The Lake that Got Away

It was a hiker's paradise--the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where my family lived in those days: here were mountains and plenty more mountains, and thick forests that hid their famous birds of paradise like aces up a sleeve, and rivers with rapids and lots more rapids, and orchids in the woods, and on the hillsides: artesian springs and waterfalls. At night there were stars to beat the band, just multitudes of them--softly, collectively glowing. I loved passing by a thatched roofed villages. I loved seeing the smoke from inside the huts seeping up through the thatch, and inveigling itself with the morning mist. Also near every settlement would be sweet potato mounds planted sometimes on inclines so steep as to beggar belief. Occasionally you might hear of someone "falling out of their garden," and even being killed in the fall. Quite a way to go: falling out of your garden.

The locals, when you passed them by, always enjoyed the white-guy parade. Of course they would all be speaking Enga, but you knew the gist of it: "Would you look at that! What's he huffing and puffing about? Why, my old lady can climb faster than he can!"  Even the older folks seemed so vividly alive. Their calf muscles, from having to negotiate the slopes of the place, were thick as fists, and their toes all splayed from years of gripping the muddy paths. We Bjornstads have a dyed-in-the-wool respect for competent walkers, and we're not often outclassed in our native country in the art itself; but let me tell you--there, in spite of our longer legs, and our water bottles and provisions--those folks easily had us licked. 

Even back in my youth I never aspired to adventure, not in the Lewis and Clark sense anyway; only in the nine volt inner sense. No week-long hikes into the deepest bush for me. No expeditions to see the forty-foot long alligators of the Sepik. Still, I did enjoy the occasional two-day walkabout with a friend or a guide, and this particular day marked such an occasion: a hike with a missionary family of four, organized by the father in the gang, Steve (he also happened to be the local doctor) as well as two or three local guides. My younger brother was also going with. Our destination? Well that would take us a day and a half to reach. It was a lake, which maybe when we got there, at least if we weren't afraid of leeches and could deal with the coldness of the water, we'd swim in, or maybe just go pole fishing in. Steve and his boys were bringing poles.

We drove out as far we could, out on a red dirt road, and at the trail-head, hitched on our packs. It was late morning when we entered the woods. A drizzle was falling. Already wet and cold, I can recall wondering what I'd gotten myself into. A little walking warmed me though, and soon enough we had a pace. Pace is important. You forget about distance when you have a rhythm going; then everything gets easier. Our guides were leading us along some of the traditional paths that ran between valleys, and these paths connected with others further on, and still others beyond that, so that eventually, you could get to the sea. Though mind you, back in the day, and even into the present, the Enga had never wandered far from their own valleys and clans. No, the paths were all for trade. And there had been plenty of that, as evidenced by the shells that people wore, even up there in the highlands, even in the era before first contact was made with the larger world. 

You couldn't have called it a pleasant stroll. The woods were dark, damp and mossy, the air thick and primeval-feeling. 

"Dispela samting, em i wanem samting?"  I asked one of the guides, nodding and not pointing toward a certain tree. What sort of a thing is this? I didn't get very far with the question though. Translated, the conversation went something like this:

"What's what?"

"That."

"Oh that."

"What is it?"

"Something."

It was clear from their discomfort that they didn't want me to go near it. So I contented myself with the view that I had. Then we moved on.

It was a bush spirit--or depending on your point of view, a man-sized carving of one, deeply incised on the bark of that tree. Was the carving meant to invoke that spirit, or keep it away? To flatter him? To give that spirit some way to look at himself? What? Well I would never find out. Some things we never find out. In fact, most everything we most deeply wish to know, we never find out for sure; at least that's my experience. Why do I think this? Well because on one or two occasions, I've been lucky enough to touch the edge of the world I knew and found folks there who saw things differently, really differently, from me; and for the life of me I don't see why their view of the world holds any less of a claim to being real, than mine. Which kind of puts the kibosh on dogma and certainty. Nor for that matter, do I think that we properly credit the strangeness of what we ourselves claim to have discovered. For instance in spite the advanced state of our physics, most of us still talk glibly about an inert, solid, generic stuff called "matter," even though physics cannot find anything here or there or anywhere by that description, but only waves of probability and energy, governed quite possibly by the observational intentions of Consciousness itself, whatever THAT might be. So that, say, the stop sign I see there on the corner, is far more a happening than an item, and no more solid than a cloud of gnats, and every bit as active. 

All this is important. It points us to the fallibility of our senses, as well as the limits of language when applied to the task of describing the world, as well as the stubbornness of our minds in clinging to the easier (because familiar) categories; not to mention a profound resistance in our culture to imagining the world as an absolutely interactive and energetic reality, in which easy oppositions such as dead and alive, and in-my-head and outside-my-head, are questionable at best, and misleading at the worst. Why? Well in the first place, because they might just be dead wrong--in fact almost certainly are--but in the second place because they direct us implacably away from the description of the world most likely to keep the human race sane and safe these days: namely, an imaginative reality in which everything resonates with everything else, and in which one being's pain is another's too; a universe in which reverence and silence and leaving well enough alone ought to be the going strategy, as my guides treated the image on the tree. Most folks reject the notion of Gaia, that is, of the planet as a whole living being. But what if seeing the earth as a living being was not just an pretty fair reflection of the reality, but also, again, the obvious road to sanity in our relationship with that being, of which we seem to be a rebellious portion? Questions questions.


Mud made the going that afternoon particularly hard.  How many times did I slip on the path? who knows? dang it all though, the stupid rain. Not that I should have expected any different. It was rainy season after all, in one of the most lavishly rainy places on the planet, and you'd be a fool to go on a walkabout in that season with the expectation of keeping dry. Still, for some reason, we all keep wishing don't we? 

Well, after all that slogging, finally, finally, we came to the edge of those woods and out. And there in front of us was a wide valley of grasses and giant tree ferns. Tree fern here. Tree fern there. Grasses between them. I want to be precise. The ferns amounted to light and tasteful punctuation on the dense lush text of the grass. Hundreds of yards separated most of the ferns. And I couldn't say why, in that area, the vegetation proved to be grass and ferns as opposed to woods; it may have been altitude, or soil chemistry, or periodic burns in the past. But in any case, right at the demarcation between the woods and the grassland, we set up camp, which is to say we pitched our tents, ate a bit of dinner, and crawled into what you might call bed. Overnight it rained pretty heavily.

