NINE POEMS FOR MAMA

 

HOW THESE SPELLS BEGIN

Eden is in her sun room.
She is surrounded by a jungle of house plants—her
Garden of Eden. It is morning—her
time of day. In the corner of the window screen
a spider annexes silver and magenta veined leaves
from the Wandering Jew into her doilied domain.
A tiny lizard suns herself on the toe of Eden's slipper.

Eden is standing at her ironing board.
She is sewing, of course—a Wonder Woman uniform
for my doll. She is frowning her famous frown
of intense concentration—that frown
that I diligently practice throughout my childhood,
because my mother is beautiful and I want
to look as much like her as I can, as soon as possible.

 

YARN SPELL

The old woman’s
experienced eyes
easily measured
the child’s size.
The child’s eyes
were firmly fixed and
fastened by
the stream of string
which flipped
betwixt her fingers
and slipped
beneath her chin,
as it ran from her hand to the hand
of the old woman who wound
the yellow yarn ‘round
the yellow wool ‘round
the ball.

“Thumbs up!”
the old woman cried,
then laughed
when the little girl blinked,
surprised,
and frowned
a little girl’s frown
with her little girl’s face.
“The movement tries
to capture your eyes.
If you follow
you’ll fall
and we’ll lose our place.
No need now to frown
or your thumbs’ll fall down,
your yarn’ll fall down
in a spell.”

In the loose
end of the yarn
the old woman looped
a small noose,
then picked up her hook
and with fingers crookt
she began.
She struck through the loop
again and again.
I will never forget how it felt
as my grandmother
leaned over me
where I knelt
and on my neck laid
the soft crocheted braid,
the soft golden braid,
like a necklace.

As I saw her then,
I see her now.
The firelight glows
on her hook as she goes,
back and forth
cross the chain
again and again.
My little coat grows
in neat little rows,
from right to left,
as though written
in some old
language she knows.
From the dish on the bricks
the yellow cat licks,
the yellow fire licks
the log.

 

WOMAN SIGHT

A woman sees in the dark, moving
through mazes thick with night, and shadows
slick as satin on the skin, seeing without light.

Silently she goes, careful not to startle sin,
with prayers and will she stills all sound
and unafraid, she tucks her children in.

Yet, a woman staring out of windows,
past land and sea and city hall, and seeing
nothing, sees forever, shudders in the pall.

 

HONEYDEWS

I lost five friends to death last year. When Mama told me
how the management of her apartment had destroyed that nest
she'd watched the sea gulls build outside her window

She cried and wrung her hands. I had not realized my belief
that spring would never come again, until I found myself
in the market, sobbing at the sight of pale green melons.

 

ALTAR

The gypsies can't move on just now, Mama.
We are too tired to dispose of one thing more, too
weighted down with the thefts of all those shrines.
See Mama, I have made one for you:

From the five-spool thread-rack on the over-lock,
I've hung your last pair of high-heeled dancing shoes
by their T-straps,  along with that drape of
blue velvet that, like an old Jew,
you used to test between your thumb and fingers.

That sewing machine hasn't sung a single stitch
since you got up and walked away from it.
No one else knows how to thread it, time it, tune it,
sharpen its needles and knives, make it hum.

 

LAST MOVE

"If you've got more than three keys on your ring,"
I've philosophized in more carefree times,
"your life is too complicated."

I can barely feel a difference in the heft of mine,
now freed from my mother's and her three.
She uncomplicated her life a long time ago.

Always ready to move on, she traveled light.
Before the passing of her keys to the landlady,
I turn them over in my hand this one last time.

Through transparent tape on one of them, I see
in my writing: MOM. My thumb, its nail pale
from this last cleaning, and almost transparent itself, 

charges the edge of the tape like a trained dog
ready to eradicate all evidence, then stops,
as though waiting some final command.

I hear the landlady making her final inspection say,
like they always do, "I've never seen an apartment
left this clean before!"

I think of Mom quoting Faulkner, "Before you can
really love, you must learn to walk on snow
without leaving footprints."

Not this time, Mom, I think, dropping the keys
into the landlady's hand. Just this once, someone else
is going to have to deal with this one last trace.

 

WATCHING BEAUTY BREATHE

Credit for lessons learned, the building
of character is most often assigned
to our walk with suffering and sorrow.

But saints and poets say that beauty
is the hardest master to serve. Beauty
requires the greatest expansion of the heart.

Sitting at your final bedside, Mama, holding
my breath between the long intervals of yours,
it is still your beauty, even at ninety-six,

that demands the strictest allegiance. It is the
burden of watching that light on your brow and
cheekbones that breaks this heart of mine.

 

LONG HAVE WE GAZED UPON BEAUTY

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us.
Psalms 90:17

Stop! commanded our mother, mid-celebration
on the afternoon of that final wedding feast.
Even the leaves of the apple trees hushed
as the breeze halted halfway up the sunlit hillside.
All ceased together and, in silence,
turned to where she stood.

Stop right now and look upon one another!
Is it not written that we become what we behold?
Therefore, behold! And become beautiful
in the eyes of our Lord! Praise Him,
in whose image we are created!
Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us!

Look how beautiful you are! How beautiful
your sisters and your brothers, your husbands
and your wives, your children and grandchildren,
your parents and grandparents! Look!
How beautiful, your aunts, uncles and cousins!
Behold your beautiful friends!

Stop now, and look upon one another.
Look upon all that God has created.
Look deep and hard and long at Beauty.
Drink her into your very being.
Claim her as your possession.
Hold what you see in your hearts.

We turned, and we did look upon one another,
according to her counsel, and in turn, we turned
and looked upon the bride and her shining groom.
We saw as the mothers down through the ages
had taught us to see, and we feasted
upon all we beheld as though it were bread.

And we gazed upon our beautiful mother,
and she said: Thousands of years from now,
when people say, How beautiful your children are!
tell them to teach the children to speak
as I have spoken. Teach the children to say:
Stop, and look upon one another!

For long have we gazed upon Beauty.

 

APPEARANCES

Mama stayed young forever.
Then one day she was old.
No apparent traumatic event
triggered it. It was like that time
she snapped at my step father
over something so minor in comparison
to years of routine abuse
she had just let go by.
Shortly after that she left him.
Casting off her youth was like that.
Like she was just tired of what it takes
to stay, to stay young — and she left it.
 

 
TWO POEMS FOR DAD

 

NIGHT FILER IN CONCERT

Sweet slippery stench of pond log,
reek of sawdust rip, clank and gnash
of saw buzz, arc, spark, cut, slash,
constant clamor grinding cacophony—

While in his solitary midnight bower
the instruments are keenly honed
beneath the master’s touch
to the fine toothed edge
which sustains his symphony.


HOW THESE SPELLS NEVER END

My Father sits in his sunken leather chair. Smoke
from his cigarette trails in the amber light. Head bowed
he reads aloud Night Filer In Concert — the poem
I have written in his honor. He is pleased. He will make
no edits this night.

This night, when for the first time my eyes
seeing in the lamp light, can no longer deny
what my heart has known for a long time — my father
is an old man. My father, his nationality
now augmented with age,
is an old Swede.

An old Swede looks at a photograph of himself, taken
when he was young, standing cocksure as a sailor.
He laughs his embarrassed laugh, “Who did I think I was?”
“A cool guy,” I say. “Still are.” He knows it’s true,
but also knows what time has stolen from him.
I’m glad I knew him back then.

Back then, when the camera captured the cute guy
I can still see in the old man I see tonight.
It’s hard to fall in love again when we are old
and looking into one another’s eyes
we find no record there of the way we were.
But we do fall in love again.

In love again, we try to speak again
that long sought language that will say it all at once.
But time, as always, overtakes us all too soon.
So we are grateful for these memories recognized
in one another’s eyes, now that we are both
so old so soon.

So old so soon, we....

 

 

                   WRITINGS FOR MY PARENTS


VALENTINE’S DAY 2008

There is a woman at Kah Tai Care Center who has Huntington's. It is severe. Her worn out body is never at rest, but flails constantly and to such extremes that, to keep from hurting herself, she can no longer wear her false teeth and has to sleep in a rubber pen on the floor.

Today I was with Mama for their Valentine's party. I was fighting tears, because Mama has moved another step towards leaving us. That each holiday together could be our last until Jesus comes looms like a presence. This— along with so much other stuff going on right now that has Jim and me convinced that some cosmic shift has taken place in the universe—made everything even more surreal than usual.

The love songs that Rusty was strumming on his guitar and singing didn't help. There are a few very old residents who have very old spouses who are still able to get to the Care Center to be with them. Watching these people holding hands and looking into each other's eyes with that history of shared secrets and trials, private jokes quietly passing between them, the tender and familiar way one man put his hand on the back of his wife's neck—something tangibly golden had come into the room.

