Ghosts Of Christmas Peace.

“Each December the people of Boston gather to witness the annual lighting of the Christmas tree. Some of them probably do not know why the people of Halifax send a tree every year or even that it is a gift from Nova Scotia. No one needs to know the story behind a tree to admire its beauty. But the people of Halifax know where it comes from and they remember the story.” —From the frontispiece with an illustration of Halifax Harbour in the award-winning book Curse of the Narrows, The Halifax Explosion 1917, by Laura M. Mac Donald. Mac Donald began researching and writing this book, about her hometown of Halifax, after emigrating from Toronto to New York City. While waiting for her green card and deciding that perhaps another book about the Halifax Explosion did not need to be written, Mac Donald experienced in person the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York City—“I watched in incredulity as so many of the details I’d just researched repeated themselves.”

Mac Donald’s book, and my excursions with my husband and my daughter last summer through Nova Scotia, affected me deeply.

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There is a display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax of a child’s collection of pocket possessions. The collection includes a small, bouncy ball toy, made of translucent rubber the color of tumbled, light-green sea glass. There is also a stainless steel hair comb. There is an eraser, the corners rounded and worn away. And there are three wooden pencils—two yellow, one green—sharpened down to about two and a half inches each, with hand-carved leaded points. The soft wood on the end of one pencil still bears imprints from the child’s habit for gnawing on the pencil, perhaps while thinking, or feeling bored, or daydreaming.

The child was killed in the Halifax Explosion of December 6th, 1917, before enjoying another day of lessons and play at St. Joseph’s School where, it seems to me, no part of a pencil or an eraser ever went to waste, hair was kept neatly groomed, and bouncy ball toys might have been taken away by a stern nun from time to time.

This death, as far as I know, was never labeled collateral damage or an accident of friendly fire. Though, the way I see things, it was a little bit of both combined with too much innocent victim of the most devastating, man-made explosion ever to rip through wartime history prior to the dawn of the Atomic Age. (After that, the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki usurped the Halifax Explosion for biggest and most destructive.)

The Halifax Explosion happened during World War I. It was an event of war that resulted in casualties and lifelong trauma for civilian citizens on North American soil. Like a lot of legendary war stories, the story of the Halifax Explosion is a tragic tale of unfathomable human recklessness tangled up with inspiring examples of humanitarian courage, comfort, and care.

The setting for this war story was Halifax Harbour, a place of prosperity due to its position as a significant port for naval warfare operations in North America. Through the harbour’s particularly tight passage, known as The Narrows, sailed ships in the business of organizing convoys to deliver munitions, supplies, and soldiers to the battlefields of Europe. One such ship, the French ship Mont-Blanc, carried a load of munitions so lavish and volatile that her cargo holds were secured by copper nails to prevent sparks—a detail as useful as designing a place to keep a bucket of water in the cargo hold of the Enola Gay, in case her infamous cargo blew too soon.

What was aboard the Mont-Blanc? 2,300 tons of picric acid. 250 tons of TNT. 62 tons of guns cotton. And 246 tons of high-octane fuel benzole, stored in barrels on the deck. She had sailed to Halifax from Gravesend, NY and was entering The Narrows at the same time the Norwegian ship, SS Imo, was leaving.

The SS Imo carried no cargo. She was sailing for New York to acquire emergency relief supplies to aid civilians in war-ravaged Belgium.

On the morning of December 6, 1917, the two ships collided as they tried to pass each other in The Narrows. Metal hulls ground together igniting sparks. Fire erupted and an oily, black cloud arose, drawing the attention of onlookers.

The residents of Halifax watched from windows at home, at businesses, and at schools. Mont-Blanc’s crew immediately abandoned ship, shouting out desperate warnings in French, but no one could hear them or understand what they were saying.

Mont-Blanc drifted toward the shores of doomed Halifax and within twenty minutes, exploded.

Her catastrophic blast released the energy of 2.9 kilotons of TNT sending a shock wave through the Earth at twenty three times the speed of sound which could be felt well over one hundred miles away. (So says one website.) Shock waves rocketed in all directions, at the destructive speed of 3,000 feet per second, shattering windows sixty miles away. (So says another website.) And—at the moment of detonation—the temperature of the explosion exceeded 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The blast affected everything within almost two miles. It vaporized the waters of the harbour, resulting in a tsunami that roared forth to fill the void, surging sixty feet beyond the high water marks.

The citizens of Halifax thought sabateurs! German attack!

And fires raged throughout the city.

With night’s darkness, temperatures dropped to 16 degrees Fahrenheit.

Snow began to fall.

A bleak, bitter cold gripped the tortured city and did not set it free. Gale winds howled and the next day, a blizzard raged.

Temperatures plummeted to 20 degrees below zero.

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2,000 people lost their lives, each as divine as yours, as mine.

9,000 were injured, (many of them suffered eye injuries from flying glass), and 6,000 were left without shelter. Some were orphaned. Some were never found or identified, their pocket possessions—all that was left of their lives—never claimed by a loved one.

What’s in your pocket? What are the things you carry?

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The State of Massachusetts sent immediate and sustained aid to Halifax, dispatching a train loaded up with supplies and medical personnel as soon as news of the disaster reached Boston.

One year later, in 1918, the City of Halifax sent a Christmas tree to the city of Boston as a gesture of gratitude. Nova Scotia, in the spirit of good will and peace, memorialized this gesture in 1971 and began sending a tree to Boston every holiday season. For the people of Nova Scotia, it is considered a great honor to donate a tree from your own land to be sent to Boston Common.

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I never knew the detailed story behind the Christmas tree on Boston Common, though for so many years I have enjoyed admiring it. But after traveling through the resplendent otherworlds of Cape Breton Island and exploring the foodieville fun and history of Halifax this summer with my husband and my daughter, I read Curse of the Narrows—a book that caused me to cry over and over again.

Then, I showed up to join in with the people of Massachusetts and people traveling from Nova Scotia to celebrate the lighting of the memorial tree on Boston Common this holiday season. The ceremony was a festive evening of entertainment and remembrances with dignitaries from Halifax taking the stage next to dignitaries from Boston.

A strong police presence dominated the Boston Common throughout the festivities and I am sure I wasn’t the only one wondering if the crowd included any suspicious persons carrying suspicious backpacks or hiding suspicious firearms under winter coats. This is our new normal—certainly in places like Boston where a terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon stunned the city and the state and the world of peaceful sporting events.

I think that now, more than ever, maybe we do need to know the story of the tree on Boston Common, because it’s a story of war and peace and it has never been useful for any of us to just wish for Peace on Earth, once a year, from the comfort of our faith, our chosen communities, and our civilized countries. Places of peace are once again battlefields all over the world. We are, all of us, direct targets of new kinds of world wars.

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The writer and activist Natalia Ginzburg wrote of World War II in Italy: “There is no peace for the son of man…Each of us would dearly like to rest his head somewhere, to have a little warm, dry nest. But there is no peace for the son of man…all the certainties of the past have been snatched away from us, and faith has never, after all, been a place for sleeping.”

It’s true humankind has waged war since long before, and long after, Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was born. And the devastation at Halifax plus all the carnage of World War I on the battlefields of Europe, did not prevent World War II from happening. Indeed, weapons and ideologies of mass destruction grew more atrocious during World War II.

