Junkos and granddaughters

When I tell my granddaughters about Junkos

“Let me tell you about these little birds,”

I'll say, “that I saw in Seattle....”

(There will be lots of questions then:

“Where's Seattle?” “Is it far?”

“Can we go there?” “How'd you go?”

They move along a story

the way the pump the swings

in the park down from their house--

quickly, rising higher, full of wonder.)

Then I'll tell them how the cook

in the conference center where I was,

saw me watching the little birds.

He was smoking a cigarette,

watching me watch the birds

while I smoked as well.

(I'll leave out the part about cigarettes.

Let there parents deal with that someday....)

“They're called Junkos,” he called to me.

“The little birds?” I asked.

He nodded and blew smoke.

I jerked my head as one flew by,

almost skimming the grass.

He told me there were two kinds.

The ones with gray heads were just Junkos

and the ones with black heads were called

'hooded Junkos' with their black hoods.

Junkos are small and quick.

Swallow like, with long splashes of white

on their wings when they fly.

Curious birds, a couple hopped

into the meeting room we used,

craning their necks and watching us

for a while, wondering about us,

I suppose, then hopped back out

the door we left open

because of the heat.

I told the cook about Junko visits

and he replied they came in the kitchen

from time to time,

then left.

I don't know if Junkos

live in the East, if my granddaughters

could see them some day

in Baltimore.

I could look it up

before I tell them

in the green bird book

my friend John loaned me,

mostly forever, because

I love birds.

I could show the girls

the color plates of birds--

a multitude of them--

which I sometimes just

look at without reading the names.

But I don't think I'll research Junkos

before I see the girls.

I'd rather just wonder if I'll

ever see one here, in the East,

or if they live only on the Pacific

side of this wide land.

I like to wonder about stuff like that--

even stuff I could Google and know.

So I'll just tell them how much

I loved watching the Junkos

and leave it at that.

Let them wonder about the birds.

It's always good, I believe,

to wonder about things.

I pray those little girls,

wondering-machines,

will never stop wondering.

That is what I pray.

JGB 7/11/11

the way things are

I've been sitting out on our deck, listening to the distant booms of fireworks, a couple of days early, from down toward New Haven.

Bern joined me for a while and we talked about a novel we both just read--a Swedish mystery by an author we've both read before. This one, The Troubled Man is one of a series about a Detective named Kurt Wallenger. We've read all the others and this is the last one. Wallenger is growing old, just like Bern and me--and you, if you are paying attention. Rather than kill him off, the author ends the book--a wondrous book, by the way, I recommend it--he tells us in the last paragraph that the rest of Kurt's life isn't for us but for him and his family.


How wonderful that is.

Every time I talk with Bern I am amazed that we are talking. I met her when I was 17 and she was 14. I'm now 64 and she is 61. That's 47 years we've been together in one guise or another.

We have two wondrous children and three remarkable grandchildren. And we've been together for 47 year, married, come September 5, 2011, for 41 of those years.

High School Sweethearts that have lasted for almost half a century. Astonishing.

I think we love each other more each day than the day before. For one thing, we don't have any illusions, after 47 years, about each other.

The person we love and love more each day is precisely, absolutely, exactly the person Bern and I am. We know who we're with. No secrets to speak of. Or, more accurately, we respect each others' secrets absolutely. They are our secrets and are honored.

No one in the universe knows Bern better than I do. In fact, what anyone knows about her is insignificant and miniscule compared to what I know.

She knows me that way as well.

We still have secrets that we will never share, I don't believe. But that only gives an edge to the 'Knowing' that we have about each other.

It is truly wondrous to grow older with someone who knows you like that--only a tad less than God knows each of us.

Many people don't have this opportunity--mostly for good reasons--but if I were recommending some way to live out you life it would be this: be with someone who knew you when you were a teenager (and all the horrors of that!) and ever since....

Pretty remarkable, I'd say. I like it.

That's the way things are for me and for Bern. It's a joy to grow older together with someone you've know for 47 years....

Yes, Virginia, there are lightening bugs in Connecticut

I've just been watching Lightening Bugs--fire flies--in our neighbor's yard. So I decided to reprise the fourth most viewed post of mine ever.

They are blinking, blinking, blinking.