Then I saw that woman with Huntington's, her thin little body flailing away in her wheel chair, feet spasmodically bolting straight out in front of her like race horses out of the starting gate. Her face was contorted with the effort to follow the words in the love song as she fought to hold herself still enough to sing them to her husband who sat next her. The thin permanently anguished face he turned to her was smiling. Her hands flew out to touch his hair. He bowed his head to be mussed with hands as uncontrollable as a flock of wild birds.

I tried to look away to keep from sobbing, but the musicians rendition of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” suddenly reached into her and laid  claim to some habit of once familiar and friendlier rhythms. For a few eternal moments I was witness to the beauty and perfection of love captured by two souls who looked the way Adam and Eve must have before the fall.

I blew my nose on the party napkin with the little red hearts on it, kissed Mama and her best friend Ruth, wished them Happy Valentine’s Day, and went to my car where I sat for a long time crying loud and hard like a little kid.

How much we take for granted, like being able to just reach out and touch the hair of someone we love.


THE SCRAP BOOK

Among the good intentions with which my personal “road to hell” is paved is my intention to put together a scrap book for my mother. Mama never cared for albums or photos, keepsakes or souvenirs. Photographs of her are few and far between as she didn’t like having her picture taken. Photos of us kids are also few and far between as she didn’t like taking pictures either. And she didn’t like looking at pictures of us when we were little. She used to say that she liked us just fine the way we turned out, but when she looked at old photos, she would ask herself, “Where have my babies gone?” and it made her sad. Late in her life, though meticulous in so many ways, she had assembled a couple of albums in such a haphazard way that it was obvious she had better things to do and was only doing this because she felt duty bound.
    There came that juncture when we realized that Mama had broken her little ninety year old body so many times in so many places that she was not going to be able to return to her much loved Marine Plaza apartment on Morgan Hill, but was going to become a resident at Kah Tai Care Center. Part of the way I attempted to handle my grieving over this passage was my decision to revise her albums into something more presentable. I wanted to honor her and also thought such a record would help  stimulate her failing memory.
    This decision, however, turned out like my good intention to get her on tape telling her wonderful stories. I had even bought a tape recorder and a bunch of tapes which I carried in the car for that very purpose. One day, when one of the kids was with me, we went to visit her, and I asked her about a particular story. She couldn’t remember it. I was stunned! I knew she was losing her memory but she always remembered her stories. I had heard her tell them all my life and it never occurred to me that these would be among the things that she would forget. As a matter of fact, the stories  became embellished and grew, rather than fading and dwindled. If I had considered such a thing I would have been convinced that  she’d forget my name before she’d lose these stories which she had told over and over. Realizing that this record was now lost, and that yet another part of her was gone forever was devastating.
    This instigated my recommitting to the scrap book project. When I started tearing them apart I found that what she had lacked in structure and aesthetic, she had made up for in durability. The photos were stuck edge to edge in no particular order with something really thick and permanent like Guerilla Glue or concrete. The project lagged, as I vacillated between steam and jack hammer.
    Then, during one of our visits she told me that she could not remember what her father (of whom she had never been particularly fond) looked like, and that she wouldn’t know him if she saw him on the street. I told her she would remember him if I brought in a picture of him. She insisted that she would not. I took in the the few existing photos of him along with the album I had not yet pried apart. When I showed her, she did remember. We looked through some of the pages of the album and I pointed out different people and asked her who they were. Some she remembered immediately, others with a little coaxing, and some not at all. When we came to the single surviving photo of her second and final ex-husband wearing his California HIghway Patrol uniform with his  captain’s cap and badge, he fell into the “not at all” category. She said she had no idea who that man was. I couldn’t believe this. I insisted that she did know who he was and she stuck to her story, sternly insisting, “I do not!”  I finally stopped and looked at her, gave her little nudge, and said, “Oh Mom, knock it off! You do to know who this man is!”  She broke into laughter, and with that mischievous look that all who knew her remember well, she said, “Well, he was handsome in his uniform, wasn’t he?!”
    This fired my intention to get the new album done and to her before she actually was unable to recognize its inhabitants. A few weeks later, while I was visiting her, I realized she was looking at me intently. “What?” I asked. “Your nose!“ she said. “Where did you get that little nose? That’s not my nose.”
    “No, Mom,” I said, “You’re right. This isn’t your nose. It’s Daddy’s nose. I wish I looked like you, but I don’t. I look like Daddy.” I added,  “Not that Dad wasn’t cute.”
    “I wouldn’t know your father if I saw him on the street, “ she fired back. “Mom,” I said, you grew up together! Of course, you would know him!”
    “No, I would NOT!”  she said emphatically. And then, there was that mischievous look again as she added, “And DO NOT bring me a picture of him!”

I realize Mama was in the process of letting go of the things of this world, and she didn’t need me to keep trying to bind her to them. From the beginning of my mother’s undertaking the last part of her earthly journey, my wise family and friends encouraged me to not feel inadequate or guilty in what I have or have not done for and with my mother. Towards the last part of that journey I found myself explaining to my daughters, who know me so well, that there was no way that I was going to to be able to be free of guilt and regret. “Water is  wet and rocks are hard,” I said, quoting one of my favorite sayings to them yet again, and added, “No matter what, there will be guilt and regret. It’s not even a bad thing. It  just comes with the territory. And there is actually some comfort in knowing and accepting that, rather than running oneself crazy trying to prevent it.”  The thing is, except at some overly civilized, philosophically justified level, we never experience giving or getting enough from the people we love.
    In the three weeks between my mother’s passing and her memorial, I spent every moment, not absolutely required elsewhere, on finally pulling together her album. While I realize that the album is not for her, but  for my brother, and for the grand-children and most of all, for me, I do regret, along with so much else, not having done it as intended, so that she could see it. Whether she wanted to or not.
    Mom made good decisions. Her decision to eliminate all nonessential things from her life, and leave me with the most “zen” little apartment to dispose of when she was finished with it, found me blessing her discretion through every step and tear. Her decision to leave the scrap booking to me to be done in my own good time provided me with the perfect means to grieve her through every step and tear as I assembled the few and precious photos of her (mostly with cats), the cards (mostly with cats), the news paper clippings, the awards, the certificates, the poems, the blue and white paisleys and florals, and the occasional bursts of orange and dancing (mostly with cats) which attempt to catch and hold onto, and to celebrate some of the extraordinary might and mystery that was Eden McCloud.

Post Script:
The scrapbook was originally assembled to honor our mother, Eden McClolud, aka Merle Kenney, and I managed to get most of it done in time for her memorial. But afterwards, as I set about applying finishing touches, I found myself pulling apart a family album I’d made—that had ended with our father, Eugene Grant, passing in 1992—in order to bring more of him from that album to this one. I was amazed to realize that, though our parents had divorced sixty-four years ago when I was seven years old and Bobby was eight, I was trying to put them back together again here in these pages. But, I also wanted to bring something of Lillian and Ed who had somehow made the divorce fit in the scheme of things by becoming our much loved step-parents. They have all gone to the other side now and I like to think of them together in the Great Adventure that follows this one, and that my efforts to put them together in the scrap book will amuse them.

 

 

