“The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.” ~ Susan Sontag
O companion of my heart, I am kneeling at the long window, hushed with you, statuesque gargoyle grotesque on the cathedral barn.
In this, the attentiveness of longing, you wait in your placid eye, onyx bead embedded in the corrugated heart of your featherless head. You hunger, like me, taciturn in a violent world. You lift
off into the blue without sound, to travel like John in the wilderness. O calm and golden remiges, soft oars stippled with sun, my love, my inspiration, my ferryman to the flowing sky,
your peaceful floating a surrender to what rises, the kitely sails of your wings tilting, lilting on tides of heat that carry fragrance of decay. In this air, what is death is your joy.
All the suffering in these little ones who bring you sustenance you did not wield with talon or tooth. The pink and gray fleshes gurgle over the gullet stones of your hearted throat, all their silenced cries, their chests opened, every disappointed beat and falling enveloped in your beak, lifted up, a mercy in this fractured air.
And long in the shadow of the tree you clean yourself. Through you all is purified. Tonight the moon shines cool in a black No Man's Land, and we sleep.
gargoyle - originally gargouille in French means throat or gullet; the downspout for rain at the outer edges of roofs of churches and other buildings; grotesques were gargoyles of fantastical creatures that were not waterspouts but were meant to scare off harmful spirits
remiges (pronounced ree-meks) - the flight feather of a bird’s wing, its origin from the Latin for oarsman
Read my prose poem about a turkey vulture in a previous post here.
This King Vulture porcelain is in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the AIC's booklet writeup about the piece:Around 1728 Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, conceived of replicating the animal and bird kingdoms in porcelain. By 1733 more than 30 different models of birds and almost 40 animals had been made, many by the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler. Kändler modeled this King Vulture from life, which allowed him to animate the creature’s quintessential spirit. Such porcelain animals remain the most vivid expression of Augustus’s wish to possess and rule over the natural world.
See scanned turkey vulture (and other bird) feathers like the ones below at The Feather Atlas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The tavern in the middle of our town looked like one of those windowless bars I rode by when I was a kid in the back of the station wagon on trips when for apparently moral reasons we couldn’t use the neon sign’s “Q” in “Liquor” for the alphabet game. Covered windows or no windows at all, I envisioned those bars dark, dirty and mysteriously bad inside, with men hunched under the roof around brown bottles of beer, like trolls under a bridge around unspeakable loot.
Don and I have lived a few years on a country road two miles from a town where a tavern has presided over its comings and goings for decades. Every weekday I drive through the village's eclectic row of houses and the four corners of downtown on my way to and from work. There is an alternate route I could take, but the town reassures me, with its thousand people who know each other and on summer evenings buy ice cream cones at the general store across from the tavern, leaning on posts while they lick Rocky Road, or lounging on the store steps smoking cigarettes. I fill up my gas tank on the third corner at the BP, deciding to support a business in town even as I support a company that administered a disaster. Maybe my gas money will help someone get compensation for the oil spill too. I can hope.
The tavern across from the general store is in a building that is 150 years old. That's when the Civil War began. We got to know the tavern, where neighbors and friends ate pizza and drank beer, Harley bikers stopped for breakfast on their smooth Sunday rides across the state, and cyclists by the dozen stopped for lunch and a rest. On Memorial Day the end of May, the owner sold barbecued ribs and chicken from his trailer in the parking lot during the parade. Once a month or so we got a booth in the smoky old joint and ate bar burgers or all you can eat Friday fish fries when we didn’t feel like cooking.
The tavern burned Wednesday in the middle of the night, no one hurt thankfully. Workers pulled down the hollow brick walls the next day when the fire had been put out by firefighters from all over. When I drove home Thursday, sort of forgetting that the tavern was gone, I turned the corner onto Jackson Street between the square of charred piles of bricks of the tavern and the general store, and suddenly I had to stop. I was in the midst of a crowd of hundreds of residents (half the town) who were standing in a vigil in the middle of the street gathered around the tavern’s owner standing by his pickup, letting him know they love him and want him to rebuild. Hands were held high with cell phones snapping pictures as friends stepped forward to hug him one by one. There I was, driving my little Aveo through the crowd (it was impossible to go back the way I’d come) dividing it like Moses parting the Red Sea, with the sea of people closing in together behind me. I may not know anybody in this town (I'm fine with that, we have good friends and big families), but I felt bolstered by their group hug that surrounded me like a living piece of cloth being unzipped and rezipped by me in my car and all that love.