Yet I have experienced the graceful composure of my grandfather, a man who fought against depraved Japanese armies during World War II and was seriously injured, as he lived to see such tiny evidences of peace as those represented by the friendship of his great-grandchild, my daughter, with a classmate from Japan when she was in pre-school. When my daughter’s friend moved back to Japan, her family sent our family a holiday package with three hand-made ornaments bent from pipe cleaners into the simple shapes of a present, a candy cane, and a Christmas tree. This year, the ornaments inspired me to think of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was two years old when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Sadako did not escape the effects of the bomb’s radiation, even though she lived a mile away from the epicenter of the bomb, and she died of leukemia ten years later. She had hoped to save her life and send messages of peace to the world by honoring a Japanese legend that believes if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, your wishes will come true.

So I began to fold and bend pipe cleaners into Christmas trees this holiday season. I made them in different colors, representing the lights on the tree from Nova Scotia in Boston. My trees symbolize Peace on Earth and Good Will to All and I sent them, with a version of this blog post, to family and friends.

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I hope that people everywhere will begin to believe in doing the hard work of waging peace and, instead of joining war efforts, I hope people will join peace efforts.

From writer and activist Mahatma Gandhi: “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the Atomic Age—as in being able to remake ourselves.”

I have a wish that people will consider remaking themselves into intelligent, mindful activists ready to wage the struggles for peace. It can be as simple as beginning to write letters to elected officials. There are websites that will guide you through on how to do this. You might structure a letter around your own stories of peace. Or, you might have terrible stories of war. However it is you believe the laws of the nations of the world need to be established and/or changed in order to create a more peaceful world, put your beliefs in writing and send them to the people we’ve elected—and will be electing—to represent us. Maybe you have your own more proactive ideas for creating peace.

The work of creating peace is not futile.

Musician and activist Bono, of the Irish band U2, spoke about showing up to give a concert in Paris after this year’s terrorist attacks of November 13th: “How bizarre is it…that when we left Paris we went straight to Belfast and we found peace? We found hope. This was supposed to be an intractable problem. And this was a peace that was brutal. People had to really compromise to make this peace. When you get bleak about things and think, Gosh, is there an end to this? Yeah, there is, it just takes lots of work, lots of time. I was never a hippie—I’m punk rock, really. I was never into: ‘Let’s hold hands, and peace will come just because we’ll dream it into the world.’ No. Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world. But it can be done, I’m sure of that.”

***Boston Common, 2015***

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And a grand confetti shower over Boston and the Common after the lights on the tree started to sparkle.

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Views from our little house, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and the deck where I sat with tea and a notebook every morning.

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From my home to your home, I wish you Peace.

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Bah Freakin Humbug.

There won’t be any snow for Christmas where I live in America’s northeastern Currier and Ivesville. The grass is green and supple, flowers are blooming, and the birds are taking baths without chattering beaks.

For some of us, 2015 has been the best of years and the worst of years. Worst of all, best didn’t do such a great job of overcoming worst. Sometimes, worst is worst—maybe the worst—and even if you were to fill the cathedrals of the world with every bit of your best from one year, your worst might still hum a mournful wail over the happy-ending high notes we all hope to hit at year end.

And then what!

Well, 2015 was one of the worst years for me. But not the worst. It was, however, the worst year for too many of the people I know and too many of the people I don’t know all around the world.

There is one tried and true practice that, in my humbug opinion, never fails to create notes of grace through times of troubles. It is simply this: Think of others.

Last night, my husband came home from work hauling his collection of briefcases and his guitar. “Why do you have your guitar?” I asked him. Had he auditioned for a rock band? Were we going to sell everything and return to the halcyon days of worry-free living in rent control with bold cockroaches? The days when happiness was stored one block away at the local dive, where we’d go to drink cheap beers and watch Larry Bird show Magic Johnson how Indiana comes to Boston to shoot hoops? Pre-craft-beer glory times! When we used to donate blood to the lab rats at Boston U Med every week or so—on our way to work—for twenty five bucks which was the price of one lift ticket at posh Sugarbush or a couple of lift tickets at wicked uber-rad Mad River Glen, and a whole season of tickets at forlorn Hogback, which is now just a ghost mountain.

No. My husband was not planning to abandon our troubles. We’ve been in this place before. Things have been worse for us. And they have been better. And so it goes. (Vonnegut, with a long face.) And it’s a wonderful thing to be married to a dude who is steady and sensible, because if he had loaded that guitar into our motorhome and stuffed every dollar we’ve ever earned into the overhead cabinets and said to me something like Baby we were born to run I would have clipped a blinking Rudolph nose above my Grinchy frown, harnessed myself to the front of that leviathan rig, and yanked it high into the sky. Far, far away. As far away as far can go.

“I took my guitar to a client meeting today,” my husband said. He told me who the clients were—a lovely couple he enjoys very much—and I remembered that 2015 hasn’t been the best of years for them. One of their daughters has been seriously ill and one grandchild continues to battle heroin addiction.

“What was it like when you brought your guitar in?” I asked.

“I didn’t bring it in right away,” my husband said. “I wanted to see how the meeting went first. But after we got through their financial reviews, I said I wanted to do something different for them and that I’d be right back. Then I went and got the guitar. I said that I was sorry they had had such a heart-breaking year and that I wanted to give them a few minutes to sit, relax, and listen to music.”

“Did you feel awkward?” I said.

“Kind of,” my husband said. “At first. But then, it was just—nice.”

He played: Do You See What I See? Silent Night. And, Angels We Have Heard on High for his clients. A private and intimate performance, unexpected, all in the comfort of their quiet home, on a warm winter’s evening. I know how sweetly beautiful he plays those songs and I am sure his clients were touched.

My husband asked how my day had been. “Well,” I said, “I cried a little bit in the morning. Talked to my sister. Talked to your sister. Went for a walk in the early evening. You know. Did some work. Cleaned up.”

He opened a beer. We split it. He took a hot dog out of the freezer and cooked it on the grill. We split the last scoops of ice cream.

Another night of beer and ice cream for dinner.

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One day, during the recent fall season, we had a lot of fun tailgating at a UConn football game. My husband’s favorite cousin and his wife joined us for a day of sun, fun, food, and Left, Right & Center—which my husband’s cousin rallied a large group of my daughter’s friends to play. It was a happy day when my husband’s cousin and his wife showed up to care about us during the most stressful days of our 2015, and everyone had a great time.

Only a few weeks later, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, this favorite cousin died unexpectedly the morning after his birthday—one of the best birthdays he had ever celebrated.

When we went to the funeral, the day after Thanksgiving, I wandered away from the crowd at the funeral home and found a small bookshelf in a private sitting area. The collection of books covered all kinds of grief, all kinds of death, all kinds of life’s challenges. I reached for Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning and settled down to read it. The book is filled with shocking passages about the depths of human cruelty, human suffering, and human triumph. There are pages and pages of wisdom, philosophy, psychology, and suggested life practices.

I don’t imagine it was a book my husband’s cousin ever read, though he was an avid reader. He just didn’t need such books. He was content with his life, including all of its attendant heartaches and joys, and accepted, without too much judgement, the ways of the world. All families need a cousin like him, more than they need books by people they will never know. We will always miss him, and will always be grateful to have his spirit to see us through.

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For those of us who are, no matter what, in need of books like Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning, and find ourselves often tormented during the holidays by the joys and sorrows of lives as layered as an enormous vat of figgy pudding prepared to feed the hordes of revelers whooshing around on the ice at Rockefeller Center, there are ways to enjoy navigating the emotional minefields of Christmastime.

