Considerate @ 64

I’ve been aware for the last couple of decades — since the advent of those ‘middle age’ years — that there’s a good chance I’ve lived over half my life.  

I know that some folks worry about such things more than others, and that hitting the big ‘4-oh’ or ‘5-oh’ can be a reality check that rocks them to their very core.  

I don’t know that I felt that way too much.  At least not consciously.  But within a couple months the Beatles song, ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ becomes a reality for me.  And now, it would seem, I am having a bit of an aging anxiety issue.  

Part of what gets me is my attempts to be a good guy during my life.  I was in one fight in my days, and that was back when I was a real kid.  Had to have been younger than ten.   

Always treated my girlfriends with respect, too.  And, I suspect, that is gnawing at the root of my mid-60s sensibility.  As a respectable church-going male, I don’t admit to enjoying erotica to many.  But I do.  I have one heck of photo library, I don’t mind telling you, and a small collection of paperbacks.  Always thought reading those pulp novels made me a bad boy.  It was a part of that ‘dark side’ good guys can’t let friends and family see.  

But now, with the coming of the E. L. James’s Fifty Shades collection of erotic fiction coming to the silver screen — and with the coming of my being 64 — I am looking at that issue a little differently.  

I have no doubt some of the scenarios in my old BeeLine collection are more graphic than the antics of Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele.  But still, here’s a guy with some personality issues that encourages him to ‘get off’ by having women sign agreements that he can dominate them sexually and they, in turn, will be submissive to his desires.  And the girls will like it, by the way.  Ana struggles with agreement issues, but she (as far as I am in the first book) is willing to take it in order to have Christian.  (Such an interesting name for dom, INMO.)

That does feel exciting to me on some level.  Sexual play can be fun, though I have to admit, I haven’t had the courage to engage in much in my mature life.  Even amid the digital collections of couples I have purchased, the ones that get my heart pumping most are the ones where a beautiful pair of folks are having graphic consensual action that both seem very much to be enjoying.  

And then — to completely change the subject — I stepped out on the deck of this amazing place I’m lucky enough to have for a writing retreat the other day to take a picture of a lovely pink/purple sunset in the clouds reflected on the water.  As I stood in the fading light, steadying the camera on a deck post, a wren popped out of the little birdhouse on said post, popped me on my hat, then fluttered down to the deck floor, turned around and looked at me.  I had seen the little person working the birdhouse over the last week, trying to figure if this place would be best to raise a brood come warmer weather.  I apologized verbally to the little guy (or girl) and got the heck out of the way.  

I posted this event on Facebook.  Maybe you read it.  In any case, one of my friends commented, ‘You have always been a considerate man, Tom. I am sure the wren appreciated it. :-)’

Which brings me to the topic for this post:  Yes, I would agree that I have tried to live a life considerate of other life forms on the planet.  I did, after all, just hang sunflower seeds out on the deck yesterday afternoon.  I hope it helps somebody make it through this very cold week.  

But then the nagging idea hits me that my life of consideration has kept me from having some pretty decent ‘sinful’ fun.  

Sin, of course, can be interpreted as many things.  Stuff we were taught as kids was designed to keep us out of trouble.  Then when we got older, we realized some limits set were more a product of making society more comfortable, and not so much tangible issues of right and wrong.  

So here I sit nearing my 64th birthday and I wonder what I’ve missed.  Fact is, I’m no kid anymore.  I am now of the older and wiser generation.   

Still, doesn’t change the fact that I wonder what kind of fun I’ve missed out on. 

*** 

I expected this blog entry to be a bit shorter, hoping to direct you, gentle reader, to my other blog, The Dressy Adventuress.  With the focus this winter on my book, I encourage you to share this important time of production with me.  Shoot, when I get it done, I just know you are going to want me to sign your copy.  And you can say you knew me when!  ;-) 

Do take a look when you have time:   The Dressy Adventuress

Today’s elder idea:  There is something deliciously satisfying about actually owning land which is truly one’s own.

