An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
Gary is downstairs listening to a CD from The Searchers, his favorite group from the 60s (they were still playing a year ago). I have spent several days working on a poem for a local event. (With my luck they will not like it, but honest, I couldn’t write a cheerful “pandemic” poem. Others will.) As I sent it off as an email attachment I had word that the gallery is taking down the show the end of the month. They did not sell anything of mine (or from two other people). Yes, disappointing. But the poem . . . here’s the first stanza:
Birds fell from the sky this past
summer, a warning as defiling as riots
and bloody marble, the risk of living
in dangerous times when all times
prove dangerous.
Waves washed up into our hedge this morning, but it settled back for our afternoon walk.Continue reading →
Don’t most Americans feel that violent thugs do not represent the best of what our country has to offer? Don’t we believe that reason and fairness should rule over tyranny and violence?
Again, may 2021 lead us all to rediscover the virtues of hope, charity, faith, compassion, justice, temperance, and courage.
Simple courtesy and ordinary civility would be welcome. Truth, justice, and the American way? Surely. we remember all of that?
For days the rain has been heavy and steady. Air slides into the edge of the sea without making a line. White sea foam piles up at the rocky edge of our walk and even at low tide the sand is swept by high waves every few minutes. A bluff slid away up the beach because run-off has been so heavy. We try to go out for a daily walk anyway. A wave caught up with us once, wetting our running feet and splashing up the backs of our legs. We laugh about that. Even though we are careful and keep a close eye on the surf, the ocean is tricksy. We have come home rain-soaked almost every day for a couple of weeks. One day it took me two hours to get my hands warmed back up.
I keep trying to make resolutions for the coming year. What do I want to accomplish in 2021? What are reasonable promises might I make to myself?
I believe in keeping my word.
Last year about this time we decided to try giving up all seafood. It was not quite a promise, but we thought we might try for a month. We hadn’t eaten seafood more than once or twice a week, but we considered that might be too much. What was happening in the oceans prompted us to give eating fully vegetarian a try, just to see how much we’d miss the flesh.
Little bowls of tasty somethings, flowers from the garden in December, and red beeswax candles gifted by a friend. A better year coming, more hard times, but better.
Instead of having dinner at Ove’s (not that that would ever be on the program this time of year) we decided to spend the money on Oregon blue cheese. Seriously, our dinner tonight is all snack foods, but tasty good ones. Our cocktail napkins have beautiful roosters. Cock-Tails—get it?
On our final walk of 2020, we worked up and down the rocks to get there and found sea glass, agates, rounded pumice, and two of the little stones Jan calls “pinkies,” turned back south at the metal stairs, came home on the road, met a neighbor, and it rained most of the time. We were both wet from our walk, but that was hours ago. We have showered and washed our hair, and dressed in nice clothing we nearly forgot we owned in order to celebrate the end of this terrible, no-good, rotten, lousy, inept, appalling, no-holds-barred-we’re-glad-it’s-nearly-over stinking year. Can we say putrid?
Here we are on the day we delivered gifts to Portland—our fourth trip away from home since the beginning of March. We found out later our youngest grandchild was so upset we stayed for only a minute that she cried, then cried again when she understood she could not open the gifts yet, then was appeased when she found the winged turtle, which she was meant to have.
Gary and I defied expectations and began losing weight in the last weeks. We did not gain even over Thanksgiving, but I do not dare weigh myself to find out what damage the mince hand pies might have done.
As of today, I am three kokeshi dolls and four books richer, and our son Alan and Gary gave one another the exact same bottle of whiskey.
Under the waterlily dome are two little cheeses, under the glass are the mince pies. I took the last loaf of cranberry bread out of the freezer, washed raspberries (an out-of-season treat). and made heart-shaped cookies out of the leftover hand pie dough. A candle burns.
We woke at the usual time, before 5am, only today I walked downstairs before Gary had finished making the coffee, and we sat together before the fire. This is not a “normal” morning because it is Christmas. It is not like last year when we soaked in the pool at the Kennedy School and watched our grandchildren unwrap gifts.
Today was particularly stormy when we went out and we saw no sign of the pair.
We have been going out determinedly and despite rain and gale. Winter began this morning. Often by the time we’ve come home and had our breakfast, the weather clears. The other day was the first morning in months that we had not heard the begging juvenile gull: weak, weak, weak! But it was back the next day. It follows a parent, sometimes inches away, and sometimes the parent manages to put a few yards between them. The “baby” is every bit as big as its parent but hunches down, tips it’s head up to expose the bright pink interior, and begs for food.
This behavior is typical of juvenile gulls, but most of them are over it by mid-summer. I’m not sure this youngster has much of a future. At what point does it fend for itself? At what point does a parent say enough is enough?
We humans are begging too, hoping for safety in a year fraught with threats and for a future warmed by love and family obligations. Maybe that gull is not so out of line. When do we stop feeding the people we care about?
Some dismissed the book as empty calories, as saccharine and forgettable. I didn’t agree when I first read it a year ago. I disagree even more today. As a former student wrote yesterday: It’s been a year.
It’s been a year of illness and isolation, of struggle for many people working in dangerous conditions and without loved ones nearby, of honest words struggling to be heard.
This is one of those books like Winnie the Pooh and The Arrival and The Wolves in the Walls that I wish everyone read.
“Sometimes,” said the horse. “Sometimes what?” asked the boy. “Sometimes just getting up and carrying on is brave and magnificent.”
We could all use help about now—or those of us willing to ask.
There is no story here, but many gentle words of wisdom. And a mole who eats all the cake and then it happens again. And a fox. And a horse.
When I was young there were inspirational books all over the place with seagulls and kindergarten. This is like that or better. And the illustrations!
Yesterday, a neighbor’s dog went astray during their walk. We could hear Tim calling and calling. Gary said, “I hear his tags—he’s that way.” Oscar had turned up a side street toward the highway. We could not see him, and I could not hear a thing, but Gary has better ears. He found Oscar in a yard fifty feet from the highway, walked around and shooed him past me. A minute and Oscar heard Tim’s call and went running. It was a good day.
Our sons were both musical in school. Choirs have become particularly touching to us. Another sort of faith from mine, but it speaks me:
American poet Marvin Bell has died surrounded by family yesterday evening, the stereo playing Chet Baker’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” (3 August 1937 – 14 December 2020)
If you never heard the poem to his wife he always spoke in person and do not know the “Dead Man” poems, you must trust me when I express my sorrow at the passing of a great human being.
—Photo by Sam Roxas-Chua
“Marvin Bell taught 40 years for the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and served two terms as Iowa’s first Poet Laureate. He has published 24 books and is known for his many collaborations with other artists, including Whiteout, an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, and for his influential teaching. Often redefining his poetics from book to book, he is the creator of the ‘Dead Man’ and ‘Dead Man Resurrected’ poems, and has been called ‘ambitious without pretension.’ Bell edited poetry for five years for the North American Review at its rebirth and two years for The Iowa Review at its birth. He began and edited New Poets / Short Books for Lost Horse Press for five years, a series that published 15 poets, three to a volume. He also designed and taught a summer workshop for teachers from the urban program America SCORES for five years. He is a recipient of The Lamont Award for his first book, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, Senior Fulbrights to Yugoslavia and Australia, and awards from The Academy of American Poets and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems will appear in October 2019. A short interview can be seen online in the ‘On the Fly‘ series.”—Pacific University MFA website
He was an essential part of of my MFA experience, adding immeasurably to my education, and a practical man all the while. He often sang, promoted the arts, and was generous with useful suggestions and kind support.
I took a brief workshop with Marvin in 2016. Yes, in fact, it was wonderful.
