Grandfather

            I wrote this poem several years ago. My grandfather was a successful writer in his day – novels, poems, plays, film scripts. He is, in a sense, a spirit guide. Even though I was only seven when he died, he stayed with me through his presence in his books and his portrait.

                        

 

                        Grandfather

                         for Arthur Stringer (1874-1950)

 

To-day I am sick of it all,

This silent and orderly empty life,

And I feel savage again!

 

Arthur speaks from the stern portrait

in my father's den: profile, white hair,

pipe, curling smoke against muted

leather bound books. Swaths of paint,

patches of canvas texture his skin.

He does not look at me.

 

I want to sit down with my soul and talk straight out,

I want to make peace with myself,

And say what I have to say,

While there is still time!

 

Reaches across that gulf, my silent father

a remote echo of his father, from his books:

mysteries, sleepless men wandering the city,

spies exposing spies, a woman loving rough

life on the Canadian prairie, gun runners.

Irish dialect poems. Bold for him in 1914,

Open Water:

 

God knows that I've tinkled and jingled and strummed,

That I've piped it and jigged it until I'm fair sick of the game . . ..

 

I cannot remember his voice telling stories

when I sat, six years old, at his tobacco

leather chair. Only the pauses as he hung

details in the plot and pipe smell:

the bear, the fire, the little boy lost

in the woods. Arthur speaks from just

behind my shoulder as I poise at my desk

to take it all down. David, he says,

and that is all I need. Remember me.

 

His voice flexes, surprising:

 

And deep beneath my music,

There's a strong man stirs in me;

There's a ghost of blood and granite

Coffined in this madness. . . .

 

Arthur. You

place your pipe in the polished stone ashtray,

rise from the canvas, turn to me. David.

Let's head north. Take our legs, lungs,

a pen. Into the steadfast North, the North

that is dark and tender. You clasp my shoulder.

Our shadows leave the room, get our gear

together, and head out. Desk bound,

we make for open water.

                                                                                    --David Stringer

  

Cold

            As I’m writing this, tomorrow morning’s forecast is a temperature of 9 below zero, with a wind chill of 30 below. In response, I decided that we will not go for a morning walk, and I’m not going to take the garbage bag out to the street.

 

            Several years ago, I read something about the origin of “wind chill,” a term that now has the appearance of mathematical precision – by which I mean it is measured with numbers. I think I read that a scientist in Antarctica simply gave his totally subjective opinion about how cold it felt with the wind blowing. He noted the temperature and wind velocity, and his opinion became the official “wind chill.” Once you do this sort of things two or three times, you establish a formula for how to combine temperatures with wind speeds, supposedly coming up with a number that represents what my weather app calls the “Feels Like” temperature. Tomorrow morning it will feel like it’s f***ing cold. If anyone is willing and able to correct my understanding of the origin of “wind chill,” please set me straight.

 

            Cold? I happen to suffer from an ailment called Raynaud’s Phenomenon. As much as I like to be associated with something called a “phenomenon,” the suffering I experience is cold hands and feet – most likely a circulation problem. I did some research online and learned that Raynaud’s is treated by wearing mittens. I do that often, and I catch myself walking around the house with my hands in my pockets. I’m sorry, but my phenomenon throws off my Feels Like temperature. No matter what the temperature or wind speed, my hands feel like it’s cold. Mittens help, but not when the feels like temperature for normal people is negative 30.

 

            The next question, of course, is what to do about the cold, especially my cold hands:

 

·      The obvious answer is to stay indoors, which is effective if you don’t lose your power. This does not get the path to the front door shoveled.

·      Drinking hot coffee helps when I come in from dealing with snow, and sometimes I put my cold hands on the side of our coffee machine.

·      A glass of port can help, whether or not you are cold.

·      Drying dishes that Kim washes can also be an effective treatment for cold hands.

·      I have also suggested putting my cold hands on a warm part of Kim’s body, and sometimes she even lets me do it.

 

            How else to deal with the threat of cold?

 

·      We put a wool blanket in the car – just in case.

·      I moved my wool socks to the front of my sock drawer.

·      I pay the gas bill and call them to thank them when they restore power.

·      I limit myself to about 30-40 minutes working in the snow – shoveling or blowing our long walk and the area of driveway in front of the garage.

·      I wear my favorite piece of winter clothing: a turtle neck collar that covers my neck and throat.

·      We keep dry firewood handy – though I realize that a conventional wood-burning fireplace causes more heat to be lost up the chimney than gained. Still, it’s reassuring to see it.

·      I check the weather app on my phone every ten minutes.

·      We think about a move south. We’ve tried Florida or Georgia – and at the moment we are thinking about a move about 45 miles south to a condo in Traverse City.

