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My Mother’s Lesson in Grace

May 13, 2017 By Sarah Kaufman

My mom, Catharine, with her day-old grandson Asa.

For Mother’s Day, and in honor of my mother, whose kindness and eye for beauty inspire me every single day, I’m posting an edited-down excerpt about her from “The Art of Grace.” Her lesson in acceptance and inclusion marked me deeply as a child; it taught me something profound about considering other people’s feelings, and the rewards that flow from that:

When I turned six, my mother told me I could have ponies at my birthday party—a little girl’s dream—if I invited everyone in my first-grade class.

Fine by me!

Everyone, she continued. Including Dennis. (Not his real name.)

Dennis, the boy whose pale skin and hair made him look transparent, barely there. The kid I was very sure had the worst sort of cooties. This I knew, though I didn’t know much else about him. Dennis was given to nosebleeds and a kind of spastic jitteriness, and like the other kids in the class, I did my best to avoid him.

I think I shed some tears over the ultimatum, but I really wanted those ponies, so Dennis was in….

And on the appointed Saturday of my party, a horse trailer pulled up the alley; three squat, lethargic, darling animals were saddled up by our gate, and an excited line of children formed for turns around the backyard. I remember hopping up and down a lot. I remember going first. I remember what everything looked like from high atop my pony as I traveled grandly past the dirt patch where I made mud pies, past my little playhouse, past the other children, past Dennis, his pale face flashing even paler in the afternoon sun. He was clapping his hands, hopping up and down, as jazzed up as everyone else.

And I remember gazing over to our gnarled, solitary apricot tree, newly in bloom and magnificent, where my mother stood chatting pleasantly with Dennis’s mother. His mom was older, grandmotherly, and the white pinned-up coil of her hair almost disappeared against the blossoms. As I watched them, his mother and my mother together—the surprise of it still electrifies this memory—it registered that my mother was taking care of her guest with the same calm, sensitive attention with which she treated, well, everyone. She was looking after Dennis’s mom, making sure she had someone to talk to, delivering the unspoken message to her that her son, so often alone at school, was welcome at our house….

It took a while to grasp, but as I put together the view from my pony on that beautiful day in my backyard, I came to understand something as startling as it was liberating, heart-opening: everyone should have a good time at my party, and I wasn’t the most important person at it.

Dennis had seemed so alien to me. He might as well have been a helium balloon, fragile, not quite of this world, barely connected to the rest of us. But I learned three things about him that afternoon that anchored him, pulling him back down to earth. I learned that he liked ponies, just as I did; that he had a mother, just as I did; and most of all, that his feelings, and her feelings, mattered as much as anybody else’s. My mother taught me that, by her own graceful example.

It was a good party. And a great birthday, where I felt myself grow up a little.

–from “The Art of Grace,” by Sarah L. Kaufman. All rights reserved.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art of grace, asa, catharine, grace, kaufman book, kaufman dance, sarah kaufman, sarah kaufman author, sarah kaufman washington post, sarah l. kaufman

Grace and “The Little Mermaid”

April 25, 2017 By Sarah Kaufman


While preparing to review a ballet inspired by “The Little Mermaid,” I came across a subtle but profound message about grace that Hans Christian Andersen weaves through his famous fairytale.

First of all, let’s clear away the Disney version of “The Little Mermaid,” which takes Andersen’s dark tale and turns it into a standard princess story about winning the prince and living happily ever after. Contrast this with Andersen’s mermaid, who suffers excruciating pain and disfigurement, never has a chance with the man she loves, and loses him to another woman.

Great children’s story, right? Well, there is a happy ending, but it’s not what you’d expect. The mermaid ends up realizing she doesn’t need a man to be happy. This is in 1836! Yes, this young woman of character has everything she needs within herself–because of her graceful nature–and she joins a community of like-hearted females, neither mortal nor mermaid, but floaty, unseen creatures of pure spirit.

Remember how Andersen always sides with the outsider (“The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Match Girl,” and more)? True to form, his little mermaid, youngest of seven sisters, is a misfit in her watery world. No one understands her restless spirit, lack of vanity and yearning for love. I believe he’s drawing a distinction between this virtuous creature and the historical depiction of mermaids as deceitful sexual predators, singing sailors to their deaths.

One night, the little mermaid falls in love with a mortal man whom she rescues from drowning. She vows to somehow become human and join him on land; to do this she visits the sea witch, who cuts out her tongue to use in a potion that will turn her tail into legs. “But if you take away my voice, what is left for me?” the mermaid asks, before the tongue is taken.

“Your beautiful form, your graceful walk, and your expressive eyes; surely with these you can enchain a man’s heart,” replies the witch. She is ruthless, but she is right: Grace remains, even after the mermaid has lost her ability to speak and sing.