PUTTING TOGETHER THE PIECES The promised silver lining that is said to exist in every cloud revealed itself to me in a surprising way in the very dark cloud brought by my mother's death this last year. I felt obligated to put together some semblance of an album for her memorial. I was actually pleased (considering the circumstances) with what I was able to create. I was surprised at how interested people were in it, and have been comforted by the acknowledgments—comfort that came accompanied by some guilt over having not done this for her while she was still living so she could be a witness to her own legend. Guilt, as it often can when received as character building rather than as yet another reason to beat up oneself, probed me into action. I realized I had the opportunity to grieve Mama by contributing to the legacies of my precious family and friends, those still with me and those who had already made it to the other side. I could make something to pass on. Something legendary. I began pulling together the photos, newspaper clippings, cards, letters, certificates, wrapping paper, colored paper and markers, magazine pages, poems, ribbons and lace that had disappeared into all those various "tomorrow" files, like things stashed in cookie tins on cupboard and closet shelves, old shoe boxes under the bed, desk and dresser drawers, all those attic and basement kinds of places (if we still had attics and basements). When I went to purchase scrapbooks in shops and on the internet I was somewhat daunted by all of the very pro materials that are now available. I made the decision to try and avoid the stamps and stickers and stick with (pun intended) the scraps and pieces of things I'd collected over the years and purchase from the vast and lovely array of commercial products only when warranted by the challenge of a particular page or theme. The results are big fat abundant scrapbooks, very homemade, whimsical and compellingly organic. Some pages thick and stiff with glue and lace, fabric from one of the kid's bedspreads, and surprises like poems, notes, old concert tickets, hidden away in little pockets. Part of what makes grieving so painful is that it is never limited to that single most current loss, but conjures all loss from that first little goldfish you came home to find floating on the top of the water. But I discovered that in putting together the pieces for our legend, including the snapshot of that goldfish, or that kitty, an incredible healing takes place. I began by dismantling the memorial I had done for my mom because now that I had the time, I wanted to include more things to honor her. I worked in a kind of mad fervor unconscious of time and place. When I came to myself, I realized that across from her graduation picture and diploma I had created a mirroring page for my father. Dad had gone on to "The Paradise Bar and Grill in the Sky" almost twenty years ago, but I had found his diploma only days ago while rummaging those "tomorrow" places. I swear that it was my esthetic that made me put those two matching purple velvet diplomas across from each other. They were so lovely together—from the same high school, just a year apart. And their graduation pictures.... I suddenly realized that here I was, this seventy-one year old woman whose parents had been divorced since I was seven and I here I was—putting them back together again. I had rejoined them in the Legend, made us all look as though we were actually exemplary of the ideal family. I started to laugh and then, for the very first time—can you believe it?—I sat down and really sobbed over that divorce and all the loss and pain it had created that I was not even consciously aware of until that very moment. Then I added the parts of the silver lining that that cloud had made possible, which were my beloved step-mother and step-father, also gone. I wrote stories and poems about them all. I created a title page, "Foundations". I sent up a little prayer to "The Paradise Bar and Grill in the Sky" telling them that I hoped they were all laughing together over what I had done. There were many such realizations as I proceeded with scrapbooks for each of our generations, my brother, sister, and myself, their children and my own, grandchildren, great grandchildren, friends. Holding a little raggedy snap shot of my first husband I remembered the dream I had had years after our divorce. In the dream I saw him swimming. When I awoke I realized that I was so angry with myself for loving someone who could hurt me so deeply. I had been angry for a very long time. When I saw him in that dream, his beautiful arms perfectly slicing through the glistening water, I forgave myself. How could I have not loved him? I forgave him also. Looking at his picture I sent him prayers. Wherever he may be, I pray that he has forgiven me and himself also. I pray that he is not angry. The process produced beautiful books and the healing and heart work has been like no other. I came to pray over each picture and memento, award, baby picture, birth certificate, as I pasted it into its little shrine. I dragged out the old music—played the soundtrack. I became willing to be with and process through whatever came up for me, laughter, tears, resentment, guilt, shame, pride, joy, anger—I even tore some things up, threw them in the wastebasket. That too was healing. The silver lining was the thousands of words that poured from that dark cloud in which I began being with the pictures. Notes, poems, letters, stories, phone calls are still going on. Words of making amends, acknowledgments, apologies, remember whens. Some of us may not want to do this kind of work, but it occurred to me how powerful doing this work together and being able to support each another through this part of shaping our journey—sharing our laughter and tears and prayers with each other—how powerful that could be. I'm thinking about creating a workshop. Yes! Yet another workshop.  

The silver lining has been that as each album finds its point of closure, there is a sense of completion. Putting together the pieces to create the big picture provides a whole perspective on the life of family and friends. While maybe not always as ideal as the pictures show, or as we would have wanted, we are who we are. And we discover that the portrait that our silver lining reveals is that, after all is said and done, who we really are is love. 

 

 

OUR FATHER’S RECORD
 
The myrtle wood chest my father built when he was a young man, which I inherited after his death in April of 1992, has found its home at the foot of my bed. Looking back, I realize that—after my sister Janet had trucked it over to me from the final load of Dad’s belongings—even though I put off the painful task of going through the various items stored in it, I didn’t wait long enough. As, with age, I become even more sentimental, I feel that if I had waited longer I would have kept more of his things. On the other hand, perhaps it is a good thing I did it when I was still the person so capable of disposing of things. In closing out my mother’s apartment after she could no longer live independently,  I was so grateful for what a tight little ship she ran. I committed to following her fine example in order to spare my children having to deal with all this stuff that we cannot take with us on the Great Adventure that takes us off this earth plane.

But  these are hard decisions. Things that do not seem important to us can become quite precious as we age and our sense of what is valuable changes. The  gratitude I have for the things that have survived my cavalier attitude magnifies my remorse for those things lost along the way. I thought my lack of attachment very Zen in those vagabond days. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the preciousness of the few remaining things which have emerged contributes to their value. I know that having both of my parents graduation diplomas with “Marshfield High School” embossed in gold on their worn purple velvet  folders, after moving around in separate households since their divorce over sixty years ago, now mounted across from each other in the album I have put together to honor our foundations, gives me the sense of completion I was trying to attain by always throwing things out. So, as it turns out, rather than getting much disposed of, so far I have done more towards attempting to collect and piece together albums and information to pass onto my family. Perhaps that will help me in deciding what needs to be let go.  

Among the things in the beautifully crafted chest was a classic tall thin gray ledger with the stripes running down the side of the binding, the triangularly trimmed corners, and the word RECORD defined in burgundy.  It had a little strip of lined yellow paper  sticking out of it with my name in Dad’s printing on it.

The first page has some rather disorderly bookkeeping entries that I could tell did not meet with our father’s standards as he had written “Ruby and Lillian’s Book keeping” in Red pen across the page in a way, that if I knew him as I think, communicates his being resigned, but not without humor, to the fact that after all these years he was never going to get Lill, even with the help of her friend Ruby, to keep the kind of books his perfectionism coveted, anymore than he was going to get her to soft boil the perfect three minute egg no matter how much he complained and how hard she tried. I can see her lovely face beaming with the excitement of her purchase of this perfect ledger in which to make her entries and her intentions of getting it right for him. Even though, after all these years, she knew, but not without humor, even with the help of her friend Ruby, she was not going to get it to suit him.
   
“For the Record” is written across the top of the second page, and is followed by several pages of journaling.

      Having arrived home from night shift work and relaxing at 2:40 AM Nov. 13, 1972 before retiring to bed.
      On this day we hesitate to contemplate how to celebrate the up coming date of November 20th—Lill’s birthday—What age now?—But she will never grow old and doesn’t fret to be young. Just squanders the pay check, adds her own tint to the old bubbles of love, praises the Lord, cooks the meals for both me and those who seek her, washes my dirty socks the same as when we first married and sits patiently on the bank waiting for me while I am fishing . —What shall we do to commemorate her birthday?—Maybe she will take me fishing.
      On this day I struggled yesterday before going to work on the cleaning of the under house plumbing from the stationery wash tub and cleaned the pipes as far west as you can go under the house. —It was fun to get it done. I also over-hauled the washing machine a few days ago and was proud of re-building the water pump, which couldn’t be done. Now its all ready for pleasant home washing with good drainage and Lill is using the local laudr-o-mat!
      On this day I sharpened the blade to my skill saw.—Janet has been much on my mind for many days. —I have drawn up a blueprint of exact geometric dimensions with protractor, dividers, and straight edge, of the hand drawing of the design on the floor of  Mary’s Help Hospital in San Francisco where Janet was born.—Now I hope to duplicate the design in wood inlay on a table top or serving tray etcetera, etcetera, etc. This requires the service of a precision table saw so all I have to do is make one now that I have a sharp blade to use. I’m going to worry about that tomorrow after the T.V. football game.
P.S. The reason I drew the interesting design of the inlaid floor of the spacious immaculate reception room of the beautiful hospital is that I had nothing else to worry about while my wife Lill was giving birth to my daughter Janet who would have been called Rex had she been a boy. I think the bars were down and past the cocktail hour.
      On this day, Lill returned a parcel of pretty red wearing apparel which she said appeared to be for lounging and too thin a material for one her age , and who had little time to use it on T.V. from the davenport while waiting for me to come home and forget the price, she exchanged it for a snappy out-door or maybe in-door also outfit which shouts for a party and I’m glad I came. Well, she had to pay a little extra but it was a fun exchange.

Dad opens another paragraph with “On this day “ and goes on to write about  how Lill had shared with him some letters she had written and he had proceeded to correct. He closes this entry with remarks on how  he should not do that. But he always did. We would sometimes get our letters back with his corrections. Actually, I liked it when he did that and learned so much. After all he taught me, however, I notice that  I am reluctant to correct his punctuation.
The next entry is dated a week later and is about how Lill has the house torn apart cleaning it because their daughter, Janet, and her little girl, Bridget, are coming to visit and how that is something to celebrate.

      Lill even laid new tile on the bathroom floor and made new kitchen curtains. It took a long time to get the tile laid in the bathroom—everytime she got a square pasted down, one of  her friends that are always passing through the house had to go—which would give her an opportunity to pour another round of coffee and pass the cookies—then back to the next square of tile and so on—She was in there on her knees when I came home from work last night at 2:30 in the morning—I mean happy-like and having fun but aching like hell with arthritis and too sleepy to share a cup of coffee with me—No body has fun like Lill.

He writes another page about how he hopes he can be a good grandpa for Bridget while she is there and how he hasn’t had any practice at that because his other kids (that would be the ones by his first wife, Bob in Seattle, Washington and me in Marin County, California)  had had our kids “too far away.”  He closes that entry with:

      Well, there’s a lot of love anyway and we are sure proud and thankful for having such a wonderful family scattered up and down the coast and Lill and I sort of in the middle.

The next entry starts on the very next page, as though he had just left off, but is dated over a year later.

