Something Silent, something sweet...

GW and Eleanor were part of my life for only two years. Members of St. James in Higganum and part of the Transfiguration community that is part of the Cluster of three churches, I came to know them well. And now they are moving to Costa Rica for the interim, forever.

So, I wrote them a poem that I think captures our relationship...and several relationships I have had. The touching of 'souls', not people so much.

Something silent, something sweet

When souls meet, something silent passes by.

Not like when 'people' meet.

People ask questions,

seek to find connections,

disagree,

fall in love,

battle with each other,

reunite or part in anger and regret.

When souls meet, none of that matters.

When souls meet, something silent passes by

and they travel together—side by side--

or one behind the other, or the other way around--

until they part.

And when souls part, something sweet passes by.

Gratitude, people might call it,

or even Joy.

But it is sweet to travel on

apart.

Silence and sweetness:

what could be better?

What could be more right?

JGB/8-16-2013

This gentle weather

I once wrote two very bad lines of an equally bad poem that went like this:

   "When comes a misplac'ed Spring afternoon
      on such a Winter's day, so out of tune...."

Mercifully, I've forgotten the rest of the poem though it may be lurking to haunt me in the boxes full of long ago written things I've not gone through for decades.

It's the (') to insure your pronounce it mis-place-ED rather that 'misplaced' that makes the line so regrettable.

I had a bishop once who always began the service in ordinary time with, "Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

I've always said that "Bless-ED" be God and so forth.

I've always thought that God should be 'Bless-ED' rather than merely 'blessed'. I've always thought that 'blessed' was an adjective about God rather than a verb about God.

Which brings me to the gentle weather we've had for a couple of weeks now in Connecticut. After a record-breaking heat wave in July, August has been gentle and warm and even cool at night. We haven't turned on an air-conditioner or even a fan for over a week.

We have been 'blessed' by such weather. But the weather itself, I would suggest, has been 'bless-ED'. "So out of tune with the expected heat..." I still think in iambic pentameter.

But the recent August weather has been both unexpected and bless-ED.

I stand by that pronunciation though 'misplace-ED' is a mistake....

Sleep well this wondrous cool night....

Threes...

"Good things come in threes," Lina Manona Sadler Jones, my grandmother, used to say.

...Well, actually what she used to say was "deaths come in threes..." Not quite so optimistic.

But there is the Trinity, after all, to hint that threes are a good thing.

So, in the past month, I've seen 3 of the funniest movies I've ever seen and read three of the best novels I've ever read.

I don't do reviews here, but I do want to share my bounty with you.

Movies: The Heat (course, I've always loved Sandra Bullock); Red 2 (which has a cast you could only dream of and is the only 'comic book' movie that was really like a comic book) and RIPD (panned by most critics and already pretty much out of theatres but I've always loved Jeff Bridges and I thought it was hilarious, with  some hysterical special effects). An unusual 'buddy' movie, a strange 'action' movie and an unconventional 'sci-fi' movie. I'd see any of them a couple of more times.

Books: three times in a month I've had to rearrange my Top 10 novels of all time.

The Hunger Angel by German writer, Herta Muller (the u needs one of those two dot diacritical marks over it that my keyboard cannot make). It is a troubling read, about a ethnic German living in Romania who is sent to a forced labor camp after WW II. While I was reading it, I heard an interview with a historian who has written a book about all the removals and displacements that took place in Europe after the second World War, which made the story even more moving and troubling. A hard read but well worth it (I think I read at least two murder mysteries, my genre of choice, while slogging through The Hunger Angel, but the slog was well worth it.

The Uninvited by Liz Jenson, a British novelist. It is also disturbing but compelling. It is a distopian novel that you never saw coming. The most troubling total eclipse of  'life as we know it' I've ever read. Beautifully written. The narrator has Asbergerer's Syndrome and besides being a fascinating 'teller of the tale' helped me finally have some rational understanding of that disorder. Don't read this to you young children.

Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, who is one of my favorite mystery writers (Case Histories--now a made-for-TV movie and Left Early, Took my Dog, which I just read again after Life after Life reminded me how good she is. LaL, if I might abbreviate (and why not?) is, if I can spell it, one of the tour de forces of modern literature. I wouldn't dare spoil it for you by telling you anything about what it is about. But it is about something I've never (and I bet you've never) imagined. But once the author makes you imagine it, you can't stop imagining it. The main character, Ursala, "little bear", her father calls her, is the recipient of 'life' after 'life'. 'Nough said.

