A perfect early evening....

This is about yesterday though it might have been about today since the two days were rather seamlessly put together by nature. But it's about yesterday because I got home earlier yesterday and got to notice it all more.

Walking the dog, still bright, not yet seven p.m., I noticed the light. Cornwall is an East/West street--sunrise from Rt. 10, Sunset down the hill toward Prospect. Great light much of the time. Yesterday, stunning.

I sat on our back deck for a long time. It is canopied by hemlock and firs and red oak. You have to look almost straight up to see the sky. And the sky yesterday was the blue of that girl's eyes back in eighth grade. You never kissed her but wished you had for decades. And if you had you would have been lost forever. That blue.

We have a side yard of ferns that are coming up nicely--all ferns and rocks and old tree limbs. The wind moved the ferns feathers slightly. Our deck is assailed on two sides by Rhododendron--state flower of West Virginia, by the way--and the green of the leaves is almost blinding, shiny and deep.

There were birds in the trees and a distant woodpecker who comes every spring and I've never been able to find and see.

Even the aged Horse Chestnut tree I keep thinking is dead is in full leaf. The air felt, tasted, smelled so alive, so sweet--like something called 'forever'.

How many perfect early evenings can we expect in a year or a lifetime? Better grab one when it comes and wrench all the beauty out....

The flowers in our yards and neighbors' yards are all primary colors--reds, oranges, yellows, blue, fluffy cloud white. Not a pastel in sight last evening.

One of the hemlocks has a perfect 'Green Man' on it--I may paint him when I retire so I can see him better and show him to people. He has a long nose and deep eye sockets and a chin that trails away from his mouth.

I had a glass of white wine and smoked a forbidden cigarette and thought things no deeper than something like this: "the light...the light...the light..." for an hour our so.

Our dog slumbered on the deck, his nose under the gate to the front yard. He wasn't even thinking something as weighty as "the light...", he was 'one' with the evening.

It was 53 degrees, I noticed. My favorite temperature yesterday.

Alas--we should all have evenings like that one often....

A perfect early evening....

Living too long....

I was driving home after a great day at church listening to an NPR report on how most teens text some 50-75 times a day. "Mostly useless stuff," one of them admitted and all of them should, it seems to me.

I've recieved some text messages in my day on my phone and tried once or twice to return them (unsuccessfully).

Here's what I promise: I will not run away to Boreno, I will not drink Yak milk, I will become a Republican or a Baptist, I won't tug on Superman's cape or raise chickens (though I've dreamed a couple of times recently about having chickens--long story....) and I will never send you a text message on your phone. OK? You can go to the bank on that....

So I stop to get a bottle of Starbuck's cold coffee--Mocha, a weakness of mine. The total was $3.01. I had four quarters so I gave the kid 4 quarters, a $10 bill and a penny. He probably texts his friends 50 times a day.

He looked at me and said, "What do I do with this?"

I told him, "Enter $11.01 on your cash register and give me my change...."

Skeptically, he did. "Wow," he said, handing me a 5 and 3 ones, "Cool."

He wished me a nice day though he had almost ruined it....

Hey, I can't leave you there...

sitting out on my back porch...just sitting, not thinking or pondering or anything else, mostly feeling the cool air on my face and staring at the trees and looking at the sky between their branches, not doing much of anything....I thought about my last blog.

My dad lived a decade and a half or more after that--saw his grandchildren (which my mother never did) lived with us for a few months before going to a nursing home in Hamden for a year or two before he died. Lots happened. Maybe I'll blog about that some time. But my relationship with my father improved--still improves....I love him and appreciate him more each day. Hey, I was 25 and an asshole, not the wise old bird I am now....so don't bum out on that.

And there is this: I can sit on my back porch on my 63rd birthday...just sit...just feel and see and hear whatever is there to feel and see and hear.

That ability may be the beginning of JOY.

I don't think of myself as a happy person, though I am happier than 95% of the people I know or meet. So, maybe I am happy--but I'm too pondering to call it that.

But I am a Joyful person. I tend to almost always notice every moment of my life with an intensity and a thankfulness and a pondering that gives me great joy. Great Joy.

Even when I'm 'unhappy' or 'depressed' or 'anxious' or 'distracted'--even then I am joyful.

I truly love, love, adore, honor, am humbled by and grateful for simply being alive.

I like being alive a lot. And I hope I'm not wasting more of it than I'm enjoying. I'm about to go wash out my sinuses with 8 ounces of salt water--not pleasant, but I'm sick and need to. And it will be a feeling I will acknowledge and honor--but not like....

So, being 63 is a lot better than not being! A lot better.

I am joyful.

And I encounter my father in dreams often these days and it is usually wondrous. Maybe he's forgiven me for being an asshole.

And maybe I'm becoming a wise old bird sooner than I expected.

So, in spite of that last blog, fret not. I am joyful to be alive.

Happy birthday to me.....

humungous overshare

Today--4/17/10--I turned 63. When I turned 25 4/17/72, my mother was dying and I was by her bedside. She was 63. On the morning of my birthday, after I'd spent the night by my mother's bed, my Aunt Elsie came in and said, "It's your birthday". I had forgotten.