Of course there are.

First of all, take your family and friends and Internet bloggers up on some of those out-of-the-ordinary suggestions for holiday-season entertainment. My sister recommended my husband and I go see “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” during a visit to New York City. Neither of us had read the book. We woke up early on a Saturday morning, dressed up, drove a fast three hours to our favorite cheap (but nice enough!) hotel in Long Island City, Queens, (written about in my first blog post when 2015 was just getting underway), took the 7 Train directly to the theater district and settled in for a matinee performance. We thoroughly enjoyed the inventive and exciting play.

Afterwards, we let a pedicab rip us off for a thrilling ride through the insane crowds and tightly-packed vehicles of Times Square. (It was so warm out! We feared for our lives!)

We were on the way to the Morgan Library Museum, where we met our son and rushed through exhibits on Matisse and Hemingway. After that, we strolled in the tropical temps to the lounge at The Bowery Hotel for a quiet place to have drinks before dinner at Upstate Beer and Oyster Bar in the East Village—a place recommended by one of our son’s good friends. We ordered oysters, sea urchin, smoked trout, crab cakes, clams and fettucine, all served small-plate style in an intimate, dark space that’s lucious with crazy-loud happy eaters.

Another fun place for drinks with festive decorations: Pete’s Tavern near Gramercy Park. O Henry lived nearby, but did not pen The Gift of the Magi while drinking craft beers at Pete’s.

Another suggestion: Listen to Patrick Stewart’s A Christmas Carol on the CD player in your car if you have to drive long distances alone. So superb.

Another suggestion: Bake cookies that require a lot of time and effort. Lose yourself in the long moments required to make a big mess and clean it up. Don’t get all Martha Stewart about how to decorate them. Hand the job over to the kids. Even if they’re big kids.

And the old stand-bys: WALK through the woods! Early mornings and late afternoons are lovely. Later, drive around and look at Christmas lights. Professional displays are nice:

But neighborhoods are the best, by far. Here’s the best band of 2015, Teeth People, out and about enjoying the bling of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

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And now for some of my favorite words from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The book is so good.

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

“Christmas a humbug, Uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that I’m sure.”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

“Bah! Humbug!”

“Don’t be cross, Uncle!” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God Bless it!”

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I say, God Bless the Keeping of Christmas, too, however it is you choose to do it. Keeping Christmas has always done me good and sustained me, even when I’ve been called upon to bear the worst of years. And if this has been a worst of years for you, I am thinking of you, and hoping the best of Christmas will find you, and see you through.

From a painting given to me by my daughter one Christmas.

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Twenty Fun.

Do you remember when you believed reindeer could fly?

Close your eyes.

It’s nighttime.

The night is so big. The cold is so warm. The snow falls and falls and falls.

Every snowflake is smiling.

The reindeer appear in rainbowed arcs from another side of the nighttime, flying forth on a trail of shining stars that look as though they are bursting and popping, yet they are as quiet as the gentle swish of a salamander’s tail.

The reindeer land in your backyard. Their coats of brown fur glisten in moonshine that smells like fresh honey and tastes like bright yellow.

Shiny-belled harnesses ring—winter’s own music—a thousand joyful nightingales singing Christmas carols.

Majestic antlers reach almost as high as your bedroom window where you are watching from the second floor of your home. Everyone else is fast asleep.

The reindeer stamp their hooves deep into the snow, jingle their bells, and—looking up—find you in your bedroom window, believing.

This gives them the courage to keep flying.

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(Photo by Aunt Heidi.)

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Today is my daughter’s 21st birthday. Twenty Fun she says.

She was born to forever honor and keep special the expansive worlds of childhood play and creativity. She wrote her first manifesto as a toddler and has never doubted her words and all they can accomplish:

She believes reindeer can fly and she believes in you, too. If you’re having trouble finding your wings, or calming an aching heart, she might cook you an unforgettable meal or leave a note under your pillow or on your desk.

She’ll pick a posy of wildflowers and arrange them just so in a paper cup and place them in the middle of a picnic table. She’ll bring you a butterfly.

She’ll catch the biggest fish for you. Or the cutest creature colored orange.

She’ll hike all day in the rain with you. She’ll bake for you. She’ll paint hearts and rainbows.

She cheers for the home teams. She plays Christmas carols on the piano. She plays love songs, too, with her boyfriend.

She’ll play board games and watch Disney movies, over and over again until everyone feels like going out for a night on the town, flying around, dressed in princess garb or mermaid skirts or cool boots. Get on your boots. Cowgirl boots. Hunting boots. Ski boots. Big city girl boots.

The spirit of party reigns in my daughter’s world. In fact, she has taught me that Party Spirit is the best remedy for the doldrums and the sads. It’s also a necessary component to most every day. When she was a toddler, she would awaken on random days and declare Dress Days. We had to wear dresses all day. You could choose different dresses throughout the day. I was a tomboy mother without dresses in my closet, but I became one fair lady on Dress Days.

The rules for Dress Day were simple. Wear what you want, in whatever combinations you like, all the way down to your shoes, which don’t have to go on a “right” foot.

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My daughter taught me to Fling a Little Festive into Everything You Do.

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Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her essay, “Beginnings,” that the impulse to create is utterly mysterious. “…’art’—originates in play…it remains forever, in its deepest impulse…a celebration of the (child’s?) imagination…”

Oates headlines her essay with a quote from Andre Gide: “I will maintain that the artist needs only this; a special world of which he alone has the key.”

And Charles Baudelaire said: “Genius is no more than childhood captured at will.”

—And one day, recently, when I asked my daughter if she had had a happy childhood, she said:

“I don’t know. It’s not over yet.”

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Is your childhood over yet? Have you stopped believing reindeer can fly?

Do you love your birthday?

—Or is age something that takes you further and further away from your youth and its attendant genius, instead of delivering you deeper and deeper into those special worlds where only your heart can unlock your own unique perspectives on what’s so wonderful about being alive—and then share them with the rest of us.

My daughter loves her birthday. It’s the one day every year when the party is about the arrival of her world into this world.

Everyone has a birthday. It’s a day better than New Year’s Day for beginnings and celebrations and the sharing of you with all of us.

Do you remember when your lungs drank up that first breath of air before you were plunged into childhood?

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath.

“There is a fountain of youth: It’s your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” Sophia Loren

Let the breath go. Follow it!

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Happy Twenty Fun to my daughter! Drink up that first breath again. Keep drinking that energy. Keep playing. Keep sharing the creative genius of your youth.

It never gets old!

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Giving Thanks.

“Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.”

This quote, by W. J. Cameron, showed up in my Friends of Acadia newsletter. I agree that giving thanks is probably the best action we can take to honor our own place in the world and to be mindful of all the people and all the serendipitous good fortunes—here now, happening now and/or gone before, happening in the past—that have made our lives the best they can be and inspired us to continue to live joyful lives with meaning and purpose.

Thanksgiving is the one day of rest created for and celebrated by all. It is a day of rest with the kind of work, thanksgiving, that is good for everyone’s well-being.

As a sincere expression of my gratitude toward the readers who read my blog this year, I decided to use the Thanksgiving potatoes to make a set of letters with which to create a note of happiness.

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You, Reader, are special to me. I think about you, with good cheer, when I am at work in my “blog studio” practicing how to write. I care very much about how my art is cyber-delivered into, and cyber-received by, the whole wide world.

