The Fickle Days

Ryan Rosenberg

I sometimes get scared about my lack of formal religion. Although my last name is Rosenberg, my childhood years were comprised of stringing popcorn and cranberries together with a sewing needle as snow draped the windowsills before Christmas, and spring days of painting Peter Rabbit in watercolors on fragile white Easter eggs from the grocery store.

I wonder, though, about whether I’ve missed out on a soothing spoonful of something that might securely glaze over my peeling, cracking, thumping chest when I start to think about the hovering valleys of existence. Yet, I’m grateful that I inhaled Hinduism in the same way that I inhaled Christianity when I took a World Religions course at the drip-drop age of sixteen. My mind is open. “That was the point,” my mother said.

Some weeks ago, in grappling with the laminated title of “eighteen-years- old,” I found myself cross-legged in the office of my former English teacher, Mr. Wood, ready to absorb any scrap of meaning he had to offer me. The natural light from the window, glossing his gold hair, gave him a halo, and it never ceased to remind me to breathe. I began by rambling, as I often did. School was good, but what was I trying to make of my senior year? Why did I suddenly feel so old? We usually didn’t know, but we tried to figure it all out. As the next period of classes was about to begin, Mr. Wood hit me with some words that soothed me, scared me. He told me about an Emerson quote that a contemporary writer, Annie Dillard, also worked with.

“I might get it tattooed on my arm,” he said. “What is it?” I said eagerly. “’No one suspects the days to be gods.’” And after some debate about whether we thought “gods” was supposed to have a capital G and an apostrophe before the S, we concluded that “gods” made sense and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I’ve made these words my religion, I think. I’ve come to believe that the days really are gods, that each one is meant to teach us a lesson, and that being present and aware is the only way you’ll gulp it down. I’ve even wondered if the days are specifically Greek gods and goddesses. Maybe Aphrodite kissed the sunrise on the mornings when I feel a loving spark buzzing in my chest, or maybe Poseidon had his pick on the calendar when streets flood with water and people drive boats like cars, even though they’re not in Venice. Or maybe not. Maybe there is no tangible god at all; rather, the day’s natural events, the way they influence you and others and coincide with different events, makes the actual components of the days bewilderingly sacred.

Shortly after my talk with Mr. Wood, the shiny approach had already kicked in. I started to look for holiness in everything—especially things that seemed the opposite. In yoga class it wasn’t the meditation or the vibrancy of my third eye that captured me, but instead the conversations with the vivacious, white-haired women in their 70s, who did headstands with strength. I felt they radiated a sacred essence.

One day after school, I was waiting in the parking lot for my mom to pick me up. As I waited, a teacher whom I’d never really talked to before walked by and she said, “My best childhood memories come from waiting.” I’ve thought about that a lot since that afternoon. The trees and the grass and the flowers hummed when I walked the dogs with my mom. I positioned my mind to think about things like how the colors that we dye on clothing and the makeup we paint our faces with all came only from the sky, the earth, and how really everything came from only the sky, the earth. I started to notice more.

A few days before Christmas Eve, I slept over at my grandparents’ apartment in New York City, so I could do some last minute shopping. That night, after I had taken a warm shower, put on a comfortably fraying pair of my grandmother’s pajamas, and combed back my wet hair, I had the impulsive idea to scurry down the nighttime streets to go see the Christmas tree at the Met before the museum closed. My grandmother agreed, although she always took serious convincing when wet hair and cold air were both in the picture. When we finally got to the museum, rosy cheeked and out of breath, we entered the Medieval Art wing and there stood the glowing tree. The angels swept the branches, and the figurines by the trunk of the tree were busy doing whatever they were doing, just like we were. And although I know that there are religious symbols beyond the tree itself and that the name of the town portrayed probably has a name from the Bible, I couldn’t tell it to you. But I know that on a cold, dark night in December when my grandmother and I snuck out in our pajamas to a cove of candles and colors and people in the city doing the same exact thing, that something felt right.

My younger sisters made fun of my new outlook. When I complimented my mom on the night’s dinner, Georgia would ask, giggling, “Is the steak a god?” She had a point, but I wasn’t letting go. On Sundays, when my parents drove me and my sisters and brother home from our late evening tennis lesson, I watched the water bordering the highway. The sky’s lights grew dim and the colors streaked as if inside a marble. But I mostly watched the way my mom readily turned up the volume with her right hand when her favorite Chicago song played, and the way she clasped my dad’s free hand with her left one.

When things went right for me, it was easy to spot the sacredness that wove together the mornings and the nights. When things went wrong, it was harder. Beginning in the first months of my senior year, I grew a crush on this boy. For weeks on weeks, my days were consumed with whether this boy and I had spoken, whether we had made eye contact, or whether we did not. I was hyper-aware of my actions and when the school day ended, I would reflect on the day’s events, revolving around my progress with him. In the end, nothing became of this crush and I was kicking myself for allowing my mind to so intricately weave itself into something that it had basically made up on its own. And though for a while this bothered me, I came to realize something big. Even though the boy meant nothing, he somehow was a bridge that allowed me to wake up to the days’ events. I was aware that my senior year was fleeting and that I was eager to hold on, so for that “woken up feeling,” I was actually grateful. Looking back, I can remember less about the way he barely glanced at me in the hallway and more about the way I felt. I remember independently walking to the dining hall for my ritual Monday lunch date with my book, before heading to Poetry Club, and how after a while I slowly came to understand that those things were far more nourishing.

A couple of Mondays ago a bomb went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people died and 282 people were injured. “Is today a god?” I wondered to myself. I didn’t know and I didn’t begin to make remote sense of it until I saw an article in The New York Times a few days ago that pinpointed specific people who were at the marathon and their recollections of the day. One woman, Kristine Biagiotti, ran the marathon pushing her 18-year-old daughter, Kayla, who has mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, in a wheelchair. Kristine said of the day, “Kayla had her hand raised in the air; people had been cheering for her all along the course. All of the sudden there was an explosion. We saw a runner go down; people were screaming. The one thing I’m thankful for is the positioning of Kayla in her wheelchair; she was sheltered from the scene and was thinking that the big noise was part of the celebration for her finishing. She never saw the carnage. For Kayla, with all of this horror, she still has that picture of a beautiful day.”

I only know that Kayla’s own day was a faithful god. And maybe it will take time for me to understand why something like this happened, or maybe time won’t matter, but I don’t know where to start.

“The gods were fickle,” Mr. Ives, my ninth grade history teacher, wrote on the white board, as we delved into Ancient Greece. Just like the Grecian gods, the days are also fickle. There is no pattern; there is no shape. Emerson wrote in “The Oversoul,” “If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature.”

All that I’ve come to really understand so far is that it is vital to watch the days breathe and watch the days perform. I think they might be trying to say something too.