Forever silenced, and in constant pain from her new limbs, the girl remains devoted to her prince. Despite what she’s lost, she retains her true heart, her loving nature, and–Andersen is very clear about this–her grace. Grace is what buoys her in the dry, unfamiliar land in which she now moves.

“All who saw her wondered at her graceful-swaying movements,” Andersen tells us. Yet the mermaid is new to walking on land, and her steps are painful, so how could this be? I believe he means for us to understand that grace is in her spirit, her hopeful attitude, her perspective. Unlike her beautiful singing voice, it is something no one can take away. Her pain was terrible, “but she bore it willingly, and stepped as lightly by the prince’s side as a soap-bubble.” This grace of movement is a reflection of her love. It is a spiritual force infusing her movements from the inside out.

Still, she doesn’t win over the prince, who’s stuck on another woman and plans to marry her. This, according to the sea witch’s spell, will mean death for the little mermaid. Andersen compares her terrible failed sacrifice with that of her sisters, who come to her with a plan. They’ve given up their hair for an enchanted knife; once their little sister kills the prince with it, she’ll revert back to mermaidhood. But their act of love is tainted; their sister’s homecoming rests on blood.

Of course, the little mermaid refuses them. She nobly leaves her prince to his new wife and throws herself into the sea, expecting to die. And yet! “Hundreds of transparent beautiful beings” surround her, lift her up; she has become like them, lighter than air, floating out of the foam towards the clouds. She is now “among the daughters of the air.”

Now Andersen shows us how the little mermaid can acquire the true treasure–an immortal soul. But he also has a broader and quite practical point about the actions that we take, and how our behaviors can take on a spiritual, even angelic quality. This is something his young readers (and older ones) can carry out in their lives. It echoes what threads through “The Art of Grace,” in the wisdom I gleaned from my interviews and research into ideas going back to the ancients: Grace is about giving, loving, and thinking of others. And so it turns out that our little mermaid is in an even better place than if she’d won the prince’s heart. These “daughters of the air” have adopted her because she is like them–generous, kind and helpful. And there’s more:

“A mermaid has not an immortal soul, nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human being,” one of these creatures tells her. “On the power of another hangs her eternal destiny.” But no matter: The daughters of the air can get themselves their own immortal soul ”by their good deeds.” They are independent women!

What kinds of good deeds, you may ask? “We fly to warm countries, and cool the sultry air that destroys mankind with pestilence. We carry the perfume of the flowers to spread health and restoration.” After 300 years of doing such environmental works (Andersen was quite the progressive), and “giving all the good in our power,” they are able to receive an immortal soul. And they tell her: “You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing, you have suffered and endured and raised yourself to the spirit-world by your good deeds.”

In other words, she became one of these exquisite celestial beings because of her grace–her loving, generous, compassionate nature and actions. This, I find, is a beautiful message.

It’s a message that must have comforted the author himself, a lifelong outsider who never married and had unrequited affections for men and women. Some researchers have noted that “The Little Mermaid” may have been inspired by an ill-fated romance with a male friend who decided to get married. This could explain the mermaid’s loss of voice and the dramatic descriptions of her pain–allusions, perhaps, to being silenced and heartbroken at a time when Andersen could not be open about his feelings. This only makes the story more poignant, and Andersen’s notion of grace all the more exceptional, and powerful.

Related story: My review of Hamburg Ballet’s ‘Little Mermaid’: Adrift in a Sea of Despair

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: andersen, art of grace, grace, hamburg, kaufman book, kaufman dance, little mermaid, mermaid, sarah kaufman, sarah kaufman author, sarah kaufman washington post, sarah l. kaufman

Practicing Grace Online

March 12, 2016 By Sarah Kaufman

cdtblogpostphotoRecently I had the great pleasure of speaking with Brian Wesolowski of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that works to preserve Internet openness and freedom of expression. He’d read “The Art of Grace” and wanted to interview me on how to bring grace into our plugged-in lives online. A fantastic CDT Tech Talk podcast resulted; click here to listen.

Brian also wrote a terrific post expanding on what we spoke about to include more ways to bring grace into the digital age. Here’s an excerpt:

“How many times a day do you check your email or messaging apps? How often do you try to cram in a call while you are walking somewhere? Does your calendar have you booked in 15-minute increments? These are all byproducts of technology supposedly making our lives easier and more efficient, but has also made our lives more stressful and complex.

“So how can we slow down in our increasingly digital world and still embrace the technology so many of us love?”

What follows are Brian’s smart and thoughtful ways to bring ease into our tech activities, like this one: Lose the headphones on your commute. (I love this advice…walking around outside with my headphones on definitely makes me feel disconnected and weirdly vulnerable.)

What are your tips on better online living?