Thank you for visiting my site this year. I hope you enjoy celebrating the heartwarming spirit of giving thanks with all of your favorite families and friends. And I hope the day’s work returns to you all varieties of heartwarming goodness.

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This ephemeral work of art, created especially for my readers, is bordered with leaves I saved from my Sweetbay Magnolia Tree. It measures seven and a half feet by three and a half feet. The quote is from Percy Bysshe Shelley. I saw the quote painted into the elaborate crown molding of a grand room, opening onto a grand stone porch, overlooking America’s Hudson River Valley.

French Entrance. French Exit.

Come and sit in a Parisian cafe with your friends close to me. I want to write, but writing is a lonely way of making art and when I sit near other people, I feel some comfort. I want to sort things out on the page, entering and exiting trains of thought. If you ask the waiter to take a drink over to me, I know you won’t mind how I keep at my work. My smile for you is one of deep gratitude. And if we are blown to bits, we will agree it was only because we practiced and believed in, freely-chosen, broadly encompassing, and generously-shared education.

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At dusk a week ago, in my peaceful garden far from Paris, a lingering leaf on the Japanese Snowbell Tree partied on like a plump house wren—the silhouette of its petiole became the distinct image of a delicate beak aimed for the heavens, ready to sing, and the curved edges of the leaf’s blade had softened into smoothed feathers. One last pear dangled lopsided at the top of the Pear Tree with a squirrel bite carved into it. Other flowers, leaves, twigs, fruits, and birds had already made their French exits—sparing my feelings, avoiding the unpleasantries of long goodbyes—by falling, blowing away, withering, packing up and moving on when I wasn’t watching.

The surface waters of the old garden pond rippled in slow motion, like the calm beat of a heart enchanted by poetry.

It was the news of more terrorist attacks—this time throughout the city of Paris—that had caused me to stop and appreciate the peacefulness surrounding me. I sought consolation, too, in Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, his book of prose poetry that never seems to get shelved in our house. Some days, Baudelaire’s writings make perfect sense to me and when that happens it is as though I have found a companion who will sit and write with me in a cafe on the streets of Paris for a long, long time. We drink and smoke and talk of how depraved humanity is. After we agree that mankind is the most evil beast, Baudelaire convinces me we must get more and more drunk, Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk. Which we do until our amplified laughter is shattered by dark discussions of our own deplorable and habitually sinful shortcomings. When it’s time for us to take our broken hearts home, or into bed together, we leave our small table crammed with empty glasses, smoldering cigarettes, and torn apart journals. (Though I save every page of what CB has abandoned.) And then we go, hoping our chairs will stay warm for anyone else who needs to sit and think and talk and write as you please. In Paris.

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While gazing at what was left of my gardens and thumbing through Paris Spleen, I was also expecting the arrival of five boys in a rock band from Brooklyn. The boys (one of them my son) had a scheduled gig nearby the next day. Their journey would become a many-houred, several-moving-parts adventure beginning in Manhattan, with a detour to New Jersey before they circled north again. All of it led to one kitchen—mine—in New England’s safe and sound countryside, in the deep hours of a seasonably cold November night.

Dinner was set for midnight, and that’s when the boys showed up.

We decompressed over a candlelit repast that began with oysters before the next course was served, which was an offering of what I called jampalaeya—chicken, sausage, and fresh mussels from Prince Edward Island afloat in a spiced-up tomato broth with rice. The drinking started with beer and wine and advanced to whiskey.

All of us tapped our glasses together. “To Paris!”

And then I said that it will never be enough for me to believe we will always have Paris which, if you’ve ever watched the movie Casablanca, was just a remark murmured between lovers in homage to the salve of fond memories.

The truth is, we might not always have Paris. Furthermore, any memories we have of our lovely selves in Paris will never serve to console us if we were to lose Paris.

The world cannot do without Paris.

Paris is not just about food and wine and champagne and hand-wrought loaves of bread and cute dogs prancing through a city with the most wonderful twinkling lights!

Paris is about the civilized world. And the civilized world includes any of us who have ever had our hearts broken, shredded, ravaged, persecuted, oppressed, and/or disregarded while, at the same time, we chose to madly believe that in the same world where endless evils and sadnesses exist, we will never tire of figuring out how to love and be loved.

We will always need Paris!

I notified the boys in the band—because I am a woman and I am a mother—that they cannot make a French exit in this life. They all have to do something, throughout their lives, to tip the heart of humankind toward its good side. They must stay at the party and never leave without saying goodbye. They can only say goodbye with a kiss to each side on the face of the good gods, one for gratitude and one for promises.

Yes, for sure. They agreed.

The most obvious thing everyone can do to tip the heart of humankind toward its good side, is to become educated.

I am standing up on a chair now, swinging my arms around in the air, trying to type. Education is under fire in my own country. We aren’t so sure how important it is to have a Liberal Arts education. We can’t seem to link such an education to making big bucks. When my son showed up for his Liberal Arts education at Bard College, the first thing they did was ask whether or not he was registered to vote. He was not yet 18. No problem, they said, if you’ll be 18 before the next election, we can register you now. Bard College makes a direct link to the crucial importance of becoming liberally educated, learning how to think, and employing your knowledge and skills to become a responsible citizen and voter. Education in the Liberal Arts is the most important process we have for preserving and continuing to create a functional and fair democratic society. Is it too expensive to become educated? We spend an enormous amount of money on weapons and jails to fight the consequences of ignorance, hate, and poverty. The value of education can’t be argued away. Furthermore, one doesn’t have to go to college for a Liberal Arts education. We are a nation that takes great pride in our free libraries. It’s hard to find a cafe in America that will allow you to sit and think and read and write for as long as you want, but not so hard to find a library.

We are, whether we like or not, a part of the battles to create a more peaceful world. It means we must do the hard work of learning how to think and how to become aware. We must continually go through the growing pains of intellectual evolution. We have to read—including work we don’t want to read. We have to look at art—including art we don’t get. We have to listen to music—including music we’re unfamiliar with.

We ought to walk through gardens. Admire architecture. Explore history. In our travels, it’s important to sit and talk to people we don’t know.

Most of all, we have to learn to listen.

********

At 1:30 AM, apres dinner and discussions with the boys in the band, I brew a pot of coffee. The boys charge up, then file out to the barn to begin rehearsing for their gig. They are all tired. It has been a long week of day jobs colliding with night jobs as artists and a lot of driving. Sleep is what they want most of all. But it has also been a week of their new record release called, “Let’s Go!”

On the release is a song that made me dance the first time I heard it in a vast warehouse-district, underground bar in Bushwick. Syrian landlords keep the urban campfires burning, on the sidewalk across the street. Artists come and go, free to perform and put their art out there.

The song is called French Entrance and it’s about coming out as a gay man. It makes one think of what it might be like to be a man suffering about his own real and true and normal self and how simple it would be for him to be able to tell a friend and have the friend say it’s okay fuck the people who can’t deal with it. The drumming and percussion pound out intricate rhythms of harmonious chaos with bass beats and guitar strumming that culminate in one fine blend of celebratory desperation. The vocals are casually Lou Reedish. Sexy casual. The song is a call to arms and legs and jumping up and down bodies—it’s time to get up and start dancing about the people at work making the world a place where everyone can live their own best life.

We can never settle ourselves into lives of comfort and complacency.