The "trolls": our son's friend Stephen and our son Peter
when we took Stephen, a world traveling cruise ship videographer, to the town tavern when he visited from Vancouver last year
Before my time, my father was an itinerant preacher, driving his old car through the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia to four parishes, preaching sermons and ministering to the rural poor. They needed saving, and he had a heart for them. Maybe this is why he kept walking even long after he left Virginia for Michigan, where I was born. He was a walker, a bicycle rider, a car driver, a grocery store cart pusher. Get out the way of the good reverend.
Saturday nights, alone in the upstairs hall he paced in shirt and tie through a tunnel of ancient books with his shoes on, never in stocking feet or barefoot, on the velvet leaves of the Persian runner, rehearsing his Sunday sermon. Striding rhythmically by the books aligned at the edge of every shelf, his feet rang the steps from one end of the hall where his oak desk filled the bay window to the other end at the screen-doored balcony, the toes of his pendulum feet dotting each “i” and jotting every tittle of his Biblical speech.
Beneath him, I sat in the living room with the TV, hearing through the ceiling the creaking cadence of his feet. I prayed the walking would carry on, that he wouldn’t come down and see me watching and listening to a program he didn’t approve with a worldly man on the screen: Dean Martin, born forty years before me, the same year as my dad, but destined for a different vocation. In a black tuxedo, white shirt, and bow tie coming undone with one finger, he crooned. He stood on a different kind of platform, with another kind of mic than my father's. He sang me a rock glass lullaby, loving me with eyes half open from within a nimbus of cigarette smoke.
I had a thing for older men who looked different than my red-haired father. I went for men with dark hair and graying temples. If they were olive-skinned and brown-eyed, I was smitten. Even as a teenaged girl riding on airplanes to visit my sister in Chicago, I kept my eye on the middle-aged gentlemen in suits. I was too innocent, and outwardly aloof, to fall prey to the wrong kind of man, but I had fantasies of their attentions. Dean Martin was the model older man of my daydreams — beautiful, charming and funny.
If my dad paused in place in the hallway above me, suddenly silent, my heart would stop. I’d watch with anxiety for him to appear at the French doors. Then the old oak floorboards above me would chirp again and chide: a phrase in the sermon had been wrong. He’d stopped his hallway itinerary, corrected the line or word, and his steps were off again, pacing steadily, my heart commencing its beat.
I wondered what he had rewritten in the pause, and hallowed in cradling breath, what halo of dust was stirred up around his hesitating feet. What would I hear Sunday morning from the pulpit microphone that he had altered, out of some fault that needed forgiving, so that this time his voice would sound something like crooning?
I read a friend's post about losing a baby to miscarriage at ten weeks. Her love for the baby she barely knew surmounted what some would imagine, and others might try to comfort away ("thankfully you already have three children . . . "). It brought to mind my daughter's best friend, who learned early in her pregnancy that the infant inside her had anencephaly, the cephalic disorder that prevents the brain developing. There is nothing anyone can do to help the baby survive once she's born, and they usually do go full term, depending on the mother for survival. Lesley's friend named her daughter, carried her in her womb the rest of the months to term, loved her, gave birth with her husband touching her wherever he could, and they held their daughter for a couple of hours until she passed away. I believe that it is possible to distill a full lifetime's love into a short span like that. What is time?
You've probably read about the sixteen-year-old boy who shot the final basket to win the varsity basketball game in Fennville, Michigan, and just after he was carried on the shoulders of his teammates and the crowd surrounded him with hysteria, suddenly, he paled, collapsed. And he died. Fennville is the high school where my siblings and I would have attended if my parents hadn't moved to a different town an hour and a half away shortly before I entered the world. My sister's granddaughter is student teaching in Fennville this year. Wes was in her school, where stunningly, with one missed heartbeat, he won't be Monday morning. We are throwing her a bridal shower tomorrow, for she is marrying a nice fellow named Jeff in May. Tomorrow in our celebration with Katy toward her new life with Jeff, we will also carry the weight of this too-soon-gone sixteen-year-old.