The next morning we hadn't been walking for more than an hour, when it became obvious that something was wrong, and that this something had to do with me. At first the trouble showed up in whispering among the guides. But then, as if by collective subconscious consent, and not by any spoken order, the whole party stopped, and the guides conferred aloud with Steve. They kept pointing, and soon enough Steve came over to me, asked a few questions. Sure I was limping a bit I said to him. Sure my back hurt a bit. It didn't matter though, no, I wanted to go on. Like the good doctor he was, he nodded and sympathized, but then told it to me straight: there wasn't a whole lot of time for the hike, he said, not if we were going to make it back to camp by sundown. Now, if we didn't make it back by sundown, we'd have to sleep out in the open on the grass, and it was cold out in the open in the grass. There was nothing to burn. No firewood etc etc. Long and short, I'd be holding the party back. I had to go back to camp. 

I don't think I managed to hide my disappointment, my chagrin. I was eighteen. I ought to have been able to hack the hike. Steve was doing fine. His wife was doing fine. His two boys, age ten and eight were doing fine. Little legs pumping away. My brother too, was doing fine. What was it with me? But the real disappointment, the deep stuff, had to do with giving up on the destination itself, having to accept the fact that I wasn't going to see the lake probably ever. I was headed back to the States in a month or two, and probably would not be returning to New Guinea. 

"You know there's no way you'll get lost," said Steve. "Just follow the trail back. Simon's back there. He'll take care of you." Simon was one of the guides.

"Better luck next time," said Steve next, hand on my shoulder, pushing off like a boat from the dock. Then off they all went. Within minutes the whole party was out of sight. 

There are times in life when, knowing the destination, you just have to slog on and get through. THAT had been the challenge of the previous day, in getting through the woods. Other times, the challenge has more to do with letting go gracefully, and saying "okay here's my limit, now what do I do?" It's that second category of challenge (often the far more painful one) that I was up against that day, and not to beat a dead horse, but it's also the challenge we're up against right now as a civilization. Here we are dreaming of robot "caretakers" for the elderly and of stock markets that only go up and nano this and nano that and mining asteroids and founding colonies on Mars, meanwhile here on earth our home the honey bees are dying of pesticide-laced seeds and the price of the crude oil is running over a hundred dollars a barrel and the fisheries are collapsing and the topsoil's blowing away and many of us don't know what to do with food unless it comes in a package to be microwaved. Look folks, it's time to bite our collective lip, lay aside the fantasies of omnipotence, and make the best of it. Time to revert to bona fide personal competence. Time to build up a world in which we recognize that we are not in control and never really were. Time to get along cheerfully with less. Time to suck it in and man it up. Time to share and get along. Time, in short, to get down to work on something called progress, and I mean real progress. Defined as a mental, physical, intellectual, social capital which has nothing to do with how many computers per capita, or how much money in the bank per capita, or how tall our buildings are, and everything to do with knowing where a potato comes from, or walking over to your neighbor and to have a chat across the fence and the blackberry bushes, or the simple happiness of a child at school learning two times two. All that's all tied together with our treatment of the earth, believe me. Or at least, if you continue to read this blog, I hope to convince you of that. Ecological progress is human progress too. Treat the earth as inert dirt, and we will die. 

I cannot tell you how quickly disappointment dissolved for me that morning--once I realized that the lake was not for me, and never had been. That was when, literally and figuratively, the sun came out, and it struck me in the first place that I was alone! Truly, magnificently, stupendously alone! Baby, forget the lake. I'm going to enjoy this wide open country! I am going to be who I am! Out here in this amazing place!

So, first of all, under the beaming sun, under a sky most clear and blue and limitless in beauty, under a fern tree indistinguishable from its ancestors in the Jurassic, I lay me down in the soft grass and snoozed.  When I woke up, maybe an hour later, I started back. But slowly slowly. Slowly enough to sing. One song after the next. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Tis a Gift to be Simple. Hard Times Come Again no More. Mrs. O'Leary. All the Pretty Little Horses...Summertime and the Living is Easy...  

Back at camp, sure enough there was Simon, who, full of concern, made me a stew and a bed of branches and ferns near the fire, so I could take it easy some more, like the freaking king of Sardinia after a really hard day in the harem. And he and I talked, which was a thing no one, whiteskin or national, had really done that whole time, since after all, the goal had been the lake. His pidgin was very good, and mine was good enough, and I remember asking him the Engan names for this and that plant or flower or fern, and about how you planted the sweet potato, and I remember him asking me about life in my homeland too--what they did with old people there, and whether everyone had cars. I remember trying to describe how far away America was. How big the ocean was that you had to cross to get there. How, if you could walk on the ocean, you could walk for days and days and days and days, and never come to the end of it... 

Simon was an expert stewmaker and an entertaining and plant-savvy guy, I was just me, the world (where I was) was all beauty, and there was nowhere else I needed to be, and nothing else I needed to do, and how could anyone ask for more? Except for maybe a song to top it all off. I asked Simon, would he mind if I sang? Simon said he would not mind, and so I sang. Kind of crazy-like, even. I kind of fell out of my garden and sang.  

HB

A Cello for Blue

My son and I are two of the regular Sunday instrumentalists at church, and we play up on the balcony, which at least in my opinion is the best spot to be. From the balcony you have a comprehensive view; the human landscape is all laid out for you. You see the older folks and the younger folks, the single folks and the married folks, the ornery folks and the quiet folks, the beautifully dressed folks and the just-got-out of bed crowd too. It's a meaningful sliver of humanity. A small circle that lets me practice the task of drawing the larger one. A micro-cosmos. A Sunday village of 150. And when I'm not playing a melody or improvising a descant, I really do like to look down and see who it is (in particular) that Infinity stoops to concern itself with, and asks me as well, to love.

To tell  the truth, the ones I most enjoy having a view of are the kids. We have a pretty nice number of them in our congregation, and since their families often sit in the same places every week, you can look for the children in the same way that, if you were an informed boy scout, you could look for certain stars in the sky, because you're prepared and you just know where to look, and even know a lot of their names. There's so-and-so reading a book, and there's so-and-so rolling a matchbox car over the road of his fathers thigh, and look so-and so's just figured out how to hoop cheerios over her canines, she's the cheerio vampire, and look so-and-so is spending the sermon time just peering up at the wooden beams and the chandeliers....

