What we talk about when we talk about grace

One of our flood pictures features a little section of our backyard garden where a whole mess of detritus floated around until some stiff current pulled the mess into the swollen Floyd River. That stuff is long gone. 

Among the things floating around was the inside title page of a collection of stories by Raymond Carver, who for a time in the eighties and nineties, stood atop the contemporary literary world with his own style of bare-boned realism, a genre that seemed new at the time. From a floor above, I recognized that sad and sodden book—and that it was lost.

Carver did a summer’s worth of teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where, back then, I was a student. I read him religiously before he came—we all did; but for reasons beyond my ken, his work bore down on my life like few others. It was 1980, and to me his flat, minimalist style was as much inspiration as it was genius. Some early stories of mine are embarrassing attempts to be Raymond Carver.

For me, Ray Carver autographed a book of his, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and said some savory words about whatever I’d handed in to him. I swear that’s the Carver I spotted from the front window of the house in a couple feet of water with a bunch of other water-logged favorites from the same old shelf. It’s gone. What’s worse, of all the books in the Schaap library, my son had long ago determined that one day he wanted that signed copy of Carver’s short stories. He liked Carver too.

All of that is what lay down there beneath me in a sorry mess of ruined books and who knows what else in the windfall of a flash flood that left five feet of water in our walk-out basement.

That’s a bad story, one of the worst—personally I mean; there were other great losses, too numerous to mention; but all around us—from Canton to Spencer and Cherokee, southwest to Hawarden and Akron—hundreds of people suffered total losses and found themselves nakedly homeless, wandering into social service outlets to tell the volunteers that they needed, well, everything because they had, well, nothing. Hundreds. 

Compared to those folks’ losses, ours barely register. We can move back into one floor of our house before we need to be out of the college apartments where we and other refugees found immediate and generous refuge. Still, in a flood no one saw coming I lost my own personal copy of What We Talk About When We Talk about Love, and I’m not ready to say that the loss of a very special book is just a pittance.

Enough with the tears. Let me tell you about Grace. It’s abundant and free, magical in its pervasive and often silent power. 

For years, Barbara has taken her grandchildren out to the strawberry fields east of here, where we sit (I resigned from sitting three years ago) in the rows assigned until we’ve picked two or three flats of plump red strawberries. Her grandchildren have always loved that romp, in part because Grandma’s purse suddenly falls scandalously open. Not only does it pay for the abundance they’ve picked, that gaping purse gets them the treats the business sells more of every season–strawberry malts, strawberry pie, strawberry ice cream, and whatever new fruity concoctions the berry business creates. Whether I pick alongside the bunch or just drive them out there, I somehow come home with a half-dozen strawberry donuts.

For health reasons, I didn’t go this summer; but when she returned from the outing, lo and behold a half dozen strawberry donuts appeared–for me. I shan’t eat a half dozen in one sitting, so the package went into the freezer and were then, well, totally forgotten, amid the bedlam of the flood and all the muddy madness thereafter.

Yesterday, by chance I opened the freezer. Frozen strawberry donuts. 

Grace isn’t particularly difficult to talk about in the neighborhood right now. Where the destruction was total, entire communities look upon the cloud of witnesses and caregivers that have descended in grace itself. People cry publicly, when amid the catastrophe, someone somewhere sounds the good tidings of sweet and abiding hope.

So let me trumpet mine for a moment, because last night, just as we were about to leave our flood-ravaged home for a snug and wonderful apartment, I happened to look in the freezer and found pink donuts I’d forgotten we had–strawberry donuts from before the flood (that sounds biblical).

Real theologians will give wonderfully comprehensive definitions of grace, but for this 76-year-old homeless guy, last night, at the end of the Sabbath, those strawberry donuts fell on me like a soft and sweet bolt of sheer grace.

There’s a grand mess all around, but precious moments rise out of nowhere, and flood into our lives, maybe even by way of pink donuts. 

There’s always grace.