The studied notes of our genome

My son, my epiphany, was born at 0300 December 24, 1990 at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. I say my epiphany because I was not prepared for the amount of hit-me-in-the-heart love I would feel. I liken it to the moment the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. Yesterday I was reading a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and there’s a line, A hundred doors spring open and I thought yes, that’s it. 

My son has become a conundrum rolled in a cloak of silence. He was a happy baby, a happy boy, a loving child. He was teamed perfectly with his sister. She was (is) bold and headstrong and he was restrained and calming. Both smart, creative and full of laughter and light: children.

Both are grown now. Both have made their own marks in the world, their own lives, in wildly different ways. You think that you’d always feel any hurt like a web vibrating to the fly’s touch. But the news of disappointment comes the same way, if at all, dribs and drabs, piecemeal. I guess it feels like what Ellis from No Country For Old Men says, “What you got ain’t nothing new.” Families are tentative.
 
Here’s something I wrote recently, called Palindrome, that thing that is the same forward and back. You can’t get back what was taken, you can work to repair what is still possible. My son is thirty and silent, my father is dead; I’ve never shut the door to possibility.

PALINDROME

One of my warmest memories of my father is when I am three or four. It’s evening, my father is home from a day in the woods. He’s settled into his chair smoking a pipe and watching TV. I curl up in his arms my head in the cradle between his shoulder and chin. The tobacco smell is sweet, he wears Old Spice and the remnants of this smell is always on him. He bathed after coming home from work; he does not shave in the afternoon. When I move my head or he speaks his whiskers graze my cheeks. He wears a flannel shirt which is line-dried and smells of apple and sky. I feel his heart beat, I hear his breath.  This memory ends there, because I always fell asleep.