Friday Feb. 9th 1973—Same Place.

      Home again from the night shift saw filing at McIntosh—and would you believe, its not a lot different than the last entry in this —record—about one and a half years hence—past hence—
      I discovered this “Record” half hidden from the eye the other day while I was sorting out the junk which had accumulated in the “catch all” lower compartment of the tape recorder—that is the “old” tape recorder—of course Lill has purchased much more modern ones in the past 1 1/2 yrs both large and small—and for good reason, which we shall discuss bye and bye.—
      The important thing is to quickly fill in the lines and pages of this “Record” as to just what has happened in the 1 1/2 yrs from last entry—And why the delay?—
      Oh yes!—the delay of entry—the neglect or lack of time—the intentions lacking impulse—improper drive or just forgetting there was a “Record”—
       I should like to shout—Well—I was too damned busy having fun catching steel head—or one should say—casting his fly upon the proper slick of water—

He then writes,  “Hi Lill—What you doing up?” and continues.

      She poured coffee for both of us and I mixed another 7 Up—and she understood. —and so we talked of love—we talked of our friends loves— which help us to measure our own love—which of course one can’t measure.

He writes about some troubles with a friend and a family member within the context of his and Lill’s love and goes on.
 
       And so, our love, Lill and I, having been recognized as still solid and abundant even at our age—she went back to bed and left me to the “Record”.
      Such is the life of a well fed married man in his 60 teen and fed well in more ways than none. Strange that I have never met, that I can remember, any gentlemen named Fedwell.
      Oh, yes—the past 1 1/2 years—Ere daylight peers thru the drapes of the front window which only tonight Lill asked—”Did you notice that I have dyed them green.?””
    
He does not tell us if he had noticed before her asking or not. He goes on to write fondly of family, friends, and fishing. And of his wife Lillian—or as he called her,  “Lill.”
There is humor.  And there is heartbreak, although he manages not to frame it as such by relying on that same tone he used in the explanation for the long delay between journal entries. He speaks of how he has failed as a father and grandfather and he typically lets himself off the hook by confessing his selfishness.

I am wont to have to realize that I guess I’m just not a good father—Wasn’t worthy when I apparently was slip-shod with my first children and then had to realize I wasn’t doing so well even while I had a try at my last chance when at times there was even a conscientious effort.—That sounds bad, but it was bad also—We are inclined to be proud people—At least we have something to cling to for parent-hood sake.—Something someone passed on to us— Even tho it be something so simple as the desire to be honest. And the music in our beings that isn’t of our own development but from the past memories of forgotten melodies—What you are now is important—Not what you were—but how blessed to have fond memories of childhood days where everything started right—and there was a reason. Whatever happened to the good old Family Tree?
      Well, Ill tell you—If you pour too much water on it to help, the foundation gets mucky and the damn tree falls over from over-root-nourishment—If you don’t pour water on it the leaves and limbs droop down and die so who wants to have to water a tree anyway—Now I have a dog, an English Sheep Dog— ”Ruff”—He knows what a tree is for.

When my niece Aleta sat at my kitchen table and read the RECORD she said, “Oh, my goodness! I am always feeling bad about how I am failing my children. It never occurred to me that Grandpa questioned his role with you and my dad and us kids.  I never think of Dad as questioning his relationship with us, either. Do you think he does? Is that just the way it is?” I tell her that I am afraid that that yes, I know her father questions because I have heard him, and that yes, that is just the way it is. Comes with the territory.

I hold nothing against my father. I don’t think any of us do. He was just too charming. His concerns, however, about having failed as a father and grandfather and trying to make light of it don’t let me off the hook, but somehow let me know just how much I have failed not only as a mother and grandmother, but as a daughter. Especially when I turned to the last  page which consists of a list titled “Donations for Lillian’s Funeral Expenses” from which my name is blatantly missing. The fact that doing such a thing never occurred to me is no comfort  and now it is too late.  When I received the RECORD he was already gone and when I discovered this list it hit me so hard I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. It actually changed the way I operate in the world. But this is not about me. This is about my father and his family. And at this point  I am going to include a poem he wrote that wasn’t a part of the journal but I think he would agree fits right here.

FAMILY TREE
E.W. Grant

Come stir the soil beneath the tree
Whose leaves are ghastly pale.
The family pride sticks in my side
And I am wont to wail.

While life is red the soil is dead
And moss lies on the branches
Some careless seeds have grown to weeds
And cling to that it blanches.

Come stir a birth into the earth
Beyond the you and I
And let the blood mix with the mud
So age can smile and die.

Cover the roots and clip the shoots
That are suckers and barren to seed.
Get out of its light so it can fight
For the harvest of your deed.

Come stir the soil beneath the tree
Where mothers and Fathers lie
Where the leaves are shed of those now dead
And for those not ready to die.    

His three journal entries cover thirteen pages written in the beautifully squared handwriting that I have mentioned before as somehow reflecting the hand that shaped it. The final entry, other than the list of donations, was made about two years before he died when he was only eighty-two. It is a note to me giving some genealogy and a reminder, “You are a member of that proud tribe and nation—”The Kingdom of Sweden.” The pages in between are the most heart breaking and convicting of all. They record expenditures made from 1975 to 1980 and include payments for Lillian’s medical care and hospital bills leading up to her death in 1976 when she was only  sixty-three.  Between these and his note to me are ten years of blank pages which I hold as the extended period of grieving of which he was unable to write.

But there is one more page of journaling from that long February 9th entry before the actual bookkeeping entries begin.

      The rain has ceased it’s
violent pounding on the roof
in reminding me the river
at South Fork of Smith is
much too violent to fish
and I must rest—and resist
and fail again to have a chance
at week-end steel heading.
      However the parted curtains
do reveal the break of day—
Behind the green drapes
it is a blue like Crater Lake—
Not dark—not light—just blue
And makes me want to let
Myself outside to find
Adjustment with the color
To the hills and trees beyond—
The blue is much too solid—
Only blue between the drapes—
Only sky and one electric wire
To know what’s parallel.

 

FIRST LINE FOUNDATIONS

At some time or another, all of us growing up in the Grant and McCloud households have been read to by our parents, or by each other, from books of poetry praising the obvious and the not quite so. Looking at some of the first lines calls us back to a remembering of our time at the hearths of our fathers and mothers. Hearth made up of the foundational stones that cast the legacy of our character and of our values. Lines like:

My heart leaps up when I behold...
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days...
If you can keep your head when all about you...
Music, when soft voices die...
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

More of the first lines which shaped us are listed at the end of this story, but for now, to borrow one of Longfellow's famous lines: Listen my children, and you shall hear...

A Love Story

If you can't know a man or a woman by the first lines of the poems they love....how then? Well....Lillian Goforth knew Gene Grant, right enough. And we can be sure that his first lines, and those following, were certainly among the things that so enchanted her. And make no mistake....she was enchanted! And he by her, also! And so it is of that "Enchantment" of theirs that I would tell.

So, let us think for a moment on those lines of his and on the very first one that she ever heard. Let us imagine a time and a young woman, newly divorced from the only man she'd ever known (in the biblical sense). No small matter at that time.

The entire world is traumatized by the scope and atrocities of World War II and by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The nation is still mourning Franklin D. Roosevelt. His successor Harry S. Truman is busy redefining world geography with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. The Nuremberg Tribunal will be coming to a verdict. Juan Peron has been elected president of Argentina and the people are in love with his beautiful wife, Eva. Isotope Carbon-13 has been discovered and Nobels are being awarded for studies in mutations, enzymes and high-pressure physics. Women had just begun to take their place in industry as wage earners, resulting from the need for the production of goods required for the waging of war and the need to fill job vacancies created by the men having gone off to fight the war. They are now being displaced by the returning troops. Any decent citizen will still pick up a hitch-hiking man in uniform and invite him home for dinner. In Italy, women have only just been ensured the right to vote. Women's suffrage has just become law in France. Blacks are still Negroes and will not be allowed into major-league baseball clubs for another year-or-so, when the Brooklyn Dodgers will sign Jackie Robinson. Dylan Thomas has written "Deaths and Entrances" but has not yet come to America. Hermann Hesse is awarded the Nobel Prize and Gertrude Stein is dead. The release of Benjamin Spock's book, "Baby and Child Care" is about to screw up the natural instincts of the mother and child for the next twenty-years-or-so. Picasso and Pollock are household words. Pizza, sushi, and french-fries are not. "Bambi" is already a few years old and television will not start showing up in our homes for another several years and then, only in the homes of the wealthy. Hats and gloves are still the required dress code for any self-respecting lady "out-and-about".