Mabel Loomis Todd

20 July 1908 diary entry

image:  Sunset over Lake Cumberland (20 January 2014)

earthspeaks @ the New Year

The other day as New Year’s Eve ground on to the inevitable television watching of the ball drop at Times Square and a champagne toast at midnight, I gave a bit of thought to a new year for the planet.  More specifically, I gave some consideration to the ‘state of my life’ as it approached taking on yet another year.  

It is hard to fathom that I have been retired from working secondary school for over ten years.  I can remember when I approached that last year teaching history at Wayne High School, I wondered if the year would ever pass.  I mean, one and done was something to look forward to at that stage in a career.  And as much as I enjoyed teaching, I was ready to ponder what would keep me entertained for the second half of my life. 

It was on a winter Sunday afternoon in 2001 when I sat at my computer contemplating my joining the internet world with the purchase of a domain name all my own.  On that afternoon, a couple thoughts were stirring through my ‘mellowed’ brain (if you know what I mean), when the concept of earthspeaks popped through the options.  

I’m sure like many of you, my home office space is the gathering place for all kinds of valuable stuff.  My father’s collection of Tarzan books resides there, as does my modest collection of gifted Nancy Drew titles that have come with me since I was in the sixth grade.  I still have some college texts stacked in one bookcase, with an extensive collection of poetry in another.  Behind me is the prose collection of spiritual stuff, more contemporary history pieces, and Nature/environmental essays, all filed in alphabetical order by author.  

So on that Sunday when I was searching for a catchy expression that I could morph into a domain name, my eyes fell upon a favorite collection of thoughts by Steve Van Matre and Bill Weiler titled The Earth Speaks: An Acclimatization Journal.  Perhaps I was introduced to that book first on Hog Island, when just before dinner a short reading from it was shared with campers.  What wasn’t to like, with thoughts by Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, and Rachel Carson, among so many others, punctuating the end of a day of boat trips and/or a workshop on mushrooms?   

In any case, when my Sunday thoughts pondered the idea of the Earth speaking, I thought earthspeaks would be a fine domain name for a soon-to-be-retired educator who walked with high school kids into the Grand Canyon and sponsored Saturday hikes for junior high school kids.  earthspeaks, it would be.  

Problem was, earthspeaks.com and earthspeaks.net were not available for purchase then.  (The .com site sold women’s linen clothing, if memory serves, while the .net site was the internet home of someone who made multi-media Nature shows.  Both are currently out of business, it would appear.)  All that was left was earthspeaks.org.  I wasn’t sure if I qualified as an organization just yet, but I went ahead, bit the bullet, and bought the domain name.  Besides, one friend observed, the .org sounded organic, and wasn’t that the point anyway? 

Since that time I’ve taught a couple classes at Aullwood Audubon Center & Farm here in Dayton and a couple others at the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine, all under the banner of earthspeaks.  I tried to build a website, hoping it would house an e-magazine, but it never really worked.  You could go find earthspeaks.org now, if motivated.  All you’d find is the last update made in 2009 which includes a lovely picture of our front yard dogwood tree in its full May glory, a pic of yours truly, and links to this blog and another connecting the reader to an essay of mine on one of my favorite places on the planet, Crestone, Colorado.  

Still, tom@earthspeaks.org provides my primary email address, and that is really enough.  In a real way, if the gentle reader wanted to know what the proprietor of earthspeaks.org was thinking, all she/he would have to do is surf over here to The Back Porch for content.  So in that regard, the website still does its job, though I always dream of updating it with photo slideshow links, more Nature poetry and essays, and room for reader comment.  I’ve had a sign posted on my office closet door for years that reads:  earthspeaks.org: A humanities-based web community.  Didn’t happen, though it was a great idea. 

So here I am at the beginning of 2014 writing my 188th blog entry, born of the concept of earthspeaks.  And, I must say, I am pleased overall with how things have worked out.  I still work at poetry writing when the muse permits, and I still very much enjoy taking walks in the woods watching birds.  I still teach a bit of history (and poetry) at Hog Island, and am about to set off on a January/February sabbatical to make progress on my book about Mabel Loomis Todd there, The Dressy Adventuress.  In August this year I’ll be writer-in-residence on Hog Island, to boot, doing my best to get Mrs. Todd’s story as a woman of Nature in print.  

