Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 82nd post, Helena recounts finding a tiny American flag on her property on Labor Day, which transports her into memories of her first experiences of awe at things larger than ourselves.
The Night Sky
1.
This Labor Day weekend, it seemed appropriate to save those three days for jobs I hadn’t had time for—labor that has to do with my house. Since cataract surgery, I can now see the dust and cobwebs. As for my car, I was amazed to see the sprays of spring and winter mud still coating its lovely pearly gray and resolved to wash it. The garbage pails and recycling pails needed tidying, the tarps covering them, refolding.
I began with the pails, next to the railing of the porch at the side of the house, moving the pails to get to a bottle top, a few scraps of paper, and something that startled me—a tiny American flag. I picked it up, with a feeling that caught me by surprise. It was reverence. I cradled the little flag in my hands, and looking at it brought tears. I remembered my anger in spring, when I’d bought a plant at a market with that small flag tucked into its soil. It was a spectacle to see 30 little flags, made in China, its colors stamped on some flimsy fabric, used as decoration, as selling agents for 30 plants. I had been angry, so angry, I’d thrown it away. Now I felt a wave of sickness.
I finished with the pails, saved the car washing for the next day, and brought the little flag inside. Its edges were fraying and I wanted to hem it, but the fabric would not take my needle and thread. I washed it in soap and water and laid it on the porch rail to dry in the sun.
2.
In summer camp, on Sackett Lake and in Parksville, Upstate New York, I felt something hard to describe, something that came over me at the raising and lowering of the flag. It was a feeling different from any other. I sensed that everyone around me felt it, a collective thing that went beyond ordinary life. We all had fallen into awe. The bugle blew, first a call to assemble at the flagpole, then the call that accompanied the raising of the flag, like a hymn—played on a record, through a microphone in the head counselor’s shack, rising and falling out over girls campus through a loud speaker. At the first call we stopped whatever we were doing, left our bunk and headed to the middle of girls campus where the flagpole stood. The sound of the bugle calls felt holy and seemed ancient. A little research tells me that my perception was true—bugle calls go back long before the time of ancient Greece. We all assembled to witness the flag being hoisted onto that tall flagpole in the silence that had fallen on the group of maybe a hundred of us. I remember the feeling of being part of the assembly of children and our counselors, so fresh from sleep, in a solemnity that felt important, set apart from life, heads tilted back, watching the flag ascend that white metal pole, the hoisting rope’s iron clips snapped into the flag’s eyelets, clanging against the flagpole in the wind. If it was raining, we didn’t raise the flag; the flag was not to get wet. If it began to rain, counselors raced to get the flag down, then cradled it in their arms like a child and hurried with it inside somewhere to fold. We raised the flag at the beginning of day, and lowered it at day’s end, another bugle call playing, a melody written before our Civil War.
I remember the awe in the morning on girls campus, and at sunset, when the flag came down.
3.
On Saturday mornings Uncle Moe Deutch, the camp’s director, led Saturday services to mark the Sabbath—to mark Shabbes. Uncle Moe took the part of the Rabbi. He recited the prayers and read the Saturday readings. Then he addressed us all. We sat, sweating in the summer heat in our white shorts and t-shirts on slatted folding chairs, our legs sliding on the wood worn smooth with years of campers. And though I can’t recall any of his words, I knew they were about something of importance, something that related the prayers for the day of rest to our lives—because tall Uncle Moe, with his gray moustache, who was so often full of laughter, was so serious. I knew it was important because I could feel the way his seriousness felt in me. Maybe everyone in the rec hall felt it. It was as if time had stopped. The place was as quiet as we girls were at the raising and lowering of the flag.
“…and they will flourish…grow strong like the Cedars of Lebanon…” he said. I didn’t know what cedars looked like, but I knew they were trees. I pictured them growing in a row, tall, along the water of a place the words of the prayer called into my mind. And that same feeling fell over me, the feeling that the world was standing still, that the world was a good place. I felt it the way I felt it for the flag.