So, when Lillian is out-and-about and she goes to a movie, wearing her hat and gloves, she continues to be re-indoctrinated with those good old-fashioned values (which most of today's generation would be hard-pressed to imagine the degree of torment and self-recrimination they imposed on one such as her) represented by such films as William Wyler's "Best Years of Our Lives". Or she is being romanticized by a plethora of musicals, depicting beautiful girls in filmy gowns who inspire impeccable young men to break into classical song at the very sight of them, and to dance them up sparkling stair-cases into star-spangled night-blue skies and off into The Milky Way. On that silver screen, however, she will never see her celluloid idols in the same bed together. When she turns on the radio she hears the crooning of songs such as "Tenderly" or "Come Rain or Come Shine." She is influenced towards hope or despair, depending on what stage of her menstrual cycle she happens to be in (but, here I break form, for such things as menstrual cycles were never spoken of in this time of which I am telling).

Being divorced, she is part of a generation that are very likely to constitute the shame of the first divorce in their family history. Being a Christian hangs her on the horns of a raging dilemma.

Now think of this Christian, divorced, unsophisticated, inexperienced, small town girl in post World War II San Francisco. Think of her alone. And all the more alone for the ache haunting her whole body—missing the feel of holding her young son Charles who is far far away, left in the care of another. (Just how young will have to be established by Chuck, since Dad's records place him at around five years old and mine almost twice that by the time I first saw that face beaming from between those magnificent ears. So I don't know if the faulty flash-backs are Dad's or mine or missing years in my calculations. Or another of the tricks time plays with our individual realities.)

But now, back to first lines. Think of this lonely young woman at night. She is out walking the foggy San Francisco hills, desperately wondering how she, with her limited skills and experience and in such times, is going to be able to make the money necessary to bring her son back into her arms and if even able to achieve that—how to sustain him there.

She contemplates all this as she walks. All this, along with the being dug at by her ever pressing need to write, to create her own first lines like: "No greater battleground on earth than in the human heart...." and "Alone and wind-swept she stands by the rail...." when suddenly! a huge German Shepherd lunges out of the dense fog! All the more threatening for the reputation of the breed established in their use by the enemy in the barely-over war. They each stand dead still as though on point, the stare from the dog's large intense eyes placing Lillian under unblinking arrest, her heart pounding against her thin coat.

Then! in an instant pretending to be an eternity, a man's voice calls from the fog, "Come Lady." Without a sound, the great beast instantly turns on the spot, disappearing back into the dark fog as mysteriously and magically as it had materialized!

Lillian catches her breath with relief and at the same time, is overcome by an awe-filled longing. Oh! That that very voice should speak so to me! "Come Lady!" I too, she thinks, would wheel and follow!

She looks up as a clearing in the fog is opening and she sees, illuminated in the mist, before her very eyes....The Cross of Twin Peaks! She knows it is a sign!

Was it a sign? Or was it another of the superstitions impressed upon her by her history of seeking the supernatural? Was the whole incident just the product of a lonely woman's fantasy? And even if it did happen, and in this very way, was it just a so-called, coincidence? Perhaps. I leave that for you to decide. But in your deciding, ponder this: That line coming to her from foggy darkness, that, "Come Lady," was the first line that Lillian ever heard spoken by my father, Gene Grant.

Now, while he is no more blood to some of you than Lillian is to others of us, if anyone has shown us the truth, that the sap of the tree that runs through the branch grafted-in, is the same as that which runs through the natural, it's Lillian. Could I ever doubt it? When looking into your beloved faces and into the faces of your children! Why, it's like looking into those of my very own! It always calls me to new ways of thinking on her oft times strange and sometimes wearisome dwelling on the "Blood of the Lamb". And on all the possibilities of what that could mean. Oh! and the sense of peace that comes from one of those possibilities being that we may now be living, and may continue to do so, in the space of those answered prayers of hers, a mighty Prayer Warrior. Prayers faithfully calling on her God on our behalf and on the behalf of those to come after us. Prayers offered at that very hearth of our learning....her altar. I know that I for one would not be here to tell you of these things were it not for her prayers to see me through, along with those of my own mother.

Well then, I most often think of her seated there, in front of some fire-place, wood-stove or another, which made up the time of the hearth of our father and mother, in unpretentious mill towns such as: Dallas, Crescent City, Blue Lake, Arcata....waiting for her Gene to come home. She, along with one dog or another, them all unpretentious too, with names like: Pete, Brownie, Ruff....waiting with her there. And she, glad with gratitude and anticipation to be doing so, "also and too," as he would say. A book of poetry open on her lap. Or her Bible. Or some forbidden book of ancient wisdom. Qabala. But she never called it that.

Always a treat of some kind or another,—blackberry duff in an iron skillet, or the makings for grilled-cheese sandwiches readied on the kitchen counter. Maybe fried eel or the cheek from the salmon he had caught during some god-forsaken, cold, rainy Hour Of The Dog. Or maybe some of the clams he'd dug all the way to China for, or at least until his fine head disappeared from shore-line. Such exotic foods we took for granted back then, as the fare of the poor. All ready and waiting there in a house turned into a home with "a heap o' livin'". A home warmed with wood split by himself with a hand and eye as sure as that of an old Samurai. Everything readied for his return from clam beach, trout stream, river mouth, Hart Mountain bow-hunt, or from night-shift at town mill or local bar.

It was right there with the waiting, and on more than one such occasion, that she told me, that sun-streamed face of hers aglow in fire-light and with the talk of him. Told me how she'd finally condescended then, to go out-and-about with her girl-friend, Peggy. (Peggy, who many years later would give my baby, Shiloh, a feather pillow, which she has to this very day, thirty-eight years later.) So, out-and-about they went. In their little hats and gloves and suits fitted-at-the-waist, the silk stockings with the seams-down-the-backs and little open-toed sling-back pumps. Suede. Black, navy, or maybe dark brown. Never white. No self-respecting San Francisco woman ever wore white shoes. Not even in the summer-time. In spring and summer you wore black patent-leather. White shoes weren't even allowed if you worked in any of the shops or department stores. Only women from southern California or from out-of-state wore white shoes unless they were ... shhhh ... prostitutes. Maybe waitresses. Everyone knew that.

They went to this nice little neighborhood bar with its street-face all done up in wine tile and Deco glass block, maroon tuck-and-roll padded leather door with the big covered buttons and the brass headed nails all around the edge. Upholstered like a piece of furniture. It was that kind of neighborhood. Inside, a juke-box all full of warm promise in its arched neon rainbow setting the whole place and everyone in it aglow. Pouring forth something sweet and cool by Glenn Miller or Louis Prima. Poignant, post-war celebration still lingering.

She told me, how she and Peggy would order something "lady-like" with a maraschino cherry in it, and how they'd be flattered if a gentleman would offer to buy them a drink, but they always said, "No." Paid always with their own money. Because if you said, "Yes," it was a kind of flag that you might be available.

Lillian made sure every one knew she wasn't available. Told me, how she sat there at the shiny Mahogany bar copying down over-heard conversations into her little writer's note-book, so folks would know she was there to work, not to be "picked-up". Besides, it was a good way to practice her short-hand. So she could get a good paying secretarial job and bring her boy to be with her.

Then she told me, how this one night, she was copying down this deeply philosophical conversation as fast as her little Scheaffer pen could fly, because one of the men was saying some really intelligent things. Nice things, too. And besides, he had a beautiful manly voice. Deep and even and warm. And firm with authority, but at the same time, humble. She just loved the voice of the man whose words she was writing down, line upon line. All of a sudden! she just about knocked over her drink! She realized that that voice was the very voice that had haunted her so. It was the voice speaking from the fog. The voice that had spoken the words, "Come Lady," and made her want to follow after it. Forever.

She told me about the glove which she hadn't meant to leave in his car ("So it must have been fate!") when he drove her home that night. And how he'd brought it to her the very next day, just like the prince coming with the glass slipper. And about how they just wanted to sit and talk all night because it was so comfortable and easy for them to be together and yet, it was exciting, too. And he was having a hard time because he had been through this divorce he couldn't seem to get over. And there had never been a divorce in his family before. And he felt such a miserable failure. But the worst of it being how much he missed his kids.

Then there was the invitation to have Sunday dinner with his family and what it was like meeting the perfect hostess, his elegant and ever-so San Francisco sister Ellen. (Our Aunt Ellen wouldn't have been caught dead in white shoes!) And her hilarious husband, Uncle Jack. (Our notorious lamp shade on his head Uncle Jack!) Then there was the sweetest and handsomest of young men, his nephew Jerry. (Always Dad's favorite out of us all, but that was okay, because we loved Cousin Jerry, too, the original number-one white-boy-blues-boy, himself!) Then she told about meeting our beautiful Cousin Corinne, who I would just die to have pay attention to me when I was a little girl. (Corinne, trainer of dogs-for-the-blind.) And she told about, "best of all," meeting the magnificent, impeccably trained, neither tail nor paw extending the parameters of her rug, Lady.

Years later, as I sat with my beloved step-mother Lillian at the hearth, and the moment of Daddy's arrival would near, she would rise and poke up the fire, filling the room with sparks and cedar perfume, put a fat little all-night-log on the coals, put the coffee-pot on, filling the room with yet more perfume. Then she'd settle back in her chair, her face newly lit, push her glasses up on that turned-up nose (that she'd passed along to Janet, the daughter of that very union of which we speak) to take a look at some mending she'd been poking at. And then, as confidence grew courage with use, she'd tell me just the tiniest bit, before shaking her head and laughing that laugh of hers, about the earrings which she hadn't meant to leave there, on his bedside table....(It must have been fate.)