The book, of course, will require another website, too.  I have purchased the rights to thedressyadventuress.com.  Nothing there yet, but if 2014 works out like I hope it does, that site should help folks learn about my book and, perhaps, help me sell a few more copies.  

So as 2014 opens, I am pleased to reflect that I am still wedded to the concepts behind the origins of earthspeaks.  I love the sea, I love the mountains, I love the desert — all places where Nature’s people make their work of living on a planet circulating in a spiral arm of the Milky Way.  It is my fervent hope this year that I can do justice to living mindfully and do what I can to be one with All that call this planet home.

***

As mentioned, tomorrow I head off to seclusion to work on my book.  I’ve learned that if a body wants a different result, one has to try something new.  I’m trying something new.  Wish me well.  

Do stop by here to see how things are going.  I’ll be blogging as The Dressy Adventuress takes shape.

Today’s elder idea:   One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out.  Be as I am: a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader.  Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.  It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.  While you can.  While it’s still here.

Edward Abbey

except from The Earth Speaks: An Acclimatization Journal

image: Front-yard goldenrod at Mrs. Todd’s Camp Mavooshen.  (Hog Island, summer 2013)

Winter

If the truth be told, I’m itching for a good snowfall.  

Pause.

My most recent thought is that the above line should really be the content of a Facebook comment, not the major plot line of a blog entry.  I mean, what can a writer say about a snowfall?   ;-)

Thinking about snow positively seems against the Midwesterner’s way of thinking.  Snow = wet, slick road = slow traffic at the least, major damage to your vehicle and possible loss of life at its worst.  True. 

So drive slowly.  Or don’t drive at all.  

For me, such is part of the true joy of big Ohio winter weather events:  Everybody slows down.  Have to.  Wouldn’t be prudent to drive out in 6 inches on the ground and snow still coming.  Toss another log on the fire. 

As much as I loved teaching, I was always excited for a snow day.  Like few other professions, I got a day off when it was deemed too chancy to send out a fleet of school buses to transport children for miles for a day of education.  

Other kinds of education would be on tap for a snow day, whether going out playing in the snow with my girls or giving them a day to read, watch Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, or work on crafts.  We sat by a fire in the fireplace with mugs of hot chocolate most snow day mornings, too.  At least I think we did.  Sure is a rich memory.  Sometimes I wonder what is true memory and what has been enhanced by dreams.  

Winter snow days have that kind of power of me, I’m afraid.  I have a handful of great weather memories connected to snowfall.  One of my favorites is the first night I walked out into a heavy snowfall — and heard nothing.  I mean nothing.  Dead silence.  Maybe a hint of a car moving across the intersection beyond, but so muffled.  So quiet.  The snow sucked up every sound wave as it moved in, covering the neighborhood.  Magical, indeed. 

I want to revisit that wonderland whenever I can.  It’s not a province you can visit.  It’s not something you can even come to expect.  Maybe this winter will be mild and every day just brown grass, bare trees, and grey skies as far as the eye can see.

But then there might be a weather advisory a couple days prior.  Yes, conditions look promising for a heavy snowfall if this front moves this far by then.  But maybe not.  So the snow-expectant have learned to make snide comments about weather men and women who ‘always get it wrong’ and go about their regular business, but watching more carefully for weather updates.  Hope winters eternal. 

And then, sometimes, there is a blessed event.  A beautiful snowfall that starts just about dawn and continues throughout the day.  You tune in to the Weather Channel to confirm what you see out your window.  Yup.  Lookin’ good.  Still snowing strong out past Indianapolis.  And the world changes. 

The bottom crawl line on the television teems with schools, churches, and some companies who have reconsidered the wisdom of having colleagues come out in weather to gather for whatever purpose.

Instead, the family unit is united in a special event that all will participate in; that all can see.  If all goes well, this could me a memory of a lifetime.  Maybe it will be the foot of snow predicted.  Maybe the trees will glimmer with ice before some fall from the freight.  In any case, it will be special. 

