Now Is the Thing to Praise
I’ve had a book in my collection for thirteen years and I’ve finally figured out what its title means.
It’s called Now Is the Thing to Praise and it’s signed by the author, Dolores Kendrick, the Poet Laureate of Washington DC. I bought it when I was a student at Phillips Exeter, where a portrait of her — dressed royally in a flowing gown — hangs stately in the assembly hall. The titular poem (which borrows the phrase Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) is steeped in the spiritual peace of gazing at the world’s minutiae and seeing moments like James Baldwin running late for a meeting in Paris. I feel very present when I read it. (I can’t link to it because no one has published it online but, trust me, it’s excellent.)
But what is presence? What is “now”? Now is the result of all the moments that got us here. To this. My now is I got married almost a year ago and five months later, I was hit by a car. A silver Chevy Camaro. After the impact, I was conscious and tried to stand up, but I was bleeding from my forehead and someone over my left shoulder advised me to stay down while he called 911. As I lay in the street, the driver approached me from my right and apologized. I reached for my phone and said, “Call my wife, please.” He held it up for me as I told her over speakerphone what had happened.
I either lost track of time or she took a jet-powered cab from Brooklyn to Soho, but she reached me in what felt like an instant and was with me at every moment afterward. She took the ambulance with me and stayed by my side at the hospital. She came with me to all my follow-up appointments. And she was there when I got the news that, after an MRI, my neurologist saw nerve lesions on my neck and brain.
Now, I know that I had been living with multiple sclerosis for years but had never been diagnosed.
Now what?
Now, I’m on a treatment where I (or my wife, bravely) inject a drug into one of seven areas of my body three days a week. I don’t feel any of the severe symptoms — vision loss, trouble walking — and the meds will hopefully keep it that way, for many future nows to come.
I think about death and mortality much more now. People die from getting hit by cars. People suffer badly from multiple sclerosis. For whatever reason, neither of those apply to me now. I’m thankful for that, but I’m under no illusion that I’ve cheated death. It’s all around me and it’s a part of life.
Sometimes, I daydream about preventing death from reaching other people. I dream that I’m a superhero. An invisible superhero who swoops in to be a force field between a car and a pedestrian. Or I gently tug at the coats of hurried New Yorkers who are too close to the curb when a car is turning or crossing the street when the “Stop” hand is still lit. (For the record I was hit while legally walking in a crosswalk and I have a hard time calling it an “accident” because it’s clear to me that the driver made a choice to avoid paying attention.)
But I’m not a superhero. I’m a guy who, like you or any of us, might die today or soon or a long time from this now. So, I just look at every new day as a new chance — a new “now.” A now to tell my wife I love her again and plan something special for our 1st Anniversary. A now to be better than I was yesterday.
And when I wake up feeling stubborn about the work day ahead or sore from yesterday’s injection, I put on my glasses, which still have a crack in the left temple, and I recognize that now is the thing to praise.
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