Browsed by
Month: July 2024

April

April

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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month of dead land, in Maine a time of in-between, of not still and not yet, not still winter but not yet spring, mud season, colorless season unless you count the dull brown of lawn and roadside or the dull grey of bare trunks and branches. I might wish to have been born in July, like my wife, revelling in the brilliant light dancing among the yellows and purples and reds of the lilies, or in October, like my grandson, tramping up a rock-strewn trail among oak and birch and maple exulting in their autumnal dress.

But I was born in the cruellest month, this month mixing memory and desire, each birthday cataloging an ever increasing number of days and months and years irretrievable immutable shaping me but also binding me a looming thatness out of which or against which I now must make myself wanting yearning praying to be free to be able to live in and for and by what is beautiful.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month stirring dull roots with spring rain, asking old limbs to dance and a jaded spirit to soar, teasingly intimating that adventure and revelation and joy are just over the horizon …

Or perhaps they are …

Perhaps April is not the cruellest month, but a month for hope undimmed and unvanquished, undeterred by bleak days and starless nights, unfazed by any accumulation of burdensome remembrance, unfettered by any limitations laid on spirit or body by time or space.

April is the bravest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, infusing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots to new life with spring rain.

The watcher

The watcher

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Our writers’ group assignment today … We each took a book and found the fifth word on the forty-seventh page of the book. We wrote down each of these words, eleven words in all. Then we wrote pieces that had no requirements other than they must contain these eleven words. The words: the, the, Scioto (a river), was, his, fisherman, impressive, hill, livings, front, edge. Here is my piece …

He stood on the knobby edge of the granite escarpment, gnarly limbs of stunted spruces dotting the steep rise of the familiar hill behind him, far from the first time he had stood here, just here as he stood now, wordless and transfixed, his eyes following the tumultuous freshet twisting and turning beneath his feet, its waters shrouded in morning mist, heedlessly bent on its one purpose: to spill itself into the sea.

The name of the stream, if you must know, was the Scioto, but the name meant little to him, merely an epithet rather arbitrarily attached by men who hardly knew the river, who could hardly know a river that lived and moved and had its being centuries before they had theirs. They borrowed the word from the Wyandots, another affront, naming a river not theirs with a word not theirs, stealing from the peoples who had made their livings for generations from these fertile waters.

He hardly knew the river, though undoubtedly better than most, the best moments of his now long life spent here watching its moods, spring and summer, fall and winter, walking its stony banks, wading its stiff currents, trailing fingers in the frigid waters. He always came here alone, in the commonly understood sense of the word, though he knew with absolute certainty, that in this hallowed place he was never alone. Given the constraints of his delimited body and his oh so brief lifespan, he was sure the river knew him better than he knew it.

He watched now as a lone fisherman stepped in front of a mid-stream boulder, carefully moving in the direction of a smooth run along near bank. Pausing in the eddy, the stranger raised his rod tip and, after two or three false casts, set the fly at the end of his leader gently into the seam between run and eddy. His steady retrieve was abruptly interrupted, rod now bent, line spooling off his reel, and then the head-shaking leap of an consummately impressive rainbow trout.

The fisherman took back line, steadily and surely bringing the fish to net. After admiring the exquisite silver and pink flanks of this inimitable creature, he held the fish beneath the babbling surface for the stream for a few short moments before releasing it to its proper home, which he, not the fisherman, but the one watching the fisherman from the granite escarpment, which he hoped too was his own proper home, because when the fisherman lifted his eyes from the waters looking upwards to where he himself stood, he realized that watched and watcher were the same.

Heirloom

Heirloom

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I had no inheritance from my parents. Any remaining monies were exhausted in my mother’s end of life care. And few of their tangible belongings have been passed to me. I have my mother’s violin and her dining room set, a Celtic cross that my father hung around his neck. And nothing, nothing at all, save a few Bible commentaries bearing my grandfather’s name, from grandparents on either side.

Not even stories, stories of ancestors remembered and passed along generation to generation. The only grandparents I knew were my mother’s parents and they lived three thousand miles distant on the opposite coast. Our nuclear family lived isolated, far both physically and emotionally from any extended family and my parents told few, if any, stories, of childhood, of their parents or grandparents, of characters in the family tree, noble or ignoble.

My heirloom, the one single entity of precious value my parents purposefully passed to me was their faith, the faith that had shaped and directed my mother’s consciousness from the very beginning of her life, the faith that had captivated and delighted my father of a sudden when he came upon it or it came upon him as a college student in Michigan.

It was a faith, not of rote or custom or habit, not driven by compulsion or fear of celestial consequences, not a means of attaching themselves to a desired social cohort, but a thing deeply personal, palpably passionate, curious and creative and explorative and resilient. It was not a piece of their life together, but its centerpiece, the first principle, the driving motivation, the guiding star in every decision they made, in every project they undertook.

It was this faith, this kind of faith — generous and humble, earnest and accepting — that they passed to me. But, of course, faith, genuine faith, is such a thing that cannot be passed. It cannot be possessed secondhand. I did live their faith for a while, as a child and even into young adulthood, eager to please them, eager to do right and be right.

But one day, not in a single moment, but in an accumulation of moments, existential crises and intellectual discoveries, seeing new things, feeling new things, sensing for myself the real meaning of the Jesus among us, the Jesus with me, that faith became mine, no more my parent’s faith, but mine, the centerpiece of my life.

My heirloom is not really something my parents could give me, but only something they could point to, hoping and praying, that for the sake of my their joy, for the sake of my own joy, for the sake of joy itself, I would be able to find my way there.