I think we are all mothers at times like this. Whatever our gender or childbearing ability, we carry the weight of a child, as Anne Michaels said in her powerful novel, Fugitive Pieces:
"There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child."
Sometimes love itself feels this way. Love is almost a grief in its timelessness, ever constrained by the weight of gravity and distance. Even the separation of skin is is almost too much to bear.
I am adding Sting's rendition of "My One and Only Love" today, Sunday, but still in time for Valentine's Day. The video includes artistic representations of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche through history. Lovely!
Inge and me after walking in the Making Strides event
This is my best friend, Inge. She is a breast cancer survivor. Today we walked a 5K from our state capitol for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.
Inge.(Please say it in your mind's voice with a soft g, as in flying.) Inge is faithful, and disciplined; she loves language and reads voraciously when she isn't working too hard; she also loves numbers and being organized. She is fascinated by memory and why we remember some things, and not others. She has artistic, intelligent hand writing. Inge is a poet; she is German, with a steel-trap mind; her English is more proficient than many Americans I know. She has beautiful, dewy skin; she adores her 16-year-old son Piet; she is golden, with a golden heart. When we sit together, it's as if we are one person, with two sets of eyes. At lunch today after the walk Inge shared David Brooks' recent column "The Flock Comedies" describing friendship, saying that this passage quoting C.S. Lewis is how she sees ours. I agree:
Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”
Warning: Mixed metaphors follow.
Seven years ago, Inge told me she had a malignant tumor. That "cosmic two-by-four," as she calls it, smacked her into an intense journey of chemo, radiation, and exploration of the soul. Shortly after the diagnosis, over lunch out of Bento boxes, she described her session that morning with an esoteric healer who was helping her go beyond medical treatment, toward inner wholeness. Hearing about it I practically jumped over the table into her lap with excitement. The moment was full, and I was eager, recognizing instantly that we would be doing this work together. I could feel an unseen world of mystery and beauty ready to flood us with its light, if we could just get the curtains open. For a couple of years we devoured every book that leapt off the shelf at us, starting with Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, and on into meticulous inner excavations with Don Miguel Ruiz, Michael Brown, Osho, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Thomas Moore, John Hillman, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, G. I. Gurdjieff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, and others in snippets, poems and synchronicities. Even a mother beech tree in Ireland and a Scotch pine in a back yard were our teachers. We dug, scraped, chipped, whittled and brushed off caked-on layers of bad habits we'd accumulated, such as resentment, fear, judgment, dependence and jealousy. No matter where we looked, everything in every direction was vibrating: . . . Life! . . . Love! All seemed simultaneously more . . . and less important. An apple, a leaf or a bird were the center of the universe. The present moment was the only one, and it was eternal. Our conversations flowed with enthusiasm, discovery, and hunger for more. As frightening as Inge's cancer was (thank God I didn't lose her), I am grateful that it was the wrecking ball that knocked down my shabby, haphazard scaffolding, revealing a spare, quiet sunlit meadow of peace at the center of myself. The ugly scaffolding isn't gone completely, but the work isn't as aggressive now. It seems to happen on its own, like a hummingbird whose wings are moving, but almost imperceptibly, as if on a different plane.
Life keeps happening. We are healthy (I too, survived melanoma), but death hovers all around, through distant stories, and sometimes close to home. A couple of weeks ago, there was a terrible car wreck here. In one car three teenagers, and in the second car two grandparents lost their lives. One of the teenagers was a friend of Inge's son's and a former 4th grade student in my husband's class. There isn't much to say about such unthinkable sorrows. But a few days later, a rare morning when I failed to read my Writer's Almanac poem, Inge emailed it to me and said, Read this. Sometimes poems transcend the inadequacy of words, cutting right to your core. Love and life become a choice. This was the poem that day:
There is an emotional intimacy that certain performers let us share that expands musical pleasure, into rapture.