And I know I'm supposed to be participating in the service, and really I am, I'm listening, I'm thinking, I'm considering, I'm all of that. But put it this way: often the kids serve for me as the medium through which the service transmits itself to me--the way the  window-glass here at my desk serves as the medium through which the scene of my garden is transmitted to me. And I think that's just fine. What's a better window than a kid? I figure if a sermon doesn't transmit through a kid, then it needs some editing and maybe even wholesale reconstruction. Kids are translucent to the good stuff: God so loved the world, and Mary treasured all these things in her heart, and consider the lilies, and love is not envious or boastful or rude, and there is a river in the city of God...

My own tradition of worship--pews, organ, hymnals, liturgy--is often considered pretty hard on kids, on their attention spans and cognitive stages and so forth, though I myself tend to think that the difficulty is over-rated, in part because there are pleasures for kids in the whole business that we adults often underestimate. For one thing, for many of our congregation's kids, I'll bet church is the one time in the whole week when they have their parents right there with them for a whole hour. Right there holding them. Rubbing their shoulders. Whispering yes yes that's a pretty picture you've drawn.  Yet, note as well, that it's also a time when those same children see that they're not the center of attention, no, something else is clearly going on around them, and THAT, whatever that is--that's clearly the center. All of this is very good practice. You can't grow up until you know that you're not the center, though the center may be said to be in you.

 I'm thinking right now of a ten year old girl, a member of our congregation. Her grandmother's a longtime fixture in the place. Her mother and father are both ambitious professionals, and she has two brothers as well, both older than she is, and both confident and outgoing. Both boys have read the scripture lessons to the congregation during services, and they knock your socks off every time they do. It's hard to find boys like that these days, expressive and authoritative so young. Where's that come from? Well, a theatrical streak runs through the family, beginning with the grandmother who has worked in the local theaters for ages now, and who I owe some credit to, for helping me out in my first attempts at producing my own plays. Beware the tiger though. Whew. She's going to give it to you straight.

"You think you guys got a show here? Well let me tell you..."

Anyhow this girl, several weeks ago, after the weekly service, showed up in the balcony space, where I'd never seen her. Actually her mother brought her up, and it was the mother who did the talking. Her daughter, she said, had expressed some interest in cello lessons. Did I have any recommendations, thoughts, concerns, advice?

I looked at the girl, who was standing in the doorway. She was about the size of a cello, but skinnier. Lessons would be good, I said. In fact, I knew a cellist, who was probably looking for students.

"Oh?"

"I don't have phone number handy, and honestly I'm not sure I even remember her last name, but I could get both for you, would you like that?"

"Sure sure," said the mother, and the two of us--the mother and I--went on to talk about the local orchestra program. She said that whether the lessons happened or not, her daughter would participate in that program. In fact within the next few days, she'd have her rented cello, and she'd be plucking and bowing away. She looked back toward her daughter, but by this time, the girl had sort of faded out into the hallway, and was looking steadfastly into the office of the music director. Was she feeling contrary? Bored? Just embarrassed by her mother exposing her interests to the world? Just shy?

Well, I was out of town for a week or two. Then their family was. But finally this past week I had the teacher's number and name, and sometime during the service, noted that the girl's family was sitting in its usual place toward the rear, on the left side of the nave. Although the mother was not there. Well, I thought to myself, I could just talk to the girl; it was her lessons after all, her cello, her musical education. She sat in the pew just to the left of her brothers. She was wearing a blue dress. I could catch her after the service.

So after church, I descended to sea level and there she was, sort of flowing toward the front door. I called her name, which I'll pretend was

"Blue." 

She kept on walking. I followed. Maybe she had not heard. 

"Blue." Had I gotten her name wrong? Because if it was shyness, she really had changed in that department. Goodness four or five years ago, at every children's sermon, she had again and again been the firecracker, the innocent comedian, the industrious generator of bon mots. Quoting Jesus maybe, or maybe her grandmother. Sometimes my wife and I would think of these moments during the week, as a pick me up or a chuckle.

"Blue." Third time's the charm. She turned around and smiled and touched her bangs. She was standing just at the top of the stairs, which led down to the glass doors and the exit.

"Have you started with the cello now?"

She nodded. 

"Oh good, because I had the name of that teacher for you, if you still wanted it."

Oh goodness, she was quivering, actually quivering. No parent in sight. No brothers. No grandma. Just her against a musician intent on general recruitment. She was managing though. 

"Um. We said that I could just learn at school. For now. Maybe I'll take lessons later?"

"If you liked it enough?"

She nodded, gratefully.

"Well good, I just wanted to make sure. And I can give you that number for that teacher anytime. When you decide."

"Okay."

"See you around," I said.

"Okay."

I want to put in a good word for going to church, or temple, or whatever expression you might use for a place where we come together, in order to express a sense of unity in the One to whom we all belong, and a love for one another and the rest of the world. There are all sorts of reasons to belong to such a community, but the one I'm thinking of now has to do with this ten-year-old in the blue dress. 

Dear Blue, 

I like going to church. I like it for a fairly high number of reasons, the view from the balcony among them.  But I like it particularly right now (as I'm writing this to you, thinking back on our short conversation last Sunday) as a place in which the raising up of young people is still in some way viewed as a job for everyone. Everyone who cares to help. A place where I can walk up to you, and you'll probably know my name, and I'll know yours and I can talk to you about your life (with or without the cello) and feel as though all that's the right and the proper and even the expected thing to do. Part of the theory of the place. And you can respond. And get through. As you managed to do on this occasion, when, even in spite of your shyness, at the top of the stairs you turned, whipped out your secret sword of spunk, and talked to me. You're wonderful, Blue. 

Sincerely,

HB 

PS: I hope you're enjoying the cello. If you like it (even just a little bit) keep at it. You'll probably like it better and better, the better you get. Generally this is true of all skills in life. The more you master the skill, the more enjoyment you get out of it.

Now I can anticipate two possible objections to this post, from different sides of the religious divide. First, some on the secular side might feel nettled at the implication that opportunities for collective child-raising are experienced only in religious settings. Second, when it comes to believers, a few may feel dinged around the fenders that I seem to consider church mostly as a social opportunity. 

To the first set I would say that I wish that community involvement in the raising up of children happened everywhere all the time, but it's sad how the circle of trust needed for that has narrowed to one so small. It wasn't always so. Not so long ago for instance neighbors everywhere could count on neighbors to keep an eye on the kids, and to know them by name, and to give them advice and just wave them a hi on the street. But the world has become so complicated and big, so anonymous; it's like a factory of suspicion, and we buy the yucky goods; I think we eat them. Of course, if you find any opportunities anywhere to be helpful to kids, I'm thankful for that. I expect that you are too. 