So, yes, I’m ready for a Calgary Clipper or a Nor’wester or whatever named storm blows up somewhere headed for the Miami Valley bringing a winter smorgasbord of precipitation.  I wish everybody the best.  I want everybody to have a warm place to stay, like me.  I hope everybody is safe on the roads.  I hope everybody has wood and a wood-burning fireplace.  

I hope everybody has a chance to get out into a good winter snowfall and feel one of the Earth’s softest and most beautiful events.  And then just stand there in a zen-moment, sensing snow accumulating on you, too.  On your nose.  On your glasses.  You stick out your tongue and wait for a few flakes to find you, melting coldly, immediately returning sky-born moisture to your being. 

Pretty damn cool, if you ask me.  

Today’s elder idea:  The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches. 

e. e. cummings

image:  Noah doing his snow removal piece at Grandma & Grandpa’s.   (December 2004)

Late November

When the time for blogging comes around, I begin to feel topics in my gut.  I start weighing what topic is working on me and then I try to figure what a reader might get into.  At this juncture on this cycle, it would seem, the gentle reader gets a potpourri of grandpa thought.

***  

When the most recent internal alarm clock for this blog entry tripped a couple weeks ago, it was at least a week before the 22nd.  I decided then I had to write about the JFK assassination. 

I asked an old friend who was a classmate of mine on that Friday afternoon fifty years ago — us in the 8th grade  — what she remembered.  It was nice to have the accuracy of my memory confirmed.  

It was around 2:00 EST, after lunch for our classroom at Immaculate Conception School.  The academic week was pretty much over.  We were finishing up business by having a classroom civics club meeting with yours truly facilitating. 

I must have chaired a number of civics club meetings that year.  Can’t remember anything about any of ‘em — except for November 22.  Singed into memory: 

I was sitting up behind the teacher’s desk running the meeting.  Mike Yosik had the floor and was talking about the benefits of our installing an aquarium in the classroom.  I can still just about make out his complete face in my memory, though I can’t recall if was sitting or standing.   

In the middle of what Mike was saying, the principal, Sr. St. Augustine, clicked on the PA in the office, an audible click we students had learned meant stop talking and listen to the announcement.  Her voice was a bit subdued, unlike the raucous football punter we all knew and loved on the afternoon playground.

I don’t recall Sister’s exact words, but the phrase ‘the President has been shot’ seared like a hot iron making a memory indelible.  I was stunned.  I distinctly remember thinking that he can’t die.  He couldn't die.  He meant too much to the world.  He was an exciting family guy, just about my dad’s age, who from my point of view was succeeding in making the world a better place.  Besides, he was the first Roman Catholic President this country had ever elected.  He was one of us.  He couldn’t die.  

My friend remembers the meeting and the announcement, too, but she remembers a next thing that 1) she couldn’t believe, and 2) I don’t remember.  I suspect my head was still analyzing the odds of a ‘shot’ President surviving such a thing.  She remembers another of the guys in class picking up the aquarium discussion like nothing happened.   

Next thing I remember is Sr. Ann Mary climbing out of her seat at the back of the room, making her way up an aisle saying we would continue our discussion and meeting at a later time.  I returned to my seat.  

I don’t remember how long we waited until we were dismissed for the day.  I have a sense the classroom was pretty quiet.  We were standing in dismissal line when Sr. St. Augustine came back on the PA.  I imagine her voice cracked a bit.  The President is dead, she announced.  

I can remember my very place in line when I heard her unfathomable words.  Within as few minutes as possible I was running down Fauver Avenue eager to get in front of our old black and white television to watch the news.  I had sat for hours watching space shots over the last couple years and had really gotten a sense for history in the making.  I could not begin to imagine what the news looked like when a President of the United States was shot to death.  

Though I wanted to sit in front of the old Westinghouse all evening, I had work to do.  I was a morning newspaper carrier who had bought those papers from the Journal Herald and I had to collect from each and every customer so I could pay my weekly bill regardless of world history.  My guess is I set out sometime after 5 to collect my 45 cents from everybody who was home.

I think it was at Mrs. Sengle’s house where I stood in the living room for a few minutes watching with her as Jackie Kennedy disembarked Air Force One in her pink dress stained in her husband’s blood.  Only later did I hear she refused to change clothes when offered on the plane, saying she wanted the country to see what we had done to her husband.   