Lansing. Monday evening we took our seats in a small venue for a hundred people, the Creole Gallery in Old Town, with bohemian brick and mottled plaster walls, wooden chairs and old porous wood floors. It feels familiar and homey, as the venue for small, casual concerts. The gypsy jazz John Jorgenson Quintet seems to prefer these small, informal spaces, from what I gather touring their YouTube videos, and I can see why. If they were up and out on a remote stage in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center, where they fully deserve to perform with their outrageous skill and polish, we would be an audience, not participants.
Gypsy jazz is energetic at the get go. Many of the numbers are so fast paced that you have no breath left when one is done, and you're sure there are no note-stones left unturned in the musical riverbeds of the world. But John Jorgenson and his rhythm guitarist, bassist, drummer and violinist knew we couldn't take that pace any more than they could keep playing it for two full hour sets. So they mixed in Edvard Grieg (sorry, I don't remember which song), "Melancholy Baby" and "La Mer", among other calmer tunes. But for the most part, the rapid guitar picking, plucking, strumming, fingering, harmonics and violin bow stroking made it hard for me to sit still. So there was this energy in the room, flowing from the stage, and being boomeranged back from us, the listeners, many of whom were aging band members, exploding with appreciative whoops. There was also another force at play, and that was repartee. In the middle of John's frenetic strumming, violinist Jason Anick would reply with a decidedly schmaltzy quip, or a sarcastic violin moan, and the corners of John's mouth would turn up. Or vice versa. Again and again. The musical conversation of joy, love, and fun.
Here is John Jorgenson's Quintet playing Ghost Dance, but the only musician who is the same besides Jorgenson himself is the bassist, Simon Planting. The current members we saw are at John's site. And while you can catch a smile or two in this video, you can't sense the subtle frivolity we experienced at the show.
Paris. There was another concert of strings that had the same effect on me. It was Vivaldi, in an evening concert in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, another small venue for an audience of 100, one of three times I've sat in that stunning, historic space to listen to musical ensembles. (If you are interested, please read more about this jewel, Sainte-Chapelle. Here is one place to read more. You can read more about Sainte-Chapelle, and John Updike's poem after a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, at my post at Paris Deconstructed.) In spite of 6,500 square feet of windows telling biblical stories, rising 60 feet above and around us like a stained glass forest - reds, blues, purples muted in the softly lit chapel - the setting feels intimate, yet as unlike the Creole as a room can be. Old in the Sainte-Chapelle means 13th century. An ensemble of half a dozen musicians on cello, bass, violin and piano played many pieces, and often, there was the same camaraderie - the grins, the nods of understanding, the snickers while raising eyebrows and attacking strings with a bow flourish. I was so magnetized by the tangible connection between the musicians, that I left that concert floating on a cloud of euphoria. When I'm in Paris, all my senses are heightened (something I'd like to bring into the now, everywhere), which made this experience especially ecstatic.
At first, in both concerts, I wondered if the smiles, the quips, the fun, was put on. Was it just part of the performance, something to entertain and hold the audience? An act? At the Creole Gypsy Jazz concert, my eyes bored in on John's and Jason's faces to see if I could find a clue of artifice in their looks. They seemed genuine, though I couldn't be certain. I let it work its magic anyway. I believe that exuberance from us, the listeners in the wooden chairs, also amplified their emotive energy. When I glided out into the darkening warm summer night of Old Town after the Jorgenson concert Monday, with my hand in Don's, and a smile and a beat still lighting me up, it hit me that this fun, joyful exchange is necessary to their level of music. The musicians need it, as they need to practice thousands of hours to hone their skill. The music needs it, for the seeds of the notes to be broken open, and brought into the light of loving attention, to take root in the listener, and come alive, emotionally, and spiritually.
Here are 37 seconds of a concert in Sainte-Chapelle, not taken by me.
That night in Paris back in 1997, after listening and watching young violinists and cellists play like children on a playground of delicate but robust equipment, lying in bed, my soul left my body and met with those musical "children" in impassioned, playful conversation, all night. I woke up wondering, Was the conversation words, or did we speak in music? Was it a dream?
