Category Archives: personal essay

birthrights and summer nights

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We’re getting the old house in as good shape as we can in anticipation of a barbecue this weekend. Our book group is meeting at our house at three, and a crowd of other friends are coming at five thirty on Saturday. Our god daughter, Emma, will be here with her mom—they are honorary members of the book group.

Normally, we would have barbecued on Independence Day, but Emma couldn’t come on the fourth this year. She’s working lots of hours as a lifeguard this summer and saving as much as she can in her college fund. In August she matriculates at Oberlin College. We’re very proud of her. She graduated with high honors from Iowa City High School in May. She’s not going to Oberlin for music, and we don’t know what she will decide to do with her life, What we do know is that she will do the deciding, just as she chose Oberlin because of its diverse faculty and student body and because she felt after visiting a good many schools that Oberlin offered the kind of challenge she is inclined to take on now.

For the past several days I’ve been trying to think of something to say about why I love my country, but that immediately puts me at odds with many people I know and love who believe that the country I love, the creation of a liberal establishment, needs to be dismantled in the name of freedom and creativity. I am now to understand that greed is not only good but socially redemptive as well; to accept the destruction of the fundamental institutions of a great nation, everything from public universities to highways and bridges in the name of privatization or that will-o-the-wisp, reform; and to adjust to a public sphere in which swaggering thugs strut about brandishing assault rifles.

So I’ll wave no flags this year. Instead, I’ll think about what it was like to be as young as Emma, when the things I most loved to do came easily. I’ll remember swimming in the lake, canoeing out to a floating pier at Lake Junaluska as Pat Boone’s voice crooned “April Love” out over the water. I worked there in the summer of 1956 as a singer. We created a stir by protesting the segregated swimming pool. I’ll think about rides up the mountain in my roommate’s convertible, and rides back down after dark with the girl I fancied then. I’ll think about how open the world seemed. I didn’t think of that openness as an unearned privilege, but of course it was. I had a ticket to the American meritocracy—that was my birthright.

But tonight after ice cream at Ted Drewes on old Route 66, I’m not inclined to be analytical or judgmental. I’m enjoying a fine summer in the last days of my seventy-fifth year. My garden is grown up as never before. My cup runneth over, because you see I’m still privileged. The world remains open to my concerns and desires. Pat Boone is still singing out over the lake somewhere; and somewhere fine young people who are kin to me, their bodies lithe, their faces devoid of guile, paddle out to a floating pier, tie up their small boats, and share the evening. They’ll swim, some of them will kiss or exchange other endearments; they’ll talk and their talk will be fine summer talk, talk for the time being, talk of the wondrous open world they share. And that’s a good thing.

It’s the best thing I have to celebrate this Independence Day season, except perhaps for the crowds lined up at and around Ted Drewes, some waiting to buy at the windows where young people who will go to college with Ted Drewes’ assistance serve us concretes and banana splits—just ahead of me a beautiful little girl has helped her father collect two huge banana splits to be shared with their family of four as they speak Spanish together. And some across the street sitting on the wall in front of a bank, leaning against it, eating ice cream, some like us who simply lean against the iron rail of Ted Drewes’ parking lot and watch our neighbors as we consume two identical butterscotch mini-concretes. All around us the blessing of openness, of a parking lot one can get in and out of, of camaraderie at the service window (I have met foreign diplomats, Salvation Army executives, priests, scholars, and baseball players there, among others), of the gift of one more blessed summer evening.

—the gift of one more blessed summer evening.

waiting for the second dove

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A pair of doves had come to stay with us. I first saw them together on the wires behind our house, wires that serve as branches might if we had trees. One of the advantages of wires as branches is that one’s view of the multitude of birds that frequent my neighborhood is unimpeded by foliage. I tell myself such as I procrastinate about planting the tree that I have been thinking about planting in the back yard for some years now. Doves mate for life. If one flies off the other follows. They perch as though joined at the wing. When they descend to eat some of my next door neighbor’s birdseed, they seem never to stray more than an arm’s length from one another.