Abdellah Taia, an openly gay Arab writer and filmmaker, wrote an editorial for the New York Times after the attacks in Paris entitled, “Is Any Place Safe?” He writes of how much he needs Paris, yet how concerned he is for the future of the city:

“I came to Paris 16 years ago as a young, gay Muslim…”

“I made my life in Paris because I believe in its values: rationalist, humanist, universalist…”

“I left Morocco as a young and desperate gay man. In Paris, I found a place where I could fight for myself and for my dreams. But I know now that nowhere is totally free or safe.”

“But Paris is a city that has, in losing its borders, lost certain values as well. The neglect of a segment of our youth (especially those of Maghrebi origin, from countries like Morocco or Algeria) is an undeniable reality. This neglect has produced an environment conducive to radicalization, joyous nihilism and, now, carnage. Racist attitudes, ever more frequently espoused by certain politicians and intellectuals, have become the stuff of daily life.”

After I read Taia’s editorial, I was inspired to read something else he wrote: Homosexuality Explained to My Mother. The essay is completely astounding and grew my brain into new evolutionary worlds.

After listening to the new song by Teeth People called French Entrance, I resolved to move a book on my list of “must reads” to a more urgent position: Jean Genet’s A Thief’s Journal.

I do these things because I want to think about and learn about and try to understand the ways we might be neglecting youth in this world and why they seek to join communities of evil or become increasingly evil as lone gunmen throughout the world, especially in my own country.

********

We will, indeed, always need Paris. It is a city where brave artists and freedom fighters (like the French Resistance during World War II) have found, and continue to find, their voices. I am grateful to them. The legacy of their work changes how I perceive the world and inspires me to join the battles for love and peace.

In that way, Paris keeps us alive through the darkest days of our lives. We are encouraged to get to work. To keep thinking and educating ourselves. To be brave and to Smash the Televisions. (Another great song on the new “Let’s Go!” record. The whole record is outstanding.)

********

Here’s a link to the new song by Teeth People called French Entrance. Promise that if you listen, and read the lyrics, you’ll never opt for the French exit when life asks you to tip the heart of humankind toward its good side. Actually—don’t wait to be asked. Get out there and start dancing.

https://teethpeople.bandcamp.com/track/french-entrance

Here is a picture of one last leaf playing the part of a house wren on the Snowbell Tree in my garden:

********

Doing Lines in NYC.

Walking to Manhattan Island, sun setting

over the Brooklyn Bridge west

then back again, night rising

over the Brooklyn Bridge east

suspended in loud skyways

afloat with turbulent tides

never becoming the future

never settling the past

splashing uptown and downtown

east and west

dropping

dumbstruck

down to the bedrock where a gamble feels like a sure bet

and shoots out a line from one gothic tower to another

anchors it

reads it, sings it, speaks it

takes it striding into the tangled tension of lives from everywhere and all times

sniffing oooh and ah and

why and oh no and I give up and I believe and—

Let’s just kiss.

Let’s kiss like the bridge is falling down!

Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh Yes!

********

My favorite shot coming up next. Birds on a wire. City on the edge.

Followed by lines from the not-so-long-ago Bard of Brooklyn.

And Witch Hazel flowers I picked fresh just for you. They bloom in the November sun of my gardens.

Don’t jump.

********

The Monster Inside That Will Never Be Crushed.

Today is my son’s birthday. He’s twenty four. He was, from the very beginning, a double-black-diamond child to parent. (Experts Only!) At birth, his forehead was marked with a bright yellow triangle. (Caution!) And when the hospital presented him to us, he came swaddled in a roped-off basinet labeled with a last-chance bailout. (Parent Area Boundary! Not Patrolled!)

Every morning when he was in high school—all four fucking ferocious years—I dragged my son from bed at least three times before he’d agree to wake up. After that, he would stand in the shower until fish in the Quabbin Reservoir cried uncle. Then he wasted 20-30 minutes arguing why anyone should have to wear shoes anywhere. I’d wrestle his shirttails into tucked-in positions while muttering a litany of ultimatums he never once regarded as threats to his life.

And then, we’d drive to school. I had already searched his backpack for contraband. I had already cleared my calendar for sure-to-come meetings with the Head of School, the Dean of Students, the Disciplinary Committee, and his advisor. And, best of all, I had already set aside some of his school work to read while enjoying a cup of tea.

A lot of my son’s artwork—his drawings, his writings, and his musical performances—ignited disciplinary discussions and punishments. The troubles began by third grade when he came out as a manic reader and writer, a manic car and truck freak, a manic artist and cartoonist, and a manic, multi-talented musician. He accepted himself as he was and that was that.

We took him to his first monster truck show when he was four.

Ten years later, as a 14-year-old sophomore in high school, he wrote an article for his school’s newspaper encouraging the elite community of his peers to consider attending MTU (Monster Truck University) instead of MIT. It was one of the few works of art that made it through to the public without the censors hauling him off to the gallows in the town square.

I still derive pleasure from reading my son’s school work. I saved everything. In honor of his birthday, here’s his monster truck story, just for fun.

********

An Ex-Monster Truck Racer Speaks By Anonymous

Few of the festering beings that populate the bubble we live in have ever been graced by the presence of an ominous, looming monster truck. I still remember that fateful day, back when I was six years old and went to my first monster truck show.

As a wee lad, I could actually walk under the yellow caution tape withholding the beastly, leviathan trucks from millions of screaming, frenzied spectators. I could easily sit myself in the massive, hollow rim of the truck’s tire. I remember the experience so vividly, how I felt like an unborn bear cub resting snugly deep within his mammoth mother’s womb. At that moment in time, the monster truck and I were one, and the entire future of my life was decided. Some people as adults still haven’t found their one true love, their one true calling, but I am proud to say I found mine sitting in the 66″ Terra Tire of a monster truck when I was seven years old.

When I was nine, I drew up blueprints for my own mini-scaled monster truck. I spent every waking hour of the summer of fourth grade drawing these plans, and, using only duct tape, some WD40, the wood from a grove of oak trees I chopped down, and some granite I mined from Mount Wachusett, I built my own little state-of-the-art monster truck and was soon terrorizing the neighborhood.

When I was twelve, I was driving the Bigfoot truck—(only the most infamous, the most revered of all monster trucks)—in the professional monster truck circuit, the USHRA (United States Hot Rod Association) Monster Truck Nationals. Unfortunately, in an incredible twist of fate, the truck I was driving blew out its right rear tire when I was driving over a few school buses in the finals of the competition. I lost the whole title, along with my entire life. I was shunned in school, publicly accosted by those millions of fervent monster truck fans—all of them let down by my loss—and I was almost exiled from my family.

That’s actually why I came to prep school under a different identity; I needed to escape the previous life I had ruined for myself.

I sometimes get lost within myself in history class and remember the good old days of my monster truck career; I can smell the pork rinds sizzling on the grills of the rednecks who attend the show. I can taste the fumes of nitrous oxide-charged gasoline that the engines guzzle. I can almost hear the almighty, godly roar from their tailpipes.

But those days are behind me now…

With that all being said, I ask you all to give monster trucks a second look, especially if you’ve always regarded them with ridicule and associated them with people who live in trailer parks and keep crocodiles for pets in their bathtubs. Check out the Speed Channel (channel 39 in the greater Boston area extended cable network) sporadically to see if a monster truck competition is on and I guarantee that you too will be captivated just as I was back when I was a wee lad. Monster trucks have greatly influenced the outcome of my life and made me the person I am today—I want to share the gift of monster trucks with you all.