 

Remember when being “chill” was a good thing?

4’33”

            When I was team-teaching Humanities, our music teacher told us about a piece John Cage composed: 4’33”. It was written for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the musicians not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. As the title suggests, the composition lasts 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The concert room is silent, except for ambient sound from the audience, and perhaps the building. My sources describe the piece as “modernist.”

 

            Makes me wonder. Cage’s piece came about a year after Rauschenberg’s 1951 work, White Painting. (You can probably guess what that looks like.) I could possibly follow Cage’s lead in my blog and publish a blank page, and I do wonder at the response it would generate – most likely, concern for my health and/or computer skills. So – just think about it and I won’t have to do it.

 

            No, this is not about the healing power of silence in this increasingly noisy world, with much of the “noise” coming to us silently on our phones. But maybe there is something appealing about the simplicity of those 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Hard for me to say, for I have never attended a performance of 4’33”, nor will I, if offered the opportunity. (By the way, if I were to buy a ticket to a performance, I would pay with my invisible VISA card.) A live performance is probably not the same as listening to the piece on some digital device. Perhaps I have been listening to it while driving and never noticed. I suspect that a major part of the live performance is seeing the group of musicians sitting there, not playing their instruments. This appeal is missing in the recorded silence. 

 

            So, perhaps the appeal of 4’33” is not in what does or does not come to our ears, but rather what happens between our ears as we listen to the musicians’ not playing. Thinking, perhaps, “What the f***?” And is there some sort of bonding with the other members of the audience? “Audience?” The word derives from the Latin word for hearing, which is what does not happen here. I would think that people attending a performance might feel more like witnesses rather than members of an audience.

 

            Makes me wonder how applicable Cage’s idea is to other areas of our lives. When your wife asks you how you feel about this or that (her clothes, Trump, dinner – whatever), probably not wise to respond with 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. (It’s unlikely that the silence would last that long – unless she walks out.)

 

            Several weeks ago, Kim passed along a scrap of paper with these words she had found somewhere: “Someone that I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” Kim says that this has to do with her ex-husband. For me, the darkness resembles the 4’33” of silence, like a door opening into an unknown room.

 

Joy

             This is a piece I posted on the blog about ten years ago. I think of it as a follow-up to what I posted on Happiness a couple of weeks ago.

 

Joy

 

            Kim from time to time wonders if I am happy. I am, most of the time, but as a New Englander with a Canadian father, I am not very good at showing it. I don’t laugh much, preferring to make others smile. I’m not a life of the party because I don’t go to parties. Our idea of a dinner party is sitting at the table with another couple, where Kim has taken the trouble to make the meal and the table itself special. My job is to buy, open and pour the wine.

            But happiness is not really the point. Let’s make a distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is shallow and temporary – what you feel when you go to Disneyland, win at solitaire, eat a good piece of pie, or get laid. All good things, to be sure. Ambrose Bierce defined happiness as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another,” and while I would not go that far, I do note that the word derives from the Middle English word for luck or chance, and it’s related to pleasure. I think we can live more deeply.

            Joy, as I’m using the word, is that deeper quality of living. It’s also a pleasure, but a pleasure of connection. While getting laid might make you happy, making love brings you joy, and if you don’t know the difference, or how to express love, too bad for your partner. Sharing in the suffering of others – friends or strangers – creates a joy that explains the spiritual and psychological benefit of giving. We can feel a joyful connection when standing alone at the edge of the ocean, feeling its comforting immensity, an “otherness” that you can hear and smell and feel and see.

            When do I feel this joy?

            I am with Kim at Sweetwater Wetlands Park. She is photographing birds, and I am carrying my camera but mainly listening to the cries and calls and squawks and croaks with the late afternoon sunlight warming the grasses and the water, and spotting the odd butterfly or bird for my wife to photograph. Kim, who is thirty yards away and peering intently through her viewfinder, shares this moment with me, though she is not aware of the sharing.

            Or,

            It’s late (for us!) at night, and we are on the couch watching something from Netflix, and suddenly Kim’s pillow is on my lap and then her head is on the pillow and she says, “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a bit,” and I stroke her hair and then feel for the muscle spasms in her back.

            Or,

            I’m typing addresses on the Christmas cards that Kim made. I am, in a small way, part of the artistic process of Kim, and at the same time I’m feeling a momentary spark of connection with each name and address that I type. It’s a small joy, but a joy nonetheless.

