A Still Life…A Life Still

Sally Field crumples down into her own hoop skirt, melting into an inconsolable circle on her bedroom floor.  She rides in the presidential carriage, Mrs.Lincoln does, carrying her love and depression in colors that sting; she attends her husband’s fateful death in her home, shattered into fragile pieces.  My father sits next to me in the cinema, his wheelchair nestled into the handicap niche.  I remember, as a child, Carl Sandburg’s huge biographical tome on Abraham Lincoln by my father’s chair; how he followed this fellow Kentuckian’s life and political strategy for its honor, efficacy, leadership.  Now, watching the end of his hero’s life, my father can hardly breathe, he is almost choking on tears.  I wonder if I should be concerned, but he is not.  So, I lean back and move into the story with him – the long marriage, the accomplishments and failures of this man who came from nothing and made something large of it, this heart-wrenching death.  Long after others leave the theater, we remain.  The story holds us there.

Since my father’s words have gone, rather completely now, we must find other ways to weave the day-to-day connection between us.  Conversation is difficult, to say the least, and rather one-sided, with me the loser there.  So, we watch movies together.  We enter a larger story, feel our way down to the nub of it; we steep in its brew.

On my last visit, my father broke his bedtime schedule for the first time I can remember in order to watch the next installment of Downton Abbey with me.  I put him onto the show a year ago; he consumed all the past episodes on his ipad with fancy headphones that make the music swell, the world go away.  Now that he is caught up, we jump into the stream together with Carson and Mrs. Patmore, Mary and Bates and Robert all struggling to face the changes set upon them.  And then, right there in my father’s family room, dear Sybil gives birth to a new little life and, in doing so, gives up her own. I am there for the blame, the oceanic grief, a father’s helplessness.

Conversation with my father was often a heady affair.  So, it surprises us both, I think,  to let story take over.  Story takes us behind another theater curtain, one where we don’t have to understand but simply feel life happening between and among us.  A new and unpredictable conversation of the heart.

On my last phone call, my father asked if I had seen the final episode of Downton Abbey.  Our cable connection had inconveniently gone out that night and we missed the conclusion to the season, I had to report.  Ahhh… he said.  And then, in slow carefully enunciated slurs, It will break your heart.  

This is how it is these days.  We live with a larger world, with an imagination embracing a vivid past and yet hopeful future, seamlessly braiding life and death, the tragic and the fair.  Not many words are needed. Our hearts are broken, and held.

Posted in Uncategorized

I’ve heard a lot about Rata and Rimu lately, hiking along the coast of New Zealand with an avid botanist who personally introduces us to each specimen on the trail. The Rimu, (which we notice could just as well be Rumi if you scatter the letters and rearrange them), is a tall, elegant poem of a tree with long-leafed fingers reaching into the blue sky. High onto its branches, spores of the Northern Rata lodge and begin to sprout, growing roots down – 25, 35, 50 feet down – until they touch soil. The Rata roots, growing downward oh, so slowly, encircle their host and embrace it, until at last they form a solid casing around it. The Rimu, enfolded, dies a natural death of old age; while the Rata lives on, rooted in the same soil, for hundreds of years to come. At the center, forming the core, is always the lingering poem.

At our Christmas gathering last, my father sat quietly, beyond speech, as his family encircled him. We chattered away about our lives, children and grandchildren with little greatgrand now all at last rooted in soil, and growing around him, thickly, forming a tree of our own. The golden-tongued poet was silent at the center of us all. After our exchange of gifts, he spoke as he could to our straining ears.”The thing of which I am most proud”, said my father, “of all that I have done in this life, is this, my family.” We circled around him, our strong roots joined, now holding up his faltering trunk.

He will go, of course, from us. The family will live on for years beyond. But at the center of who we are is the tree who hosted us when we were simply spores of ideas. The one whose wide branches held us as we grew down into ourselves, into our place on earth.

At the core of our lives – all of our lives, I want to believe – is an elegant poem not of our making. It lingers in us, beyond speech, distilled into love.

Posted in Uncategorized

Within the circle of our lives,
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again, we come and go,
changed, changing.  Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy.  The circles turn,
each giving unto each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

Song (4)

by Wendell Berry

Posted in Uncategorized

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Psalm 23

my dear father,

I want to roast you a turkey with oyster dressing (no sage) as you always wanted it at Thanksgiving.  But you can no longer eat.

I want to sit with you and hear about the progress of your latest writing project – how your book unfolds, surprises you, wakes you in the night.   But you can not longer speak so that I can hear.

I’ve been pondering how we shall celebrate Thanksgiving without the banquet spread, without the lilt of conversation, or a walk to stretch our legs.  Will the warm fragrance of fowl baking, the clatter of gravy being conjured bring you happiness that family is near, or an ache for what you cannot taste, or both?  When I ask, you laugh and shake your head and utter that happy mound of words I’ve come to recognize by their cadence:  “I’m OK.  Don’t Worry About Me!”