What else can I say about the brutal and bloody death of an eighth grader’s personal hero?  It wasn’t the day the music died, but something felt very different after Jack Kennedy passed.  Lyndon Johnson turned out to be okay in terms of Great Society legislation, but he was no charismatic Jack Kennedy.  It was a hard time.  

And in just a touch over four years from that November 1963 day, the deaths of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy would make the omega bookend for us kids in the high school class of 1968.   

***

Well, that was longer than I thought it would be.  But here’s what else I wanted to mention today: 

Waffle Shop was amazing this year.  Thanks to all who made the effort to come down.  I like to tell people that if we get 1600 in the door in four days, we had a good Waffle Shop.  We had 1800 this year.  We set a modern record for lunches served.  All good news, indeed.  

Be advised that Outreach Grants applications are due either to me via email or in hard copy to the Christ Church office by 16 February 2014.  We’re very proud in our $89+k in Outreach Grants over the last 10 years.  If you’ve got a good idea, let me know. 

***

I have been moved of late by the concept of living a life with enhanced gratitude.  

I try in a zen kind of way to lead a life of gratefulness.  Every day I have on this marvelous planet is a gift unto itself.  

Living a life of gratitude seems very grounded to me.  

On my office door hangs, among other things, the saying ‘Practice gratitude.  Honor the ordinary,’ a line I picked up from James A. Autry, author of the book Choosing Gratitude and guest of Bill Moyers a couple months ago.  I was so taken by explanations that I ordered Autry’s book before the show was over.  

Then the other night I’m catching up on some TED podcasts and I come across one from Edinburgh this past winter by Br. David Steindl-Rast.  His topic?  Living a life of gratitude. 

Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine brother, cited studies showing the commonality that happy people are most often grateful people.  Sure, he says, one would think happy people would be grateful for their happiness.  He contends it really goes the other way:  Folks who lead a life of gratefulness are most often pretty happy with the the gifts life has given them. 

He says that even when one is dealt a hard blow, like loss of a job, or death of a parent or child, one can be grateful for the opportunity to rise to the occasion.  Those of us who have buried loved ones know something about that. 

The David Steindl-Rast TED link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful.html

***

For those of you who are aware of my attempts to write a book on Hog Island, be advised that Shannon Wood, a long-time friend, has offered me use of her lake house at Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.  I’ll be on my own January and February next down there getting my focus tightened and making progress on chapters.  

It feels like the time is now to make good progress on The Dressy Adventuress.  I’ve tried different approaches to writing in the past with minimal success.  Getting away and getting lost in my work seems the best way to go.  Wish me luck. 

Today’s elder idea:  Say what you want to say and let the words fall out — honestly.  I want to see you be brave…

Sara Bareillis

‘Brave’

Very cool song…

images:  Top:  Early November at Wild Grace.  JFK:  borrowed off internet.  Bottom:  Thanks, indeed!  ;-)

Partners

 You know, it really is a cool thing being in love.  

I hope everyone gets the human experience of loving another sometime in their lives.  I hope, too, that everyone gets a generous helping of second chances because relationships first time around don’t always have the best track records.  

I offer this blog/meditation today on having a partner to love because of the amazingly good time Cindy Lou and I had on our trip to England and Ireland.  After the laundry has been washed and put away, phone calls responded to, the yard raked and tended, with jet lag not completely shed, we still feel a glow between us that had not been unknown to us, but now is perceived in a deeper and more connected way.  We have, in fact, fallen more deeply in love with each other.  

Cindy Lou and I have gone on plenty of trips over our twenty+ years together, some longer than others.  Thirteen years ago it was three weeks in Alaska.  We’ve spent lots of time in New Orleans.  We do Hilton Head every spring of late.  We’ve driven to California and Montana, the Maine coast and south Florida.  We frankly look forward to spending time together in restricted travel space because at home we often find ourselves living different lives in different places.  She has her TV spot and I have mine.  I like sitting outside under that canopy in the summer.  Her, not so much.  It’s a bug thing.  Can’t blame her.  And now I’ve found sleeping in the guest room with music playing more to my liking.  Music just keeps her awake.

