We are all human

My poem about the silent fathers has arisen from stories both told to me from colleagues and friends, and recorded endlessly in novels. War is hell. 

We take either idealistic young people, or rebels to begin with, or financially diminished persons in hope of a leg up on life, and we pound into their every waking breath the concept of kill or be killed. We mold them into resistance to civility.

And when/if they return, we say, good luck with life on Main Street. And the internal stew bubbles ominously.

Sometimes "normal" life returns.
Sometimes the fire within blazes to consume all in its jagged path.

But whatever is visible above the surface the internal landscape must be littered with landmines.

Now there is talk of more war. Why can we never see beyond the dollars to the real price tag?

Daddy never spoke of the war

When his tour was over,
he came home,
unpacked his kit,
filled a modest brown box
with all the memories
of blood,
blown tissue
and breaking hearts,
taped it shut and
shoved it into the
darkest corner
of the cellar.

And he never
thought about them
again,
Except in quiet dawn,
starless nights,
and the unfilled spaces
between seconds.

lucky

On workday mornings, my radio eases on to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. What a glorious way to begin the day as his familiar voice rambles huskily through famous birthdays, not only of writers, but people who have made a difference in science, music, politics  - and every area of the arts. Today his poem was called "Lucky" and the last line was "as if you had/stacked up bricks/at random/ and built by mistake/ a lucky star."

And that's the way I feel, lucky.

The worst ills known to mankind could descend on me in the next hour, but I would have to acknowledge that I've had a lifetime of generosity - of birth, health, family, friends, work, home environments - just as if I were stacking the bricks at random and building a lucky star.

How can I not give thanks?

the gift

As a follow-up to My Name is Lucy Barton I had to wonder as I was sitting with my exquisite group of readers in the book club, what personal reactions poured into the mix - because after all we are all mothers and daughters. Since then I've discussed the book with a few friends and have found very strong reverberations among them - for good or bad. All I can say is that if I could awake and find my mother at the foot of my bed any day of the week, month or year I would be ecstatic! But I know that's a gift.

I do think that whenever a child has a major problem with the dynamics of the childhood home, that child's shoulders will be heavy for life. I'm not saying that people can't come to terms with whatever injustice or hardship, but that primal relationship - if skewed - is most difficult to untangle and shed completely.

So back to the gift. I say with each waking day, a smiling thank-you for my mother and father. I know that I did nothing to slide into my family of seven. They were all given to me. And as the tissue and wrappings fall away each day, I am humbled anew at my enormous good fortune.

Wrap-up of My Name is Lucy Barton

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life…”

And that loneliness seeped into the very soul of Lucy Barton isolating her from much of the world despite marriage, children, and a successful writing career.

The story opens in a hospital room where Lucy, as a married adult with two small children, is convalescing from some mysterious complication following an ordinary appendectomy. Upon awakening one day she discovers her mother at her bedside – the mother she hasn’t seen for many years.

Mother. Comfort. Safety. Well, not exactly. Lucy’s life had begun in her uncle’s garage with little heat or water and fiber-glass walls for décor. In addition, her father had returned from the war with tortuous memories of murder and mayhem that skewed each wakening day. And the mother watched.

As a five-year-old Lucy was sometimes locked in her father’s dilapidated old pick-up as an alternative to child-care while both parents worked and the other siblings were at school. The sheer desperation of her tears streamed down through all of her days, in some ways locking her in that truck, with the one-time snake, forever.

Lucy escaped to college and later New York City, from garage to Chrysler Building. She never grasped, nor recovered from the wonder of it all. When she married a wealthy German, William, his mother proclaimed to her friends, “Lucy came from nothing.” Nothing or everything.

Meanwhile back at the hospital, Lucy discovers her husband had sent her mother air-fare to facilitate her visit .When she asks her mother, how she managed to navigate from their small town of Amgash, Illinois, to New York City – she replies tartly, “I have a tongue in my head and I used it.”  For once.

For five days, Mother and daughter tiptoe through the silent years, gossiping about home-town friends with failed marriages or other disappointments, speculating about the nurses giving them names like Toothache or Cookie, light-heartedly passing the hours – and avoiding all sleeping dogs in the room.

Aside from the sizable gift of presence, her mother is unable to bridge the gaping emotional ravine between them and all of Lucy’s longing cannot pull her to the other side. And so they remain, while an extraordinarily kind doctor shores up her sorrow, gently laying a hand on her healing scars.

Elizabeth Strout’s brilliant little volume shines with compassion, but its truth is delivered with rapier thrusts. “Everyone loves imperfectly,” claims one friend. Despite the sadness, Lucy blossoms under random kindnesses – from a gay friend, a mentor, a neighbor. Having been born into pain, she inadvertently delivers some to her own daughters, through a divorce and remarriage, but still she remains steadfast, acknowledging the pain “we hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: this is mine, this is mine.” The book closes with her remembering with gratitude the last soft light of day on the Illinois farmland.

But in the title she owns it all.

 My name is Lucy Barton.

clean sweep

For a while this morning as I cleaned, I had the TV on and was listening to the political chatter of the day. When I got to the point of some of the White House staffers trying to tone down DJT's tweet to Mexico which contain the phrase "bad hombres" saying he meant something more whimsical - nothing ominous, I had to set down mop, pail and temper! I could not be more embarrassed by this man. Was there ever a person in our highest office more juvenile? Seriously.

So I turned off the humiliation, and switched to the classical music station. Now, hours later, Brahms, Mozart and Mendelsohn have rescued me, smoothing out my soul furrows and renewing the sacredness of the day.

And the house looks cleaner, too!