They're out there tonight--the fireflies--in the mulberry tree just beyond our fence where the groundhogs come in the late summer to eat mulberries that have fermented and make them drunk. A drunk groundhog is a wonder to behold!

And the lightening bugs are in our yard as well. I sat and watched them blink for 20 minutes tonight.

My dear friend, Harriet, wrote me an email about lightening bugs after my blog about them. If I'm more adroit at technology than I think I am, I'm going to put that email here.

Jim, I just read your blog and have my own firefly story. Before we   went to Maine,
before 6/20, one of those nights of powerful   thunderstorms, I was awakened at 10PM
and then again at 2AM by flashes   of lightning followed by cracks of thunder - the
 kind that make me   shoot out of bed - and pounding rain. And then at 4:30AM there
was   just lightning, silent. The silence and light was profound. I kept   waiting
for sound. I couldn't quite believe in heat lightning in June,   so I got out of bed
and looked out the window. There I could see the   sky, filled with silent lightning
 bursts. And under it, our meadow,   filled with lightning bugs (as we call them) or
 fireflies, flashing in   response. I've never seen anything like it. I can't remember
 the last   time I saw a lightning bug. And then your blog. Is this, too, part of
 global warming? Are you and   I being transported back to the warmer climes of
 our youth, West   Virginia and Texas? Well, if it means lightning bugs, the future
 won't   be all bad.
I did do it, by gum....

So the lightening bugs are blinking, as we are, you and I.

Blinking and flashing and living. You and I.

Here's the thing, I've been thinking about a poem I wrote 4 years
ago or so. I used to leave St. John's and go visit folks in the hospital or nursing home or their own home
on my way to my home. Somehow the blinking of the fireflies has reminded me of that. So, I'll try, once more
to be more media savvy than I think I am and share it with you.
 

I DRIVE HOME

I drive home through pain, through suffering,

through death itself.

I drive home through Cat-scans and blood tests

and X-rays and Pet-scans (whatever they are)

and through consultations of surgeons and oncologists

and even more exotic flora with medical degrees.

I drive home through hospitals and houses

and the wondrous work of hospice nurses

and the confusion of dozens more educated than me.

Dressed in green scrubs and Transfiguration white coats,

they discuss the life or death of people I love.

And they hate, more than anything, to lose the hand

to the greatest Poker Player ever, the one with all the chips.

And, here’s the joke, they always lose in the end—

the River Card turns it all bad and Death wins.

So, while they consult and add artificial poison

to the Poison of Death—shots and pills and IV’s

of poison—I drive home and stop in vacant rooms

and wondrous houses full of memories

and dispense my meager, medieval medicine

of bread and wine and oil.

Sometimes I think…sometimes I think…

I should not drive home at all

since I stop in hospitals and houses to bring my pitiful offering

to those one step, one banana peel beneath their foot,

from meeting the Lover of Souls.

I do not hate Death. I hate dying, but not Death.

But it is often too much for me, stopping on the way home

to press the wafer into their quaking hands;

to lift the tiny, pewter cup of bad port wine to their trembling lips;

and to smear their foreheads with fragrant oil

while mumbling much rehearsed words and wishing them

whole and well and eternal.

I believe in God only around the edges.

But when I drive home, visiting the dying,

I’m the best they’ll get of all that.

And when they hold my hand with tears in their eyes

and thank me so profoundly, so solemnly, with such sweet terror

in their voices, then I know.

Driving home and stopping there is what I’m meant to do.

A little bread, a little wine and some sweet smelling oil

may be—if not enough—just what was missing.

I’m driving home, driving home, stopping to touch the hand of Death.

Perhaps that is all I can do.

I tell myself that, driving home, blinded by pain and tears,

having been with Holy Ones.

8/2007 jgb

Someone once told me, "We're all dying, you know. It's just a matter of timing...."

Fireflies, more the pity, live only a fraction of a second to the time that we humans live. They will be gone from the mulberry tree and my back yard in a few weeks, never to be seen again. But the years and years we live are, in a profound way, only a few blinks, a few flares, a few flashes in the economy of the universe. We should live them well and appreciate each moment. Really.

One of the unexpected blessings of having been a priest for so long is the moments, the flashes, I've gotten to spend with 'the holy ones', those about to pass on from this life.