I spend lots of time reading and writing on my Mac, often many hours a day.  She has her computer time in front of the TV on the couch, too, and also spends a couple days a week with the wee friends she babysits.  Such means we sometime don’t spent time eating our evening meal together.  

These revelations might have the reader conclude we don’t spend enough time together, a conclusion with which I doubt we would disagree.  Cindy has talked for years of going to dinner and a movie one night a week.  Great idea, but we seldom do.  We both end up feeling comfortable in our home space and hate to leave it.

The balance of being together and being apart reminds us both of the dance Anne Morrow Lindberg explained to all at so many weddings we attended back in the day.  The reading I refer to is from her book Gift from the Sea, and explains the ‘country dance’ healthy partners perform:

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules.  The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s.  To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding.  There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing.  Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back — it does not matter which.  Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. 

I fancy the image of our both dancing to our couple melody while performing our own songs as we feel them.  Feels mighty healthy, actually. 

I’m not saying Cindy and I did not find moments to be cross with each other on this trip.  It happened a couple of times, both while we were dragging too heavy luggage down a London or Holy Head street with another heavy bag draped over a shoulder.  Cindy said last night one shoulder still hurts from bearing the weight of the bag that included a few magazines, a laptop computer, and her Kindle.  We have since concluded that whatever impatience we encountered with the other was really the product of stress.  Nobody was trying to piss anybody off.  It’s just that when one is tired, it just feels that way. 

In the truth of knowing that and how much each wanted the other to have a really good time on this trip, a newly recognized flower bloomed within us sometime on our travels. I’ve seen something similar happen to Cindy before when we go to the beach.  She is, in fact, a beach girl, and sheds accumulated winter by walking barefoot on the sand.  

This time we didn’t have much sand to walk on, but in a different way of doing things, we both played big hands in how this trip came off.  I usually do most of the travel planning, which is why this unfamiliar overseas trip didn’t come together for so many years.  

This time in planning, we both had more to say about how our time would be spent.  Cindy got her days in London and Norwich, special places she wanted me to experience.  I got a quiet week at Holy Hill in County Sligo, which is another link in the chain of experiences fostered by the disparate likes of Paul Winter, the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado, and the Spiritual Life Institute.   Don’t get me wrong:  Cindy wanted Ireland, too, as I wanted to see London.  Still, we had different agendas when the planning began. 

I told Cindy throughout the trip that she did not take a bad picture.  Every time I turned the camera her way, she was beaming.  If you followed our escapades on Facebook, go back and look at the selfies we took.  Every single one of ‘em.  She’s flat out gorgeous in each.  Such a smile!  ;-)

I am grateful for the chance to accompany Cindy Lou on this magical trip she’s been waiting for.  It was supposed to happen eight years ago when she retired from teaching.  Now, as it turns out, we celebrated a 60th birthday and a 20th year of marriage, to boot.  

Truth is, we’ve grown together as we’ve grown older.  We love each other deeply.  And it feels damned good, I don’t mind telling you.  

Today’s elder idea:  ‘If it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone.’

Gregory Alan Isakov

‘Second chances’

freebie from iTunes a while ago

images:  Cindy Lou in London; a ‘selfie’ at Stonehenge.

Fathers

As the the departure time for our UK/Ireland trip drew near, I began considering what poetry I would pack and haul along with me.  First and foremost was to be a collection of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize winning Irish poet who passed away just a few months ago.  

I don’t know anything about Heaney, so I placed a copy of a recent title of his in my Amazon.com basket -- and never quite got around to ordering it early enough to pack.  Fair enough, thought I.  Dublin will a fine place to pick up a copy of Haney. Sure enough, the Hughes & Hughes Bookseller store just off St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin had plenty of Heaney titles, and along with a birding guide of Europe, my stack of traveling books got two texts heavier. 

I eventually opened Heaney’s New Selected Poems 1966-1987 on day two here at Holy Hill Hermitage in Co. Sligo.  I must say, much of what he writes about has such an Irish flavor that I feel I need a primer on local history to follow his threads of thought. 

