the emergency shoulder to get a single car length ahead. I’ve been the object of road rage for driving the speed limit in the slow lane. I fantasize about shooting out their tires. Driving While Righteous has been on my Lenten abstinence list for six years. Because clearly I’m not learning the lesson.
This will be the second Lent that I’m giving up Facebook and Twitter. This one is actually a relief. There’s too much pressure to “like” someone’s band or hide one political extremist friend from another. Besides, I waste far too much time on those sites – time I could spend praying, writing, or dealing with my righteous indignation before I get behind the wheel.
Before you dismiss abstaining from social media, think about the amount of spiritual energy generated around the globe from the simple act of prayer. Visualize it as a huge, electrical grid connecting the world with light and heat of the Holy Spirit. Now, visualize Mark Zuckerberg in his black hoodie, throwing the switch and causing a global spiritual brown-out. We can even monetize that energy drain: Facebook’s impending IPO could net over a hundred billion dollars. A hundred. Billion. Dollars. Imagine what God could do with a hundred billion dollars worth of our prayers.
I headed to Ash Wednesday service, geared up for my social media blackout. But Reverend Anne said something that got my attention: Lent is not a self-help program. It’s a crash course in getting real with God. She made a few points that stuck with me.
- Why do we have ashes imposed on our forehead? To remind us of the truth we only think about when a child is born or a person dies: we belong to God. He is who we came from, and he is to whom we will return. What shape we return in depends on what we do with all those in between years.
- Two: take an inventory. What is that one sin you have a hard time giving up? I knew what mine was: entitlement. I did all this awesome stuff for God, so why didn’t he bless me, the way he’d blessed everyone within my arms length? I didn’t want to go out and buy a BMW with a machine gun mounted on it. I wanted to make a living doing what I am good at. I wanted to adopt a boy from Ethiopia. How can these be extravagant dreams?
- “Or maybe it isn’t a sin,” Reverend Anne continued. “Maybe it’s a deep wound in your soul that is so enormous you cannot let anyone near it, least of all God.”
BULLSEYE. I knew exactly what it was. It was the wound that regularly shows up in my dreams, in the hours I cannot sleep, and in the dread I feel at the first hint of waking. It is that deep sorrow over a lifelong dream that God seems to have kept out of my reach. It leaves me feeling unblessed, uncherished, unloved by God. My reaction in my dreams is always the same: rage and grief that destroys everything and everyone. My reaction when I wake up is the same, too: get coffee, turn on the computer and cover it up, with productivity, busywork, or any of the internet sites that serve to numb one’s pain.
An actor friend I talk to about three times a year emailed me last week. He had been praying that morning and God gave him a word about me. The gist was, “There’s something you’re afraid to do, but God wants you to go for it and have fun wiht it.” I knew what it was: a creative project I’ve been procrastinating on, for fear that God will refuse to bless it, my lifelong dream will die and I will have to become a legal secretary. And all that grief I keep at bay will finally destroy me. This is the wound that is so overwhelming I won’t let God near it.
And you know, God doesn’t have to bless it, does he? How many of us want good things: to be married, or to have children, or to adopt a particular boy in Ethiopia, or get out of debt, or (insert that longing you have here). How many of us have done as much as we can to fulfill that dream, teetering on the edge of of having our hearts shattered?
It has been five days since Ash Wednesday. Every day I have woken up to that dread, got my cup of coffee, and opened … not a blank journal. The first days I filled the pages up with some classic spew: anger, grief, tears, embarrassment. It was messy. It continues to be messy. I didn’t get any clarifying response from God. However, having gotten that spew out of the way I’ve actually been able to make some headway on that project I’d been procrastinating over.
This Lent is going to be difficult. It’s going to be about opening the wound my hard heart is so sure God does not care enough to heal. But what other choice do I have? What choice do any of us have? Sometimes you get to a place in your life where you can no longer NOT do that thing you know you were supposed to do. Regardless of the outcome.
It’s going to be a long forty days. I pray I’m not the same person come Easter morning.
To the Artist: What Makes Your Heart Ache?
I got to speak at George Fox University a couple of weeks ago. I sat down with Sara Baldwin, the dean of Spiritual Life. She asked me some interesting questions for the artist starting out.
Um, I have no control over what frame YouTube grabs for the image. I look startled, but I promise: this video contains no discussion of ghosts or socialism taking over America.
I Remember Crafts
Crafts. Remember crafts? The lost art of relaxation. I used to have time to do crafts. I wish I had more time to do them now; maybe later. Or maybe it’s one of those “I’ll rest when I’m dead” items.
One thing I liked to do was make tea cozies. I started off knitting cozies with wool and then felting them. Then I thought, I could buy old sweaters, felt them, and use the felted sweaters as raw fabric. I got kinda good at them and fancied selling them on Etsy. Until I saw some of the crazy-good work by others on etsy. And anyway it was too labor intensive. I should be so diligent at writing screenplays, which sell for a lot more money than a cozy.
I do knit, and I do still enjoy making cozies to give to friends. Here are two favorites.This one was made from a boiled wool jacket I found at the Goodwill. I made it for a friend who’s a classic beauty and has lots of red in her kitchen. I used the lapel for the opening on one side.
This is a Christmas Tree Cozy. I made a couple and gave one to my sister-in-law. She’s German, a classical pianist. Just listening to her laugh with glee over receiving it was worth the time spent.
Heaven
Two days ago I took Pinky, our young cat, in for her second flu shot. She’s eight months old now and nearly full grown, so I can’t really call her a kitten.
