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.

Another Memorial Day

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Last October I wrote about a photo of my father and his immediate famiily that was taken at the Long homestead in Las Cruces, New Mexico around 1930. That photo came my way at about the time I was reading Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, a reflection on the closing of the Indian wars in the southwest, the part of the southwest where I grew up and thought of those bitter conflicts as part of an ancient past. But it wasn’t ancient, isn’t ancient today.

A family history research project led me to a greater sense of connection with and proximity to the southwestern frontier than I had ever experienced before. I had visited the graves of Quanah Parker and Geronimo at Ft. Sill as a youngster, but I didn’t know then and have only recently understood that those graves are about eighty miles as the crow flies from Sayre, Oklahoma where my father was born at his family’s first homestead. That proximity and connection does not incline us to place wreaths on Indian graves at Ft. Sill. But perhaps it should.

When I first started this blog, I wrote about my father, who died in World War II. I’ve always liked this picture of him, taken at Ft. Bliss during training exercises before he and his comrades in the New Mexico Militia were sent to the Philippines as the United States 200th Coast Artillery in August 1941. He was a physician and a volunteer—at the time his unit was federalized physicians couldn’t be drafted—though he didn’t want to go overseas and hoped for a long time that the unit would be reprieved. I’ve always thought service in the National Guard was part of a payback for help with medical school—my father graduated from medical school in 1932—though I’ve never confirmed my suspicion. We saw him off with his unit on the train at El Paso a couple of days after my birthday that summer of 1941. He told me to take care of my mother. Here’s a bit more of what I wrote back then, paraphrased a little.

“More recently, I’ve read many of his letters to my mother. They describe his westward journey, first by train and then by ship, to the east, his arrival, much experience in the first heady weeks of his encounter with the MacArthur establishment. He didn’t like MacArthur, but I think he loved the old brown shoe army and relished being even a very lowly Captain, as he puts it in one letter, in that foreign outpost which must have had a certain old fashioned clubbiness and esprit. Then, of course, things turned sour. The letters are fewer from mid October on, and stop altogether in late November. One letter arrived after Pearl Harbor, written from a tent on Bataan in February, 1942. He died in 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific on an unmarked prisoner ship that was torpedoed by the U. S. Navy. The story of the sinking made the papers back home, with tales of escaping prisoners being beaten to death by Japanese marines. Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the whole horror of it.

“I learned more about the Japanese death ships when I read Dorothy Cave’s Beyond Courage a few years back. Apparently the Japanese used prisoner ships, marked with a red cross, to ship munitions, but there seems also to have been an intention to exterminate prisoners by transporting them on unmarked ships. Cave’s book also confirmed my impression from family and other history that my father and his comrades had been abandoned by their government when it was decided that the war in Europe took precedence over the far east. I learned too that my mother had been a member of an advocacy group during the war, that attempted to pressure congress and the president to rescue the folk in the Philippines. I found a collection of newsletters among her effects after her death. I also found a check for $100 that my father wrote to someone with a Filipino name. It was presented to my mother for payment after the war. The letter that accompanied it explained that my father had written it for black market medical supplies that he managed to smuggle into the prison at Camp O’Donnell.

“After his death was confirmed, they promoted him to Major and gave him some medals. One was a Bronze Star, the highest military decoration awarded to noncombatants. He also received a Presidential Citation, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which my mother always cherished. I didn’t know much of this as a child. I thought my father’s Purple Heart more important than the Bronze Star, bigger and more imposing. And for a long time I refused to believe he was dead. I fantasized that he would come around the corner of my school one day and grab me up in his arms.” There’s an error in the Bronze Star citation. It dates my father’s internment from April 1941 and should read April 1942.

My father’s regiment was sent to the Philippines because its personnel spoke Spanish. It was a multicultural unit that included native Americans as well as hispanics and anglos like my father. It had been a horse cavalry unit only recently. I remember a closet full of my father’s cavalry uniforms and riding boots. It’s a nice irony that less than fifty years after the close of the Indian and range wars, and in a place where both had been pretty fierce, there was a military regiment that included soldiers whose recent ancestors had likely fought each other over territorial and other claims, some of them genocidal, now a unit engaged in a common struggle far from home and united in part by a common language that wasn’t English.

Great Debaters

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Here’s a story that makes us proud. It’s about Destiny Crockett, this year’s valedictorian at Clyde C. Miller Academy in our city, a city public school that has been a good friend to the St. Louis Urban Debate League. It is also about Destiny’s partner, Cameron Smith, a fine student as well, and the success the two of them have achieved as debaters this year, winning Missouri state championships and achieving Top 16 status at the UDL national debate competition last month. In June they’ll compete in the National Forensic League’s national Tournament as the first St. Louis team to qualify for that event.

My beloved, Kathleen Farrell, is on the SLUDL board of directors. We have watched these young people for three years now, watched them grow and succeed, and we have watched debate help them do it. These things have been beyond heartening to witness, and it is also beyond heartening that Destiny and Cameron’s sucess has unfolded in an urban St. Louis city school, which sits just north of the Delmar divide in this still divided city that is nonetheless ahead of its time. A recent essay on our city, written by anthropologist, Sarah Kendzior, and originally published by Al Jazeera, has been widely attacked, but I think it is spot on. Clyde C. Miller Academy, SLUDL, Destiny and Cameron, and their fellow debaters in this new city league are signs of hope in a city that still nourishes the dream of social justice.

Destiny will go to Princeton in the fall—she has already spent two summers there participating in debate camps and other programs. Cameron will attend Wylie College in Marshall, Texas, the site of the 2007 film The Great Debaters. Denzell Washington has recently endowed the debate program at Wylie. We wish Destiny and Cameron success and happiness in their colege careers and beyond. As Sarah Kendzior points out, the American dream may still be alive in this small city on the banks of the Mississippi. Certainly Cameron and Destiny seem to be achieving it.