Still, the concept of father grabbed me with the first poem I read.  A few lines from ‘Digging’: 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into the gravely ground:

My father, digging, I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging...

By God, the old man could handle a spade. 

Just like his old man...

And, of course, such a remembrance of Heaney’s made me consider my old man.  

I think about Dad often, but especially on this trip.  Having spent a few years of his young life in England in the US Army Air Corps during World War II, he told us a few stories of that dangerous time that have stuck with me.  Like when the ship on which he and hundreds of his comrades crossed the Atlantic sailed into the Firth of Clyde in Scotland after a week of radio silence to avoid enemy detection.  Story goes that Allied air support would survey the ocean for approaching ships.  One such recon sortie spotted a quantity of flotsam on the water and making a reasoned judgement, assumed the Aquitania, my father’s ship, had been sunk by a German U-boat.  All were surprised and delighted to find everyone intact.  

Dad’s place of duty was Bury St. Edmunds, England, where he worked in the kitchen cooking for crews of airmen who flew over Europe on bombing missions.  One of his most poignant stories was that guys flying out would leave their wallets behind, knowing that if they didn’t come back, whatever cash was in those wallets would buy a few rounds of drinks for the guys that did.  Even late in his life Dad couldn’t listen to taps without choking up with tears.  I witnessed that more than once.

Back when I was a kid, like my other brothers, I’d help him on occasional jobs when he installed floor covering on weekends and in the evenings to raise a little extra money for the family.  He did the same gig for Rike’s, a local department store, full time.  Later on in his career he went out on his own to ‘lay’ carpet and linoleum.  One summer I worked with him and honest to goodness, I’ve never seen a man sweat so much.  Imagine one guy -- with a little help from me -- jockeying a 400 pound roll of carpet, getting it into position, cutting it perfectly, then kicking the edges into the tack strip to make the installation secure.  Heavens.  He made it clear, by the way, that none of his sons would follow in his career footsteps.  We were all going to school.

I remember, too, plenty of Sunday mornings in my late teens when he would get me up early so we could make it to church on time to serve as acolytes for the 5:45 AM service at church.  It didn’t matter what time I had gotten in the night before.  We made it to church and performed our duties.  It was about then, too, when he would take me out driving after church when the streets were pretty empty.  Such was a special time for both of us.  

And then last week when Cindy Lou and I were in London walking along the Thames over by Westminster Abbey, I found myself in tears.   We had happened upon the Battle of Britain memorial.  Oh, my.  The airmen in the monument stood out in proud relief.  I could see my father among them.  I didn’t expect the tears, but there they were.  Pride in my father’s contributions in that war effort was rich and heartfelt.

Seamus Heaney writes of his father’s influence on him, even from the grave.  I feel some of that, too, I suppose.  For me, though, I’d have to say I felt it most authentically a while ago this evening when I went out into the dark for a slow amble down the little two-lane road in front of our hermitage. The moon was full, the air still, and the murmur of the Ardnaglass River carried through the trees.  Took me back to one of the nights Dad had us kids out for an all-night fishing adventure.  

Because of him, I’ve concluded, I love Nature as much as I do -- so much so that I’d travel across the sea for the chance to have a quiet week where I can listen for birds; photograph flowers; enjoy an amazing sunrise -- and warm, Irish rain; and drive up into the Ox Mountains just to get the best panorama of the countryside possible.  

He was one of the best Nature lovers I’ve ever known.  Thanks for showing me the way, Dad.

Today’s elder idea:  Might be a computer for me, but you get the idea:  the finishing lines from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging’: 

  

...I’ve no spade to follow men like that. 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests. 

I’ll dig with that. 

images:  top:  Dad in his early 20s;  mid:  Battle of Britain Memorial detail, London;  bottom: moon out on the road by our place in Ireland. 

Problems of history

 A number of year ago, I remember hearing that history was written by the ‘victors.’  My first reaction was to bristle at the concept that the actual story of what happened in a particular battle or historical era was constructed through the bias of the folks who had either won a political victory or vanquished a particular enemy.  The more I thought about it, though, and the more I critiqued the history I taught and so much personally loved, I began to realize that, though such a criticism might be taken with a grain of salt, much truth resided therein.