Hey, if you woke up this morning you're ahead of a lot of folks. Don't waste the moment.

(I told Harriet and she agreed, that we would have been blessed beyond measure to have walked down in that meadow while the silent lightening lit the sky to be with the fire-flies, to have them hover around us, light on our arms, in our hair, on our clothes, be one with them....flashing, blinking, sharing their flares of light. Magic.)

fire fly sighting???

I thought I saw a fire fly tonight, out on the deck, looking down to the back yard.

It flashed once, then again. I didn't have my glasses on--I take them off when I'm reading and on the computer--so I ran inside and tried to find them. I looked on one of the tables in the dining room where I sometimes eat and read. I looked in all three bathrooms since I often read in them and like to use them all....I found them on my computer table and went back outside and didn't see it though I watched and watched.

Then, when I took the dog out, I thought I saw a flash in one of the trees across the road. But I only saw one flash. Maybe I'm just wishing and hoping to see a fire fly. I miss them so.

My grandmother used to sing a little song to me that began:
"Glow little glow worm, glitter, glitter...."

though I don't remember the rest of it.

In the mountains of southern West Virginia, where I grew up, lightening bugs were ubiquitous . They were everywhere for months.

A couple of years ago I was in Washington, DC, at Howard University, leading a workshop. Some of the other people who were helping me lead and I went to dinner. Across from the parking lot was an empty lot near the Metro tracks. It was full of lightening bugs (which is what we called them back home). They practically had to drag me into the restaurant to eat.

I used to catch a mayonnaise jar almost full of lightening bugs. We made bracelets and necklaces out of them, I am sorry to say. "Like flies to young boys are we to the gods," King Lear observes, "they kill us for their sport."

I killed lightening bugs for sport. But there were so many of them, lighting up the evening yard, flitting to and fro, flashing, glowing, daring us to catch them. I remember their little black wings, almost plastic like, but it was their bellies we longed for and tore off and pressed to our sweaty little kid wrists and necks. We would be adorned with light in the humid evening while the adults sat on the porch and talked of serious, profound, ultimately boring adult things.

We must be too far north for serious lightening bugs/glow worms/fire flies. I see them from time to time, fleetingly. Maybe they are all just figments of my longing and imagination.

But they are back there in my childhood, back in the mountains, blinking in such abundance that even the fierce commitment of young children could never extinguish their glow.

I miss them so.

Jump

JUMP

All morning long, in my comings and goings,
out and back again,
he was sitting on the edge
of his nest,
the only home he's known,
deciding whether to jump.

The other baby robin was gone,
along with Mama and Papa.
It was just him,
alone and abandoned,
deciding whether to jump.

(Did the big birds
simply wake up this morning
and know it was jump off day?
And when the first fledgling leaped
out into the air that will be her home now,
did the parents follow,
teaching aspects of flight,
leaving the other
to decide whether to jump?)

Curious, I crept around the side of the house
to look at the nest.
And he was gone.
He had jumped into the emptiness,
falling at first,
then, led by instinct,
flapping, careening around
like a drunk,
I imagine,
until he trusted his wings.

(Do birds remember
first flight?
Or, like us humans,
forget jumping after a while
because, like walking for us,
flying just seems eternal?)

How often in one life
do we find ourselves on the edge of the nest
deciding how to jump?
How often we perch,
one leap from a new beginning,
an adventure,
filled with wonder and terror,
knowing everything,
simply everything will be different
once we leap
into what comes next....

6/25/2011

"A public celebration
is a rope bridge of
knotted symbols
strung across an abyss.
We make our crossings
hoping the chasm will echo
our festive sounds
for a moment,
as the bridge begins
to sway
from the rhythms
of our
Dance."
--anon.

Robin update

For the longest time I've thought that Mama Robin only had one baby in her nest. But yesterday I saw a second.

They have feathers already and one of them climbed up on the top of the nest and Mama knocked him down and sat on him. Little buggers can't fly yet so she keeps them in the nest.

Yesterday, after some rain, she was out in the front yard digging for worms--those little birds eat constantly--their mouths are always open.

So I came out with the dog and startled her. She flew up in a tree and yelled at Bela and me for a long time. "Don't sneak up on me...." I think she was saying.

