A Century of Living Fully

One hundred years of multitudes contained within,

of beatitude, plentitude, and gratitude

which is to say grace, overflow and thanks.

Of living in the Now, with time arrested

when we embrace over nothing whatsoever

except the all of it…

the arrival of the red cardinal from Georgetown

with no sense of direction, the oriole down from

Crestline to yellow our days.

This extravagant life of clarinets and cucumbers,

of Orson Welles’ baritone shadowing you

and Irish tenors with whom you swoon.

 

So, too, I’ve seen you enter your forest.

The window out is also the window in.

One hundred years of solitude, too, are yours

in the silence of the skeletal tree, the hush

of the calendar’s fiction, the interval

between squirrels where you dwell,

a pilgrim on your inscape in the dusk

where tulip bulbs wait before their burst.

 

You live in that unknown space made an aviary

by your loving. Your basket is always full,

an offering of nocturnal scribbles become poems

like a caterpillar taking wing.

 

I gave you the stump of an oak………………..you give me seeds for an orchard, a garden overthrowing its walls.

I gave you a sack of soft clay…………………. you give me a Hopi pot, Navajo rug and Kwakiutl mask.

I gave the Apollonian sun in a cantaloupe …you give me a lunatic moon of cows leaping.

I gave you a compendium of pills……………….you give me a map to my underground spring.

I give you a paragraph of participles…………you give me a poem of exclamation points.

I give you days of devotion………………………you give me moments of dwelling in astonishment.

 

 

Certainty and Doubt

Search in and out and roundabout

And you'll discover never

a tale so free of every doubt.

No probable, possible shadow of doubt,

No possible doubt whatever.  

        Gilbert & Sullivan, The Gondoliers

We live in uncertain times. I’m sure of it. Those two poles have always yanked me back and forth.

John Keats famously described an artist’s consciousness as one being able to live with uncertainties without reaching for resolution. Easy for him to say; he was all of twenty-two. When he was my age he’d have been dead for sixty-three years. But he was wise beyond his years. The poet, the artist of any form of expression, knows some resonant chord may have been struck when the inexplicable has been attained. Not an absolute but a nascent emergence from chaos. Truth has a ring to it and it is beautiful. It may also be fleeting.

Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. One of my best lines. I wrote this in a poem trying to understand why my dear friends joined the Jim Jones cult almost fifty years ago. The same question could be put to those in the Donald Trump cult. There seems to be something in the human unconscious which so desperately seeks an authority figure that autonomy is happily ceded. They squirm living with doubt.

When I hear Dr. Fauci change his mind regarding masks or the safety of the J&J vaccine, it is the sound of Science, always a work in progress. Let Fox News mock him as they pander to the vexed but un-vaxed Repugnants. I count them among those looking for Daddy to set in stone some unassailable commandment.

I know the feeling. When I was young, centuries ago, I too sought out a kind of doctrinaire philosophy. No matter the question, I had the answer. I couldn’t, for a minute, be wrong. If I was wrong about who was the best shortstop I could be wrong about everything. It took me a long while to live comfortably in the muddle of conflicting ideas. It seems to me that is the source of imagination.   

Absolutism could be seen as a failure of the imagination. I don’t mean the certitude of who won or lost the election. That is quantifiable. The imagination is not the delusion of self-serving deceit as practiced by Donald but the vision of what this country could be and how this planet could yet thrive.

Caring

In his superb memoir, Barack Obama tells of a meeting with Mitch McConnell in the White House in which Obama’s team tried to explain why a particular piece of legislation would benefit the entire country. McConnell interrupted their presentation saying, You seem to be under the mistaken belief that I care.

This statement from the Kentucky Senator was startling in its candor and revealed the essence of the man. He simply doesn’t care. Of course, he does care, selectively. He cares about his corporate sponsors, the NRA, the Koch Bros. et al.

That word, Care, keeps popping up in my head. Caregiver, Caretaker, Medicare, Eldercare, Urgentcare, Childcare and Careless which was, I imagine what Mitch may have felt when a few words of truth slipped his mouth.

The Greek word, Caritas, appears in the Bible (God is love) as a form of love or charity. I like to think of it as cherishing. Care-giving is an extension of love. It adds a new dimension to the loving relationship. To care is to be present, to extend oneself and anticipate what may be needed a minute from now.  It’s a matter of being resonant. There is an element of transcendence even in grunt work as the giver receives from what is given.

Aging together is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There’s no rehearsal and we only get to it once. We are likely to be at our neediest and most attuned. When word came that Peggy was to be released from the hospital I Windexed the glass which she spends much time in front of. She is now back observing that piece of world through the window. Her poetry shows that all the universe is contained in any part of it.

Our apartment house is gift-wrapped on three sides with hundreds of daisy-like fuchsia flowers. With the calligraphy of our bare-branched coral tree now bursting with red lanterns and yellow berries answering them it is like a symphony of colors which Peggy orchestrates. Somebody cared in the planting.

Our salad days may be gone, replaced by these tranquil halcyon days. Just another phase in the journey when the limitations and bodily insults can be shared. Those shouts of joy become moments of enduring in unison, a new dimension in intimacy.

I wonder if Mitch will learn to care when it’s his turn. If it will ever dawn on him that he’s a mere foot soldier for obstruction, suppression and greed, easily replaced by other lackeys. Maybe then he will find his heart and write a memoir telling all. But who really cares?

 

 

 

A Priest and An Atheist Walk into a Bar

 No, that’s not what happened.

