Directions (way past WIFI)

First you’ll come to the end of the freeway.
Then it’s not so much north on Woodland Avenue
as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,
and the road, you’ll notice,
is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.
You’ll see a cemetery on your right
and another later on your left.
Sobered, drive on.
Drive on for miles
if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.
Sometimes a spotted horse
will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you’ll see
a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.
You’ll cross the river many times
over smaller and smaller bridges.
You’ll know when you’re close;
people always say they have a sudden sensation
that the horizon, which was always far ahead,
is now directly behind them.
At this point you may want to park
and proceed on foot, or even
on your knees.

“Directions” by Connie Wanek

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I would like to find the place that Connie speaks of.  From my own front porch, I catalog the sounds- different bird calls (shrill, screach, chirp, whirl-whistle), traffic from Guilford and Byron, lonely dogs barking, engines idling, air conditioners humming dryly, leaves rasping on the ground and in trees, bees busily working, cicadas shaking their rattled throat or legs or whatever they shake to make that noise, more road traffic (fan belts, tire treads, radios, engines accelerating and decelerating) and children yelling- probably at each other.  It is peaceful and quiet on my front porch- or at least peaceful and familiar.

The place that Connie speaks of seems quiet and peaceful in a deeper, reverent way.  It is beyond graveyards, beyond the road crews of INDOT or ODOT or PADOT, beyond the congestion of city-life vegetation, past the river, over top of more and more rickety bridges, even beyond the horizon.  It is beyond roads because you cannot take your car.  You can walk but not all of the way.  It is a place so distant and holy that you may only proceed on your knees.

If I ever made it there, I hope that I wouldn’t check my phone for WIFI.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

Death of a lawnmower

It died in its sleep,
dreaming of grass,
its knives silent and still,
dreaming too, its handlebars
a stern, abbreviated cross
in tall weeds. Where is he
whom it served so well?
Its work has come to nothing,
the dead keep to themselves.

“Death of a Lawn Mower” by David Ignatow

Listening to a stranger

 

 

 

My seatmate on the late-night flight
could have been my father. I held
a biography, but he wanted to talk.
The pages closed around my finger
on my spot, and as we inclined
into the sky, we went backwards
in his life, beginning with five hours
before, the funeral for his only brother,
a forgotten necktie in his haste
to catch this plane the other way
just yesterday, his wife at home
caring for a yellow Lab she’d found
along the road by the olive grove,
and the pretty places we had visited—
Ireland for me, Germany for him—
a village where he served his draft
during the Korean War, and would like
to see again to show his wife
how lucky he had been. He talked
to me and so we held
his only brother’s death at bay.
I turned off my reading light,
remembering another veteran
I met in a pine forest years ago
who helped me put my tent up
in the wind. What was I thinking
camping there alone? I was grateful
he kept watch across the way
and served coffee in a blue tin cup.
Like the makeshift shelter of a tent,
a plane is brought down,
but as we folded to the ground,
I had come to appreciate

even my seatmate’s breath, large
and defenseless, the breath of a man
who hadn’t had a good night’s rest.
I listened and kept the poles
from blowing down, and kept
a vigil from the dark to day.

“Arc” by Amy M. Clark

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I’ve never attempted to put up a tent in the wind.  Putting up a tent in 72 degree weather with barely a breath of wind is complicated enough for this indoorsman.  But the imagery is perfect- A struggle to build something and protect yourself from the elements is hard enough but when there are gusts that make sheltering more difficult, a second set of hands are a comfort.

Each of us have people in our lives that seem to be constantly battered by gusts.  Some friends are in a storm of life for the moment.  Consider the ways that you can help shelter someone or how you’ve been sheltered recently.  If you need some background music, try Ray LaMontagne’s “Shelter” on.

Sliced bread

Sliced bread was sold for the first time on July 7, 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread, or bought it in solid loaves. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had been working for years perfecting an eponymous invention, the Rohwedder Bread Slicer. He tried to sell it to bakeries. They scoffed, and told him that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn’t work. Finally he hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. Still no sale, until he took a trip to Chillicothe, Missouri, and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the five-foot-long, three-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: “Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.” Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

_________________________

Where would we be if Frederick Rohwedder did not make sliced bread?!?  We wouldn’t be that much poorer off but we wouldn’t have one of the most common metaphors that remind us of the geniusness of small things.  Sliced bread- not a big deal- but you know what it means when something is as good as sliced bread.

Consider the lilies…

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

Authur, Anne Quindlen

Learning from your father

In the warm painted porch
of our old stucco house
at the legged laundry sink
covered with a plywood board
my father taught me as a boy
as he’d been taught, how a salesman
ought to polish his good shoes.

“Make them shine enough to speak,”
he insisted. “They’re your first step
through the door.” He’d spread out
newspaper, rags and brushes
and metal tins that twisted open
with a pop, revealing creams—
deep brown, black, cordovan.

He taught me by doing: the rag
doubled to keep the gob of polish
from bleeding though;
the non-master hand like a foot
inside the worked-on shoe
to hold it steady; the thorough
coating and spreading over leather

of waxy color, starting from scuffed toe
then down the instep side to heel
and back to toe. Once both shoes
were creamed over, he lit a cigarette
to let the glazed pair dry. Hurried
brushing, he’d say, made a short-lived
shine that wouldn’t last half a day

of cold calls on the road. My father
knew so much in his handsome hands—
gilded with a rectangled wristwatch
a wedding band, and between knuckles,
wiry sprays of golden hair.
I can still see one good hand hidden
inside a brougue, the other gripping

the wooden brush as it bristled out
a leathered glow. How long did they last
those lessons on the porch? One year?
Two? How long the morning polishings
with the jobless day before him
and a son watching, a wife waiting
and no door but ours to walk through.

“The Polishings” by Charles Douthat

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Are you a shoe-polisher?  I polish and when I do, my kids love to watch.  They would like to help, also.  All children like to be helpful.  From a child’s perspective, it’s an easy task and I often do tasks that they are too little to help with.

If you’ve never shone shoes, it is just like the poet describes: rag folded over so prevent the paste from leaking through onto your fingers, one hand inside the shoe while the other hand applies systematically, a haze covers the shoe and a few minutes of patience while the haze becomes hazier.  Finally, the best part- buffing the haze until it shines.  Voila!  A new pair of shoes, free of scuffs, free of wrinkles and shined to a high gloss.

I used to be fascinated when my dad shaved.  He would line the bathroom sink with a full sheet of newspaper, place the#2 guard on the electric clippers, move slowly against the grain, push and pull his cheeks for better angles and finally discard the newspaper into the bathroom trash can.  I guess the business of being a dad is somewhat mysterious.  Seeing them polish shoes or shave beards removes some of that mystery.

Home By Now

New Hampshire air curls my hair like a child’s
hand curls around a finger. “Children?” No,
we tell the realtor, but maybe a dog or two.
They’ll bark at the mail car (Margaret’s
Chevy Supreme) and chase the occasional
moose here in this place where doors are left
unlocked and it’s Code Green from sun-up,
meaning go ahead and feel relieved—
the terrorists are back where you left them
on East 20th Street and Avenue C. In New York
we stocked our emergency packs with whistles
and duct tape. In New England, precautions take
a milder hue: don’t say “pig” on a lobster boat
or paint the hull blue. Your friends in the city
say they’ll miss you but don’t blame you—they
still cringe each time a plane’s overhead,
one ear cocked for the other shoe.

“Home By Now” by Meg Kearney

To make a prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

In Uganda, American Becomes Foster Mom To 13 Girls

In Uganda, American Becomes Foster Mom To 13 Girls.