Jean Valjean, Good Samaritan

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

As the story of the Good Samaritan is today’s Gospel reading, I turn to one of literature’s great Good Samaritan figures. I’m thinking of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, whose selfless rescue of Marius—he carries the wounded man through the sewers of Paris in an epic journey—grips the reader as few stories do. The fact that Marius, as Jean Valjean sees it, robbing him of his beloved Cosette makes the Good Samaritan parallel all the stronger. He has reasons to dislike the young man but saves him anyway.

For a reminder, here’s the original story:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37)

Rather than focus on Jean Valjean, however, I want to figure on another Good Samaritan figure, the bishop who teaches him Jesus’s message in the first place. Jean Valjean, who has spent years as a galley slave for stealing food for his hungry family, has stolen silver tableware from a kindly bishop. The bishop has taken him in when no one else would, leaving the ex-con bewildered at the prelate’s subsequent actions. Jean Valjean has just been captured by the police and brought before him:

“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—”

“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake.”

“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”

“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the gendarmes.

“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

“You may retire, gentlemen.”

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

After a momentary lapse, which gets him into trouble again, Jean Valjean devotes the rest of his life to becoming a honest man. He becomes a beneficent factory owner, a beloved guardian to orphaned Cosette, and a savior to Javert, the policeman who has been relentlessly pursuing him. (Unfortunately, this act of pure Christian benevolence so upends Javert’s traditional view of world that, rather than having a Pauline road-to-Damascus conversion, the inspector commits suicide.) And then there’s the rescue of Marius.

Jesus’s radical vision of love, in other words, can have profound effects, rippling out into a world that desperately needs it. When we embrace it, we no longer belong to evil but to good.

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Coates’s Message to White Allies

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2022

Friday

Sometimes I’ll come across a passage in a novel that throws me back in my seat. This happened recently with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Water Dancer where the slave narrator (Hiram Walker) assesses a white plantation owner who is, contrary to appearances, a key figure in the underground railroad. If Corinne Quinn were discovered, she would lose everything—her privileged status, her wealth, probably her life. Why would a privileged woman, he wonders, risk everything for the sake of abolition?

Her own explanation is that she has grasped a truth that we also find in Hegel’s master-slave paradox, where the master is enslaved by his enslaving. Here’s how Quinn puts it:

Power makes slaves of masters, for it cuts them away from the world they claim to comprehend. But I have given up my power, you see, given it up, so that now I might begin to see.

Hiram, however, has a more cynical interpretation. While he admires Quinn’s work, he does not see it as selfless. In fact, he detects an element of vanity in it:

Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because if offended a basic sense of goodness that they believe themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their position was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.

I am reminded here of Brother Jack and the Brotherhood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In a dig against Communism, Ellison objects to the way that a grand ideology, even one with laudable objectives, sometimes cannot see actual people. Ellison captures this blindness by giving Jack a glass eye.

To be sure, Hiram doesn’t dismiss Quinn quite so thoroughly since he values her as a fellow combatant. In fact, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is working through his own ambivalence about white liberal allies. On the one hand, he sees elements of privilege and selfishness behind their actions. On the other, he realizes that liberation can only be achieved if Blacks and socially conscious Whites work together.

The message for Whites is to realize, like Quinn, that you are only free when everyone is free—and to also realize that the very freedom to pick your battles is a privileged position. The oppressed  don’t have that luxury.

I saw political scientist John Stoehr make a similar point recently in a column where he complained about white liberals sitting out elections. Often they don’t see the urgency of voting because their white privilege cushions them against the horrors of rightwing authoritarians coming to power:

White liberals, even now, after a preponderance of the evidence to the contrary, still believe that it’s up to the leaders of the Democratic Party to give Democratic voters a reason to vote in November. If they lose, white liberals say, the Democrats will only have themselves to blame.

What does enthusiasm have to do with self-preservation?

I don’t know about you, but when someone’s drowning, I don’t want the lifeguard asking beachgoers to inspire him to do his damn job.

In short, stop complaining that the Democratic Party isn’t catering to your every position. Stop thinking that Joe Biden has to be perfect. Forget about disillusion and consider what will happen to non-Whites if fascism prevails. And then recall the words of Saadi Shrazi, in a poem that I also owe to a Stoehr column:

To worship God is nothing other than to serve the people.
It does not need rosaries, prayer carpets or robes.
All peoples are members of the same body, created from one essence.
If fate brings suffering to one member
The others cannot stay at rest.

See people as people in their own right, not just as comments on yourself. Then let your concern for them drive your political action.

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Help! My Mom’s Having Trouble Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2022
Delphin Enjolras, Woman Reading by Window

Thursday

In today’s post, I’m asking readers for advice. My 96-year-old mother has had a stroke and can no longer manipulate the pages of a book with her right hand. She has a tablet, given out to Chattanooga Times subscribers when the paper went digital, but the print is too small. Listening to books on disk, meanwhile, is not her cup of tea. Does anyone have other suggestions?