********

Go ahead, walk past the caution tapes you have tied around your heart.

Excalibur!

Reptoid!

********

Before my son went off to kindergarten, I marveled at his drawings of cars and trucks.

“How do you know how to draw so well?” I would say. “I wish I could draw the way you do!”

And my son, taking my question to heart, would create “how to” drawings, with simple steps,

to help me (and anyone else) learn how to enjoy drawing cars and trucks!

By junior high, more and more elaborate trucks roared onto the pages of school notebooks.

We always liked to read and write together.

Happy Birthday to my son, a young man who has never abandoned his childhood passions.

“We’re all going to die, all of us.

What a circus!

That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t.

We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities,

we are eaten up by nothing.”

A quote from Charles Bukowski, an unruly artist my son introduced to me.

********

Herzog For Halloween Week. Do You Have A Soul?

One day, not too long ago, I posted feelings of love for a plant on Facebook. Here’s what I did. I wrote about the Montauk Daisy, (Nipponanthemum nipponicum), which grows in my dooryard and my gardens. I described the plant as a “happy late bloomer” thus identifying my own humanity with the plant and, furthermore, employing the plant’s bright white, daisy-like flowers as an arousal agent for human emotion.

This sentimental slash romantic behavior stirred up a cyberspace snake pit—that vale of venomous angst where contemporary culture gathers to unlock, and brutally judge, the mysteries of human existence. Before long I felt the sink of snarky fangs slicing through to my bones and calling me out—in the public theater of social media—for being a romanticized, sentimental dweeb. The pointy fangs punctured a few rowdy endorphins that flow like champagne bubbles through my blood whenever a shot of botanical bling makes my heart way too plump. Pop!

I considered that if I wanted to survive the bite and reduce the stings of humiliation, perhaps I ought to come up with a clever response or those fangs might sink as deep as the taproot on a bloom of winter depression. Alternatively, I could open a bottle of champagne and drink up. But a killing frost was in the forecast for New England and I still had more than 50 potted shrubs and perennials to settle into the soils of my pleasure grounds, aka My Gardens—the breeding environs, of course, for radical romanticism.

So instead of wrestling with snarky snakes, I escaped into the hours of the day’s late afternoon and went to work finding places in the garden for as many of the potted plants as I could. I also wrenched gnarly clumps of Lily of the Valley, Convallaria mojalis, out of the Earth for division and reinsertion into my little part of the Earth’s ecosystem. I did the polka with a nest of bumble bees, Bombus terrestris, while trying to place some Royal Ferns, Osmunda regalia, over those bumblers’ hideout. And when the setting sun lit up the colors of autumn on every growing thing wherever I looked, I halted my obsessive work and did my own kind of calling out:

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum!

(Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand, then a hundred more!)

Struck happy by a soulful rush of satisfaction with my own little world, I concluded there would be no rehab for my sentimentalism or my romanticism. I carry the propensities for mush from at least an 8-year-old self. She is such an awkward self, yet remains a dependable friend. I see her again, (the delirium of my labors has done it), and she is hiding under a tree, reading a book. She is most likely in love with the tree and is sure the tree loves her too.

The book my 8-year-old self is reading, (under a tree I have decided to remember as an apple tree that must have been planted by the folk hero John Chapman), is entitled George Washington Carver, A Great American. It’s about an American-born slave—traded as an infant for a horse—who conquers adversity to become a botanist, scientist, inventor, artist, and teacher. Carver also believed that flowers planted in the dooryard and bright colors painted on the interior of an otherwise dreary cabin, could lift the spirits. (Both of these practices have become life habits for me. I plant flowers in my dooryard and I paint the walls and doors and ceilings of my home with bright colors and cheerful pictures.) After my young self is done reading about George Washington Carver, she climbs into the tree. (Surely it must have been an apple tree. They were the best for climbing.)

I had discovered the kiddy-lit biography about George Washington Carver on the shelves of a Bookmobile that visited my Indiana neighborhood during summertime. In those days I’d wake up early on Tuesday mornings and leave home to wait for the Bookmobile. I’d press my butt up against the butts of every other kid crouched onto the stubby curb of our cul-de-sac, where the Bookmobile parked and stayed for a few morning hours. We all wanted to be first on board the big white van and although we’d come to attention and stand in line politely when the Bookmobile arrived, it was only because we’d already scraped each other’s grimy faces over the pavement, in the gladiator arena of that cul-de-sac, for curb positions.

The Bookmobile days marked a time in American history when every butt on every kid was small, and summer reading was a free-choice act, (there were no required summer reading lists where I lived), that led to the fulfillment of at least one unalienable right: the pursuit of happiness.

I remember how the interior of the Bookmobile smelled as sweet as a Garden of Eden.

It was not a snake pit. It was a quiet sanctuary.

Nobody bothered anybody else in that mobile monastery.

The librarian was nice to romantic dweebs.

********

Alone at home, later, after the day of the Facebook snake bite, I turn on the television. I click into the movie, Almost Famous, about a young kid who wants to write about rock music. There’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs (the legendary writer and critic) talking to his adolescent mentee, William, on the telephone. William is despairing about his life. Bangs breathes out a sobering declaration for William, but his voice drifts from TV land and fills the quiet chamber of my empty house:

“We. Are uncool,” he sighs.

William tells Lester Bangs how glad he is that Bangs is at home to take an SOS call.

Bangs smirks: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

The scene about “cool” in Almost Famous is a great one. It comes after William’s euphoric rise as a neophyte rock-and-roll journalist ends in profound heartbreak. And, let’s face it, if you’re home alone clicking into that scene—a scene featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the inimitable Lester Bangs—after examining your failures as a sentimentalist, you’re bound to experience a disturbing attack of dweeb doom, slamming like a rogue wave into your gut, and tossing you to the carpet into a pitiful heap of smoldering defeat.

I was so home alone listening to the character of Lester Bangs define cool on television, something I rarely watch, even though earlier in the evening I had gone out for a brief excursion. My excursion delivered me to a leftover bookstore because I wanted to buy Patti Smith’s newest book M Train. When I couldn’t find the book on any of the display tables, I asked a doe-eyed young woman standing behind the help desk about the book. The young woman had cool, long, blond hair. She wore cool boots. She had a cool scarf, cool jewelry, and cool make-up. Back when bookstores were cool, the people who worked in them could talk cool about books.

“Tell me the name of the book again?” The young woman said to me.

“M Train.”

“And tell me the author again?”

“Patti Smith.”

The young woman tapped her cool fingernails onto a computer, consulting cyberspace. She had cool painted fingernails. “It’s shelved in our music section,” she said.

We went to the music section.

“Tell me the author’s name once more,” she said.

“Smith. Patti Smith.”

I found the book. There were three copies.

“Here it is,” I said to her, “thanks for your help.”

The young woman told me she had never heard of Patti Smith.

Wow. I thought. That’s kind of cool.

********

Just about anyone can related to this line from the first pages of M Train: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (Word, Patti.)

And from Almost Famous I soon locked into another great line, delivered by the character of Lester Bangs, as acted out by Philip Seymour Hoffman, via the screenplay by Cameron Crowe:

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

I thought: Sharing. In cyberspace. It’s what we do nowadays: Cats. Dogs. Bunnies. Horses. Food. Art. Kids. Lovers. Boozy late nights. Landscapes. Good times. Flowers. Music. Articles. Events. Epic trips. Holidays. Crafts. Births. Deaths. Illnesses. Fund raisers. Videos. Political bullshit. Tricks. Deep thoughts. Rants. Raves. Blog posts. Selfies.