Photo: 1911 stenographer, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art of grace, cdt, digital grace, grace, kaufman book, kaufman dance, sarah kaufman, sarah kaufman author, sarah kaufman grace, sarah kaufman washington post, sarah l. kaufman, wesolowski

Cary Grant & Bobby Kennedy: Two Gentlemen of the Junkyard

February 20, 2016 By Sarah Kaufman

Cary Grant and Robert F. Kennedy. © 1963, Bob Burchette/The Washington Post. Used with permission
Cary Grant and Robert F. Kennedy. ©1963, Bob Burchette/The Washington Post. Used with permission

A beautiful spread in the British Harper’s Bazaar about THE ART OF GRACE is very dear to me, and not only for its wonderfully kind descriptions (“delightful,” “elegant,” “always with a light touch…” oh, I could go on!). The writer, Literary Editor Erica Wagner, also takes note of one of the photos in the book, and she highlights its meaning.

It happens to be one of my favorite photos of the book, depicting the actor Cary Grant and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy standing together in an impound lot. In her review, Wagner notes Grant’s “considerate charm and physical carriage,” and also this extra dimension of his caring nature: “Sure, we’re used to seeing him staring into Katharine Hepburn’s eyes in ‘The Philadelphia Story’–but perhaps the image of him standing in a junkyard with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963, as the two men consider what turning it into a playground might do for the children of Washington, DC, is less familiar.”

I found the photo in question hidden in the archives at The Washington Post, unseen for decades, its edges curling, and my heart gave a little leap, for it perfectly illustrates an altogether different, off-screen view of Grant. It underscores why the debonair actor is a guiding spirit in my book.

The Harper’s review (please click on it to enlarge):

The Art of Grace, Harper's Bazaar, December 2015

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art of grace, bobby kennedy, cary grant, grace, robert kennedy, sarah kaufman, sarah kaufman author, sarah kaufman grace, sarah kaufman washington post

Joyce Carol Oates, on the Power of Sympathy

September 22, 2015 By Sarah Kaufman

photo credit: Alvaro Remesal Royo/Flickr Photo Sharing

To prepare for upcoming book talks (check my list of events here), I’ve been going to author events around town. I have approached them soberly, as research. Then I saw Joyce Carol Oates at Politics and Prose, a beloved independent bookstore, and I found the inspiration I craved.

Oates, 77, wasn’t perfectly polished. She wasn’t excruciatingly prepared. She was simply at ease in sharing her work with us. She read from notes, and from her new memoir, “The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age.” And she was absolutely charming, human, funny and, yes, graceful.

The first thing she did, in fact, was not talk about herself. Instead, she complimented her audience in advance on the intelligent questions she knew we would have for her at the end of her reading, “and I can’t wait to hear them,” she said, in a kindly, almost shy voice, and you believed her. She seemed utterly sincere in intimating that the minor business of her  book was just a bit of housekeeping to get through before addressing the more fascinating topic of us.

Apparently, she’s not only graceful in front of a crowd. The young woman who introduced her noted that Oates, who has made more than a dozen appearances at the bookstore, was “always so kind to the staff.” What a lovely–and unexpected–comment to make when presenting a literary celebrity, or anyone, for that matter.

In the memoir excerpt that Oates read, she detailed her young appetite for Mad magazine and horror comic books like Tales From the Crypt, which gave my heart a little jolt: that’s my own story, I thought, recalling summer days poring over the same material. She also read about her early passion for knitting, though her funny-shaped sweaters “didn’t really have a natural ending.” She recounted a distaste for Bible camp, and drew hearty laughs when she noted that “one of the nice things about being an adult is you don’t have to go to camp.” As she spoke, she gently swirled a hand through the air, as if brushing away dust motes.

Not all of her memoir is whimsical. It contains episodes of abuse and other traumas. But in referring to these darker passages, Oates reminded us of something essential. Reading from the Afterword of her book, she concluded that without having lived the misery described on some of the previous pages, “I would feel that my life was less complete; most importantly, my life as a writer, for whom the most crucial quality of personality is sympathy.

“Indeed, to revise Henry James: ‘Three things in human life are important. The first is to have sympathy; the second is to have sympathy; and the third is to have sympathy.’”

Sympathy, indeed, is what you feel from Oates’ writing and, most especially, from her presence, which was all about humility, generosity and understanding.

I can’t wait to read her book.

photo credit: Alvaro Remesal Royo/Flickr Photo Sharing

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: joyce carol oates, sarah kaufman, sarah kaufman author, sarah kaufman grace, sarah kaufman washington post

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Join me here in exploring grace and ways to cultivate it. I’ll be drawing attention to inspiring moments of grace in everyday life, in pop culture and art and points in between–and I hope you’ll help me. Connect with me via email, Twitter and Facebook.

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