No matter how a violinist interprets Bach, Vivaldi or Mozart with bow strokes that are collé, legato, louré, martelé or staccato, or how many notes a gypsy jazz musician like John Jorgenson can strum and pluck out of a guitar in a minute, with joy and the force of love, the notes can't be squandered, or used up. The more you give, the more you get back. The riverbeds will always refill, and refresh - a far, far better immersion than what mere technical skill, melody, arrangement, and orchestration combined can provide.
I found this gypsy wagon at a flea market in Holland, Michigan in 2008
Jean "Django" Reinhardt was a French gypsy who was the first European jazz musician to make it big, and he started Gypsy Jazz - Jazz Manouche in French. 2010 is the 100th anniversary of the year he was born, in a gypsy wagon near Brussels. John Jorgenson was asked to play Django in the 2004 feature film, Head in the Clouds. How's that for synchronicity for this July in Paris? And you know what? I did not know until just now, at the tail end of this post, about that title Head in the Clouds. All that floating euphoria. I think I'd better see this film.
I did pull down a jigsaw puzzle. It says it's the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, although the castle-like house looks European. It was just what Nancy and I wanted, lots of green. In this shot midway through the weekend, my brother-in-law Rodger only has about 750 pieces to go. I don't know if it got completed after we left Sunday evening.
The kids keep us young. But theydidn't stay as little as they were at the last family gathering. They keep narrowing the gap between short and tall. I wish I could harvest and store the youthful energy that was spent running, jumping, diving and swimming. Not that I know what I'd do with it if I had it. You also have to have something you want to do, and the will to do it. I am a sedentary person, but Don and I have decided we're going to start biking around our beautiful state. At least I can do that sitting down.
There were play fights. There were serious adult conversations too. Sometimes I think some play fighting as adults wouldn't be a bad idea, as long as there are quick peace talks, the way the A-team, Aden and Asher demonstrated.
There was sport and adventure. Eric, my tireless fisher-nephew, was no end of entertainment for his nieces, nephews and first cousins once removed. (Did I say that right?) But poor Lydia didn't have a stomach for the fish's pain.
Eric tried to show how to cause the least amount of damage extricating the hook, before letting the fish go.
We have gobs of love and joy in our family, but we also have pain, just like everyone. There is illness, there is heartache. In the cycle of family, new ones being born and starting life's journey, it's up to the older ones to show the younger ones how to not only endure suffering, but how to gather around each other, encircling and touching, even when we don't understand. We fail sometimes when we can't stomach the particular type of hardship we face. Other times the younger ones show the older ones how to do it better.
Life gets so messy. When you're at the cottage with 20 or 30 people, life really gets disheveled, and you're sleeping pretty close to someone else. You might be closer to the person in the next bed than you are to the one in your own. You wouldn't do that with just anyone.
We all have shadow selves, the parts we don't really want anyone to see, the aspects that cause us shame. But these are thankfully only part of who we are. What I saw this 4th of July, more than any other in memory, were some of the greatest challenges we've faced to the cohesiveness and flexibility of our big, and getting bigger, family. Look at us. We look like oddly shaped countries, with distinct borders, and big bodies of water separating us. The nice thing about being human, and not land mass, is that we can easily grab hands and shoulders and instantly thin the distance to a stream. One that flows between us and is easily crossed.
There is a Blogger issue I have reported at a forum, along with many other bloggers, that comments that get posted (since at least 9:30pm EST July 5) do not appear on the post. I received email notification of 8 comments from Mystic Rose, Gemma, Anna, Terresa, Delilas, Gwei Mui and rauf, but they have not appeared at this post. When I posted a comment about this below, it appeared when I posted it, but when I refreshed the page, it was not there. I hope you are not experiencing this at your blog, and I sincerely hope it is rectified soon. I am still not over the grief of discovering some time ago that I had lost at least the first year's comments at this blog, and also at Paris Deconstructed. These were precious exchanges with dear friends, including the first time rauf visited synch-ro-ni-zing, with Wordsworth's daffodil poem. :(
UPDATE: As of 11:30AM July 6, comments seem to be sticking.