To the second set, the ones who think I'm in danger of reducing faith to a social hour, no, for the most part I'm just enumerating a blessing, just telling about a certain moment and where it happened and what it meant to me, and why I'm grateful for it. Though I am also not ashamed to say that  for me abstract doctrine and cosmological assertions play second fiddle to the truths of human experience, unless in fact they have something to say to that experience that is relevant and useful. This is to say that I love my church less as a place to say "I believe in such and such a God who has such and such properties," and much more as a community of Love in which the human generations come together and worship and pray and bury their dead and celebrate their marriages and congratulate one another on their achievements and sympathize with one other in their sorrows and griefs, and through it all, that Love is always there. I don't think there's anything strange in this. Or culpable. Precisely because doctrine and our love for one another ought to be one and the same thing, and understanding of the divine ought to be embodied in action i.e. "God is love (a cosmological assertion if there ever was one), and God is within me, and acts through me; therefore I will express God's Love to you."

Finally, to give a nod to the grand theme of the blog, I just want to say once again (to everyone) that as we go forward and life gets materially more difficult and expensive, and weather-wise more uncertain, and politics-wise less effective and more explosive, and just in general things feel less stable and predictable--in the face of this, the immediate human community is one of the wisest places to invest your time, energy, affection, patience, and love. Get to know your neighbors and their children and their gardens and their dogs. Find a set of people who will support you as you pass through all the stages of life, and to whom, in return, you too can be of service. And of course I don't mean this just as pragmatic preparation for the future. I mean it foremost for today! So much meaning lies in being able to give yourself away. It is a good thing now. 


HB

Work and the Life as One Song

A young person dear to me happens to stutter a bit. She's not particularly self conscious about it, at least as far as I can tell. In fact she is vivacious and confident, with a vivid sense of what's she's about and where she's going in life. She is a fine student and musician with a warm heart and a genuine sweetness of temperament, and she is modest in her expectations of what life is likely to hand to her free-of-charge. Her future is likely to be full of happiness. Next to all these blessings, the fact that she trips over a word or two when she speaks is hardly even worth remarking on.

So is her stutter a handicap or just another feature of her speech? I myself believe the second. In fact I would go so far as to say that her stutter makes her speech more beautiful to me; such that even if it magically could be evaporated away (like a puddle on the street to which the birds come to drink) I'm not sure I would want it gone. I count it as a feature of her humanity, a part of what about her is dear to me.

I'm impatient with the notion that "nothing is perfect." Of course there are things that are perfect--precisely because real perfection includes the faults and imperfections. It encompasses them. It gathers their tribute too in the waves of its river. Consider how a freckle or mole can unfold an already beautiful face into yet another dimension of beauty. Or consider how Sinatra, as his voice took on the features of age, and the cigarette smoke and alcohol aged it as well, learned to put those "faults" to expressive use, so that with just a bit of vocal gravel or a slight hesitation of response in moving between registers he imbued this song or that with a sense of vulnerability or of sad experience or of been-around-the-block canniness. Or consider the arches and flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral: a symbiosis of ascension, stone in flight. Yet at a structural level especially the buttresses are nothing more than a response to the problem of the distribution of load! They take the limitations of material and weight and literally leverage them to add a fuller force of beauty to the whole.

Of all the maddening ambitions of the heart, excellence and the quest for it, has to be one of the hardest to negotiate. Out of a fear of falling short, we may refuse to take risks. Or out of an expectation for young achievement, parents may remain cold and aloof to the needs of their children. So therapists are probably right to inveigh against perfectionism. Yet it's also true, that a good share of what we most enjoy and deeply value in the world could not have been created without a yearning for perfection, or without the sacrifices involved in translating that yearning into hard bright pieces of reality. 

And here I'm not alluding just to art. I mean, as well, the well-framed door to an eighteenth century farmhouse, or an Airbus model that has flown umpteen times without the hint of a crash. I mean marriages that last. I mean lifelong mutual admiration cultivated between father and son. I mean nature reserves where native ecosystems have been lovingly restored. I mean public architecture made truly useful and enjoyable for the public. All these, too, are products of the drive for excellence and quality. They happen only out of the yearning to get things really, really right.

William Butler Yeats wrote a poem, called "The Choice," that deals with the question of balancing work and life. It's probably over-quoted, but since any opportunity to quote that majestic voice is worth it to me:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work....

It's one or the other, according to the poem. You either enjoy your life and live it to the fullest--and never quite measure up in your work; or you commit yourself to your work alone and allow your life to be a bit of a mess or a bore. Now choose.

Some of us really do seem to go all one way or the other. On the worker bee side, I think of Beethoven and Auden, both of whom, especially in their work-spurts, lived in astonishing domestic disorder--pig sties of entropy really--their only focus in life in those days of concentration being the ordering of marks on a page. Or, when I think of life lived for life's sake, I think of Thoreau, tramper of the New England woodlands. Eater of beans and bread. Builder of a one-man cabin. A great writer, also but one who probably could have been content not to write. Certainly he never cared for wage-work. Having, apparently, an extraordinary capacity for ecstatic immersion and careful observation, the man's daily craving was at bottom just to take part in the spectacle of life. 

Does our existence really have to amount to a tragic either-or? Might not life and work at least on occasion prove mutually-interactive, mutually-productive? I am sure we would all like to answer yes, and yet the're no question about it but that many of us have experienced the dilemma Yeats sketches; that is, we have had to choose and know the pain involved in doing so. Consider a marriage in which both partners have high professional ambitions. The one receives a promotion contingent on a move, while the other feels that in order to succeed he must stay where he is. I have seen this situation end in divorce. Or I am thinking now of a friend who recently spoke of how frustrating she found it that all the effort and care she put into recycling as well as not wasting food and keeping the thermostat low, etc. was all dwarfed to a sense of silly negation by her annual trips to Europe and all the carbon that her flights and general travel consume. Yet she feels that on a professional level such trips are essential. In both these cases perhaps we could say perfection of the life is also being sacrificed for perfection of the work.

On the other side of things I often think of Wallace Stevens who toward the end of his life wrote these rueful lines, in which he mourns how the comfortable perfection of his life has gotten in the way of perfection of his true vocation, poetry:

I of course have had a happy and well-kept life. But I have not even begun to touch the spheres within spheres that might have been possible if, instead of devoting the principal amount of my time to making a living, I had devoted it to thought and poetry. Certainly it is as true as it ever was that whatever means most to one should receive all of one's time and that has not been true in my case.