Imagine how traumatic this must be. My mother has been an avid reader all her life. She devoured the Little Pepper, Raggedy Ann, and Oz books when she was a girl—she recalls reading some of them by the light of the streetlamp when she was supposed to be asleep—and the passion never subsided. She was an English major at Carleton College, although unfortunately her professors—in the grip of modernism and the New Criticism—didn’t appreciate the intensity of her literary immersion into 19th century fiction. My father, who was at Carleton with her, could see it, however.

He knew, for instance, her deep love of Jane Austen, who helped shape her own wry sense of humor. (When that humor reemerged a day after her stroke, I knew we were going to be okay for a while.) I think she’s read virtually every Dickens novel (Pickwick, Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit excepted), and the only one she didn’t like was Dombey and Son. I once figured out that she’s read 17 of Anthony Trollope’s 51 novels. A couple of months ago she fell in love with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Robert Louis Stevenson has always been high on her list.

She doesn’t only read classics. She loves mystery novels, whether old (Dorothy Sayers) or new (Louise Penny). In short, she has spent her life in books, only to be denied them now.

She has a reading cushion, constructed to sit in the lap, that can hold individual pages, so if I have to print magnified versions of online books, I’ll do that. But if you have other suggestions, please send them in.

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Sickness Strikes Again

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2022
Gustave Doré, iléus. from Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Wednesday

No sooner had Julia and I recovered from Covid-omicron than we went down with sinus infections. I don’t know if this is normal but it has made caring for my invalid 96-year-old mother difficult. Whenever I get flattened by a sickness this way, I always think of Marlow’s sickness in Heart of Darkness.

To be sure, the two sicknesses can’t really be compared since Marlow almost dies whereas we, thanks to Moderna and Pfizer, knew we had every prospect of emerging healthy and whole. Nevertheless, “impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor” approximates what I felt.

In Marlow’s case, his physical sickness becomes a metaphor for his soul sickness, forcing him to confront various existential questions that he cannot answer. Foremost among these is “What is my life’s purpose?”

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

Further in the passage Marlow talks about “a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself.”

As it turns out, Marlow thinks that Kurtz, the man he has been sent to fetch, does have something to say. His admiration for this idealist-turned-fascist does not speak well for Marlow.

Incidentally, I can now report that Pfizer’s marvelous new pill, Paxlovid, has one downside: while you’re taking it, an awful taste resides in the mouth, something like metallic grapefruit. It doesn’t leave until the regimen is completed. Although the analogy is not exact, I thought of a passage from Rime of the Ancient Mariner as I was taking it:

And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

A temporary unpleasantness beats death, however. And cinnamon candy helps counteract the taste.

Wish us well. My mother has been somewhat neglected during our second bout of illness, but we anticipate being able to devote more attention to her shortly.

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Inheriting My Mother’s Poetry Column

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2022
Eugene Carriere, Woman Reading Newspaper

Tuesday

Over the past two weeks, life in our household has become very complicated. I will share in future posts the challenges of caring for my 96-year-old mother, who has become bedridden after three strokes. Today I report on how I have become heir to her poetry column in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger.

I owe equal parts to my father and my mother when it comes to my character and interests. My father was a literature professor who loved reading to us as children. I aspired to be like him and became a professor in turn. My mother, meanwhile, started the weekly town newsletter (it was the Sewanee Siren before it was the Messenger), which helped shape my desire to reach non-academic audiences. Working together with my father, she would begin every issue with a poem or timely quotation.

She and my father continued with practice in The Messenger, authoring a column they called “From Bard to Verse.” Usually they tried to find a poem that had some tie-in with Sewanee events. The beginning of the school year got a poem, as did the various holidays, election day, visiting speakers, weather events, seasonal changes, and of course Commencement. This very blog owes something to their column.

Yesterday, however, I had to inform the editor that, while my mother had chosen the topic for this week’s poem—the Sewanee Summer Music Festival—she is no longer able to provide poems for her column. I offered to continue in her place, and it appears that the editor is agreeable.

For the record, I excerpted from John Dryden “Song for St. Celia’s Day, 1687,” which rhetorically asks, “What passion cannot music raise and quell!”

The poem is not entirely appropriate since the Summer Festival focuses on symphonic instruments whereas Dryden is most enamored of the organ. The poem concludes,

But oh! what art can teach
         What human voice can reach
The sacred organ’s praise?
Notes inspiring holy love,
Notes that wing their Heav’nly ways
         To mend the choirs above.

Orpheus could lead the savage race;
And trees unrooted left their place;
                Sequacious of the lyre:
But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r;
         When to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n,
An angel heard, and straight appear’d
                Mistaking earth for Heav’n.