********

Later, later, later into the night, I exchanged some text messages with my son about Werner Herzog, the filmmaker. My son told me to check out Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the Chauvet Cave in France which contains the oldest known paintings created by human beings.

So I did.

It’s a romantic film. You might not believe in the human soul or the soul of flowers. You might not even be sure if you have a soul. Herzog will help you answer some of these questions. It is his goal to arouse your imaginings and seduce you into believing that about thirty-two thousand years ago, something magnificent happened in the history of evolution: The awakening of the modern human soul.

So since it’s Halloween week, why not watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams and consider the human soul? (It’s easy to watch online.) The music, composed and performed by Ernst Reijseger on cello with Harmen Fraanje on piano and the voices of the Kettwiger Bach-Ensemble, will evoke the hauntings of a Poe short story, the sleeping quarters of a dark, damp, and cold medieval cathedral, and the conjuring of the human soul from the great beyond!

Let Herzog guide you into the Chauvet Cave.

Allow your imagination to become unleashed. Free your rational mind.

You will find yourself in the spirit world—where trees can speak, man can become an animal, an animal can become a man, and the spirit world controls the hand of the artist.

You will believe the walls of the cave can talk, while killing you softly if you linger too long.

You will think of leaving this life to enter the world of the spirits and you will not doubt that the spirits exit their world to exist in ours. Indeed, even the scientific minds that have laser scanned every nook and cranny of the Chauvet Cave have admitted to being overcome by irrational feelings of “eyes upon us” when they have been inside the cave—eyes from humankind that lived more than thirty thousand years ago. And perhaps never died. (A chilling historical point of reference: The last glaciers melted away just twelve thousand years ago.)

As Herzog guides the viewer on a strange pilgrimage into the lives of humans so vastly long gone, he asks: Did they dream? Did they cry at night? What were their hopes, their families?

The ending became, for me, deeply unsettling and spooky. I felt the familiar ghosts of romanticism and sentimentalism wrapping their arms around my shoulders and taking control of my hands and my heart, growing my soul.

For many viewers, the ending won’t be unsettling or spooky at all. They’ll think it’s mushy.

The film is only spooky, and wonderful, if you have a soul.

********

Where is God?

*****

God did not make the earthquake happen.

He does not hand out suffering.

He does not answer prayers.

He doesn’t choose individual people to be the recipients of good fortune.

He doesn’t single out or mark groups of people to become victims of prejudice, racism, sexism, genocide, slavery, oppression, murder, poverty, illness, misfortune, personal tragedy, accidents, natural disasters.

God does not test us.

He doesn’t give the strongest people the most difficult challenges.

God does not talk to us.

What is God? Is God real?

*****

Intro to Philosophy. College. Up on the chalkboard:

Words exists. God is a word. God exists.

Teacher to class: “So. After reading this. What do you think? Have I proven the existence of God? Does God exist?”

Classroom entirely silent.

I raised my hand: “Yes. You have proven the existence of God. As a word.”

*****

Nun, years ago, at local Catholic school, in a conversation with me about whether or not I should enroll my young son: “You must ask God. He will give you an answer.”

I didn’t bother to tell her God doesn’t talk to me.

I decided I didn’t want to send my son to a school that might teach him to believe that if you asked God for something, you would get your answer, or your wish, or your great accomplishment, or your magical miracle, or what you’ve always been waiting for.

Life is not wonderful in that kind of way.

*****

The afore-written godstuff is only what I think, for now.

*****

The God I believe in…would never…

The God I believe in…is kind and loving…

The God I believe in…is joyful when we are joyful and suffers when we suffer…

The God I believe in…

*****

On this day in the history of my own life’s sufferings, my husband and I lost our second son. He was stillborn, full term.

The hospital gave me some things to keep. Pictures. A lock of his hair. The little knit cap they put on his head. The blanket he was wrapped in.

They also gave me a piece of paper, made to resemble something official. It was bordered with a stylized, document-type graphic and titled, “Certificate of Birth.” The rest of the paper read, “This is to acknowledge the life of — (Our second son’s name) — Born on 4/27/93 — Time 10:30 AM — Weight 7lbs. 3oz. — Length 21 inches.” At the bottom of the paper: “Unto us a child is born, a special child for a special reason. We don’t pretend to understand, only to accept.” Onto the paper were stamped, in black ink, our son’s footprints and handprints.

We didn’t understand what our son was and neither did our culture. The baby wasn’t really born—there was no birth certificate. And, officially, he didn’t really die, there was no death certificate. A holy person at the hospital blessed him. But the church wouldn’t hold a funeral.

*****

It wasn’t the first tragic thing that ever happened to me. But it was the experience that, as my husband says every year when we visit our son’s grave, “fucked us up.” It used to bother me when my husband would use that word at our baby’s grave.

“This is so fucked up. We were too young. This fucked us up.”

He was right. The suffering did fuck us up.

*****

The instant I understood that our son was dead, a terrifying doom strangled the life out of me. I knew my heart was so broken, it might not ever be healed. In the days, weeks, months, and years to follow, I would find myself balanced over crevasses descending into pits of desired surrender—the caves of Hell that promise to end all pain. When I fell in, sometimes I didn’t care if I ever climbed out.

I never looked at a homeless person the same way again. Many of them were me. Not everyone is able to survive the trials and tribulations of adversity.

I hated war more than ever. Each person killed in a war is someone else’s baby.

I feared the powers of natural disasters. Random, massive sufferings.

I snubbed my nose at people who believed they could entice the favors of the universe through carefully concocted thoughts, behaviors, and choices, or those that believed it was our fate to ride the waves of the universe no matter how they came crashing through our lives.

I had to teach myself to believe in a new kind of God, or accept that perhaps there was no God at all.

*****

I started to read a lot of books. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, spiritual, self-help.

We had a friend in those days, someone my husband worked with, who gave us a book that helped me. The friend was a small, peaceful gentleman. He dressed impeccably and kept himself cheerful. He was an intellect, had attended Deerfield Academy and Dartmouth, and he appreciated antiques, classical music, history, and the coastlines of New England. My husband was very fond of him and so was I.

He gave us the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, with a note that read, “This book helped me at a time of similar need. I hope it will help you.”

The book was a good turning point for me. Though written in simple language about something so complex it will never be understood, I found the writings by Harold S. Kushner to be useful.

I especially liked these ideas from the book: That the primary purpose of religion and belief in God is not so much to put people in touch with a God they can talk to, but to put them in touch with each other. That the purpose of prayer is not to make a request and desperately hope that God will grant what we want, but to become a part of a community of others willing to pray with us, so that we won’t feel isolated or abandoned—“prayer doesn’t help us find God, (because it is easy to find God everywhere); prayer helps us find each other.”

One passage from the book: “That wonderful storyteller Harry Golden makes this point in one of his stories. When he was young, he once asked his father, ‘If you don’t believe in God, why do you go to synagogue so regularly?’ His father answered, ‘Jews go to synagogue for all sorts of reasons. My friend Garfinkle, who is Orthodox, goes to talk to God. I go to talk to Garfinkle.'”

I am like Harry Golden’s father when it comes to showing up at a church.