So what to do? Sometimes of course there is no way through but to muddle. Nothing to do but accept that life contains paradoxes and contradictions. Or perhaps wait until the desire for perfection in one category really overcomes desire for perfection in the other. Sometimes too circumstance can solve the problem for us, so that the life and the work really can be made to complement and reinforce one another; or just do. To return to Yeats, in one of his poems, called Among School Children, he manages to create an almost perfect work of art out of a visit he made (as a senator of the Irish Free State) to a school for young girls. Nothing could be more prosaic source material--a school inspection!--and yet Yeats's mind knew a promising theme when it saw one, and it took this straw of circumstance and spun it straight into the verbal gold of meditation. Surely for Yeats, the creation of that poem had to have felt like a triumph of unity of life and work. 

Or to take a personal example: "Nine Volt Nomad" serves a forum of life-work unity for me. Here, like an open air glass blower at a renaissance fair, I can publicly fuse my love for the cosmic economy, to my love of language and art. Here my art of writing can meet my art of living. 

Finally too, I think of the famous scene in Anna Karenina in which Levin, a nobleman, works side by side with the peasants on his own estate, scything at the harvest. Levin, a profoundly self-conscious person hampered in every way by doubts and misgivings, uncertain of his goals, and a skeptic in matters of religion, nevertheless finds in the rhythms of scything a kind of redemptive muse guiding him to this: 

Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those moments his row was...smooth and well-cut...

 I am told that those who stutter, when they sing, usually find themselves entirely free of their impediment. And I think this is something we're all after: the work-song-moment that frees and unifies our being. The harvest perspective that binds our work and lives in one.

HB

The Big Bicep Cosmic Economy (Laundry in the Late Carbon Age part 2)

It's usually no good preaching, in a prescriptive sense, about how to live responsibly. Generally what works better, is to map out how you yourself attempt the feat: how you go about solving for that elusive x. So for myself, and for my part in Sunnyside, I say: "Don't wait for anyone else: the president, the congress, the neighbors, the corporations, the municipalities, the technologists, the advocates for green this or that. Just get to work. Practice what might be called cosmic economy, which is to say, expand, first, your sense of home, till "home" means not only the walls that immediately surround you at night, but also the whole of the planetary sphere that sustains our lives; then act in harmony with the needs of the whole by practicing thrift in the particulars, yes right down to how you wash your clothes."

For me, when our washing machine broke down last year, practicing cosmic economy meant no, I would not replace the machine; instead, I would wash the clothes myself and leave their drying to the sun. Now that that's done, and the change is made--a commitment of about half an hour a day for me--the verdict on its practical effectiveness is in: over the past year, our household's total gas and electrical consumption has been cut by a fifth, and the equivalent of about half a ton of carbon has been saved. All of which, by itself, makes me happy enough to do the work. But that's not where the story ends.

One of the premises of this blog is that, once we have begun the shift to slower, simpler, less consumption-based lives, certain benefits that we had not necessarily expected to accrue to the endeavor begin to make themselves (beautifully, quietly) apparent. One by one, I'm saying, like the stars at night, these blessings make their entrance, winking in out of the low-volt blue. And I would like to speak of one of those benefits here: namely the likely blessing of healthier bodies. 

To begin with though, a thought experiment:

Imagine that, in conversation, I tell someone that, some time ago, I purchased an exercise machine with three components, a sort of exercise ensemble. The day I brought it home (I go on to say), I committed myself to spending half an hour every day with this machine, and have pretty much stuck to that commitment, and although the results are not exactly miraculous, it's a pretty sure bet that my muscles--and especially my arms and shoulders--are stronger for its regular use. 

No doubt I could expect a compliment or two for my discipline. Or a low whistle expressive of wonder. Or better yet, a request to inspect my remarkable machine, my fitness ensemble.

"You really want to see it?"

"Oh yes."

"Well just a minute then, it's in the basement. I'll bring it up."

"Can you do that? It's not inconvenient?"

"Oh no, really it's quite portable."

So I descend into my basement, and bring up my machine, my fitness ensemble...which of course turns out the be my plunger, washboard, and pail. 

Now what might be the reaction? Incredulity perhaps? Puzzlement? Pity?

Consider. We spend billions of dollars annually on exercise machines of all sorts: rowing machines, treadmills, bicycles, weight machines, etc. none of which of course even pretend to do useful work. They generate no electricity. They grind no corn. No, the pile of weights on a weight machine goes up and down, returning manically, mechanically, to the precise ground-location from which they were launched. The wheels on the exercise cycle go round and round, but the bicycle itself moves not an inch. The treadmill is...well a treadmill. You walk on it, or run on it, but it gets you nowhere, a situation which in your sleep would translate into something called a nightmare.

But! My plunger cost me some fifteen dollars (yes, seems overpriced, until you consider the elegant engineering of its molded plastic end-piece, and yes its cerulean hue). The washboard cost ten, and the pail five. Oh and the drying rack--a hefty antique with dowels more than half an inch thick--that was thirty. For this rather modest expense, for years and years I will not only be able to exercise my arms, shoulders, back, abdominal core, but also accomplish useful work. Yes indeedy folks, my "fitness machine ensemble" does the laundry!

Of course there will be objections. A weight machine exercises a more complete and balanced array of muscles. Plungers and pails generally cannot get the cardiovascular system working fast enough to do my body the heartiest good, not the way a treadmill or a run around the town can etc. etc. And though these arguments have some validity, the biggest trouble with them is this: Most people don't stick with those programs or machines. If they ever do start, they cannot find the motivation to continue. As for why this may be the case--why they can never muster the motivation--I would suggest the following:

Premise one: exercise feels like work.

Premise two: normally when we work, we work in order to get something done.

Premise three: If any activity feels like work but seems to accomplish nothing, something in us rebels, and so much for the program, so long, hasta la vista, goodbye, all because we are meaning makers, meaning cravers, and because pure abstract exercise just doesn't provide the existential goods, at least not in the moment in which we're actually putting out the sweat.

Of course, not everyone will agree with me. Some folks will point to themselves and their (no doubt successful) exercise programs as counter-evidence. And I know that plenty of people really do find exercise bracing and pleasurable; that for them, a good six mile run is no different than say a jam session with my band is for me, which always concentrates my mind, and makes me feel vital and alive.