Uncle Moe wore a white satin yarmulke and a prayer shawl, the wonderful Uncle Moe we loved and gathered around to hug when we saw him on campus, we only as tall as his waist. Now he was full of that feeling I could feel too, a holiness—awe. And I was drawn by it, and wanted to stay there.
4.
There was one hot night in camp when I couldn’t sleep. I got up and lay out on the grass in front of my bunk, next to Barbara Plotkin who was our OD that night, our counselor on duty. She was sitting in a folding chair, reading, I think, with her flashlight. I was looking at the sky. It was clear that night, a country sky, all stars, densities of them, patches of them, and the constellations. The one I knew was Orion. I was silent and Barbara was silent. We were separate, still I felt her presence. I felt connected to her. We were both under that sky. I looked into the Milky Way, our galaxy. I knew that by then. As I lay there questions began tumbling though me—where does it end? If it ends, what bounds it? My stomach knotted up. I turned away my eyes. It was too much for my mind. I didn’t look again at the night sky, at the stars in the country sky, the sky without any ground light to dull it, by myself, without holding someone’s hand, for 54 years. By then I had moved to the country. I came home late one night, the house dark, I hadn’t left any lights on. Suddenly like some unfinished business, I wanted to face the immensity. I think I held onto my mailbox at the road.
I tilted back my head and looked, held my breath and looked—until something gave way, burst open at the middle of me. I could bear them, I could bear the stars, bear to see the endlessness of them without fear—and the stars poured into me.
5.
This Labor Day, I felt the sacredness of the small flag I’d, in anger, cast away from myself in spring. When the sun had dried its satiny material, I ironed it. I folded it the way the flag was folded when I was eight years old, a camper three miles from where I now live. I folded it into triangles, as I had seen it folded then, with such reverence after it was lowered to the calling bugle. I knew the folding meant something by the gravity I read in the faces of the two counselors who were folding it, counselors just a few years older than we were. I knew this act meant no small thing, but a thing almost unworldly, and time seemed not to exist.
Now, all these years later, years enough to know that the experience of awe, a thing that doesn’t seem to happen quite in time, but maybe just beyond it, I know this: at those moments I feel the importance of life, and I know the world is a good place. The surprise of awe is the thing that makes my life worth living.
I read that the flag was folded into the shape of the three-cornered hats of the generation that envisioned this country and swore to each other to commit their lives to the beginning, of bringing that vision into being, whatever it may cost them. And they folded the flag so that the last fold would show its stars which they named The Night Sky for that infinity of stars that spoke of eternity, the potential they saw in the country they were founding—the significance of the pursuit of happiness, of rights unalienable from a human being, a vision that was long in coming, but had arrived.
6.
I put my small, folded stripes and stars into a beautiful piece of pottery I keep. It’s round, glazed blue, and its top is gone. My friend Linda made it a long time ago. There is a rosary I strung and keep in that remnant of pottery, and a tiny gold Buddha, left for me by my friend Jenna before she moved to Colorado. I never found the lost top of that small masterpiece of Linda’s—maybe it broke beyond repairing. Or maybe it’s just somewhere in this house. I can still see it, the blue glaze Linda used, with three painted brown-glaze dots. Just three. They were perfectly placed, I mourn losing that top. I treasure that piece of work. Three brown dots on a field of blue, who knows why? She was the best potter I’ve ever known or seen, pursuing her happiness, her destiny, in her work. I always told her that her pottery was holy. She’d laugh. But I can hold that little vessel in two hands and feel it, the holiness, the awe of that pursuit and where it brought her. Linda had MS and found her freedom in her work. And now I know where the words come from that Moe Deutch read to us when we were children—Psalm 92. I will write those words and put them in that little blue relic, that altar, underneath my flag…They will flourish…they will grow strong like the Cedars of Lebanon…
Some days now I look at everything with awe and think, everything is holy if I look at it, look until I can bear to see it, bear to let it enter me.
Can you remember your first experience of awe? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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