My mother was 38 when I was born and 63 when I was 25. That was 38 years ago come Monday. I'm now the age she was when she died. She had just retired from 40 years of teaching elementary school when she had stroke after stroke and slipped into a coma for a week or so and I sat by her bed, feeding her ice cream with one of those wooden spoons most of the night. Half comatose, she still loved--as she always did--vanilla ice cream.

I'm not superstitious at all. I pay people to let black cats run in front of me. I walk under every ladder I encounter, I spill salt and don't throw it over my shoulder, I don't even whistle through graveyards. But the math intrigues me....She was 38 when I was born and 63 when she died. I'm 63 now and it was 38 years ago she died. A little too ironic. And we were both retiring....ok, I am a little superstitious. Plus, I have all these wierd blood tests and stuff to deal with in the next few weeks. If I make it past Monday, I'll feel better....

My birthday is always a little sad since I remember how close my mother died to when I turned 25. Two days. 4/19/72. And this one is a tad wierd, given the 38/63 stuff....

I'll be fine.

I was with my mother when she died. The doctor had warned my father and I (who were not getting on too well at the time) that she might seem to regain consciousness but it was merely a reaction and she was already quite brain dead...stokes and kidney failure and all...plus a comotose state.

My father and I were with her and she did exactly what the doctor told us she might do--she sat up and seemed to look around and then fell back on her pillow, dead.

My father, in spite of all the advanced warnings, thought she could see us, hear us, communicate with us and started calling out her name: "Cleo! Cleo! Cleo!" he called. Then she died.

We stood silently for a few minutes.

"She heard me, didn't she, Jimmy?" My father asked.

And in the worst thing I've done--and I've done horrible things in my life--I said, "No, she didn't."

I'd give anything to have that moment back and say, "Oh, Dad, she heard you, she knew you loved her, she died with your voice in her heart...."

And I can't go back and do that.

Instead I said, "No" and he wept and offered me 40 dollars to buy some shoes that would be fit for the funeral and I told him that wasn't enough because I was insulted that he didn't find my shoes worthy and was thinking of my shoes instead of his dead wife and I was so angry that my mother had died instead of him.

So, this time of my natal joy is muted by a memory like that....

Like I warned you, an overshare.....

Last things

Almost everything I do around St. John's these days is 'the last time' I'll do them--last holy week, last Easter, last baptisms, last nursing home communions, last meeting of this kind or another--and even my last Vestry meeting.

I actually, unlike most priests I know, have enjoyed some 85% of all the Vestry meetings I've ever attended. It is the remarkable commitment of people willing to serve on a Vestry that makes the time together magic--that and the occasional breakthrough to consensus and the great good humor I insist on and often get and stuff like the time two vestry members were about to take their disagreement to the parking lot for some bare knuckles...stuff like that....

At the vestry meeting--with cake and champagne--one of the vestry members said something to me that makes me think perhaps my 20 years here were positive and good.

"You were the reason I came back the second time," she told me, 'but you're not the reason I stayed--I stayed because I love this place...."

Perfect. I get anxious when someone says something like "I don't know what we'll do without you", as flattering as that is in a ego satisfying way. I am humbled and honored to be the reason some people started coming--but the parish is what matters now, not me--no matter how much you love me...and I know you do...and I you.

Last things are strange and a bit emotionally challenging. And, as they come and go "next things" are what matter--for me and for the parish....

who I be

I think I lost this post by some dumb thing I did by typing too fast.

So, if you get the same thing twice--or sort of the same thing--sorry.

today, when I was preaching about how in John's gospel everyone was more interested in what Jesus could 'do' than who he 'was', I realized what has been making my leaving St. John's so very, very hard. I have become, in my letting go, so tied up in what I 'do' as the Rector I have lost sight of who I 'be' as the Rector.

I won't be 'doing' those things anymore after a short time, but I will still 'be' who I have been while doing them.

Where I come from, people who meet for the first time usually ask, "where are you from?"

Where you're from--which town, which holler, which part of the area--tell volumes about who you 'are'. The Millers from Jenkinjones are not at all like the Millers from Spencer Curve. The Blankinships from Pineville aren't the same folk as the Blankinships from Leckie. 'Where you are from' tells people who you 'be'.

When I came to New England I noticed the first questioned people asked a new acquaintance was "What do you DO?" Knowing what you 'do' doesn't tell me who you 'are'. Doing and being are distinctions.

I even lead a workshop a few times a year that is based on making the distinction between 'doing' and 'being'. And I lead the workshop quite well, thank you. But only when I listened to my sermon did I realize that who I 'be' is who I will continue to 'be' after I leave St. John's....What I 'do' will be vastly altered.

This realization (I often say I alway 'preach' to myself and others can listen--today that really proved true!) enables me to create a new future for myself and allow St. John's to create their future. My 'being' will continue though I will mourn the loss of what I've been 'doing' with my 'being' for these 21 years.

It is still painful to imagine leaving--but now I know I can...I can 'leave', 'stop DOING' what I've done so long and still 'be' who I am.

That is a gift--a profound gift to me. I should listen more closely to my sermons....