Unfortunately though (again for most of us) unless the physical movement has meaning in the moment--unless the exercise has use, the way a puppet's mouth can be made to smile and entertain--it's very hard to stick with the program. But here's where the nine volt life comes in! The low-carbon, high-imagination, lifestyle adventure! 

Unplug your automatic washer. Replace it with a laundry fitness ensemble. 

Make bread by hand. Kneading is real exercise, and you won't regret the goodness of the bread.

In the market for a lawn mower? Consider a reel mower, the kind with the rotating blades. Or let the grass grow a bit more and learn to use a scythe. 

Chop wood. Saw wood. Build stuff with hand tools.

Learn to play the piano or guitar. It's surprising how many calories strong handwork burns, and nothing nourishes the soul like homespun entertainment. 

Walk. Bike.  Everywhere you can. It is simple and carbon free. It gives us time to breathe and to think, and preserves a direct connection between our bodies and the elements.

Note the commonality here among all these suggestions: practical, in-the-moment meaning to accompany the physical action; a destination arrived at, a necessary task accomplished, a pleasant way to pass the time. No longer, under this arrangement of understanding, are we trying to reach (by means of bodily movement) some abstract future state of fitness, some perfect body that never really shows up. No, for a nine-volt adventurer, the healthy fit body is simply the inevitable result of a daily routine that calls that body into use; it just happens; it's a gift, a happy indication that the way of life you're leading is changing both you and the world.

HB

Laundry (Late Carbon Age) Part One

At Sunnyside, our laundry gets done by hand. I know this, and can vouch for it because it's my own two hands that do the work. They get exercise doing it. And they even get wet.

First I fill a utility tub with soapy water, into which I then submerge whatever laundry is to be piloted that day into the land of Clean. "Give me your whites, your darks, your cottons and polyesters yearning to be free." Purveyor of liberty, I take up a plunger in my hands: an item specially engineered for laundering, elegant and effective, with wooden handle and molded plastic end-piece of cerulean hue.

Next, in order to agitate the clothes within the soapy water, I plunge the plunger into the water, up and down, up and down, preferably while listening to an energetic movement from a Bach concerto, so that the beat of the music may become the rhythm of the wash, and Beauty worm its nutritive way into the sterile soil of Labor. The D minor keyboard concerto first movement is a fine laundering piece: manly and serious, a favorite of the romantics such as Schumann. The brows cannot remain unfurrowed while laundering to anything that Bach composed in D minor, and this  furrowing of the brows renders one's thoughts as you know much more profound. Plus hey the whites come out clean.

After the requisite number of returns of the ritornello theme, the plunger may be laid aside and the dirty soapy water drained. This at Sunnyside is accomplished by means of a human body named Harlan taking up a cheery orange 5-gallon pail. Further procedures follow, but in the interest of preventing both reader and writer from falling into a catatonic state of boredom, their minute, minute-by-minute explication is hereby curtailed.

To proceed then, a few nuanced admissions. First, to those readers who have seen me at the Laundromat and Bahama Tan facilities down Lincolnway in Valparaiso, comfortably seated and thumbing a book, you are absolutely correct to observe that I am no hand-wash laundry absolutist. No, I do not begrudge myself the use of a machine, or even two and even three machines, at least once in awhile, in what you might call exceptional laundry situations. Say the family has been travelling, or say I've been sick for a few days, and the clothes are piled up in the wicker hamper such that the lid slides off the rumpled mountain of them, and with a wicker thump falls to the floor to roll down the stairs like a dog in search of a walk; well then I figure it might be best to take the clothes to the laundromat, and make use of all those expensive, power-hungry, but fabulously muscular machines, devourers of Washington quarters, but willing slaves (once fed) to my laundering will.

Furthermore, even here at home, as I go about my laundering, I do not entirely eschew the society of the machine.  For instance, before hanging the clothes on the drying racks, I make use of an electric spinner, charmingly marketed as "The Charming Spinner." I cannot therefore lay claim to any knowledge of the fine art of wringing or wrangling, any more than I can take credit for the work of sun, which does most of the drying, and also cheers me on as I hang the items on the drying racks. Really we can never give enough credit to the sun. It is the first numeral of our natural existence, the unity of light from which we all proceed and are sustained. Just ask Pythagoras. He made it a special point never to urinate in the direction of the sun, and for obvious reasons. The sun is way way too cool to pee at. The sun dries your peplos or chiton, as well as your himation. Or if you're Diogenes, and prefer to wear nothing at all, then still, you should be grateful and reverent to the sun because after you bathe, or once the rainstorm passes over, it is the sun that dries off your patootie as well as (not to mention) your et cetera.

(To be continued)

HB

Sunnyside

When I was a young boy living in South India, no one in the community in which we lived ever bothered with numbered addresses. Instead, all the houses, boarding houses, and even apartment buildings had names. I still remember some of these names. They were magical.  Dunmere, Jumisba, Loch End, Loben....with these words you could conjure up the places immediately in the mind. It was very efficient, like a spell that called up a picture. Also if you just knew the name of the place, just that alone made it somehow automatically more familiar to you, more susceptible to communication with you. You had something like a key to entering its heart, and also a means of describing its mysteries, and of course of being able to inform others of what you had experienced there. 

My conviction that we ought to name more aspects of our surroundings, extends to trees as well.  On the campus of the university here in Valparaiso, stands a beautiful oak with a name: a great big huge spreading oak, out in the middle of the largest green open space on campus. The oak has for generations of students been called Merlin. Which is perfect. People sit under the shade of Merlin, against Merlin's trunk. People read books under Merlin. Couples kiss under Merlin. Every year actors perform Shakespeare under the leaves of Merlin. Merlin is their canopy. 


It is generally easy enough to cut a tree down in this world. All you have to do is claim to own it. Even on a University campus this is usually true. But try taking a chain saw to a tree named Merlin! What a protective spell the name literally casts! What's in a name? Well, reverence and affection for one, sometimes even awe. And let me add that, in the same way that naming a tree changes our feelings towards it--deepening them, fixing them like dye to a cloth--naming our homes could be a first step to caring more deeply about them as well. And to living in them more happily and contentedly. 

I remember a Canadian friend in college, making fun of the American penchant for numbering our streets. We were on band tour, and while we were traveling, the subject naturally came up. "Yes," he said to someone on the tour bus, "In Canada we actually name our streets." Someone hazarded the point that Americans, by numbering their streets, made navigation in their cities easier, but my Canadian friend simply shrugged, "Look at a map." By which I think he meant (if I can presume to extrapolate especially his shrug and guess at its larger intent) "It's a shame that any nation would value efficiency of navigation above unique and descriptive names. It bespeaks a poverty of imagination. A lack of settled affection. An addiction to easy abstractions."