This particular memory loomed when I held my son when he was small as he placed his head beside mine or rested where he could hear my heart.  By that time my father had excised me from his life and my son would only meet him once, though I tried to tell each of the other in halting and strange ways. They would have gotten along. My son would have loved the endless tools and building, he would have taken to welding (which he did later in high school) and mechanics. My father may have found someone who was content to sit and learn. To learn the names and ways of all the tools and motors. To be content in the silent hum of machine and a man.

~~~

And here, also, a poem. Indulge me, it's a tough day:

A semi-explanation for our continued disorders
 
Here is stardust disguised as bone:
vertebrae, wrist, cup of hip,
time secreted in tibia and femur.
The moon’s shadows have nothing on us.
 
Things that hold the half-life of joy
stay buried deep in the marrow;
we carry this as our inheritance.
A collective grief waiting to be stirred.
 
Here where wonder hesitates, dreams
pretend to sleep. Who knew sadness,
was a recessive gene? Inertia like a hidden
blood disorder, shyness passed down like a lazy eye.
 
Better to believe in prayers and spells
than the studied notes of our genome.
I can apologize in advance but I cannot
give you the cure that will heal us.

~~M.E. Hope

Music and lights

This morning the alarm was set to play Charley Pride. When Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ began playing, I said Take it Jerry! And he confessed he does not know Charley Pride’s music. He said they did not listen to country music. Of course, they had a few more options and weren’t really tied to the 12 hours in-valley broadcast of KWVR. Granted you could occasionally get a station from Lewiston or Walla Walla, we could hear American Top 40, but you had to want it. I had a friend in the Navy who, when she’d mention a song and I’d say I don’t know that, would yell at me, Yes, you do! But I didn’t. She was from Philadelphia and could name songs and singers and groups and the years they had hits. I was culturally “deprived” by listening to instrumental, country, the curious “music for the dinner hour”, the farm report and Swap and Shop. But I knew Ferlin Husky and Dolly Parton, (oh we knew Dolly) Sons of the Pioneers, Chet Atkins and Porter Wagner. Now I need to teach Jerry one Charley Pride song and why not his biggest hit?

Well people may try to guess, the secret of my happiness
But some of them never learn it's a simple thing
The secret I'm speaking of, is a woman & a man in love
And the answer is in this song that I always sing

And it’s the Solstice! Jupiter and Saturn are closest to earth that they’ve been since 1623 and, per an article I read, the closest observable since 1226. The convergence. At dusk, as if on cue, they showed up low in the southwest sky. There is also rumor that tonight during the longest night the Ursid meteor shower will be peaking. All this celestial wonder comes after a bright and sunny day. When we went out for our afternoon walk, I mentioned that the sun was at the point in the sky that it rose to in Belgium and then sort of skirted the sky before it disappeared. Days shortened in chunks you could see and feel and then Winter Solstice hit you could feel it rewind until you were closing the black out curtains in the summer to cut out the light.

Shadows

 

Goddamn Google, don’t put up something so a sad when I’m in such a fragile state! Sunday's Doodle paid tribute to Sudan, believed to be the last northern white rhino born in the wild. I just got weepy, I didn’t even know Sudan, but I knew of him.

Sigh.

The shadows will only get one day longer and then begin back the other way. Solstice eve and the sun burns itself out minutes quicker than yesterday, not as fast as tomorrow. A lot is promised at the end of the year, a lot more to be parceled into the new year. Some people this past year have paid more attention to the days as their normal distractions were hidden. Others only counted toilet paper and body bag as markers. Grief and commodities. They counted anger and lies, disappointment and death. Each day was another breath, another meal, another day still inside a seemingly safe space until no space was safe. Fire, fever, heat, skin color, conspiracy, hurricane, tornado, on top of COVID and food insecurity and loneliness and fear and…well, you’re paying attention, aren’t you?

Be safe, be kind, be careful. Look for a quick day and a long night, look for the planets on the horizon. Happy Solstice. Let’s keep ourselves together and heal, for Sudan.

Noble Nobel, a prompting

A poem written after Louise Gluck was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sunlight to darkness

Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
 
            ~~~
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
                                    ~~Louise Glück, A Summer Garden
 

After school we walked behind the apartment
to the small park on Via Andrea Ciardo. Shadow
and sunlight fell in equal shades of jade and emerald
and then every version of lush green that Fall afternoon.
There was a long tunnel built here to play
on and over and through. While I watched they
slid from sunlight to darkness, the day quickly
cooling to dusk.  Issac and Justine were flowers
in the garden, then cats hunting lizards
and then careful gatherers collecting cicadas.
Inside their bug houses the new tenants
climbed the scratched walls. Once home
they documented their finds, offered small
lids of water and crumbs, placed them on the balcony,
where they joined lizards and beetles that had spent
the summer feasting on cheese and fruit
and any unfortunate grasshopper that came about.
The agreement was every being would be returned
to their wild home, even the rhino beetle that had escaped
in the kitchen by working its way through
cheese cloth only spent a day or two in captivity
refusing any foods offered. My heart
tightened with each release. Knowing that this agreement
extended to all the guests: lizard, beetle, praying
mantis, child. One day all doors open. One day all
beings go.

                               ~~M.E. Hope

Equal measure

Each day is another lesson in patience and calm, worry and absurdity, in equal measure throughout the day. Taken with a heavy, heavy acknowledgement that we are okay. We are not sick. We are not without a home, or worrying that we could lose our home. We have food. We have money for food. We have healthcare. We have each other and we laugh together – perhaps, at times, about things we shouldn’t laugh over. And yet, living will slam you down but, that is not for this forum.

This morning we woke up to snow, just a tiny dusting that lasted a few hours and quickly melted away. But it brings the birds that for the most part don’t come to the feeders as long as there are fields to forage. The starlings were across the street behind my neighbor’s house doing ballet and dance on the power lines – the only power lines in the area near us as everything else if buried – but they were landing and rising, fluttering and skittering. There’s a small swale behind their house the birds were very busy. Yesterday they were in our front yard briefly but left quite quickly when a hawk cried.

 

Some blackbirds did arrive and made themselves at home around the feeders. Usually, the blackbirds cross the skies in long clouds of song. A snippet of a poem I wrote this spring says:  

As blackbirds pepper
the clouds – west to east mornings
east to west of an afternoon –
 
I pause to listen to the wave
of wings; their cries
soft bells against the leaden sky.

But this morning just a few showed up and were in no hurry to spend the morning foraging in the fresh fallen snow. They spent a lot of time sitting, like unwelcome guests, in the bare lilac bush. Poor things.

This afternoon, geese crossed over the yard while I was out, wings whispering in the dying light. A sliver of moon was nearly caught in the lonely pine’s arms and the cold was just turning from eye watering to bitter. Tonight will be clear, tomorrow sun will arrive and we will walk into a new day, rested and ready for every new gut punch.

Scrooged

It’s that time of year when I usually have a good dose of Scrooge hit me. A lot of bah and humbugging and the double wham of bah humbug. Typically, it has to do with the weather and commercialism and false cheer. This morning though dawned brilliantly bright and cold. The cardinals had dipped into their winter gear and were especially red and bright against the sky. Jerry had an errand to run so I went too because I needed to look for “something” at the same place. We laughed when we got there and I said, I’m going to look for that caramel corn we really like, and he confessed that was his reason for being there as well. My shopping habits as of late have a bit of Supermarket Sweep added in as I try to get in and out of stores as quickly as possible and if I can have zero interactions with anyone in the store so much the better. I love self-check and I have one or two stores I go to most often that allow this; I plot out shopping by aisle and make my list accordingly as well. If someone said you need to fill your cart with avocados, tofu, curry mix, oatmeal and shredded cheese, I’d be able to get everything in under two minutes. Nothing to get famous doing, but it distracts. 

And look here's a picture taken four years ago in a land far, far away.

Winter rerun

 

 Celebration
 
 There is a reason we save this time
 of the year for celebration,
 this time when we need sun or star or flame
 to take us through the axis tip;
 when we need snowfall and miracle
 and warmth and song to carry us through
 till spring.  There is a reason
 we search the sky, listening for wingbeat,
 verse, the sound of doves hovering
 in the shelter of pine. We look toward
 one another, rather than away,
 pull in toward the hearth
 the sturdy chair, take the arms of one
 so loved, we could not go on
 without them, and in this
 pause, we pull in the world.
 The long winter night fills us:
 a renewal, a radiance, a reason for waking.

~~M.E. Hope