UPDATE: As of 1:00PM July 6, some comments don't stick! It's a random comment stickiness.
These eye sketches are from a page in the Andy Warhol Idea Book journal Inge gave me a couple years ago for my birthday. It's Inge's birthday today. Happy Birthday, my dear friend. In this journal there are blank pages for me to write or sketch on, and every so often there are translucent vellum pages of Warhol sketches and quotes. I truly love them. No one saw the way Andy Warhol saw. He's the one who said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everyone-- really?
The words below are sort of mine, if anyone's words "belong" to anyone (and then I made them into a text-rebus image at picnik.com). I think I am recycling these words from someone else, like G.I. Gurdjieff, Osho, Rumi, Rob Brezsny or Eckhart Tolle. Here, I give them to you, free of charge. If you believe them, use them wisely, and pass them on.
Here is a sketch I drew in that Warhol journal last October in response to reading a Rumi poem called "This Dove Here" (October 4 in A YEAR WITH RUMI, the book I post daily readings from on RUMI DAYS), when Inge and I had our writing retreat at the lake cottage. You would draw a dove in another way. You see differently than I do.
This Dove Here
Someone who does not run
toward the allure of love
walks a road where nothing lives.
But this dove here
senses the love-hawk floating above,
and waits, and will not be driven
or scared to safety.
If love is annihilation, loving the unlovable as if you are in love with them is about as annihilating as it gets. There is no YOU left, no ego, but there is YOU-essence that appreciates THEIR-essence. See. Only you see as you see. Fortunate are the ones you are in love with, and the ones you see through loving eyes.
Everyone --- really? I have lists, just like you, of the ones everyone shouldn't include. Let's get annihilated. It'll be fun.
I should have known something was up when we told the host our name, and he instantly gestured and led us to a table by the brick wall, as if it belonged to us - now, always, ad infinitum,
as if we were a quiet, gray couple in Chicago or St. Louis, who have had that standing table for fifty years and nod to the maitre d with familiarity every week, not just on anniversaries and birthdays.
So when I saw the exuberance of flowers and tissue paper my husband had asked a florist to deliver - magenta and chartreuse, bold and lusty, as if this tabletop was a declaration of young new love, as if the bee were seducing the flower -
when I saw them, the room swam, and almost in a swoon I struggled to take off my chartreuse coat and hang it on the back of a chair. I said, Oh, the camera is in the car, and dutifully he left for it. He left, and he didn't return. I waited. After 32 years,
where could he be? A siren drowned out the music, and then one emotion was traded for another. I called him on my magenta phone. No answer. I jumped up and ran out the door, down the street to the parked car. Not
there. As if he, like a bee, had made his brief, purposeful visit and left the flower, alone. Ad infinitum. I waited. In actuality, it was no more than ten minutes. You see, he found primroses on the sidewalk for sale.
Primroses, that I love and have not tucked into a flower bed since three houses ago. Primroses that were being taken inside for the night, that would not be there after dinner. He bought four.
And as if he had died and come back to life, when he returned to our table I was about to weep, just when the waitress swept up to tell us the night's specials: grouper and mahi mahi and trout,
and I told her to please go away, we needed no pretty young women selling fish and champagne. Out of the 16,819,200 minutes we'd been together, just now we needed five secluded on our island of love, with only the hot tropical flowers as witness.
In my grandmother's dreams, Mom was supposed to play Chopin to a hushed audience in Carnegie Hall, marry an ambassador and cook flawless Cornish hens for him and their international guests. Mom was piano tutored, Horace Mann schooled, Smith Colleged, Columbia Universitied, and engaged to that would-be ambassador who made it to Life magazine's cover in the 1950s. Though there was a lot of brilliant material to work with in this girl nicknamed Bobby, her mother always said that raising her alone as a single mother (Grandma Olive was an artist-designer, divorced from Grandpa Sidney when Mom was six) was like raising an army. Mom climbed, crawled, rolled, cartwheeled and otherwise got through the rooms of their house in every way except walking, while Grandma Olive finessed the alignment of delicate tracing paper for wallpaper designs taped to walls. In school Mom swam, dived, and played tennis, basketball and field hockey ambidextrously. No wonder she was voted Best Athlete at every school she attended. Her disciplined fingers played Rachmaninoff's Flight of the Bumble Bee like it was the soundtrack of her encyclopedic mind, and all this put her on course to be the wow! Grandma Olive envisioned when this Bachrach portrait was taken. Bobby in this picture is posing as Barbara in a dress her mother would have spent an entire day scouring NYC for, with Bobby in tow, tormented.