Yes, it was right there with the waiting and on more than one occasion, the flush of a woman well-caressed upon her, that she told me that it mattered not how bitter their quarrels, how frustrating his spoiled, self-centered nature, nor how sometimes stingy his ways. Why, it even mattered not, his drinking. She said, and they were old by now, mind you, "When your father comes to me and calls me his girl, and takes me by the hand and leads me off to our bedroom, why I would follow the man to the ends of the earth! Yes and beyond! It's always been that way between us! Will always be! And so be it!" And so it was and somehow is.

For all the rockiness of the road running through the love story of Gene and Lill, it was a road that neither of them regretted having taken. They did never doubt that they were meant each one for the other. What a rare and precious thing! And what hope and inspiration for ourselves in their living out that rare and precious tale that begins (as do many good tales) with the opening line....Once upon a time....

Between the dark and the daylight...
Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying...
Blessings on thee, little man...
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans...
Breaths there a man with soul so dead...
Come live with me and be my love...
Do not go gentle into that good night...
Drink to me only with thine eyes...
Four things a man must learn to do...
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...
Grow old along with me!...
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!...
Half a league, half a league...
Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crawlin' ferlie?...
He flies through the air with the greatest of ease...
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days...
If you can keep your head when all about you...
I hailed me a woman from the street...
I have a rendezvous with Death...
I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep...
I met a traveler from an antique land...
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky...
In Flanders field the poppies grow...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...
I shall not pass this way again...
I shot an arrow into the air...
I think that I shall never see...
It is an ancient Mariner...
It looked extremely rocky for the Boston nine that day...
It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home...
It was many and many a year ago...
It was the schooner Hesperus...
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree...
I wandered lonely as a cloud...
Laugh and the world laughs with you...
Let me live in a house by the side of the road...
Let me live out my years in heat of blood!...
Let me not to the marriage of true minds...
Listen my children, and you shall hear...
Love is a keeper of swans!...
Music, when soft voices die...
My heart leaps up when I behold...
Never love unless you can...
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done...
O my luve is like a red, red rose...
Once in Persia reigned a king...
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary...
One ship drives east and another drives west...
Out of the night that covers me...
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being...
O World, I cannot hold thee close enough!...
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?...
She walks in beauty, like the night...
Something there is that doesn't love a wall...
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!...
Sunset and evening star...
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall...
The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done...
The little toy dog is covered with dust...
There's a race of men that don't fit in...
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees...
The woman was old and ragged and gray...
The World is to much with us; late and soon...
They that have power to hurt, and will do none...
This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream...
Thou still unravished bride of quietness...
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright...
To be, or not to be; that is the question...
To him who, in the love of Nature, holds...
Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight...
'Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer...
Under the spreading chestnut tree...
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly...
Whenever Richard Corey went to town...
When I consider how my light is spent...
When I have a house...as I sometime may...
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...
When you are old and grey and full of sleep...
Who has known heights and depths...

Does that list not take us home again and back to the masters? And does it not make us grateful for the teaching and the legacy passed on?

 

THE BOOKS ON THE TOP OF OUR PIANO

Just to the left of the front door as you enter my home there are books of poetry on the top of the little piano my brother gave me. As there should be. There were always poetry books on the top of the piano in our father’s house. Mine are next to the myrtle wood lamp Daddy made, which spills its amber light onto the lace doily Mama made, over the keyboard and into the room. The books are held between bookends Daddy left me, which immortalize a child with a big open book on her lap. She is sitting upon a stack of books while tucked into yet another book that is standing open.

From between the twin bookends I take my grandfather’s classic, dark green leather- bound,1929 first edition with its art nouveau embossed title ONE HUNDRED AND ONE FAMOUS POEMS. The inscription in this thin narrow volume reads For my father, on his birthday, because he always enjoyed this little volume so much. It is signed Pinky. Edith Genevieve was Pinky ‘s given name and she was my aunt, the youngest of his brotherless two daughters. She left us for the Next  Great Adventure in 1950 at the “only” age of thirty-four. She was only five when her mother, Ethyl Queir,  died at only thirty, and she was raised by her older sister, Merle May, who at the time of their loss was only twelve. Merle would grow up to marry  Gene Grant with whom she would have my brother Bob and me. She would, after divorcing her second and final husband change her name to Eden McCloud, which has become our clan name.

I can’t pick up this little book of my grandfather’s without regretting that we did not  read to each other from it more often. There just wasn’t  time enough. After all, he was only ninety -three when he died. I open it and bring it up to my face so that I can smell it. I laugh thinking of my daughter Shannon who, on a visit home, took my orange paperback with its etching of Shakespeare and title PLAIN ENGLISH HANDBOOK from my desk and burying her face in the middle, exclaimed, “It smells like it always has!” She said that this made her happy because it brought back  memories of her sixth grade year when I had taken her out of a crummy public school to teach her at home. “You made me label and draw things I found in the woods, read Dante’s Inferno and the Bible, and taught me everything I’ve ever needed to know about the English language from this little book,” she explained. Considering how well she speaks and writes, this has been more than sufficient. Indeed, from all of the books on grammar which line my desk, this is the one that I consider indispensable— though old and falling apart (a bit like myself)—and the one to which I always turn.
   
In Grandpa’s book I open to that one of the one-hundred and one poems whose place is marked with a thin red satin ribbon. Its author is Alfred Noyes. I begin to read. And to cry. I am incurably and unapologetically sentimental. Just as my daughters and I—no matter how many times we watch William Wyler’s1939 version of “Wuthering Heights”  (and in spite of the fact that Heathcliff, as Shiloh observes, is a total asshole) are invariably in tears by the time the credits are over—I am, as always, totally broken down by the time “The Highwayman” comes riding, riding, riding out of the pages of ONE HUNDRED AND ONE FAMOUS POEMS, and riding out of the torrent of darkness over the purple moor upon that road that was a ribbon of moonlight and up to the old inn-door where the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, is waiting there, plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair:

One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light:
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.

Ah yes, tis a sad tale. And gorgeously written. I love to read it aloud, but everyone else hates it when I do, because I bawl all the way through.

Next, from the piano top, I take the very tattered 1883 first edition IDEAL POEMS FROM THE ENGLISH POETS. In some places the red velvet cover is worn smooth and along its edges the padding is exposed. The inscription reads Presented to Merle from her grandma aged 60 for a xmas gift 1920. I turn the thick cream colored pages, with their poems and exquisite engravings by “American Artists” now set  free by the book’s broken back. I come to this last stanza of a poem by Jean Ingelow:

Fair fall the lights, the harbor lights,
    That brought me in to thee,
And peace drop down on that low roof
    For the sight that I did see,
And the voice, my dear, that rang so clear
    All for the love of me.
        For oh, for oh, with brows bent low,
            By candle’s flickering gleam,
        Her wedding-gown it was she wrought,
            Sewing the long white seam.

I think of the thousands of miles of seams my mother sewed, including on more than one wedding-gown for me, her vagabond daughter. I turn back to the inside cover. There is an inscription above the one to Merle which is crossed out. It says Mrs. Quier from Jenny Walker Xmas 1915.  When this treasure came into Mama’s hands it was already thirty -seven years old and she was only nine. Now, smelling this one-hundred and twenty-five year old book and holding it in my own hands causes me further tears as I think how little history we have bothered to preserve or pass on. Who was Jenny Walker? What was the first name of Mrs. Quier, my great grandmother? If I had known, would I have been less of a vagabond? Or would knowing more about us just confirm my suspicions that who we are is vagabonds? Is that why we have not been able to preserve a history? 

I think of our Lord’s wisdom in always identifying Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He knew that within three generations we would lose it all if not constantly reminded from generation to generation. Jews, Native Americans, and the Chinese know how to keep track of their ancestors. Ayaan Hirsi Ali opens her book as a five year old sitting under a talal tree in Somalia, reciting the names of her forefathers back three-hundred years. 
  
How grateful I am for this cluster of miracles that resides on my piano! They have survived my vagabond’s life and commitment to travel light and leave no traces—as though in so doing, death could not find us. But it has. And now I ponder this fortuitous salvage and try to further the remembering and legend of the Grants and those who have become the McCloud Clan.

I slide Mama’s book back in beside Grandpa’s, and as I reach for the next, this habit of smelling books makes me think now of my niece Aleta. I have a tall thin gray ledger with stripes by the binding, triangularly trimmed corners, and the word RECORD defined in burgundy. It consists of a few sporadic incredibly poignant and beautiful—and funny! journal entries made by my father, Gene Grant, in 1971 and 1973. He writes of his love for family, friends, and fishing. And for his wife Lillian—or as he called her,  “Lill.” The entries concluded in 1990, about two years before he died when he was only eighty-two, with a final note to me giving some geneology and reminding me, “You are a member of that proud tribe and nation—”The Kingdom of Sweden.” The pages in between record expenditures made from 1975 to1980 and include payments for Lillian’s medical care and hospital bills leading up to her death in 1976 when she was only  sixty-three.  Then, before that final note are ten years of blank pages which I hold as his period of grieving of which he was unable to write.