Atkinson writes the best dialog (and inner dialog) I've ever read. Anywhere. And this story is haunting and lovely and in ways I can't (and couldn't!) explain, so life affirming and hopeful and breathtakingly wondrous that this novel is now up there edging even Moby Dick and The Tale of Two Cities at the top, the very top, of novels I've read.

I'll read it again in a month or so--if I can get on the 'hold list' at the Cheshire Library.

All three are wondrous and making havoc in my Top Ten Of All Time--but Life after Life is something beyond explaining....

Bonny Bobby Shafto

Tomorrow is my son, Joshua Dylan (for Bob not Thomas) Bradley's 38th birthday.

We used to croon to him a nursery rhyme that goes like this:

Bobby Safto's gone to sea,
Silver buckle's on his knee
He'll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shafto'
Bobby Shafto's bright and fair,
Panning out his yellow hair,
He's my love forevermore,
Bonny Bobby Shafto.

And he was a toe-head, though you'd never guess it now as his brown hair, like mine, has hints of grey in it and his beard even moreso.

My beard was grey by 40 and I colored it for several years then gave into time.

I was 28 when he was born. Which makes me 66 now.

When I was 38, my father was 78, having been 40 when I was born. (Stuff like that has come to matter to me as I grow older.)

Our daughter, Jeremy Johanna (forever Mimi) turned 35 last month. I was 31 when she was born. The math doesn't change--I'm still 66.

People told us when we were much younger, that time would fly and to enjoy our children while we could. It would go away faster than we could imagine.

I thought those people were fools. Josh and Mimi's childhood seemed endless and stressful and wondrous at the same time.

But those people were right.

My 'princess' is 35. My Bonny Bobby Shafto is 38 tomorrow.

How in hell did that happen?

They are both amazing people. Mimi and Tim will come with us to an island off the coast of North Carolina in what?--10 days from now. We've been doing it for several years. It's the island we took Josh and Mimi too for much of their pre-adult lives. Mimi renewed it after she and Tim went there one year, reliving childhood or something. I keep hoping we can get Josh and Cathy and the girls down some year soon, before I'm in my dotage. Shortly after we get back we'll go to Baltimore and be with Josh and Cathy and Morgan and Emma and Tegan for a bit.

Sumi--Cathy's pit bull that was then Josh's pit bull and the Morgan and Emma and Tegan's pit bull--and through much of that, Bern and my pit bull, won't be there. At a great age, Sumi died last week. The last 6 months she had to be carried downstairs to go to the bathroom. And she was the sweetest dog I've ever known. Even in her dotage, when she saw Bern and me she would be terribly animated and young again for a while.

We loved her deeply and mourn her greatly.

Which is not just an aside, but the glue of a family relationship. You become attached to your children's pets just as you become attached to your children's mates and your children's children.

I sometimes wonder: how can Josh and Mimi be that old? Which causes me to ponder 'how can I be this old?'



Time flies when you're having fun....

The Flora and Fauna of it all...

Our yards are viral with life these days.

Bern admitted to me today, after she had spent hours extracting a mock orange bush from the side yard, that she had too many plants.

"I never thought I'd say it," she said, her voice full of wonder and amusement. We are so surrounded by living things that I am sometimes washed over by life.

When I gaze at the panoply of plant life that surrounds us, I find it had to imagine that in 4 or 5 months it will all be covered by two feet of snow. But it will...I know that, having lived in New England now for over half of my life. It is that remarkable ying and yang that makes me not want to live anywhere else, ever.

My friends, GW and Eleanor, are moving to Costa Rica in a week or so. They are going to a land of constant late June. I give them traveling blessings but know I couldn't survive in a climate like that. I need the withering and dying of Autumn and the chill and death of Winter. That I need the resurrection of Spring and the lushness of Summer go without saying. But living always in late June--temperature 70-80 during the day and 60-70 at night might sound inviting in the depths of February, but there is no April without February. I love the turn of the seasons.

But nature is 'red in tooth and claw...and vines...."

We have a vine on our back deck that lives inside in the winter that has, amazingly, reached out to ensnare a limb of a Hemlock tree and the leaves of a Rhodendrum. I don't stand too close to it because it weirds me out and I imagine it wrapping around my throat and choking the life out of me. It also has the most incredible blossoms--blood red and seductive in their beauty--and it attracts hummingbirds, so what could be wrong with that except it could strangle me if I stood too close for too long.

