Reading “Palindrome” by Lisel Mueller
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other…. Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.” –Martin Gardner, in Scientific American
Somewhere now she takes
off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the
antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five
years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by
now.
Her skin is firming, her
memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees
without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband
has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their
money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her
second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
Things I will need in
the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor
radio
Sergeant
Pepper
acne
cream
five-year
diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard
about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants
to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a
roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as
she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In
the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our
lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.
Sermon
I was in junior high when I read a short story with the title “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” As I recall, the story focused on a day in the life of a young man about my age at the time, probably 13 or 14. We’ll call him Bob. During the course of this day, Bob takes some risks…some big risks for him: he tries out for the basketball team…he answers some tough questions in class…he asks a girl in his class to a dance. Each of these risks pays off for Bob: he does well in his tryout for the basketball team, he successfully answers the questions, and the girl he asks out says “yes.” He feels on top of the world. As he prepares to go to sleep that night, thinking about all that has happened, he is convinced that this day, almost past, will probably be one of the best days of his entire life. As he drifts off to sleep, he repeats several times “I wish I could live this day every day for the rest of my life.”
The next morning, young Bob wakes to discover that his wish has been granted. Sure enough, he is living the exact same day over again. When I saw the Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day” several years ago, I was convinced that Harold Ramis, who wrote the screenplay, also must have read this short story. Unlike the plot line of “Groundhog Day” however, Bob has no ability to change what is happening to him. While he is fully aware that he is living the same reality twice, he cannot change his actions at all: he has to say the exact same thing he said the day before…he cannot even alter his facial expressions from what they had previously been.
As he makes his way through the day for the second time, he realizes that some of the moments he most treasured the first time around, are not so great lived again. For example, while his basketball tryout did go well for him, he realizes that his strong performance overshadowed the tryout of a friend he knew really wanted to be on the team. While he did answer the questions correctly in class, he sees that he interrupted another student to do so and came off looking like a hotshot. And worst of all, he discovers that he was not careful with the emotions of the girl he asked to the dance. In his nervousness, he approached her in a cavalier way and made her think for a few moments that he was going to ask someone else. He sees her vulnerability and pain for the first time and recognizes it as his own vulnerability and pain.
So at the end of this second day, he goes to bed hoping that he will not have to again live through this not-so-wonderful-day after all. But the next morning, he wakes to the same day again…only this time it is worse. He cannot escape the mistakes he has made. They are, in fact, all that he sees. Each blunder becomes magnified, so much so that he has now forgotten what was good about the day in the first place. He yearns for a chance to fix what he has done, to repair the relationships he now knows may have been damaged by his carelessness. You might say that Bob is overwhelmed by the cheeps.
While I figure that I’ve known about the cheeps for most of my life, I didn’t learn the term until I was in seminary. One of my classmates and I were reflecting upon a student-led chapel service and were lamenting the fact that the service leader had chosen to lead a ritual that not only didn’t go well, it had left us feeling embarrassed for him. My friend said, “It just gave me the cheeps.”
“The cheeps?” I repeated. “What are the cheeps?”
A few years back, she explained, one of her college friends had taught her the term in a coffee shop when the campus improvisational comedy troupe decided to invade the space with what turned out to be a painfully un-funny attempt at comedy. Without batting an eye, her friend said “Well…that was certainly cheepy!”
She explained that the cheeps are the feeling you get when you realize that something you or someone else has done…has missed the mark of appropriateness and instead landed in the middle of Awkward City. Usually the cheeps occur when someone is being vulnerable enough to expose a reality about what it means to be human that we might prefer to ignore. A reality such as “we are imperfect creatures” or “our egos sometimes overwhelm the truth of a situation” or “some people should simply not attempt improvisational comedy.“
Having a fondness for quirky expressions, I immediately embraced the term “the cheeps”, believing that feeling cheepy was a good descriptor for that mixture of embarrassment and creeps that I have experienced when I have discovered that I have not done or said the appropriate thing at a given time, usually because I was not seeing myself or the situation in the proper context. My sixth grade English teacher would no doubt applaud the onomatopoeic quality of “the cheeps,” too…since it sounds so cheepy…just as the feeling it describes.
This summer I was thinking about a service topic that would fit well with the themes of the Jewish High Holy days…I had the urge to bring out the cheeps. However, as real as the cheeps are to me, I wasn’t sure that the concept would be familiar enough to most folks that I could base a service around it. So I tested the idea out on a close friend. She was, of course, new to the term, so I offered her a definition, explaining to her that “the cheeps” come about whenever we realize that we have said and/or done things that don’t match up with our perceptions of who we are in the world…when we have blindly made blunders out of ignorance, or fear, or a lack of attention. I asked her if she had ever felt the cheeps. She laughed and answered, “Only every day of my life.”
