Mom bought every Elvis 45 available at the local record shop. Dad rarely bought records, but, when he did, he purchased Perry Como exclusively. I think Mom liked the raucous energy of Elvis’s straight-up rock ‘n roll, and the sentimental sadness or the fervent affirmations of the ballads. I think she liked Elvis’s gyrating hips, those howitzer blasts against the fortress of 1950s conformity. I’m pretty sure she liked that Elvis bought a pink (mom’s favorite color) Cadillac for his mother, and that he wasn’t shy about his affection for her. I’d guess she liked that he was “nice boy,” born into poverty and obscurity and an ethos of Southern prejudice, and became wealthy, famous, and, by bringing black music into the mainstream, a force for racial integration. I’d conjecture she liked playing Elvis records while she went about her daily homemaking tasks.
I’m forced to qualify all these statements. Mom never explained her Elvis affinity. Dad was different. He liked Perry Como, and he gave reasons, and, later, when I quite loitering in the foyer of maturity and actually passed through its main room door, I saw reasons beneath the reasons.
Dad liked Perry Como because he projected an unruffled personality, and his music was soothing—“he’s smooooth,” Dad said. Dad liked smooth. Perry Como’s hips did not gyrate. Dad liked that Perry Como was Italian—“you know, his real first name is Pierno,” Dad informed me--; was born poor of immigrant parents from Italy—as Dad had been--;worked as a barber and later ran his own barbershop; gained local recognition performing at wedding receptions and the like—as Dad’s dad, a shoemaker by trade, had--; and went on to become the most popular and successful singer of his generation. Dad liked success stories, especially ones that in some way mirrored his own rise from scrawny Depression-era kid to secure middle class status. Dad knew that Perry Como’s imperturbable, cardigan-sweatered cool masked a competitive nature, and Dad liked competition. Dad also liked romantic ballads, though he would never admit it. He was a stealth romantic.
Dad did not like Elvis—too androgynous, too much grease in his hair, too unconventional—and could not understand why Mom did. “What’s the fascination with that Presley guy,” Dad once asked her. “I like him,” Mom said. Dad wanted a reason, though: “Well, yeah, but why?” “Because he’s Elvis,” Mom said, and that was that. Dad never asked again. Unlike Dad, a systems analyst, Mom felt no compulsion to provide reasons for something she considered blindingly obvious . She thought or believed or felt something, and accepted it as perfectly legitimate, an experience that did not require explanation but that was nonetheless adequate to any query.
I came home from school one day to find the living room furniture rearranged. “Why’d you change the furniture,” I asked. “Oh, I just thought it was time,” she said. “But why,” I persisted. “It needed to be rearranged,” she replied, in a how-can-you-be-so-dense tone. Once, after a particularly lengthy and intense session of pestering of my younger brother Dennis, Mom intervened and told me in no uncertain terms to stop. “Why should I,” I smartalecked. I expected she’d say “because I’ll give you a smack if you don’t,” or “because if you don’t stop you won’t be allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club,” or “because if you don’t I’ll tell your father.” Instead, she said, “Because he’s your brother.” And she emphasized that last word.
It was only later, much later, that I understood what she meant, understood the sheer power of that word, its complexities, understood that its meaning lay in its connotations and implications, that it contained within it a self-evident sovereignty of meaning, that it carried a blood-deep, biology-deep cargo of empathy, of sympathetic imagination, of simple kindness, of the best of all rules, the Golden Rule. For Mom such things needed no logical analysis, no dictionaried explanation. Mom liked Elvis because he was Elvis; she rearranged furniture because it needed it; my brother deserved attentive care and kindness because he was my brother. For her that was enough. Sometimes things, or the idea of things, capture us, and we need to accept being taken. That was her lesson for me. Mom’s replies demanded imagination, and I learned never to mistake a deficiency of imagination on my part with a lack of meaning in her way of knowing.
Dad’s lesson was the necessity of strong claims supported by reasons, a lesson forged over two millennia ago in the Greek agorae, those public assembly places where citizens debated issues of community significance, a lesson that today goes by the name of public discourse, of truth-seeking, reasoned disputation, a lesson that today we seem to have forgotten. “Always give reasons, Jerry,” Dad told me more than once; “people will respect you. They’ll consider you a person who can be trusted.” He was right, of course, and there have been many occasions when I have put his counsel to good use, though I often find myself given more to Mom’s lesson. There is an uncurtained honesty in a simple statement of this-is-what-it-is-to-me that carries its own credibility, as much, perhaps, as a statement of this-is why-it-is-to-me.
Once, I eavesdropped on a conversation between Dad and his brother Carmen about a mutual acquaintance. “He’s an asshole,” Dad declared. “How come,” Carmen asked. “He just is,” Dad said. I smiled. Dad, it would seem, was no more immune to Mom’s lesson than I was. Though, like his Perry Como-ed romanticism, he’d never admit it.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
The Call
The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October. The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s. The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing. The last time I attended Sunday mass was when I visited my folks. They did not insist, did not even ask. They had accepted that I was fallen away, had been since I was twenty-one, but I went because I knew it would please them. Lately, though, I have felt a call to reintroduce myself to a faith I left more than forty years ago.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
Monday, September 5, 2011
One Looks At One
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” the poet Theodore Roethke says. For me, a moment of seeing occurred in the pale half light just before dawn one morning toward the end of July. Waiting for the carafe of the Mr. Coffee machine to fill with just enough coffee to banish the last vestiges of drowsiness, I happened to glance out the backyard windows into the garden and saw, as if conjured from that auroral seam between night and morning, a fully-mature, antlered buck nibbling on some sedum. I knew deer were paying calls to the garden. They had left their visiting cards: cropped day lilies, gnawed hostas, and cloven, heart-shaped hoofprints. Neighbors had spoken of seeing deer in their yards, but, until this particular morning, they had been only trace presences in mine. I came to think of the hoofprints as ungulate footnotes without an accompanying cervine text.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
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