Last weekend, Grace’s best friend from camp came to visit. This friend is the daughter of my best friend from camp. The sheer fact of this, and the way I kept seeing my friend’s face in her daughter’s, made me dizzy several times this weekend. Talk about vertigo: then, now, us, them, summer, the ocean, winter, tears, girls, women … it all blended together in a meteor shower of memory. Grace is still crying about her friend having left. Only two months until camp, I keep telling her.
I couldn’t wait to read my friend Lauren Miller’s debut novel, Parallel. I was already wowed by what I knew of Lauren’s story, that she’d written the first draft of this book during her daughter’s infancy. Then, I read Parallel and found it an entirely engrossing, tremendously fun experience.
Parallel is a compulsively readable story that combines the tremendous fun of life in one’s late teens with huge, earth-shaking (literally) concepts about time, meaning, and the order (or lack thereof) that exists in the universe. Parallel tells the story of Abby Barnes, a college senior, who experiences in a unique way the theory that parallel universes exist running alongside ours, populated with parallel versions of ourselves, making different choices, walking different paths.
Parallel‘s central characters are interesting and relatable: Abby’s best friend Caitlin, a brilliant science nerd in a gorgeous blonde fashionista’s body, Tyler, their mutual, handsome, funny best friend, and Dr. Mann, the Nobel-prize winning absent-minded professor whose theories about the entanglement of parallel universes guide the book’s narrative.
More than anything else, I finished Parallel thinking about both the universal human need to plan our lives and the fallacy of that instinct. For someone whose blog is called A Design So Vast, there was much to ponder, also, about the interplay of order and chaos in our universe. Abby’s mother is an expert on Seurat, and the metaphor of pointilism, where a field of seemingly random dots up close crystallizes into a clear image from far away, recurs throughout the book. At one point, looking at a Seurat painting, Abby observes:
“Up close, all you see are the pieces, strewn about, heaped on top of each other. Total disarray. But step away, and a picture takes shape. When you make sense of the chaos, the chaos disappears. Or maybe, what looked at first like chaos never was.”
Another piece of art that figures prominently in Parallel is Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia. Abby tries out for a play at Yale and is crushed not to be cast. But then the director surprises her by saying he’d had an ulterior motive in not casting her, becuase he thinks she would be perfect for the part of Thomasina in the next play that’s going up: Arcadia. Startled, Abby reflects on Thomasina, a character she has always loved but who has taken on new resonance since she has begun experiencing the entanglement of her parallel lives. Thomasina, “…a young girl who believed that everything – including the future – could be reduced to an equation. Maybe this is part of the formula.”
Miller doesn’t entirely let us off the hook: she reminds us also that individual agency has an enormous role in shaping our stories. In one scene, Abby watches her roommate heartbroken over a breakup for which Abby’s parallel bears some responsibility and thinks, with anguish: “Everything we do matters.”
Ultimately, though Parallel reminds us that our choices help direct our path, it celebrates most of all the mystery behind the way the pointillist dots that make up the story of our lives coalesce into a clear picture. Towards the end of the book, Abby reflects on something Dr. Mann said early in the book: “You are a uniquely created being with a transcendent soul. A soul whose yearnings can’t be predicted or effectively explained, whose composition can’t be quantified, whose true nature remains a mystery, as mysterious as it ever was.”
The last scene of Parallel draws together the various strands of narrative in a neat, surprising conclusion. Abby’s thoughts emphasize the primacy of right now over someday, and remind us of the power of trusting that the universe will take care of us even when things seem chaotic and scary.
“Suddenly, it all makes sense. The path doesn’t dictate the destination. There are detours to destiny, and sometimes that detour is a shortcut. But it’s more than that. Sitting here, in this seat, Bret on one side, Josh on the other – wedged between my past and my future – is exactly where I’m supposed to be. It doesn’t matter how I got here or where I’m going when I leave. The point is, I’m here. In this place, with these people. Te dots coming together so exquisitely, crystallizing into something greater than the sum of its parts. All of the past made whole in the present. The picture of my life is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. More beautiful than I ever could’ve planned.”
The design is vast, but oh, how it is beautiful. I highly recommend Lauren Miller’s debut, which is as thought-provoking as it is un-put-downably fun to read.
Almost daily I wish desperately that I could freeze my children into in amber. I want to remember exactly who and how they are right now.
Lately Whit is slaying me with adorableness and hilarity. There’s his under-his-breath proclamation that someone is a “tionary,” or his loud, from the back seat question while we sit in traffic, “Which donkey hole isn’t moving?”