The more I thought about it, I should not have been surprised. After all, my role as a minister gives me a unique entry point to many of the cheepy feelings out there. Rare is the occasion when people want to discuss something sensitive about their lives with me and the cheeps are not in the mix. Indeed, I have come to believe that the cheeps are unavoidable if only because they are so present in my own life.
Just a few brief examples off the top of my head from my own cheepy memory bank:
When I was teaching composition at Chicago State, I wrongly corrected a young woman’s essay explaining in some lengthy written comments on the margins of her paper that “car note” was the improper way to write about a car payment. I’ve seen “car note” used probably a hundred times since then, and I feel cheepy every time.
How about the time when I dramatically stormed out of the restaurant where I was waiting tables because the managers had the audacity to make a mistake on the schedule. How could they be so incompetent?
Or the time in college when I was so busy chastising a fellow actor for missing an entrance during a show, that I missed my own. Truth be told, I feel pretty cheepy about 95 percent of my entire acting career.
Or any of a number of times when I was driving in the chaos of Chicago’s traffic and angrily honked my horn or offered an obscene gesture and then found myself a few moments later side by side with the victim of my anger.
And then there are the hundreds of times when I have said something stupid in conversation, misused a word, forgotten a name, disregarded someone’s feelings…cheepy moments all.
Of course, some of the most poignant of my cheepy experiences have occurred in the interactions I have had with my family over the years: my parents, my siblings, and now my wife. If anyone has seen me do some ridiculous things, it is my family…especially my wife. I suppose this is how it must be. The people with whom we are most intimate will undoubtedly be the ones who will see us at our cheepiest. And what a blessing it is when they still love us anyway.
I don’t want to imply that feeling cheepy is limited to the recognition of a slip of the tongue, a moment of neglect, or an occasional embarrassing tantrum. Sometimes the things about which we may feel the most cheepy are those over which we feel most powerless…those times when our mistakes have caused what seems like irreparable damage in our relationships. These are the cheepy moments we really can beat ourselves up about: the times when we have to face up to being dishonest, or not following through, or when we didn’t say something that needed to be said and now the opportunity is long gone. I’m talking about major cheeps here…the kind that can virtually paralyze us with regret or shame.
The lesson of the High Holy Days is that we don’t have to live forever in the cheeps, no matter how cheepy they might be. It is within our power to choose to make amends, to forgive ourselves, and to seek forgiveness. This is not always easy to do. Especially when a person we have wronged or disappointed is uninterested in our attempts to clean the slate, or is not alive to grant us the forgiveness that we might seek. That’s why I probably gave this sermon a misleading title when I called it “Overcoming the Cheeps.” I think there are some cheepy feelings that we will never fully overcome…and perhaps we shouldn’t. After all, the cheeps can be a great source of wisdom if we let them. They remind us of some important things about what it means to be human, things such as none of us are perfect, we can all be shortsighted at times, and we all require forgiveness, compassion, and understanding…from others, and perhaps even more importantly, for ourselves. Indeed, a good dose of the cheeps can become a treasured means to open our hearts if we let them. So a better title for this sermon might have been “Living with the Cheeps” or even better “Learning from the Cheeps.”
It’s important to remember that we wouldn’t get the cheeps if we weren’t risking something…taking the chance to know and be known in all our fallible human glory. We could choose to shelter ourselves from the outside world, refusing to engage with those around us for fear of making a mistake or doing something we may regret, but then we would miss opportunities to grow our souls, to let those around us impact our lives and to learn something in the process.
So I invite you this week, while our Jewish sisters and brothers are doing their own reflection and atonement, to consider the role of the cheeps in your life. Are you like Bob, the character in the story, trapped in the mistakes of your past? If so, you may find it comforting to know that his story does have a happy ending. Bob eventually breaks free from his trap of repeating the same day over and over. I don’t recall how he does it. How do any of us do it? Eventually we just have to decide it is time to get our lives back…our lives of risks and mistakes, triumphs and disappointments. In the final moments of the story, Bob seeks out those he has wronged and does his best to make amends…to begin again in love. You can’t help but root for the guy…and you get the feeling that his heart is opening as a result of all he has been through.
Bob learns from his experience the same message contained in the title of the story, which is, incidentally, the same message of the High Holy Days, and of this sermon: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
This is how it must be,
don’t you think? After all, we are not
built to live the same day over and over again, nor are we built to remain
stuck in our mistakes or the cheeps that go with them. We have the power as human beings to make
decisions and choices that can turn our relationships and our lives
around. I really do believe this. It’s why I became a minister and why I put a
great deal of faith not just in the inherent worth and dignity of each
individual, but also in the inherent resilience of each individual. I’m talking about you and me. No matter how painful our stories might be,
we can take them in new directions.
And, as long as we are alive to see another day, it’s never too late to start.
It’s never too late to start.
Indeed, each of us can say, “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.”
And whatever this day may bring, may we forgive ourselves and each other; and may we begin again in love.