I watched these companionable creatures as I took a break from mowing the other day. Their presence comforted me; then, suddenly they flew away in tandem as a squirrel scampered upright along the wire towards them. As the doves flew away, the squirrel lost her footing but caught herself and scrambled to an upright position again only to lose her footing a second time and scramble hand to hand along underneath the wire upside down. She then quickened her pace and scurried the remaining twenty or thirty feet to the pole across the alley, clambered off, perched on a thicker wire and scampered down three houses length before disappearing into the foliage of a neighbor’s big oak.

Later I seemed to see a dove return alone to my next door neighbor’s back yard. I worried that its mate had run afoul of one of our neighborhood’s many feral cats. As these thoughts began to take shape in my mind, my first impulse was to return inside and grab a note pad to jot them down. But I needed to finish my mowing. The sky was suggesting rain in the offing, and besides, if I remained outside for a bit I could watch for the other dove’s return. After I had finished my mowing and returned to my study I wondered vaguely if I had just been vouchsafed a lesson in providence? Scripture tells us not a sparrow falls outside God’s providential gaze. Was the hand of God evident as a rascally squirrel saved herself? I don’t know whether pairs of doves love one another—in a Thomistic sense they must, I think. Does the abrupt decease of a beloved bird, killed by an unwanted cat perhaps argue an absence? The second dove did not return, and this morning I see the remains of a nest on my neighbor’s garage roof.

I think I was forty-two when it occurred to me for the first time forcibly that I might not live forever. Like Freud I can’t imagine or think of not being except as a general concept devoid of content. But my new awareness was the perception of finitude, of living a material, concrete life detached from any surrounding cosmic stew. For some years afterwards I thought about death a good deal whilst behaving in ways that amounted to classic death denial as Becker describes it. “Know thyself first immortal,” says Chaucer’s Scipio Africanus. I had long ago given up on the consolations of my religion, but some great economy or philosophers’ heaven still might offer a malleable future pregnant with unforeseen possibility, a sort of rational reconnection to the cosmic stew that might replace the paradise I had lost.

Or so I thought. Now the future is much shorter. I’m no longer preoccupied with the grand scheme of things. To the extent that I think about death at all, I think of it as a particular occurrence that I expect to interrupt my material life in a way and at a time I shall not choose. I have just read the obituary of a former colleague who died at the age of eighty-four, a catalogue of his good works and accomplishments and of the many honors that had come his way in life. I knew these already, but seeing his age at death I noted that he had seven more years than I have now. The thought has an edge, but as I search my awareness I find no grim reaper wielding it like a scythe. If there be a grim reaper, I am oblivious; and I am faced with the same question that faced me half a life ago: what is to be done? My answer for the moment is to finish my own mowing and to watch for the dove’s return, not as a presage of some postdiluvian blessedness but as a sign of my own hope of present continuing.

This perception discloses to me other concrete and homely truths. Recently, I discovered Wendell Berry’s wonderful essay, “The Two Economies” and continue to enjoy its resonance. Just yesterday, as I listened to a sermon on providence I thought the real question isn’t whether God is able to (or cares to) help us in our trouble, or even whether we live in a cosmic commonwealth that is self-aware and desires the well-being of its constituents, but rather how to be, as the self-aware creatures that we are, when faced with our irreducible finitude. We live in a place where death surrounds us, is as commonplace as it is inevitable. Our lives bear themselves towards death no matter what we wish or will. The real problem with the denial of death is that it diminishes the future, as Berry puts it. Somehow, in a way that I shall never understand, my ability to be at all is dependent upon my very partial apprehension of not being.

Which in turn discloses to me some large goods that are present to my given life. The economy of these large goods tends to remain balanced of itself, though we humans may upend it. Berry reads the parable of “a certain rich man,” told in the twelfth chapter of Luke, as follows:

He is prepared for a future in which he will be prosperous, not for one in which he will be dead. We know from our own experience that it is possible to live in the present in such a way as to diminish the future practically as well as spiritually. By laying up “much goods” in the present—and, in the process, using up such goods as topsoil, fossil fuel, and fossil water—we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay.

