Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for July 18th

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Busy About Many Things

Francie Nolan is the central character in Betty Smith's story A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Back in the early 1900's when the action takes place, Brooklyn was a city of tenement neighborhoods, six families to a building, living in flats on top of each other. Francie's father was only occasionally employed. Her mother Katie paid the rent by cleaning three such tenements. In other words, they were dirt poor, counting nickels to put the simplest food on the table.

Francie's illiterate grandmother insisted Francie learn to read and write. She made Katie read the child a page a day from Shakespeare and the Bible. The family Bible, by the way, was a Gideon Bible stolen from a hotel room frequented by Katie's somewhat gadabout sister. This early immersion in books lead Francie to the neighborhood library, a shabby little place. But Francie saw it as beautiful - almost like a church. The inked stamping pads smelled like the incense burned at High Mass. Her intention was to read all the books in alphabetical order. It had already taken her a long time to reach the B's. But on Saturdays she always broke her routine and requested a title from the librarian. A little golden-brown jug stood at the end of the librarian's counter. It always contained flowers or sprigs depending on the season. This day it held nasturtiums, red, yellow, gold and ivory white - painfully beautiful to behold.

"Yes?" asked the librarian. "This book. I want it," said Francie. The librarian took the book and stamped it. Francie asked if she would recommend something for an eleven-year-old girl. "Each week Francie made the same request and each week the librarian . . . never looked into the child's face. . . A smile would have meant a lot to Francie . . . She loved the library and was anxious to worship the lady in charge. But the librarian had other things on her mind." And always she recommended the same book. Nor did it ever occur to her how Francie would make a ritual of her reading at home, setting up a comfortable place on the tenement fire escape in the shade of the only tree (a sumac tree) she ever saw, arranging a glass of ice water and pink peppermints on the window sill before she let herself be carried away by her borrowed adventures.

Years later, after much sad and beautiful experience within a world of hard knocks, when Francie was about to move away, she paid her last visit to that library. The librarian was still there, went through the same busy routine, recommended the same book for an eleven year old. Finally Francie said, "I'm not eleven years old . . . I've been coming here since I was a little girl and you never looked at me till now." The librarian fretfully replied, "There are so many children . . . Anything else?" Francie said, "I just want to say about that brown bowl . . . what it meant to me . . . the flowers always in it." The librarian looked and remarked, "Oh, that. The janitor puts the flowers in. Or somebody. Anything else?"

Martha, Martha you are anxious about many things. How well that fretful librarian reveals so much about ourselves. There was Francie, ultimately the worthy subject of a beautifully human story, full of that mixture of pain and faith that are the prime ingredients productive of a beauty that can transfigure a world of tenements - and the librarian hardly knew she existed, hardly realized that in knowing this child better she might have herself experienced a buoyancy of soul. But who am I to judge, I who was once so focused on producing budgets and studying statistics and all that bureaucratic stuff related to my County job that I hardly had time to think personally of the addicted and mentally ill patients who passed down my corridor - whom my bureaucracy served? And in the process - as I remained preoccupied with things instead of people - did I, too, perhaps miss out on so many transient opportunities to contemplate Christ?

-- Geoff Wood