Still, Dryden also features trumpets, drums, flutes, and violins in his poem so I figured it would work.

Many people have told me that, upon obtaining their copy of the weekly Messenger, the first thing they do is turn to last page, where my mother’s column appears, and read the poem. I will most honor the tradition she established if the column continues to draw such attention.

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Holding America to Its Ideals

By Robin Bates | Published: July 3, 2022
John Lewis Krimmel, 4th of July, 1819, Philadelphia

Monday – Independence Day

Independence Day is for honoring the promise that is America. Often we have fallen short of that promise but, time and again, we have found our way back to it. In “I Hear America Singing,” Walt Whitman embraces multitudes, to which Langston Hughes, in “I Too Sing America,” adds an important reminder.

It is our job, as citizens, to hold America to those immortal words in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That declaration can never be repeated enough.

I Hear America Singing
By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing as he stands;
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother—or of the young wife at work—or of the girl sewing or washing—Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else;
The day what belongs to the day—At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.

I Too Sing America
By Langston Hughes

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

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The False God of Christian Nationalists

By Robin Bates | Published: July 2, 2022
Duccio de Buoninsegna, Temptation of Christ

Spiritual Sunday

According to the Guttmacher Institute, “nearly one in four women in the United States (23.7%) will have an abortion by age 45.” Many of those who have had abortions are anti-abortion Christians, who seek to deny that option from other women. They give themselves a pass by declaring that Christ forgives them, making everything okay.

I have encountered stories of women who had an abortion one day and were out protesting against abortion centers several weeks later. I also know the story of my Tennessee Congressman Scott Desjarlais, who despite having obtained two abortions for his wife and a third for a mistress, continues to be a hardcore opponent of abortion. Apparently (this according to his Wikipedia entry) he told a conservative radio host that “God has forgiven me” and “asked ‘fellow Christians’ and constituents ‘to consider doing the same.’” In other words, my Christianity allows freedom for me but not for thee.

Using Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card reminds me of character in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Spintho, on his way to martyrdom in the Colosseum, believes he can misbehave to his heart’s content because “all martyrs go to heaven, no matter what they have done.” (In a comic twist, Androcles points out to Spintho that he may die of natural causes before being martyred, causing Spintho to panic, rush off to renounce his Christianity, and accidentally run into the jaws of a lion.)

I don’t see our Christian nationalists doing even this amount of soul searching, however. For them, power is the goal, whether over women, LBGTQ folk, liberals or what have you. They ignore the powerful message in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is that love is the road to heaven and egotism the road to hell. Jesus was well aware of how people would seek to twist his words to serve the purposes of earthly power. This is why he chastised Peter (“Get thee behind me Satan”) when the disciple sought to correct him for choosing the route of the cross. If Christian nationalists are willing to turn their backs on Jesus’s message of love in return for earthly power, then they have chosen Satan as their lord and savior.

Milton knew something about this. He had been part of a revolution that thought it was bringing God’s kingdom to earth, only to see the message corrupted by power seekers. In Paradise Regained, his Christ rejects Satan’s temptation that he become the ruler of Rome—which would be London in Milton’s time and Washington in our own. Here’s Jesus’s rejection:

Nor doth this grandeur and majestic show 
Of luxury, though called magnificence,
More then of arms before, allure mine eye,
Much less my mind; though thou should’st add to tell
Their sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts…

And further on:

Wert thou so void of fear or shame,
As offer them to me the Son of God, 
To me my own, on such abhorred pact,
That I fall down and worship thee as God?
Get thee behind me; plain now now appear’st
That Evil one, Satan, forever damned.

Again: any Christian that does not have love at the heart of his or her faith is not following Christ but the god of Self. And if such people forego humility and make righteous zeal their god, then Satan is calling the tune.

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Trump Dreamed a Voldemort Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2022
Trump’s dream of addressing Congress on January 6

Friday

Having finally heard from a White House insider—one who worked with Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff and who witnessed the president’s backstage machinations—we have a clearer picture of Trump’s plan for January 6, 2021: he wanted to walk into the Capitol like Voldemort striding into Hogwarts, routing his enemies as he proclaimed himself victor.

Trump hasn’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows so that wouldn’t be the self-image he carried in his head. Accompanied by armed secret service agents and backed by armed vigilante groups, he probably saw himself more like the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. In any event, he apparently believed that, with such a show of force, he could intimidate Congress—or at least Mike Pence—into overturning the election. But the Voldemort comparison works for me.

In a triumphal scene where Voldemort confronts Hogwarts resisters, the arch villain claims that their leader—now apparently dead—has failed them. Think of Harry in this parallel as democracy or the Constitution:

“Harry Potter is dead. He was killed as he ran away, trying to save himself while you lay down your lives for him. We bring you his body as proof that your hero is one.”