            Or,

            When I was working at Starbucks a man in his 30s responded to my “How’s your day going?” by saying “Not so well. My wife asked me for a divorce, I lost my job, and I may never see my daughter again.” He opened his laptop and showed me a picture of his little girl. I turned from the cash register where I had been taking orders, asked my manager to take the register for a few minutes, poured the guy a free drink and sat down with him at a table for about 10 minutes of man-to-man advice (e.g., get a good lawyer, spend undivided quality time with your daughter, don’t burn bridges where you used to work). He was grateful for the attention and encouragement. About a month later he reappeared in the store and introduced me to his daughter. He’d landed a new job, and our Starbucks became his “office” for several hours a day. We never mentioned our conversation. We didn’t have to.

            This was a joyous experience for me, yes, because I was being a Good Guy, but mainly because I knew I was working deeply and seriously, beyond happiness.

 

Deertender

            I am Kim’s deertender. That’s the part I play. And I’m also birdfeeder, foxwatcher, and squirrelhost, but it’s the beautifully majestic deer that move me every day. Of course, feeding birds and deer really means feeding squirrels the cracked corn, apples, seeds and peanuts that I set out. I have trapped 45 squirrels to relocate in a cemetery across the lake.

 

            Feeding the deer and birds is a bigger job than it sounds. We have six different feeding stations, each requiring its own kind of seeds, which I take from the four metal barrels we keep on the back porch. We also have suet and seed balls. I go out to reload three or four times a day. Kim sees this as my gift to her.

 

            Why feed them? I’d like to say that I feed them because I am humane, and helping to save the planet, but I don’t think we are in any danger of running out of squirrels and deer, at least here in Michigan, though some bird species are threatened. No, I do it because they are cool to look at, cool for Kim to photograph, and they somehow make me feel closer to nature. I feel connected. And it’s a lot better than shoveling snow, lying on the couch watching Netflix, or sitting at my desk cursing at my computer.

 

            Anyway, here are a few of Kim’s photos, taken through the windows of our porch:

That's peanut butter I spread on a tree for the Brown Creeper.

Taking a break for snowman decoration.

The buck stops here.

Mother and Daughter

Beautiful!

The corn is hung from a spring, creating a bungee jump for squirrels.

Sometimes we get unusual winter visitors.

Deertender loading cracked corn.

We sometimes get snowed in, and we entertain ourselves by looking out the window. We spend a lot of time on the porch, and Kim calls me her "DEAR deertender."

Happiness

            A year or two ago we watched a movie, Hector and the Search for Happiness, about a disillusioned psychiatrist’s search for an understanding of happiness. It was not a very good movie, but I did find a list of statements from the film’s narrator.

 

·      Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.

·      Happiness often comes when least expected.

·      Many people only see happiness in their future.

·      Many people think happiness comes from having more power or more money.

·      Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.

·      Happiness is a long walk in beautiful, unfamiliar mountains.

·      It’s a mistake to think that happiness is the goal.

·      Happiness is being with the people you love; unhappiness is being separated from the people you love.

·      Happiness is knowing that your family lacks for nothing.

·      Happiness is doing a job you love.

·      Happiness is having a home and a garden of your own.

·      It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people.

·      Happiness is feeling useful to others.

·      Happiness is to be loved for exactly who you are. (People are kinder to a child who smiles.)

·      Happiness comes when you feel truly alive.

·      Happiness is knowing how to celebrate.

·      Happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love.

·      Happiness is not attaching too much importance to what other people think.

·      The sun and the sea make everybody happy.

·      Happiness is a certain way of seeing things.

·      Rivalry poisons happiness.

·      Women care more than men about making others happy.

·      Happiness means making sure that those around you are happy.

 

You might want to share your favorites, or perhaps add something new.

 

Kim says that her happiness comes from making other people feel happy. And watching the snow fall at night. And riding around back roads after a snowfall.      

 

I prefer joy to happiness.

Have a Happy New Year!

    --David and Kim

Christmas Poem

It started with a birth, of course,

miraculous even without

the connection to something divine.

Birth is divine enough on its own.

 

Rebirth happens in December

when the first good snow swaddles

the dreary November landscape

in a blanket of shimmering white.

 

Yes, and it’s a birth when you

emerge from sleep to join me

in the kitchen, for a hug, coffee, and

then a shared hour at the window,

 

which this morning gave birth to

a rabbit, then five deer, a possum,

our elegant fox loping through

the miraculously dazzling snow,

 

and the sunrise across the lake.

Each morning the son of God is born

outside our window, into the light of day.

It’s our daily Christmas miracle,

 

silent, holy – so tender and mild.

We pause, and in our own ways

we sing our celebration and

worship the heavenly peace,

 

going out to the sacred woods

to nurture and feed our beloved,

our brother and sister creatures

who bless us each morning.