A morning glory vine in the front yard wrestled down a yard long Lilly stalk to the ground. I imagined Bern's plants were turning on each other in some apocalyptic kind of endgame. I told Bern about it and this afternoon she freed the Lilly by unwinding the vine. The Lilly is standing up again, but I don't trust plants as much as I used to before I was so surrounded by them.

But this I know and know fair well, they will wither in the Fall and be covered by a couple of feet of snow in the Winter--only to return in Spring again. I like the life-cycle-ness of plants. That would never happen in Costa Rica. Plants live year round there.

That would make me very anxious since I don't completely trust them....

The insect from hell

I went out on the back porch and a huge insect like nothing I've ever seen, smashed into my glasses and fell near the dog, who immediately ran out into the darkness of the deck. (Knowing, better than me, it seems, that the insect was drawn by the porch light.)

I, on the other hand, stayed put and had this monstrous creature with four wings and about 5 inches long swirl around my head. Finally, it landed on the wall and I got the terrified dog to come in with the terrified man.

I went upstairs and tried to describe the whole ordeal to Bern, who didn't seem to think it was so big a deal, so I kept enhancing the story, relying on the dog to back me up, and before I was through, the mystery insect had scales, teeth, a two inch stinger and the mystic ability to read my mind.

Bern still wasn't impressed. But then, she isn't scared of moths either, though their little hairy bodies drive me to the edge of horror.

(I heard on radio today that people in Australia eat locusts--they call them flying prawns. There are places where the farm insects the way they farm fish because they are becoming a more important form of protein.)

Our daughter Mimi used to eat ball-bugs when she was small. I don't know their real name but when you touch them they roll up into a ball. 'Crunch, crunch' would be the sound of Mimi eating ball bugs she found beneath rocks.

That creature on the back porch is now morphed into a Pterodactyl in my mind. 'Crunch, crunch' would have been the sound of it eating me and the Puli.

Yet, Bern is not appreciative of my terror...or the dog's....

Death from the sky...

This morning an airplane, scheduled to land at Tweed/New Haven airport, instead crashed into two houses in East Haven killing as yet an unknown number but at least 3 and probably a 13 year old and 1 year old in one of the houses. The report on radio said, 'the children's mother survived....' Newscaster, you may think so but I guarantee that the woman she was yesterday most certainly 'did not survive', will never be the same, may not be able to get over this at all.

Death fell from the sky for those two suburban children. What are the odds? Why does it matter? The House, as always, won.

The next report, without missing a beat, was about Senator Ted Cruz calling the President 'dangerous'--I kid you not, right there on radio--and repeating his threat to shut down the government if the Affordable Health Care Act (passed by Congress, signed by the President, judged Constitutional by the Supreme Court) was not de-funded. As if keeping 30,000,000 Americans (it's more jarring to write it out than say 30 million) were a good reason to bring the government of the United States to a halt. Really, that's what Cruz wants to do--deny 30,000,000 Americans the health care the act gives them that they don't now have.

And two kids are dead in East Haven when Death fell from the sky.

Well, since it was a working class neighborhood of East Haven, those two kids might not have had health insurance. So Sen. Cruz now only has to deprive 29,999,998 Americans of health care. Who knows.

After that was a report on how many 'growth enhancing drugs' American farmers are giving to their animals--so much, in fact, that Europe, Russia and China are considering not importing American meat since all those folks don't want chickens and cows that were injected with the stuff Lance Armstrong and A-Rod took but in much higher doses. ( Well, I'm sure Lance had more than a chicken but not nearly as much as a cow.)

At least those two kids in that fireball in East Haven didn't grow up to die of disease caused by eating Growth Hormone or Genetically Altered food. They went quick and, as the radio guy said, quoting a neighbor, 'they didn't know what hit them.'

I'm always confused by the 'didn't know what hit them' argument that something was ok and even good about Death falling from the sky.

It still HIT THEM and they still died, it seems to me.

I almost hope they did know what hit them so the 13 year old could have picked up the baby and they could have held each other as they died.

I hope to God Ted Cruz eats stuff with Growth Hormone that has been Genetically Altered. He undoubtedly believes in all that. I stop much short of wishing a plane to fall on him.

I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Life is hard enough without being engulfed in a fireball when a plane crashes on you.

(God help us: the news should shut down and take a minute of silence after announcing the insanity of two children dying because a plane fell on them. We should be given some spiritual and psychic recovery time before we have to endure the asshole from Texas....)