When Eve and Eve Bit the Apple
Originally published in the Modern Love column of The New York Times.
When you are raised to be a good Christian girl, you don’t just go to church; you date the church. Church is the significant other with whom you spend weekends and evenings, the boyfriend whose friends become your friends, the girlfriend with whom you share all your dreams.
I was a really good Christian girl, so I didn’t just date the church; I married it.
After graduating from a Midwestern college whose motto is “For Christ and His Kingdom,” I moved to New York City. It was my first time out of the evangelical cocoon, and my priority was finding a church I could love, commit my life to, and make my spiritual and social center.
My search ended in Brooklyn, where I found a church of young creative people and fledgling professionals who, like me, were looking for a faith less burdened by fundamentalism. We forged a quick camaraderie, including with our pastor, who was as much friend and peer as spiritual leader. We hung out in the pews on Sundays, but also in bars and each other’s living rooms throughout the week.
Seeing the Birds Through the Trees
I thought the world would look different at 7:30am. I had Thoreauvian visions of untainted nature, Dillardesque hopes for remote reflection, Emersonian fancies of transcendent scenery. Instead, Prospect Park was just Prospect Park, albeit sleepier. I didn’t find a transformed world by waking up at such an ungodly Saturday hour, but I did find the group of birders I would spend the morning with. (Bless their hearts, birders are very identifiable, with their conspicuous binoculars, chunky boots, tan vests, and ball caps or fishing hats.)
Thoreauvian? Dillardesque? Emersonian? My apologies. Birding has turned me into a romantic and made me prone to hyperoble. It’s also given me very high expectations. I blame Jonathan Franzen, an avid birder, for this. In the title essay of his collection Farther Away, he writes, “I understood the difference between [David Foster Wallace’s] unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.” He even regretfully wonders if, had he started birdwatching sooner, it would have saved his marriage.
I am new to birdwatching, and I came to it obliquely, via a research divergence. But one cannot just lean casually into the feather fray. You must be immersive. So suddenly I heard myself saying, “I need these Eagle Optic binoculars. I need Birds of North America: A Guide To Field Identification. I need to watch The Central Park Effect documentary and read John James Audubon’s collected writings.” Then, before I knew it, I was perusing theProspect Park Bird Sightings blog, studying up on patterns, habitats, and behaviors on the subway, and lacing up my L.L. Bean Boots for my first birding adventure.
“I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision,” J.A. Baker writes in The Peregrine. I too never gave birds their due. Before my interest in birding was piqued, my observed natural world was so small it could fit inside a terrarium. My knowledge of birds was little more than the scattering of black “v’s” behind the bubble clouds of my childhood drawings, the seagulls hovering on the beach when I dropped a Dorito, and the city pigeons disarming me with their boldness. I could identify a robin, a blue jay, and the other obvious culprits, but beyond that, I didn’t have the eyes to see something that deserved a name, a genus, or a journal entry. My ignorance was so pervasive that as a child, I frequently asked for the name of the black birds that murmured through the sky and sat on phone lines. I never got an answer. These birds were anonymous yet ubiquitous. No name, no distinctive traits, barely even a shape. To me, they simply existed as shadows of the idea of a bir-dah.My learning curve was as steep as Bambi’s. Birds were just flying, pecking, perching creatures, uniform and unassertive upon my consciousness, the monks of the skies. And this is why I embarked on birding: to watch the richness of these feathered creatures unfurl like the beauty of a monk’s interior life. Birds “know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us,” J.A. Baker continues. “Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse we can never reach.”
Of a Feather
A 105-year-old group of binocular-toting Brooklynites is fighting to keep the borough’s avian habitats safe.
The grass is still wet from the rain as the morning light pushes through the fog on a brisk spring morning in Prospect Park. The paths are dappled with joggers, cyclists, strollers, and dogs, yet no one notices our group of twelve, necks conspicuously craned and binoculars pressed up to our faces. It’s only 7:30 a.m., but this walk with the Brooklyn Bird Club began 30 minutes ago.
“Did everyone see it?” Steve Nanz, the leader, asks as he adjusts his telescope and points it into the branches. “Has everyone seen the palm warbler?” When we all answer affirmatively, he puts his scope on his shoulder and moves on. The rest of us let our binoculars hang around our necks and follow to scout out the next bird.
Birders, like the creatures they seek, often go unnoticed until someone points them out. Once you know how to find them, they seem to be everywhere. In Brooklyn, they are particularly overlooked despite being a robust constituency of the borough’s incredible natural habitats, such as Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, Floyd Bennett Field, Dead Horse Bay, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Once one looks beyond the pigeons pooping on park benches and sparrows pecking at the trash, hundreds of new birds come into view. The borough is one of the best places in the world to to go birding, and the club’s 250 members — in the face of park visitors and ecological disasters that pose a threat to avian habitats — are working to keep it that way.