Of course, I know that most Americans would never name their homes, just because it's not a custom here. To do so, or even consider doing it, may seem too pretentious or just plain strange. But I want to posit some other reasons as well. I want do so because it seems to me that, when certain impediments stand in the way of some action, and you can name those impediments, and then carry out the action anyway, or even pretend to carry out that action, the act serves as a powerful antidote to the negative spiritual conditions that might have placed the impediments in the first place. For instance there may be all sorts of reasons why I wouldn't use the word "brother" or "friend" to describe this or that person I disliked or felt angry with or estranged from. However if I were then to use the word brother or friend anyway to describe that person--even to myself alone--well, that act alone might serve as an antidote to my estrangement and my anger. In fact, I have tried this. I know it works. 

So. Here are some possible reasons why we might never want to name our homes, even if the larger culture were more or less indifferent to the act of naming them. 

1. Our houses generally are not very different from one another. We have not made them so. So we do not name them. After all, it's the urge to acknowledge unique attributes that generally precedes and motivates the act of naming.

2. Too few of us stay in one place long enough to fall in love with it. Since love, or at least affection, is also often involved in most thoughtful acts of naming, and love for a place takes time to grow, it follows that we never name our homes.

3. For too many of us, our homes give us little pleasure. Perhaps we are lonely there. Or perhaps the people whom we live with there hurt us over and over again, even as we hurt them. Or perhaps our homes are the generators of financial worry, or of continual headaches of practical inconvenience. In any case, why would we affectionately name the generators of pain? Better to forget about them whenever we can. 

4. Often because of our own modern inability to connect with the immediate and the real, when we are at home we are not really at home at all, but are doing our level best to project ourselves outside of our homes, beyond them, say into cyberspace or into televised landscapes or cities. Again, why would we bother naming a place which we do not truly inhabit?

5. As with old light bulbs and obsolete computers and used automobiles, so with our homes; our ambitions lie in the direction of improvement, and improvement equals replacement equals moving on.  "I don't intend to stay here," says the ambitious heart, "I intend to upgrade." But if the point of life is to achieve as many upgrades as possible, it would seem foolish to expend much affection on what we wish to leave as quickly as possible behind.  Avoid names, avoid affection, avoid all the gravity involved with both. Avoid getting stuck. 

These are just a few possibilities, but I think they are important ones to consider. 

Just to make it clear: I think that naming our homes would be a good idea. It would make them more dear to us, and the world is short on affection. Why should we leave naming our houses to the folks on historical dramas on TV? Aren't our own homes sweet enough? Important enough? Couldn't we at least, by naming them, begin to make them so? 

As for our homes not being big and important enough to be named, certainly the English of past eras had no problem with naming their cottages, so let's leave off thinking of the practice as too pretentious, and meant for big estates and such. In any case, if we really feared coming off as pretentious, well in the first place, the names we chose for our habitations could be as natural as we wanted to make them, and in the second place, there's no reason to make the names of our homes public knowledge...

...though I for one will go out on a limb and say that my family's home here in Valparaiso is named Sunnyside, for all the windows it features, and for the cheerful, nutritive sense of eggs done sunny-side up which we feel that living here injects into our lives. To me Sunnyside also signifies that visitors can come and enjoy warm hospitality, and take away with them a memory of the same. 

I hope that these words too contain something in them of the sun.

HB

Millie

The day my family and I returned from camping, I received news that a former neighbor of mine, Millie Powell, had died in Tennessee. She had moved off to Nashville some two years ago, because it was simply time for her to be in a place where she could be cared for more intensively, and because one of her daughters had found her a place very near her own home, so that regular visiting would be easy. I was sorry to hear of her death. There are of course many good human beings on this earth, but only so many that we'll ever even meet, and of these, only a very few that we can truly count as friends. Millie was a friend of mine.

She lived across the street from us, in a sturdy old house whose original construction predated her birth by only a few years. Mind you Millie did not actually grow up there. She moved to Valparaiso and into that particular home only after she married. Still it cheers me that the place amounts to her contemporary, and that she lived there long enough that its very boards and plaster must be imbued with her character, and so that its presence across the way will help me miss her less.

I would go over every Thursday to visit with Millie.  Rain or shine, snow or wind, busy or not, I always wanted to go. She interested me, and I always had the sense that my visits were appreciated. Certainly she never chased me off. Always she was polite. I would let myself in through the mudroom and walk through the kitchen and stand in the door-frame of the kitchen looking in toward the living room and there in her arm chair she would be. Sometimes go figure, she would be watching cartoons on the TV, with the volume up very loud. More often though she would be reading or snoozing or just pondering.

"Hey neighbor," I would say.

She would always turn in her chair and smile brightly.

"Well hello! Come on in! Have a seat!"

I would do just that, both things: number one come into the living room and number two have a seat. Then I'd inquire how she was.

"Oh, ornery as usual, and you?"

"Fine fine."

That was the set script. After that, we just sat around and made up the rest. Our conversations ranged in topic, but they were always rooted in the immediate and the real, and when they segued into the past, as they often did, that did not break the rule of "immediate and real." Because for Millie, the past was both immediate and real; it was her mental food I suppose most of the day. Many many evenings when, on my walks, I would pass by her home, the light in the living room would still be on, and you could see her there in the armchair--again, sometimes reading, and sometimes watching the TV, but quite often just pondering, gazing inwardly surely on all the images and experiences of her lifetime. Here was the past considering itself. Here was a woman by the self-sufficient power of consciousness, conceiving and re-conceiving Time.

She would ask me how my latest play was going. She would ask after the health of our garden, or about my wife and son. She was particularly concerned that my wife experience no hardships at work simply on account of being a woman. Reassurances on these matters usually made her suspicious, and her personal past made it obvious why. Her parents having died when she was still young, she had been raised by an aunt, who by profession was a medical doctor, that is, a rare turn-of-the-century woman Md. "A lady doctor," as Millie would put it. Millie's own three daughters (I have met them all now) are all free spirits too. No one's going to impose on them. Good luck trying.

It's maybe politic and sensible to mention somewhere along the line--and here is as good a spot as any--that I am perfectly aware that the elder Millie was not perfect. That I was a guest when I met with her, and so saw her generally when she was on her best behavior. That in short, when she said she was ornery, she meant it.