With all that inborn exuberance and strength, and the preparation Grandma helped with, basically, she wasn't supposed to marry my father. He was a Virginian gentleman with red hair like Thomas Jefferson's, but without the worldly substance that might have reassured Grandma Olive. And he wasn't just not wealthy. He was poor. And why was he poor? He had chosen a profession as a Baptist minister, which just made him even less appealing to my grandmother, who explored lots of religions in her lifetime, but not the unsophisticated, unrefined, tacky Baptist church.
Before meeting Dad, in addition to her physical, musical and mental energy, Mom was also brimming with spiritual vigor, debating over a vibrating saxophone in a jazz bar the merits of various religions with Columbia classmates. That spirituality exploded after she heard the Gospel and was offered the chance to become a born again Christian when she took her music students to church in Fairfax, Virginia, where they went to different churches each Sunday. Maybe singing The Old Rugged Cross and having no stand-up-sit-down high liturgy in the Baptist Church was just what her spiritual self wanted, in contrast to those fancy schools and a mother whose standards were impossibly high.
So what is a born again protestant Christian who is Bobbythe smart pianist tomboy to do with all that inborn abundance? Either become a missionary or marry a minister. When she eventually met a tall, young, handsome redhead (she loved red hair) who had just become a pastoral intern at the big Southern Baptist church where she had started playing piano, and they shook hands, she knew she would marry him, which she did, March 22, 1941. Then she birthed and raised eight kids (I'm #8), directed the church music program, wrote music (her hymn A Christian Home written to Sibelius' Finlandia tune is sung in most evangelical churches in the U.S. on Mother's Day), led Bible studies, mentored women, taught Sunday School, and played hymns and choruses on the piano that became rhapsodies flooding out the open country church windows into the farm fields along with birdsong from the trees. I think the soybeans grew tendrils like treble clefts those years.
My mom did feed international guests - graduate students at MSU from India, Thailand and China, and half a dozen Thai high schoolers who lived with us in our big wide-open house, including my beautiful sister DeeDee. Mom and Dad were married 54 years until my dad died of lung cancer, though he never smoked. Mom died of Alzheimer's two years later - what a mind she lost! She had channeled every molecule of physical, mental, musical and spiritual energy to God, to my dad, to her family, to the congregation, and to the world through her precious hospitality (she loved to make curried rice for our Indian friends) and her daily prayers for every world leader - around 200 of them - that began at 4am, on her knees, in the dark. I think she didn't need to marry an ambassador. She was one.
I'm sorry I didn't manage to get a photo of Mom and Dad together before this post. You might have noticed that this wedding anniversary musing had little to say about my dad. Maybe one of these memorials will focus on him, but frankly, I do not carry as much of him inside me as I do Mom.
January 26 is Republic Day in India ~ A day the whole world celebrates the power of non-violent civil disobedience.
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Permit me to synchronize that with a poor artist's rich sunflowers on a postcard my daughter sent from Amsterdam some time ago. You don't need a lot of money to create something beautiful. In fact you might be very poor financially. You might not ever make a living at what you do best.
Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background) Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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And a winter field clipped of its corn looking "like a man's badly shaved beard"* might be where power waits under a white winter sky that will come to life under the heat of the summer sun. Just a plow, soil, seed, sun, rain ~ and a new field of corn will rise up ~ Just like that.
With the right combination of elements an impossible alchemy is possible.
Golden.
Don't forget it. - -
* simile borrowed from Guy de Maupassant's Miss Harriett - -