But Daddy’s RECORD is a story for another telling, and it is not kept on my piano. It migrates between a shelf in my closet to the kitchen table where family and friends gather—which is where it  was during a visit from Aleta. She opened it and smelled it, and we began laughing about how we do  this. We wondered if everyone does, or maybe just Swedes. Or is it just a family thing? Aleta’s dad, my brother Bob, sniffs books, and most certainly, Gene Grant did.

Gene Grant had the true poet’s gift of seeing and the ability to point out that which is  often overlooked by most. In so doing he taught each of us to see. I go ahead now and take his leather-bound, tellingly worn, 1932 first edition of THE STANDARD BOOK OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN VERSE off the piano. It was given to him by his parents on his twenty-sixth birthday in the year of my birth, 1937. I open it and smell it. Yes! I am happy to report that it still radiates the scent of his pipe tobacco and cigarette smoke!

The title page boldly brags of having a preface by Christopher Morley. I ponder a moment over three underlined numbers 80 72 265 written off to the side and under one another, before realizing they must be page numbers. This is confirmed when I turn to page 265, which is marked with a little leather strap, where I find Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty”. I read the first verse, hearing it in the cadence of that impeccable voice that had taken Gene Grant all the way to the final stages of the Oregon state branch of the National Oratorical Competition when he was in high school:
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God! 
O Duty ! if that name thou love
Who art a light to guide, a rod
To check the erring, and reprove;
Thou who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe,
From vain temptation dost set free,
And calm’st the weary strife of frail humanity!

I read the long poem aloud, listening always, for the instruction of my father’s voice. I smile to myself thinking of Mama’s irritation when he read this poem because she felt he did not live up to Wordsworth’s lofty standard. But what cared I for that? I just cared about the poetry. Anyway, I felt that he was really going for the prayer in the last verse:

To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give;
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live.

Daddy was a great one for spontaneously  reciting lines, and Give unto me, made lowly wise,/The spirit of self-sacrifice; were among those we often heard. He loved tossing opening lines in just any old where. Lines like Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and She walks in beauty, like the night. My favorite is one from Edward Rowland Sill, This I beheld or dreamed it in a dream. Though this poem “Opportunity”  is actually about a battle, when Dad looked at me across the room or the back of the couch and said this line, I liked to thing that it was me that he had beheld or dreamed in a dream. Having him do that is one of the things I so miss.

I have never heard him recite or read either of the poems by Sir Henry Wotton on page 80. My guess is that rather than “Elizabeth of Bohemia” (though he did love violets) his choice was “Character of a Happy Life” which starts at the bottom of page 80, continues onto the next, and after five four line stanzas on what it takes to be a man (not unlike the sentiment in Kipling’s “If” or Henley’s “Invictus”—both of which he did quote) concludes with:

—This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet have all.

On page 72 is a Shakespearean sonnet  which I never heard Dad quote. I’d heard the one on page 73, Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments, often but not the one on page 72. I am surprised and delighted! Besides “They That have Power To Hurt and Will Do None” being a great poem, it is one of my all time favorites because it is the first work by Shakespeare I ever came to understand and memorize.
   
I discovered it while living in Tacoma, Washington in a motel used for off base Army personnel. My new husband, Loren Murray, who in a year would become my son Brent’s father, was stationed at Fort Ord.  He was gone overnight a lot on things like guard duty. I was only sixteen and it was my first experience of living away from my mom and I was afraid of the dark. It wasn’t easy to get by on Army pay but for the nights he was away, we managed to set aside a few quarters so I could listen to the pay radio in our unit. My other tactic for fending off the Boogie Man was reading. Once a month I got to buy a Wonder Woman comic book. Other than that I had my Bible and a very old, fat little book of poetry called THE GOLDEN TREASURY. It should be on my piano right now, but it’s not.  I gave it away before I was smart and sophisticated enough to be sentimental.

Anyway in that little book (which hopefully is on top of somebody’s piano) were some of Shakespeare’s writings. I couldn’t understand them, and I became very  afraid that there was going to be so much I wasn’t going to be able to learn on my own without a teacher. Reading Shakespeare now, I can’t see why it was such a mystery to me, but it was. Maybe it was just fear. But I kept at it. I kept reading the same things over and over. Then all of a sudden, it was like the lights went on and I understood six lines. It was like breaking a code. Since then I have been able to understand everything he wrote. I distinctly remember how excited I was, because it gave me the confidence I needed to continue to study, not only Shakespeare, the Bible, and Wonder Woman, but anything and everything. I’ve never stopped. The lines are:

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
    For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

My favorite poem was given to me by my stepmother Lillian, when I was only twelve years old.  A few of her books have also come to be on the top of my piano. Perhaps I should pass them on to her blood children, Chuck and Janet, so they can put them on their pianos, but for now they live on mine. There is the red one, THE FAMILY ALBUM OF FAVORITE POEMS inscribed To my Dear Wife, Happy Birthday ‘65, Gene, in that beautifully squared script of his that somehow imitates the same shape as the very hand that wrote it. That script which always brought such joy to the one seeing their own name so intentionally blocked in it on an envelope coming from the mail box like a longed-for gift.

I also have her THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Penciled inside the once-upon-a-time green cover is  Rte. 3, Box 27, Dallas, Ore. In the index, her favorites are distinguished by her little check-marks, now with mine also keeping them company. Double checked is Who Has Known Heights by Mary Brent Whiteside. After all these years—other than the one Lillian wrote for me herself— it is still my favorite and one of the few I can still quote from memory. It continues to be of comfort to such as myself to whom peace is such a stranger. And it goes like this:

Who has known heights and depths shall not again
    Know peace—not as the calm heart knows
    Low ivied walls; a garden close;
And though he tread the humble ways of men
He shall not speak the common tongue again.

Who has know heights shall bear forevermore
    An incommunicable thing
    That hurts his heart, as if a wing
    Beat at the portal, challenging;
And yet—lured by the gleam his vision wore—
Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more.

The most important of  Lillian’s Grant’s books is, of course, the one she wrote herself— THE QUEST. Included is the oh so convicting “Outside With Christ”: 

A fancy rose within them—and they left me.
I stood alone with priceless pearls to share.
The door was shut, my full heart heavy—
Its treasure, shunned, became a load to bear.
Mute tears arose for those in bankrupt blindness,
But Jesus took the tears—and left a prayer.

A prayer of Godly sorrow and compassion
For souls that turn away and do not seek,
For minds deceived by carnal craving,
For ears that will not hear the conscience speak,
For hardened hearts in poverty of Spirit’s inspiration
That points the way to Calvary’s peak.

For sluggard hands that leave the soul to perish
And will not reach and take the Bread of Life.
Thus, many pearls are trampled in the dust,
Many blossoms by crude hands are crushed,
Many doors by craven fears are barred.
Thus, many pictures by neglect are marred.

The remaining books on my piano are about a dozen chapbooks of poetry that I have written, and my father’s Bible, which contains the best poetry of all time. What greater line than that declaration opening the book of the prophet and poet John?

In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the word was God.

Finally there is a copy of Leonard’s Cohen’s book STRANGER MUSIC that gets to live on the top of my piano. Actually, there is an older copy of Leonard’s book that travels around and hangs out with Dad’s RECORD on various shelves with other books of poetry, or next to my bed, or on the kitchen table, or in the car. (Yes, as a matter of fact it does have the suspicion of a scent of a certain kind of smoke from those days of yore. It  also has pages missing—little sacrifices torn out to paste in albums, or stuck up on the bulletin board in the laundromat, or given away like tithes.

One night I was partying with my kids around the kitchen table. As the night  wore on and the candle burned low, we became sentImental and poetic as we, thank God! have a tendency to do. I decided they should know what song I wanted played at my memorial. Hey, one never knows when one might be leaving for one’s Next Great Adventure. When I told them it was a Leonard Cohen song my son Brent, and oldest daughter Shannon, said their favorite songs were also by Leonard Cohen. It was no surprise that my dancer daughter’s would be:

Dance me to your beauty
with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic
till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch
and be ny homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love.