I don't know what I'll do when the babies fly away. Having already said good by to the three earlier, it will be double postpartum depression for me. Plus Mama, who I've spent so much time with, won't hang around in the nest any more. Alas.

After two broods--5 baby robins altogether, I can't wait to look in the nest after their all gone. Can you imagine what a mess those baby birds made there--I mean, I don't want to be too graphic--but they do stay in the nest a long time and since they're always eating I can only imagine they are always...well, pooping. Wonder if there is a market for robin poop?

birds and earnestness

Our back yard is like the Merritt Parkway for birds. Sit on our deck for 15 minutes and you'll probably see 50 birds fly through.

There are Robins, of course, Mama and Papa looking for worms for their baby. A family of Cardinals who must nest in one of the back yard trees and several young Cardinals. Chick-a-dees a plenty and some swallow like birds who fly back and forth about 5 feet from the end of our deck for what seems to be the sport of it. They fly so fast and are so small I never really get a good look at them. Sparrows, of course, and the occasional hummingbird. Wrens and Mourning Doves and a Bluejay or two. A couple of Cowbirds who should have moved on--that being their modis operandi, after all. I even believe I saw a scarlet tanager the other day, though they are rare around here. And there were the three young tawny woodpeckers, that distinctive red swoop on the sides of their head, who were practicing pecking wood a few days ago.

And the crows. They fly above the tree line but there are lots of them. I've become overly fond of crows since I learned that they don't mate until their second year of life and often stay with the parents to help raise next years brood. A avian nuclear family, for goodness sake. Plus they are smarter than dogs and closing in on dolphins. As annoying as they can be, I have a good word to put in for crows....

What I can't abide in the world is earnestness. Sincerity I can tolerate and commitment is fine with me. Even Zealots for whatever cause, misguided or not, those I can co-exist with. But the earnest folks...well, no, I have no time for earnestness. Earnestness, as I am describing it, is devoid of irony or paradox or a sense of humor about yourself. Earnest people are simply single-mindedly self assured that they have the truth and 'their' truth is the Truth that will set you free.

For example, if you are truly earnest you have no idea what that last paragraph meant. It is outside of your ken, you can't comprehend it, it is not a part of your Weltanshaung (or however you spell the German world that means, roughly, 'world view').

Most evangelical Christians, much of the Tea Party and all terrorists are what I call 'earnest'. And they simply must be stopped.

I'd truly welcome a born again Christian who said, "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior...at least I hope so...." Someone from the Tea Party who admitted that destroying the world economy by blocking the raising of the debt limit might not be 'the best idea ever' could earn my respect. And a terrorist who said, 'Lord, blowing up people and myself is really a truly warped idea!' could come to my next party.

If you have absolutely no doubt whatsoever about your most dear and cherished belief, then, in my book, you are too earnest and need to get a life.

I'm not saying 'everything is relative', at least not exactly. What I'm saying is that whatever you are 'certain' about can't come into question and be made fun of and laughed about, then you need to check your earnestness at the door.

Everything isn't 'relative'. But I can't remember the things that aren't.

In one of Robertson Davies' novels, a man is questioning a Roman Catholic priest about how he can claim to be holy after eating most of a chicken and consuming a bottle of wine at dinner.

The priest says to him, "I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted in hunger. I am DEEP IN THE OLD MAN'S PUZZLE, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one...."

I fancy myself always 'deep in the Old Man's puzzle' a place of paradox and confusion and metaphor and wondering and pondering and not for a moment imagining I have the slightest clue about what is 'certain' and capital T-True. That's where I live and move and have my being, in that ironic and skeptical and mysterious place. So, is it little wonder that I am predisposed, almost to the marrow and the DNA, to want to stamp out and erase from existence anyone or anything or any group that is 'earnest'?

If I were a super-hero in a comic book, I would be IRONIC MAN and I would seek out and destroy certainty and especially earnestness in all its guises.

When I was needed, the Mayor...or Bishop...would point a spot light to the sky that would imprint a giant question mark on the clouds.

????? IT'S TIME FOR IRONIC MAN....able to leap all 'certainty' in a single bound, stronger than any dogmatic stance, beyond belief and doctrine, Enemy of whatever and whoever is Earnest in the land....Look, up there in your un-conscious and doubt...it's IRONIC MAN come to save the day......and make you laugh for a change....