I’ve been learning, as you ask, not to worry about you, but to see, instead, what is true.  Which is a generous and lavish hospitality rising in you to set a banquet for me, for all of us.  Not a groaning board of sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, but a banquet that feeds and delights me, nonetheless.

In the utter poverty of your physical resources, yet you set forth a surprising abundance.  Your humor in all things, your wide breaking-open smile, your sparkling eyes, your wry un-self-pitying comebacks.  When I suggest a date for my next visit, remembering how we used to labor through your complicated speaking schedule to find a narrow window of time, you shrug and laugh and say:  I’ll be here!  When we both go face to face straining hard – you to speak a distinguishable word and me to understand it – and when I fail over and over as I sometimes do – then there is simply a puddle of laughter into which we both go falling.  What else is there to do?  Your humor seasons and tenderizes potential bitterness on an daily basis.  I give thanks for it.

But your work – and your herculean dedication to it – is the meat you offer at this banquet.  How you still chew on ideas, cook up words, feast on the gift of creative endeavor.  You recently called the caregiver at 5:30 in the morning to get up, I hear, because you simply couldn’t wait until 6:00:  sentences had baked in the night, chapter headings were cooked.  It sets before me the sheer aliveness, the purpose, and the consuming sustenance of our creative lives.

I hear that you insisted on voting in person on November 6, with a little help from Andrew to push the buttons.  News of that fed me – how you wanted to exercise your citizenship, weigh in,  still be a part of the count.  How you read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Birmingham News every evening, barely able to hold them in your hands, but ever curious about the world chuffing on beyond the doors you seldom leave.  For that, I’m thankful – your engagement, unflagging, with the whole, and knowing yourself a part of it.

You set a table, my dear father, which I am overjoyed to join this Thanksgiving.  Your humility, your self-respect, your respect for others, your visible love, and your ever-renewing spirit are also there.  Your quiet grief in the absence of your loving wife.  All this seasons our week together.  All of it brings me to thanks.

In and above and around and below:  my deep gratitude for the privilege of being your daughter.

always at your table,

Susan

Posted in Uncategorized

Emily was his first grandchild, and his only little girl.  My father threw her on his shoulder, after delivering his most profound words in a tightly crafted sermon, and paraded her around the church like a palanquin carrying a Maharani princess.  He was smitten with her fetching wiles, as any grandfather ought to be. When she was just a crawler, he chased her around the carpet on all fours while she squealed and gurgled. He read to her, powdered her belly, stashed away for her college fund.

Emily is the one delivering sermons, now.  And not just sermons. The belly he powdered is delivering her own little ripple in the circle of life.  Last night, after twenty placid hours (!), Emily gave birth to William Dean McGee.  My father waited from afar, his heart still ready to be smitten, yet again, with life that sprouts newly green.

William Dean follows his great-granddaddy not just in name, but in promise.  He will walk in the well-worn paths of love into his own boundless destiny.  Drawing, all the while, like sap from the family tree, on the storied memory of those who came before.  The memory of those whose shoulders he rides upon.

Posted in Uncategorized

Andrew flings about in the kitchen like a one man band playing at once the drums and fiddle and bass while humming the tune.  He is making dinner for me and, much more importantly, his girlfriend, Sarah.   Get out of his way.  The sausage is sizzling, the shrimp getting pealed, the pasta is boiling, a tossed green salad appears.  Flour is dusting the entirety of the counters, packaging is detritus he doesn’t bother to throw away.  The jumble and chaos seems to feed his creative brew; the music is hot and hotter, the girlfriend is amused and happy; I am getting a very good meal for being at the right place at the right time.

I unhook my father from his oxogen, remove his glasses, power up his wheelchair:  he wants to join us for dinner.  No matter that he cannot eat a bite of this savory feast.  He cannot even drink a sip of water anymore.  His daily bread comes in the form of liquid goop ingested through a feeding tube.  He cannot speak so that we will understand.  But he wheels up to the table nonetheless, proving to me beyond any doubt that the dinner table is a social ritual, a bonding beyond food, even beyond conversation.  He simply wants to join the circle.

I light the candles.  Say a prayer of blessing.  Try to think of all the ways one can savor the world when taste and tongue are out of commission.  My father smiles to see us there, to watch us break into the crunchy garlic bread, the savory made-in-the-moment concoction Andrew has orchestrated.  He laughs to hear Sarah’s stories from her social work station in the nearby rural part of town.  He listens to the chatter, feels the fondness alive and glowing in his grandson, feasts on the family, even in little tastes of it.

I asked him later if he ever feels a little bit like Job.  His movement is all but gone, food is over, words are taken from him; he cannot scratch his ear.  Spasms of pain shudder over him throughout the day. Now his wife of 60 years is gone.   He shakes his head no.  And he tries to speak, though I do not understand the greater part of it.  But I hear something like this:  No, I am thankful for my life.  I am glad for my work, for the writing I can still do. And I rejoice greatly in my family.

Sparkling and wide-eyed,  he looks up at me and smiles.

Posted in Uncategorized