Founded by Edward Vietor in 1909 as the Bird Lovers’ Club, the Brooklyn Bird Club has waxed and waned over the course of its 105-year history. Today’s club, though, is as strong as ever. Having always aimed to educate the public on the birds that make their homes in Brooklyn or pass through each year, the club focuses on conservation and on sharing the joy of birds with other Brooklynites. In 1918, Vietor gave a lecture at the Brooklyn Museum on various local species, a tradition that continues today. As early as 1920, the club donated books to school libraries and held contests for students in which they awarded medals to the best bird essay or poster illustrating bird life. To raise awareness and encourage fundraising for conservation efforts, the club has long hosted an annual Christmas Bird Count in December and a Birdathon in May for International Migratory Bird Day. But what the club prides itself on is providing free guided walks throughout the borough, into Queens, and even outside the city to places like Doodletown, Sterling Forest, Nickerson Beach, and central New Jersey. All trips are open to beginners and experts — even those who haven’t paid the $20 annual dues.
Putnam Rolling Ladder Co.
Crannied between Soho’s modish storefronts and trendy cafes leans a five-story warehouse stocked with nothing but wooden ladders. This real estate is worth millions but rather than being sold to the scene, it sits half-empty, rich in an industrial heritage. Its owner, The Putnam Rolling Ladder Company, is one of the last remnants of the manufacturers that once dominated lower Manhattan, and it’s alive by the sheer will of a family committed to their product and engrossed in its tradition.
Putnam makes several different types of ladders but its crowning eponymous product is what makes it unique. The rolling ladder, known for its elegance, durability, and customization, is made from the best grade of hard woods and its steps are reinforced with rods and screws, not nails. It has been impeccably designed to attach to book shelving with a variety of options: The top slide mechanism allows the rolling ladder to be pulled out for use or pushed back against shelves; The roll type top fixture permanently attaches a ladder to the track; The hook slide top fixture allows a ladder to be moved from one track to another.
Putnam’s rolling ladder has been purchased by George Bush, Al Gore, Yoko Ono, Diane von Furstenberg, Annie Leibovitz, Stephen Colbert, Lord & Taylor, Brooks Brothers, and many other prestigious clients. Anyone walking off the cobblestones of Howard Street into the endearingly cluttered first floor office, however, will find that quality is not the same as pretension. Clients pay on average $2,000 for a Putnam rolling ladder because as Gregg Monsees, the company’s president, put it: “We’re the best. We’re the oldest. We’re the most versatile.” And it’s true—it seems no other company can compete with the customized ladders that elegantly roll along bookshelves throughout the world, Funny Face-style. These ladders, which often appear in the background of photos in The New York Times’ style pages, are a fetish object that this company, so committed to its old-fashioned business processes, consistently provides.
Founded by Samuel Putnam in 1905, the company’s original motto, as stated on its first catalog, was simple: “For all kinds of shelving that is more than man high.” As the city was being built up, so was the space behind and in front of its counters. The clients listed in the back of its original catalog included hardware stores, insurance companies, architects, shoe vendors, druggists, silk and ribbon purveyors, grocers, clothiers, sellers of hosiery, gloves, and underwear; of notions, collars and cuffs; of laces and embroideries. The niche evolved while the product remained the same.
Marilynne Robinson and Hymns to the Miracle of Existence
"It seems we never do have quite enough rain," John Ames muses. The narrator of Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead is not bemoaning the parched town as much as he is relishing its showers. Reflecting on an ordinary Sunday, he writes: "It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it."
Marilynne Robinson is just such a rain—warm and rare—on the literary terra of contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Even more, she has tilled a plot where deep, lyrical Christian reflection teems. Her output comes from both below and above, from the dust of humanity and the grace of divinity. She is a dream-catcher of sorts, stationing each work between the ordinary and sacred, weaving sinews of sentences that capture the lovely and true.
Marilynne Robinson was born on November 26, 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho, a small town for whose intellectual and spiritual piquancy Robinson has expressed gratitude. After moving east to attend Brown (at the time it was the women's Pembroke College), she returned west and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1977. Three years later, she published her first novel, Housekeeping, and is now the author of seven works of fiction and nonfiction, all of which shine a bright beam on something it seems much of contemporary thought has ignored: the soul.
"Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word 'soul,' and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought, and to every human pursuit," Robinson writes in her newest work,When I Was A Child I Read Books: Essays (scheduled for release in April 2012). "The soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token of signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations."
Housekeeping, in one sense, rescues the dislocated soul. It is the vulnerable story of Ruth and Lucille, two sisters whose lives, hemmed by tragedy, grow and shift in the care of various guardians—first their grandmother, then two great-aunts, and finally their eccentric, train-hopping Aunt Sylvie. In exquisite terms, Ruth narrates her own metamorphosis, a patient and passive waiting for selfhood, a slow acquaintance with her soul.