As I got up to go to the register, I heard the clerk speaking to someone about when they could “pick up the ashes.” My heart sank. When I got to the desk I saw the customer: a tall youngish man with his wife. They had a tiger-colored cat in a crate. The husband was trying to be upbeat and keep it together, for the cat’s sake and for his wife. She was pregnant and emotional. I heard the clerk say, “We can put you in a room in the back to say goodbye.” The wife stood there alone and crying while the husband dealt with the clerk. I started to cry myself, and couldn’t help but go to her and touch her lightly on the arm. ”I went through this not long ago. It’s the worst thing in the world.”
She nodded, pursed her lips in an attempt to smile through the tears, and looked away. I immediately regretted stepping in to her space. But I also I wanted to tell her to read “The Last Battle,”By C.S. Lewis. It was one of the only things that gave me any small comfort when Honey died. Not that I could have been comforted. It took months to stop crying at the drop of a hat. But if this grieving mother to be had any inkling of the afterlife, any shred of belief, she might take comfort in knowing this is not all. This is not the end. These creatures have more chance at Paradise than we do. After all, they never sinned to bring this whole thing down.
I got into my car with Pinky and wept openly. How awful death is. What a robbery. Whether it’s a pet or a friend or relative, or someone you don’t know. It’s a rip off of the highest order.
My brother in law posted this youtube video that’s been going around: A teenage kid who’s got a heart condition. The boy did one of those postcard stories, sharing how he had cheated death many times. And most recently jus a few days before he posted it. He shares what he saw. How he didn’t want to come back.
Spoiler Alert: Watch this before you read on.
If you keep up with the news, you know that this young man died this past Christmas Day, just two weeks after he made this video. He died on Christmas. When I found this out, I cried again. And though his video is inspiring and full of hope — as to what lies beyond — I couldn’t help feeling angry and hurt, that his family was ripped off. RIPPED. OFF. Why does God allow it, why do the wicked prosper, why do the godly suffer?
There is a some comfort to his family that he made this video. That they know he is very much alive, and it’s only us who are left in the valley of tears. I do believe in what’s next. You can call it Heaven or The Afterlife. I tend to side with N.T. Wright, that there’s more to Eternity than the thing we’ve come to call Heaven … people floating around singing and feeling generally awesome. I tend to think that eternity will be played out here, in a renewed world, a renewed universe. Maybe by then Jupiter will be a plane ride away, and we will be busy inhabiting all the worlds and multiverses that scientists have only just begin to imagine.
But in the meantime there are tears.
And I still cry when I think of Honey.
Pinky is very much like her. They have the same body type, the shape of their heads are similar. They both have soft fur. And they’re both very affectionate. Pinky rushes to the door when we come home. When I wake up she comes running to greet me. The kinds of things Honey did when she was young and spry. And well, there is this, too:
Which is what Honey did.
We saw “War Horse” last night. All I can say is, if you love animals you will have to bring hankies. On several occasions I had to tell myself, “It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.” It wasn’t the impact of war on humans, but on the animals. Poor innocent animals. I’m sure it’s the season for emotions, but I can’t help thinking that if God does not have a place for all these innocents, then heaven/the afterlife will not be fair or good or full of grace. And the whole point of it, is that it will be a place where there is justice and goodness and grace. And the innocents will be there. Not just innocent animals but people of all kinds who sought to do right and honor God. And before you balk at that, remember if heaven is a place where there is no more sin or decay or corruption or pride, then you and I have NO GROUNDS to be there unless God is good, merciful, and gracious.
My cousin posted a video of her parents’ 45th wedding anniversary back in 1991. Our family is in the video: there are snippets of me with no wrinkles and bad hair. My sister is so young and of course beautiful. We are both wearing outfits with obscenely large shoulder pads. There’s one snippet of my father sitting on a couch, doing what he did so often: subjecting someone to some arcane bit of history; nodding, gesticulating with his arms as if his hand movements would make the bit of the story come alive in the listener’s mind. Classic Dad.
David Sedaris wrote a lot about his mother. She never allowed anyone to take her picture. So after she died, he and his sisters had no photo album to reminisce over. No photos, no old family movies. But at their mother’s funeral, some cousins brought them a clip from a long-forgotten vacation. They’d actually captured, on an old Super-8 camera, the image of Sedaris’ mom, walking into a bar. They transferred it to video and gave it them. The clip was probably no more than eight seconds long. David and his sisters sat in front of the TV, playing that little video clip over and over and over.
I have no doubt that my father is off somewhere, regaling someone with a story. I have often prayed to God that he introduce Dad to my mentor Roy, who died a few years ago. They both got in at the last minute. I’m sure they have a lot of stories to share. Dad loved a good joke, and Roy made a handsome living writing jokes for Johnny Carson. I’m sure they are laughing where they are.
And here, for now, there are tears.
Angry Convos Solo Show: NYC
I’ve taken an embarrassingly long time to get this up on its feet. Finally, the full-length version of my solo show, “in workshop” (aka testing it out) of ANGRY CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, in New York in November. If your’e in the area, please come.
Runs in LA and other environs to come, based on interest.
Saving Valentina
Whales migrate south to the Sea of Cortez (Mexico) in winter, and there are whale conservancies that monitor their behavior. Some time back I heard a person on NPR talk of having real encounters with whales there: they’d come up alongside the boat and play! It made me want to go there some day.
This past Valentine’s Day a member of the ___ conservancy came upon a young whale caught in a net, and dying. They spent an hour trying to get her free. Here’s what happened.