But, as any person who has been around the block knows, or ought to know: our faults are inextricably bound up in our virtues, the way any shadow is roped to the sun. The corresponding virtue of orneriness is gumption, and gumption she had in spades. She had to. She was a physical mess--guaranteed at birth by the doctors to die very young, and certainly never to have children and certainly never...well you get the idea. She would never have made it through life without that fiercer, almost condor, side to her. In the words of one of her daughters, she made it her life's career to confound expectations. 

Millie and I would talk about the weirdness of the weather, if there had been weirdness, and even sometimes when there had not. We would talk about the improvements around town, if there had been improvements, and even sometimes when there had not. On occasion we talked about religion. She was a Quaker, which to her meant that life was very much about the golden rule and about accepting people as they were, and about thoughtful speech. Here were three almost metaphysical propositions to her:

1. Every human being deserves some fundamental level of respect.

2. It doesn't matter how different people are from you, you welcome them, and listen to what they have to say. 

3. You don't open your mouth to say pretentious things. Make your conversation worth listening to; otherwise, you're an oaf and an ass.

Respect, a welcoming heart, and an intelligent tongue was certainly what Millie on Thursdays always had at the ready for me. She never talked me down. In fact she did one better and consistently and specifically encouraged me in my work. She came to see three of my plays, despite the physical demands of doing so (she barely ever left the house), and she asked me without fail how my current projects were going. This was refreshing. You'd be surprised how people will, openly or subliminally, talk a writer down: letting you know for instance that they're keeping an eye out on the want ads for you, just in case the verbal fever breaks, or heck just informing you what sort of books they themselves think will sell (not the one you're writing), and what sort will not (the exact one you are). Once an acquaintance informed me that I should give up writing about my past, because at the age of thirty five, I didn't really have one yet. 

The point is, a writer always senses the presence of a doubter, though happily the converse is also true: you always sense a believer too. And I can tell you what category of person I prefer. The Millie category. The believers. The ones who sense the presence of your dreams and who, even if you failed two three four times in this project or that, would still stand with you and ask you how it's coming. Part of that believer side of her, I must mention, came from the fact that she herself was a poet of real competence and integrity. I look forward to her work finding its way onto the web, as I'm told her daughters wish to see happen. If it does find a home there, you can be sure I'll pass the address on.

Millie could never precisely recall her age. Not that, being a halfway intelligent man, I would ever ASK after a woman's age specifically. Instead the subject might come up like this: Say in some innocuous way I inquired after her health, well she would reply that though things were going indifferently for her, really she couldn't complain, because unlike most folks her age, she could still pretty do everything herself, why when a lady had lived as long as she had, namely...

"but now how long have I lived?" she would ask, as if I'd know.

"Is it ninety three?" I might say. "Ninety four?"

She would try counting on her badly warped fingers.

"Now why can't I remember these things?"

"But who's counting?"

"I am!"

"Maybe at your age though," I said to her once, "How many years you've lived should be more like a game of estimation. Like estimating the gumballs in the gumball machine."

She laughed at this. She appreciated this sort of thing. You couldn't lose her with metaphors. She always kept up with you, above all, because she wanted to. 

Which brings up the most remarkably nine-volt thing about her, and why I feel she is so relevant here and now in this space: her surprisingly delicate and varied response to human conversation. She was like a fine Turkish cymbal and anything you said was like tapping her to make her ring with laughter and philosophy and remembrance. Just say the slightest intelligent thing and voila all those frequencies, all those associations, all those sessions of pondering, came into play. She would respond intelligently, wittily, relevantly, feelingly. She would respond fully, with whatever she could give you that day. 


Compare that exquisite comprehensive responsiveness say with the young choral conductor I met yesterday at a gig I played, who when he talked to me, did so with his texting machine in hand, looking down two or three times during what at the most was a twenty second exchange. Such a high-voltage scattered state of mind is pitiable. Is to be pitied. But it is also to be mourned, as yet another sign that the scattering of attention encouraged by our machines is making us half-wit slaves to shallowness. Pray tell me, how do you taste the night-time summer lightning sparking from the brain of a distant cloud, or drink in the walk of a beautiful woman whose name you do not know, or honestly behold the butterfly perched quivering at the edge of the endless depths of a rose, or take part in the sadness of a ruined farmhouse, all torn tar-paper and aching splinters--how pray tell, can these all these sights vouchsafed to us for only these few years of life, all all these miraculous visions so fleetingly ours--how can they touch us if our mind's focus is so carelessly tossed (fanning out wastefully like pebbles or buckshot) into the high energy electrical rush and gush of what we call modern communicative life? But that  is not life. It is not even true communication. It is the opposite of life. It tears us from life. It violates trust by spurning even the simple gift of a greeting. It is un-Millie like. It is un-Quaker. It is wasteful complexity. It is death by shallow facility.

Danger. High voltage. 

Rest in Peace, Millie, my friend. Since I am a stubborn traditionalist, I trust we will continue our conversations one day in a place not yet palpable to me. In fact I believe that, since eternity itself is beyond all illusions of separation and temporal ordering, beyond cause and effect, beyond the rule of this-must-happen-before-that, for you where you are now it can be Thursday anytime and we can be perched in our living room rockers, yucking it up. 

But until that vision coalesces for me, goodbye.

Except wait! No, before you leave the stage of my bloggy mind, would you much mind it, if I passed on a memory of yours? I trust you do not...

When  Millie was maybe five, on a hot summer's day, she and her sister went to the town pool with her father. Her father was not going to be around much longer. She would know him for a year or two more before he passed into the undiscovered country, but on this day on this eternal day he took his two girls to the town pool and when they finally got there he got into the pool with them and told them to watch this and down he went under the water and stood on his hands under the water so that the only part of him showing above the water was his two feet one foot two feet, which he waved at them again and again shaking them like flippers and making the girls laugh and laugh... 

Millie when you told me that story, it might has well have happened the day before, and you might as well have been five, because you laughed and laughed, as if it was as fresh an event as that: a daisy of the mind still fresh in the vase. And I thought how wonderful it was that, ninety some years after that day in the pool, your father's little stunt still had that power to make you laugh. Surely he had thought of it, in the moment, as just a moment's entertainment. But it turned out to be a gift forever, and a gift not just for you and your sister, but (through the power of memory) for others too, and among them, me. I pass the moment on, just as you passed it on to me. I pass it on as part of the gift that you were to me and that I am now passing along to others.

Until eternal Thursdays then, Millie (when we are meeting now) 

HB