Yesterday while Cindy Lou and I were on our ‘London in one day’ tour, starting at the Tower of London, I began to think back on another history lesson I began to appreciate a few decades ago.  Back then I was in a Massachusetts cemetery spending some time at the grave of Emily Dickinson.  Where I come from on the eastern fringe of the Midwest, the oldest local graves I ever found were early 19th century.  Woodland Cemetery in Dayton dates back to a time when cities established lovely wooded reserves as final resting places for deceased residents on the outskirts of town.  Graves were even moved from downtown burial plots to the more centralized Woodland in order to open up areas for development, I presume.  

But in Amherst, Massachusetts where Ms. Dickinson is buried, I noticed headstones with dates more than a century older those I had found at home.  It struck me in a moment of realization that American history in New England was, in fact, much, much older than anything I had grown up to learn about my part of the country.  Such a realization strikes me now as a ‘well, duh’ moment, but at the time it really made an impression on me. 

I had a similar reaction at the Tower of London yesterday when I learned that the oldest part of the structure was begun by none other than William the Conquerer, a Norman monarch who changed the island nation’s history close to a millennium ago on the field at Hastings when the claimant to the throne of Edward the Confessor, Harold, was defeated when a particularly well placed arrow struck  him in the eye.  That was 1066, the year I learned in an English linguistics class that marked the end of the Old English period.  Not only would the government of England be changed, but their language as well.

I was eager to listen to our guide, a Yeoman Warder, more commonly known as a Beefeater, who, moving from one spot to another, told us little snippets of British Tower history.  When we got to the site where a round slab of marble with a glass pillow, centered, marked the spot where Anne Boleyn lost her head when she failed to give Henry VIII a male heir, she ticked off the charges made against many of Henry’s wives before they were executed.  Among most of them was ‘adultery.’  No mention of Henry’s indiscretions or discussion of trumped up charges against the women was ever attempted.  

A few minutes later when I was able to talk with the Beefeater as our group moved on, I asked about Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of my favorite characters in English history made famous by Katherine Hepburn in the movie A Lion in Winter.  Both the Yeoman Warder and our guide for the day, Nick, reached back into their recollections to agree that, indeed, Eleanor was imprisoned by her husband, Henry II, for some time in another place, and that she had been kept at the Tower of London for 19 years for her ‘protection.’  I questioned the irony of the use of the word ‘protection,’ and they seemed a little shocked and repeated that, yes, it was for her protection.  Since my knowledge of English history is sketchy at best, I dropped the questioning, but walked on wondering about it nonetheless.

And so today I write on the problem of history.

I know as Americans we have black times in our past when native people were brutally driven off their land, slaves from Africa controlled as vital parts of local economies, and Japanese Americans’ interred during World War II because the powers that be in Washington decided so.  Trust me, the Brits have a black list a whole longer just because they’ve been at governance a whole lot longer than the US.  

I’ve always felt embarrassed about America’s intolerance and social mistakes, but I didn’t get that sense from our guides at the Tower yesterday about their past.  I came to conclude, in part, that telling the story of your country’s actions that might be determined unsavory is just part of the burden of retelling the story of your ancestors.  Surely value judgements can be made about what went on, but having a long history means that both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things are part of the victor’s tale.  

And besides, I suppose it’s really about where people are today.  What has a country learned?  Where has that led them?  How has their history brought them to the place in the present time where citizens, immigrants, and visitors are treated under the law?

I have to say that what I see in London is truly amazing.  It took us a couple days to find a person actually born and raised in this country.  So many different kinds of people are everywhere.  Our guide yesterday said something like three hundred languages are spoken here.  Regardless of the criticisms that can be made about the United Kingdom’s past, it surely is a place today where all are welcomed. 

Today’s elder idea:  On our first tour the other day, when telling of bloody and unfortunate times on the island, our guide reflected, ‘Such was a bad time to be here.’  And so it is with some times in history.

images:  top:  Henry VIII (from Wikipedia); below:  changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace the other day