And today's done

 The meeting was less dire than I feared. One of the issue is that I always forget that in the absence of information (like every congregation I've been in, we have some communication problems), people assume the worst and start rumors.

I guess I'm different: if I see a situation and it seems odd but I don't know all the information I figure either I'll be told when it's necessary, or it's information I'm not supposed to know. (Without too much detail: health issue in someone who was fundamentally an intern, which lead to all kinds of bad assumptions because the people in charge were doing their best to protect the intern's privacy when they had to leave)

but it was long. And I am tired. And very, very, very peopled-out. Maybe my introvert nature is returning after seeming to have lost it during the pandemic (when I was alone all the time and longed to be with people). 

Also, midmorning the roof guy called AGAIN. His construction guys finished their job early, and they can come tomorrow instead of this coming Monday, so can I be available at 7 am to let them in my garage?

Yes, I can, but that also means setting an alarm (so I am off to bed soon - going to read for a while and hopefully make my brain shut up so I can sleep). 

I also ran out to my friend Dana's house; she had offered to give me the extra black shingles she had leftover from a re-roofing job, and that'll save me a few bucks (or: save my insurer a few bucks), so I went out and got them. My original plan was to back up to my garage and just slide the bundles out (they're 20 asphalt shingles to a bundle) but when I got to my drive I was afraid to back in (there's a bend to my drive, and right at the bend my pecan tree is on one side, and the neighbor's heat pump is on the other, and I was afraid of hitting either one, and I can't look over my shoulder as easily right now because I pulled a muscle on the side of my neck... so I pulled in straight and hefted them out of the back into the garage. The Internet tells me they weigh between 50 and 80 pounds but I don't know....I MIGHT be able to lift 50 pounds, but not 80.

Also, this afternoon (while still dreading the meeting), I looked up and re-read "Fire Watch" (well, I skimmed parts of it. I was looking for the part I was thinking about). I have a copy of the book with the story somewhere but I'm not totally sure where I put it but I could find this reprint online.

I like how it's somewhat ambiguous (the ending, you can't tell if it was really real or staged) and you do feel the sort of confusion and fear that Bartholomew feels at the beginning when he can't recall all the "past facts" he had to cram on short notice* before time traveling

(*the precipitating problem was that Bartholomew had originally prepared to travel with St. Paul back in first-century Palestine when he was ACTUALLY be slated to be sent to St. Paul's CATHEDRAL in 1940 London. And it turns out he guesses - correctly?? I don't know - that his job there is to prevent it from being destroyed, either in the Blitz or by (he confusedly thinks) someone in the cathedral who is actually a spy). 

But more than that, it's kind of a meditation on impermanence and loss and realizing that everything in the past is now gone - and as a result, everything you know now will one day be gone. And that's hard, and it feels harder to me now after I've lost the number of people I have.

But the passage I was looking for, and what originally made me cry, was this, Bartholomew remembering his last day - when Langby was grievously burned and Bartholemew's hands were burned trying to rescue him, and they both put out the bomb that would have burned down St.. Paul's, and it possibly cost Langby his life. Here, Bartholomew has returned to his own time, but is reflecting:

"St Paul's Station is not there, of course, so I got out at Holborn and walked, thinking about my last meeting with Dean Matthews on the morning after the burning of the city. This morning.

"I understand you saved Langby's life," he said. "I also understand that between you, you saved St Paul's last night."

I showed him the letter from my uncle and he stared at it as if he could not think what it was. "Nothing stays saved forever," he said, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to tell me Langby had died. "We shall have to keep on saving St Paul's until Hitler decides to bomb something else."

"Nothing stays saved forever" which for me, carries the undercurrent, heartbreaking but true, of "everything you do, every effort you expend, is ultimately futile" and I am not sure how to square that with anything, and keep the motivation to keep TRYING. 

And yes, also, there is that scene early in the story, where Bartholomew brings suspicion on himself because, overcome by seeing the beauty of the nave of the cathedral from the whispering gallery, he almost falls over the railing. He passes it off as an attack of acrophobia, but it seems to make Langy suspicious. 

But the idea - nothing can stay saved forever BUT ALSO you can cherish it in the here and now, perhaps that's the answer.

But then, at the very end of the story, Bartholomew notes - after going to see the memorial stone that, in Bartholomew's timeline* memorializes when a Communist blew up St. Paul's with a "pinpoint bomb" in 2007 - 

"Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the bloom of that first afternoon, looking at the great west doors of St Paul's at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever."

(*It's complicated. Willis wrote this story in the early 80s, when of course it was plausible Communists (the Soviets, I presume) became terrorists, and they had  "pinpoint bombs," which are perhaps like suitcase nukes?  It seems less plausible now when a lot of the "stochastic terror" we now see is extremist Americans killing schoolchildren or shoppers with guns, instead of blowing up buildings. I am not sure which is worse. Because, of course, if someone blew up St. Paul's, a lot of people would be dead, at least as many as in a grocery-store shooting)

But it is something to contemplate, a paradox, perhaps a spiritual question: nothing on this earth is saved forever. But apparently - the sense I get from the story is - we still should TRY, even if, perhaps, in some cases it means sacrificing ourselves as Langby did. But at the same time, we have to accept that those things will eventually be destroyed. And yet AGAIN - we can enjoy them in the here and now, and perhaps we need to try to, at least for a bit, forget that they will be destroyed, and in that moment as we appreciate it, convince ourselves, somehow, that it will last forever. Because maybe that's the only way you stay sane? Ignoring the impermanence of everything, even your own life? Because all of these thoughts are things I have wrestled with A LOT since 2019. 

(I forget what year I read Fire Watch, but it was well before then, it resonates differently to me now.. And I just realized this year is the fifth Father's Day without my dad. It still catches me occasionally, some of the ads I've seen, or the thought of "I'd be sending him a card if....")