My dark eyed son’s choice, hoiwever, was one with which I, at that time, was not familiar. He proceeded to impeccably  recite the entire tragic tale of love and betrayal with an expression on his nad tone in his voice I have yet to put a name to, but I felt  that I was among those responsible for the pain in his poet’s heart.  I burst into tears as he came to the final verse:

An Eskimo showed me a movie
he’d recently taken of you
The poor man could hardly stop shivering
His lips and his fingers were blue
I suppose that he froze
when the wind tore off your clothes
and I guess he just never got warm
but you stand there so nice
in your blizzard of ice
Oh please let me come into the storm

Shortly after that, as fate would have it, we played a cassett  of Leonard’s while making the long journey by car to the South Fork of the Smith River for Daddy’s memorial where we gave his ashes a Viking send off on a little boat we made from a pizza box which flew a flag bearing the name of the Israelite tribe from which we as Swedes descended: NAPHTALI. When we came to the Leonard song on the tape I want played at my memorial— though since that time, a song by Isaiah, the man who was to become Shiloh's husband, has been added to the top of my  song list— my youngest daughter, Shiloh, who had not  been familiar with Leonard Cohen said, “Oh now I get it!”

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, you must not ask for so much.
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, hey, why not ask for more?

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

I am so grateful for the heritage of poetry that informs our family and our times spent reading it to one another. I pray that our children and theirs will continue to build upon our foundations in this tradition.

 

POEMS FOR MY CHILDREN

TWO FOR BRENT

INTERLUDE
                     for Brent

 

I cannot believe how long it took

for you to come, and then

you’d barely time to kick the tires on the truck

and you were gone again. Now I miss you even more

then I did before you came, when I had your coming

to look forward to. Now I am without a clue

as to how or when you might be coming back.

I pray it will be soon.

 

I’d had so many fantasies

about the many things that we might do.

I’d thought a lot about how special

I was going to make your stay, the things

that I would cook for you. Of course,

the going out to dinner, too. Sunday sailing

on the bay, movies at the Rose, the games of chess

we’d play, and... who knows? Perhaps some poetry.

Long walks upon the beach, most certainly.

Long talks into the night, most definitely.

Revelation just within our reach of

(as you would say) "Yet another fuckin’ mystery."

 

I wanted to show you off 

to all my friends, of course. For you,

that might not have been such fun, but

you know how proud of you I am.

But here’s the clicker, Son: barely can I now recall

any single thing which we did do. It was not

about the doing -- but all about the being. All. 

 

The most amazing thing for me 

was how easy it was 

to just be. No muss, no fuss, no bother. No fanfare.

No big deal, no extra care, no extra charge 

on anything. No anxiety. No agenda heeded, 

no plans made -- none needed.

 

It just seemed like, oh,

I don’t know what to say...it just seemed

right, like any other...like 

any old day or any old night, happening 

as it should...like

you just happened to be in the neighborhood

and had dropped in on me to say hello and

hang around the house and yard...seemed natural 

that it would just go on and on.

That’s why it was so hard 

when I turned around

and you were gone.

 

 

 

O MY SON

for Brent

 

O My Son, My Strong Fir Tree,

Alone amongst the pines,

Your once sweet song seems now to be

Locked within your heart’s confines.

It is no longer sung to me.

 

O My Son, My Dark Cloud Prince,

Prince Hamlet, so it seems.

Who or what has done this thing to thee?

That thou shouldst turn so far from me,

Leaving damned few foot or photo prints

To track, and not nearly enough memories.

 

Thou wouldst break thy mother’s heart,

If she didst not run with wolves 

And hang onto her dreams. 

What hast thou done with yours?

Are they lost amongst thy endless chores?

Or come apart at the seams?

 

O Pixie Boy! O Chipmunk Child!

O First Borne One whom we adore!

Grandma, Sisters, Daughters too,

And what about that Girl Next Door?

 

Have we, these women 

So in love with you,

Required far too much of thee?

Is the man become hag-ridden? 

Is it the wish of the child within

To escape their clutch and me?

Is it because we’re all so wild

That thou canst grant us nothing more?

O Bearded One, grown grumbly cold,

Waving from some crumbly mumbling shore.

 

What in the hell is wrong with you?

What is your poor Mama to do?

Art thou mad? Or damned? Or cursed?

I’ve known thee from of old, Old One,

For God’s sake! You are The Only Son!

Will this aloofness never cease?

And now to make all matters worse,

Your wife tells me that you snore

And give her little peace.

 

But put all this foolishness aside.

You are My Beloved Son, My Pride,

In whom, yes! I am well pleased! And more.

O My Son, so very much much more.

 

 

 

TWO FOR SHANNON 

 

 

THE BELLS OF SHANNON

for Shannon

 

Tis still said that everyone could hear

All the Bells of Ireland ringing

Across heaven, sea and earth,

 

And see your angels fanning near

With all our sainted tenors singing

Full swell, with Irish joy and mirth.

 

Said twas heard well loud and clear

All this way, the good news bringing

On that morning of your birth.

 

And on that day, I’m clear that I  

Heard the River Shannon’s song so green

Beginning when I woke.

 

Gramma, who’s not known to lie,

Does tell, fairie, sprite and elf were seen

To play beneath the Druid Oak.

 

And anyway, who would dare deny

Or quell any claim so sweet and clean

Made by The Gentle Folk?

 

 

 

SHINE ON SILVER GIRL

for Shannon

 

Though we’ve hardly known at times,

What’s been given away, lost or taken,

We cast our bread upon the seas

And our faith remains unshaken.

 

We’ve loved, we’ve trusted, dared,

And our Lord sees to our every need,

Whatever comes up missing

Becomes the wind beneath your steed.

 

Ride on Silver Girl, Ride on,

Ride on, Ride on and Shine,

Shine on Silver Girl, Shine on,

Shine on, Shine on, Shine on.

 

This horse you ride is Destiny, 

But we call her Shanny Jay,

You won your spurs in Mexico,

And you wear them to this day.

 

You have defeated the enemy,

Beat him on his own ground. 

History bears the witness,

And your History is sound.

 

Ride on Silver Girl, Ride on,

Ride on, Ride on and Shine,

Shine on Silver Girl, Shine on,

Shine on, Shine on, Shine on.

 

While on our Great Adventure,

I sometimes go astray,

And when I do, you ask: Mama,

Have we ever been this way?

 

Sometimes I have to answer, 

While trying to stay calm:

I’m not really sure, my Dear... 

And you say: Come on, Mom,

 

Climb up here with me on Destiny,

You reach down and take my hand,

And we ride on together, invincible,

Through our beloved Gypsy Land.

 

Ride on Silver Girl, Ride on,

Ride on, Ride on and Shine,

Shine on Silver Girl, Shine on,

Shine on, Shine on, Shine on.

 

 

 

 

TWO FOR SHILOH 

In honor of Shiloh's recent sharing on her website <http:www.ourladyoftheredthread.com> regarding her love for and commitment to her husband, Isaiah, I am posting this poem which I wrote almost fifteen years ago. I had wanted to write something really celebratory about this extraordinary union of theirs which they framed, not only as a marriage, but as being the spiritual discipline within which they would walk and govern themselves for the rest of their lives. Her writing confirms that this covenant not only continues, but has increased beyond anything I ever realized was possible. I am so grateful for this and so proud of them for going to the lengths and depths such a discipline demands. But this poem is not about them. It is about me. I always preface it with the remark that I was not sad that she married or chose this man. After all I had also chosen him for her myself, and continue in loving him as my own son. As I said, I wanted to write something full of joy, praise, gratitude, and celebration. But the creative process finds it own way to and from the heart.

 

 

MOTHER OF THE BRIDE

for Shiloh

   

I gave my girl away last Spring,

Down in the valley, The Valley of Men.

It wasn’t until the first snowfall

That I got back home again.

 

I could not get back home again

Until the first snowfall.

 

Tears began at the Navarro Bridge

That took all Summer and Fall to shed.

I could not find my way at all

To Greenwood Ridge and bed.

 

To Greenwood and my wine-red bed,

I found no road at all.

 

A trumpet called her from the tower,

Joyously announcing the altar hour.

It was I who led her down the trail

To where he stood beneath the bower.

 

He took her from me ‘neath the bower,

Oh woe upon that trail.

 

We sang the songs, we beat the drum,

We called to all the angels: Come!

Upon her breast beneath her veil,

A tiny cross of gold was hung.

 

My tiny golden cross was hung

Beneath her golden veil.

 

In the gown I’d sewn she stood in grace,

All satin ribbons and rows of lace

Buttons of pearl and feathers of dove,

Making her vows with upturned face.

 

Oh, how radiant shown that face

Above the pearl and dove!

 

You’ve not lost a daughter, so tis said,

You’ve gained a son instead.

But it is he who looks now upon my love

And me who weeps this morn in bed.

 

I cry alone in my wine red bed

While he gazes long upon my love.

 

 

 

BENEATH HER SNOWY WING

                                              for Shiloh

 

Sitting out on the deck at Bread and Roses

Drinking foamy Caffe-Latte beside the budding tree,

I remember that gull who swooped so low

That for a split-second

Your cherry blossom face was framed

By the underside of her snowy wing.

 

Morning dew falls from a branch into a glistening

Upon the dark green table top as a finch hops down,

Looking for a crumb from your coconut cake.

She flies away empty and

No gull comes, for you are no longer here with me

To shine beneath her snowy wing.