Then he delivers a version of the speech that Trump perhaps imagined himself to Congress:

The battle is won. You have lost half of your fighters. My Death Eaters outnumber you, and the Boy Who Lived is finished. There must be no more war. Anyone who continues to resist, man, woman, or child, will be slaughtered, as will every member of their family. Come out of the castle now, kneel before me, and you shall be spared. Your parents and children, your brothers and sisters will live and be forgiven, and you will join me in the new world we shall build together.”

Come to think of it, Vladimir Putin dreamed of giving this speech in the center of Kyiv in March.

But democracy, at least so far, is kicking back. In Ukraine’s case, the curse that Putin hurls at Ukraine has, like Voldemort’s, rebounded upon him: Ukraine has never been more united, NATO has added members, and Russia’s own forces have been fatally weakened.

Will the same prove true for Trump and GOP authoritarians? Will Madisonian democracy prevail? In J.K. Rowling’s fantasy, when the bad guy goes low, the good guy goes high, and high wins the day:

Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell.

This ending is far from assured in our case. To achieve it, we are going to need everyone—progressives, liberals, independents, NeverTrumpers, principled conservatives, Gryffindors and Slytherins—working together. Whatever happens to Trump himself, Trumpism itself has metastasized and continues to storm democracy’s citadel. This is no time for rifts in Dumbledore’s Army.

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Mother and Son in a Daily Dance of Pain

By Robin Bates | Published: June 29, 2022
Dern and Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Thursday

Waves of Covid have crashed against the Bates household these past two weeks, hitting first my wife, then me, then my 96-year-old mother. Each one of us was laid out flat while it lasted, and my mother has still not regained the strength in her legs. This means that I must lift her up whenever she needs to use the facilities.

She has come to describe the moment as our dance together. I slide her feet off the hospital bed where she spends most of her time, prop up her back, and then hug and lift. She, meanwhile, puts her arms around my neck, hanging on “like death.”

That phrase will signal to poetry lovers where I’m going with this post: to Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a masterpiece of ambiguity. No matter how many times one reads the poem, one is never sure whether tenderness or tension prevails in the relationship between a boy and his father. Certainly, elements of both are present.

In the speaker’s recollection of having danced with his drunken father when he was a little boy, some signs suggest the man was loving, others that he was abusive. While the father carrying the child off to bed sounds sweet, evidence of violence can be found everywhere. This includes the man’s bruised knuckle (has it been used against his frowning wife), his beating time on the boy’s head (soft or hard?), and his buckle scraping the boy’s ear. The last incident in particular comes to mind as my mother and I go through our own waltz.

That’s because “dancing” with my mother always means pressing on two sore ribs, one of which she cracked and one of which she broke two weeks ago in a fall. As a result, when I lift up her dead weight (108 pounds, to be exact), she invariably cries out. Although I know there’s no other way, it still sears my soul to hear her moan.

Unlike the speaker’s father, I’m fully conscious of the hurt I’m causing. Nevertheless, there’s a similar mixture of love and pain involved in our waltz. Here’s the poem:

My Papa’s Waltz
By Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath   
Could make a small boy dizzy;   
But I hung on like death:   
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   
Slid from the kitchen shelf;   
My mother’s countenance   
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   
Was battered on one knuckle;   
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   
With a palm caked hard by dirt,   
Then waltzed me off to bed   
Still clinging to your shirt.

Of course, in addition to my not being drunk or abusive, I am also the son, not the parent, in our own dance. Our roles from 65 or so years ago have been reversed. Still, like the speaker in the poem, I find something precious in our dancing, despite the effort required and the pain involved. After all these years, the little boy is finally getting his mother all to himself.

Related story – Patrick Logan, whose sensitive story about his father I shared ten years ago, sent in a moving account of “dancing” with his mother after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It appears in his book Every Day Since Desenzano, which has been published by Peace Corps Worldwide. Here it is:

After my father returned from the war, the foxtrots and jitterbugs of the Big Band era had given way to Chubby Checker, the Twist and eventually to Line Dancing. Through all the changing music styles, Pat and Charlie twirled each other around the dance floor to the delight of all who watched. Taking care of my mother during my shift, I would often move her from her wheelchair to the sofa. Reaching down, I’d slip my arms around her while she wrapped her hands behind my neck. Placing my hands flat against her back, I’d count to three and she’d push off with her right leg and we’d stand a moment while she got her balance. In a grotesque imitation of the countless times my father had moved her with ease across a dance floor, my mother and I would then waltz back and forth, my right foot nudging her left as she stepped with her right, followed by a partial pirouette before I bent to set her down. Each time our pas de deux ended, I’d pray that she was not remembering those magical times when she was so graceful, when her movements were as steady and dependable as my father’s arm, as it reached out to embrace her waist. 

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