Things I love about Whit right now, May 2013:
The other day, as we drove to school, Whit exclaimed “look at that!” from the backseat. I glanced back to see that he was pointing out a newly blooming patch of daffodils along a fence. “So pretty, ” he sighed. May my son always notice things around him, including the flowers.
Last Sunday, at family dinner, Matt announced his idea that each of us pick something that’s hard for us to do that week. He was going to go for a long run, Whit was going to eat his whole lunch, etc. Matt’s suggestion for me was that I introduce myself to two new people at baseball practice. I must have blanched, because Whit reached over and patted my hand. “I’ll help you. I’m not shy,” he said, smiling at me. And he did.
Over the weekend I was trying to recruit a child to come with me to the grocery store. They were reluctant. “I’ll let you pick out flowers for your room!” I tried. Whit was instantly in. He loves having fresh flowers in a vase in his room. This may be connected to #1.
Whit’s loyalty to me knows no bounds, and is often completely without logic. He will stand up for me whatever the situation, back me no matter what, even when there’s no reason to. The weekend I was away for work recently Matt called me, aghast at how Whit always, no matter what, defended me (what were they talking about that this was notable, I wondered?). He presumed I had put Whit up to this, but I had not. I know I won’t always be his favorite person, but right now I suspect I am.
A couple of months ago we were at someone’s house and the kids had vanilla ice cream. I did not know if the chocolate sauce was safe for Whit (he is allergic to nuts) and I told him that. I expected him to be upset and instead he shrugged his shoulders, resigned. A moment later he asked if he could put maple syrup on his ice cream. “How very Canadian of you, Whit,” someone noted. I was impressed with both his understanding of why he couldn’t have what the other kids were having and his resourcefulness in coming up with another idea.
Recently, Whit bemoaned the fact that the magnolias were all gone, already. “It’s so fast, Mummy,” he said morosely, and I had to swallow before agreeing. But then he bounced back, announcing that “so many exciting things are happening right now!” I asked him what he meant. He explained that the trees were all in bloom, the chicks at school had hatched, and the chrysalises they had been following were all beginning to crack and butterflies were imminent. My little naturalist. My little noticer.
I can’t stop time, that much I know, but I can do my best to pay attention and to capture its minutes as they fly by.
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. – Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
The older I get, and the more established in my own mothering patterns, the more I appreciate this woman. The one who taught me everything I need to know. The one whose middle name is the same as mine and as Grace’s. The one whose hair my sister and I unabashedly share (I remember her saying, when we were children, that sometimes – for example if we were whiny in a store – she wished our hair didn’t make us so glaringly, unquestionably hers!).
My mother has a big, shiny, extroverted personality. She exemplifies casual competence and resolute cheerfulness. She is a hugely effective natural leader, she’s never met someone she didn’t welcome into her life with open arms, and she has a million friends. When she enters a room the energy shifts palpably; her charisma is both entirely natural and absolutely undeniable. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that most of my very closest friends are sparkly extroverts. It occurs to me that maybe I’m just trying to surround myself with people like my mother.
Though I don’t generally go in for big mother’s day celebrations (the day just feels a bit artificial to me), today seems as good a time as any to reflect on some of the important lessons she passed on to me:
– Sailing is an art, not a science. Knowing how to read the water and the wind, how to time a racing start, how to know when to tack to make that harbor entrance is all pure instinct.
– Speed limits are suggestions.
– So are the times that people put on invitations. Or start times in general.
– There is always, 100% of the time, a way to see the good in a person or situation. There is no use in dwelling on the negatives because there is so much positive to celebrate in the world.
– There’s no better outfit to garden in than a towel wrapped around a just-out-of-the-shower body.
– Cooking dinner for someone is a way of demonstrating love, and homemade food is grace incarnate. Let there be no obstacle to this: I remember Mum and Sally cooking spaghetti on the grill during the power outages after Hurricane Sandy.
– Always, without exception treat everyone you encounter – a superior at work, a server at a restaurant, the gate agent at the airport, a member of the royal family – with the same degree of respect and kindness.
– Outdoor showers are hugely superior and can be used at least 10 months of the year (in New England).
– Picking people up at the airport is a really nice thing to do.
– Handwritten thank you notes are essential. Always.
– Throwing together a gourmet dinner for 10 with an hour’s notice and no special grocery store trip? No problem. Recipes? Unnecessary. Fresh flowers? Crucial.
What did your mother teach you?