A priest and an atheist walk into a Bar Mitzvah.  No, No. Let’s get serious.

A priest and an atheist walk into Peggy’s bedside. The man of the cloth is Father Patrick Comerford. Whatever gold dust he carries is exactly what Peggy has reception for. Her own resources are sparked. His simple presence mends bones, quiets a clamorous heart and recharges her cells.

We talk about pubs in Dublin, the poet / priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and his sister, Irish writers, the history of Trinity College, his days as a tennis champ, his brother the taxi driver, Vin Scully…….everything, thank God, but religion.

Father Paddy could have come out of central casting with his ruddy face, shock of white hair and County Cork brogue. In my early days I remember Hollywood’s Pat O’Brien playing the priest as he walked that last crooked mile with Cagney on the way to the electric chair. Later, came Barry Fitzgerald, with the black gown and the amiable voice bending his elbow with a wee bit of the drink and a well-delivered bit of blarney. Father Patty has them all beat.

Miraculously it was Easter Sunday when he popped in to resurrect Peggy’s spirits. T’was a secular Mass; No wine nor wafer. Yet she was lifted. Maybe it was the synergy between Father Patty, Peggy and me. Atheists (I prefer the word Humanists) too, work in mysterious ways. I would argue that there is a spiritual dimension in the mundane, the quotidian, the secular. The sublime hides in the ordinary.

If the pagan spring festival got folded into the Christian myth let seasonal transformation be horizontal as well as vertical. Let my people go. And while April blooms let Peggy have her exodus out of St. John’s Hospital.

The Way It Is

It is Monday and Peggy is feeling weak. She’s decided to spend the day in bed. Cancel the calendar. Actually the only visitors scheduled for the day are a nurse to draw blood, an occupational therapist and a professional bather but that’s not going to happen. She has shortness of breath and sleep is the preferred choice. But that was then.

By Tuesday she has bounced back. There is a mind / body split. For the day her spirit prevails and she is twenty-five again, for the fourth time. Wednesday is a continuation of the day before with high stamina until it isn’t. Now she is back down on the couch. Robust is a distant word. And so it goes.

Caregiving is a great adventure. It never ceases. Tuesday is indistinguishable from Monday and by Wednesday evening the morning has merged with yesterday.

I try to anticipate what’s around the corner. I’m at the ready. Exertion is to be avoided since it leads to listlessness yet the physical therapist has given her a series of exercises to keep the blood moving. Nothing is simple anymore. When I say exertion I mean transit from wheelchair to couch or commode to bed one step away.

For those who are a mere ninety-three or even ninety-eight this might sound a bit much. When Peggy was ninety-nine, almost a year ago she was spry scooting around with her walker and managing the nine steps outside our front door. That was true even six months ago but standing is no longer possible even for the National Anthem; particularly for the National Anthem. Decline happens incrementally and then it leaps.

On the other hand, creativity blossoms in the dark. At least it has with Peggy. Like night jasmine it has bloomed. I’m in awe but I’ve always been in awe. Is it because she is closer to the mystery, to ultimates? Peggy embodies both the social being and a pensive aloneness. I have witnessed her go to the well. She roams and probes her inner landscape and then emerges with a basketful of grapes.

No resistance, she proclaims, yet her spirit is irrepressible and her embrace grows wider and wider.  

 

 

 

 

Unremarkable

Yesterday I got my best birthday present: the results of my cat-scan. All organs, pancreas, liver, spleen, gall bladder and lungs are all termed unremarkable. I’ve always suspected as much. At this age unremarkable is better than fifteen minutes of fame.

I leave that adjective, remarkable, to describe Peggy who will be 100 years young in 5 weeks Until then I’m a mere eleven years her junior. She can hardly remember back that far.

whenever is something special about those years divisible by eleven. At 88 I am now the number of keys on a piano. I expect to grow tusks soon sufficient to furnish the ivory. Then they can ship me off to a Steinway factory for my next incarnation.

I just looked it up. 88 is a special number in numerology. It is supposed to bring great wealth. Too late; I don’t need a thing. Where would I put it?

The number also has some nefarious symbolic meaning for White Supremacists. Good thing I don’t buy into any of that nonsense.

Come to think of it reaching 88 is remarkable. In baseball terms it’s the bottom of the eighth inning. For a starting pitcher to go that far is noteworthy. As long as my organs remain unremarkable I shall go on into the breach.

The equinox is vernal. Rhododendrons have blanketed the bushes outside our window. Thank you, Rhoda. I hear you singing while our hummingbird is humming and the high wind is swaying. It must be the anniversary of myself.

 

 

 

Out of Time

In more ways than one are we off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

The notion of clock came as imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It could be regarded as the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. Everyone knew their place and when tea is served, one lump or two.

Football, basketball and soccer are all played against the clock as well as their opponent. Managing the clock has become the hallmark of a successful team while a baseball game defies it as the great board game moves counter-clockwise into eternity.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither-filled Third Man movie when he ridicules the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

But Mrs. Dalloway’s noon was altogether different than the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf use of time was a way of giving relativity its due and give voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of  our existence being a chronicle. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. A generation was lost and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without God to write the fable.

In his review of Erica Hunt’s poetry book, Jump the Clock, Ben Lerner suggests she is leaping beyond clock-time and the logic of society’s givens enforced by racism and violence. She asserts that clocks belong to a culture of domination and her poems redress that imperfect past.

Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took their Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway through a single day which recapitulated their entire life. History, both personal and otherwise, cannot be dismissed nor the consequences of our behavior ignored as it determines our future on this orb.