Berry’s purpose in this essay is to lay out the grounds for a comprehensive ecological or environmental ethics, an honorable purpose. Mine is more modest.

Though I fear the loss of the doves whose presence just now graced my back yard, I continue to await their return. My waiting contains the hope of tomorrow that is my will to live whatever may be the measure of my life. And it contains as well the somewhat uncomfortable knowledge that my life has a measure. I continue to love my beloved, my children, my friends. I hope to remain charitable, to be generous—perhaps I may still write a few more good poems, publish another small book or two. Perhaps students will continue to welcome my conversation for a while. But I shall erect no grandiose monuments to myself nor seek otherwise to write my name in the heavens. As I resolved to continue my mowing I recalled a couple of favorite lines from a poem by Robert Bly. It’s called “Black Pony eating Grass”:

In a few years we will die,
yet the grass continues to lift itself into the horse’s teeth, . . . .

It isn’t just that my days are as the grass that withers, as the psalmist put it. The grass continues, the horse eats, and I witness—all of us bound up in the bosom of death, the edge of the world, the teeth of the horse, the boundary of time and of timely things.

In the bonds of life

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Our friend Marsha died just shy of a year ago. Today her family unveiled and dedicated her tombstone, following Jewish custom. My beloved and I attended along with other friends. We stood in the rain as a friendly Rabbi read the simple service. We were altogether about twenty, including Marsha’s small grandchildren who found ways to play in the puddles around us and to enjoy the weather that the rest of us fended off with raincoats and umbrellas.

The service was so moving that I eventually forgot the weather too. The Rabbi, who we guessed knew Marsha well, had written a poem about her, which he read. It captured her well, her brashness, her intellect–Marsha had two PhDs–her deep laugh that we all remembered as the Rabbi spoke of it, the mark of laughter she had need of as a polio survivor and at the end as she battled a liver disease, a lymphoma, and the devastations wrought by chemotherapy.

The memorial prayer the Rabbi intoned afterwards asks that the soul of the departed person be bound in the bonds of life (some translations say everlasting life). This Rabbi, today, spoke of Marsha’s soul as bound up with the souls of the living. As I looked about me at the friends and family congregated around Marsha’s grave, I knew it was so. I threw away my umbrella as I looked for a small stone to leave on the grave marker.

. . . late in Advent

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It’s always tempting to offer some borrowed eloquence; but that’s cheating, and now that I’ve lived officially three quarters of a century I’d like at least to cheat a little less than in former years. No intimation of winter yet—the season hangs indifferent, damp as the leaves in my back yard that I’ve not yet raked, neither cold enough for winter nor fruitful enough for fall. The sap wrung out of the time, I journey a sodden way towards solstice, towards the longest night.

Some years the sky has opened to thousand Seraphim striding the air, their great pennons shedding dark love. Today at dusk a fat squirrel pawed through the leaves, found an acorn and scampered up the fence to the garage roof and thence to the hanging branches of the huge old oak in my neighbor’s yard three houses down. Better bury some acorns in the ground, I thought, lay down some supplies against the time when the light goes; though yesterday at the clinic smart young doctors shined lights in my eyes and pronounced them healthy.

Lord, the thing I know best is that I don’t know much of anything. I can’t imagine not being, can’t think not thinking. But the death wind blows around me, not urgently, not swiftly, but firmly nonetheless. What angels will stride in its wake this year? I read of murdered children in the news and wonder how anyone . . . so many innocent, but would fewer have been less . . . I can’t finish the sentence. I resolve to rake my leaves before year’s end (mine by possession, not by ownership), to clean my gutters, and to sit on my back porch at dusk to watch the time go afterwards.

These will be my last things for the time being—though of course I have good memories, hierophanies some of them and those I don’t like to use too much, don’t want to wear them thin. But if you come by again, I’ll be as ready as I can be, having recalled that once you astonished me in the old red brick church, so that I ran out into the night with tears streaming down my face. After that you dropped in occasionally, like that time in the Intimate Bookshop when I picked up “A Song for Simeon.” But mostly you’ve stayed hidden in the world, the “still unspeaking and unspoken word” I wait upon.

—Come, Emmanuel.