Kushner’s book emphasizes that it is love, in this life, here and now—genuine, imperfect love—not God’s generosity in answered prayers, which heals human suffering.

He describes a contemporary play, J.B., written by Archibald MacLeish, which re-tells the story of Job—the world’s most classic biblical tale of suffering. At the end of the play, the search for fairness and reasoning and a just God in a world of random heartache is abandoned. The last lines of the play read:

The candles in churches are out,

The stars have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we’ll see by and by…

The main character, whose life has been an unending stream of personal tragedy, stops looking to God to save him and chooses, instead, to look inward and work hard on cultivating the available powers and healing resources of love.

*****

The good friend, and colleague of my husband, who gave us the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, did not escape more suffering in his life. In spite of the intentionally kind-hearted life he lived and the hard-work ethics he espoused, an unthinkable tragedy came to pass in the last years of his life. One of his sons, who had served in the Israeli Army, had been trained as a sniper. After his service, he went on to attend medical school. One day, he got into an argument with another man. A few days later, he killed the man.

I won’t ever forget the holiday season when our friend was enduring the anguish of his son’s criminal trial. He called to let us know that we would be unable to reach him for a couple of weeks. He knew his son was guilty and he also knew there was enough evidence to convict him. Our friend believed the law would hand over a just decision, and so, he could not bear to testify against his son whom he knew was already bound, most likely, to spend the rest of his life in jail. When called to the witness stand, our friend stood silent, in contempt of court. He was ordered to jail. His son went on to be punished with life in prison, no parole.

*****

There are so many beautiful people suffering in Nepal because of the random occurrence of a devastating earthquake. They don’t deserve this kind of suffering and for many of them, their lives have already been filled with more than anyone’s fair share of suffering. As soon as the earthquake stopped shifting and shearing the Earth to shreds, rain poured from the sky over the exposed survivors.

Why?

Where is God?

I am praying, not for God to stop the suffering, but for all of humanity to blow on the coals of their hearts.

It is easiest for me to believe that God created the heart and it’s the muscle we have, here and now, with big power.

As imperfect as we are, as imperfect as the world is, the miracle is always that we choose to live in spite of wanting to die. We choose to do the hard work.

We do it because we sense there is love, somewhere, to give and to receive.

I want to believe love is that powerful.

*****

While I was pregnant with our second son, so long ago, I prepared several packages of zinnia seeds to send out as birth announcements. After he died, I planted all of the seeds in a huge bed of soil in front of an old chicken coop on the property where we lived at the time.

I have kept the tradition of planting zinnias every year.

And every year, I photograph them as though I think they are more beautiful than they’ve ever been.

*****

Where is God?

God is everywhere.

Why do earthquakes happen?

Because Earth is an imperfect part of an imperfect universe.

So if God created Earth, God is not perfect?

Maybe He isn’t. Maybe none of us are, nor will any of us ever be, perfect.

God didn’t make everything perfect.

*****

The question becomes, as Harold Kushner leads us to consider:

Do we love God enough to forgive Him for not making everything perfect?

Or, maybe it is more comforting to choose to accept what we can’t understand about creation. Maybe there is no one God. We are on our own.

A sobering thought, but think of it. We have each other.

*****

“The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world.” Harold. S. Kushner

*****

Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.

In the year 1958, Katharine S. White, an amateur gardener, began to write a gardening column, Onward and Upward in the Garden. She was an editor at The New Yorker and she was married to E.B. White.

She also tended her own garden in Maine and nurtured a fun little hobby she was sure was not hers alone–the pleasurable escape of reading garden catalogues.

Thank goodness she had enough time left over in her life, in those days, to begin writing about what she read in the flimsy pages of the catalogues. She joined in with the community of quirky, and seriously devoted, garden-writing stylists whose work existed in an exclusive, sumptuous, and untrammeled green forum.

It didn’t hurt that the garden catalogues, composed with fantastical flower, fruit, and veggie pictures, were delivered though the U.S. mail at a time of the year when Katharine S. White was probably cold, tired of snow, and, at times, weary of her job as an editor with its attendant frustrations over the puzzling art of poetry.

E.B. White documented one of his wife’s earnest pleas, directed at poets, in his essay, Poetry, from his book One Man’s Meat:

“I wish poets could be clearer,” shouted my wife angrily from the next room. Hers is a universal longing. We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

White’s essay continues to ruminate about poetry. He injects a little humor: “I think Americans, perhaps more than any other people, are impressed by what they don’t understand and poets take advantage of this.” He also writes that he is jealous of poets and wishes, more than anything else, to be a poet.

Well, harumph to the days of sitting around dazed and confused about poetry, thumbs available for twiddling. Haha freakin harumph. How I long for them! I think Americans, nowadays, are impressed by how busy and preoccupied and stupendous their multiple electronic gadgets make them appear to be. Or, at least it started out that way. Now, now, they seem willfully seduced by all things glowing Google. They are so smitten, they claim they can’t help it. They’ve devoured every marshmallow of self-restraint on the researcher’s table and slept with every sexy plate of pasta tweeted by the Food Gurus. They are busier than Sheryl Sandberg leaning up against my front door, while giving birth, and running a meeting on her laptop, and having a happy marriage, and trying to sell me her book.

I think I am supposed to be feeling sorry for the busy people, because it’s not their fault. I watch them raise their syrupy eyes every now and then to make sure everyone else is wearing their favorite pair of fat busypants. Oooh. They’re so comfortable. The electronic wizards croon. I make a note to find out where I can purchase a pair.

But. The truth is. I drink alone.

Because there’s no one in the bar anymore. First, they took away the cigarettes. Then, they took away the band. They allowed phones on every table, computers too, and all other kinds of screens and toys that I am urged to swipe my fingers over. That’s gross.

I am drowning in mugs of beer gone stale because no one could sit still long enough to finish theirs.

God knows I am depending on Him to reserve a place in paradise for the poets and garden writers.

Because this hellish fad of busy buzzings is a damn bore. Or maybe I am just a big bore. And, I’m not even sure God exists or that the poets and gardeners will make it to His paradise if He does.

What if this is it?

I head for the woods.

*****

It’s springtime.

Upon the surface of the forest’s vernal pools floats the reflection of the cloud--an ugly crust of emails, downloaded photos, saved documents. I step in, sloshing about—sinking—getting all muddy and slicked over. It scares the salamanders, at work breeding the old-fashioned way, but ending up with extra toes, tails, and spots. And too many emails.

If you go to Starbucks, you can’t buy CD’s with your coffee anymore. I should have taken better care of mine. I have only been inside a Starbucks once in my life.

Someday, they’ll say we have to do everything we can to save the strange-spotted, toeful, double-tailed salamander. And the researchers will ask for donations to the Salve the Salamanders Project, which will fund safe, water-soluble forms of Xanax for vernal pools so the creatures can deal, gently, with all those emails, extra toes, tails, and spots.

I don’t understand literature or poetry. Or French. Or Russian. Or Chinese. Not even Spanish.

I don’t know how to use punctuation and I don’t know grammatical parts of speech. When I write, in English, which is the language of my youth, I am wriggling around, panting, laughing.

I will never catch up! I wasted my childhood playing, when I might-should-have-been reading and studying and obsessing over something I could do–and do like a champion–forever.

It snowed so much this winter, I wondered about the plants in my garden instead of my periods and commas and quotation marks.

The snow has melted and my Hellebores look wasted. They’re a colorless, dull black and they are limp–splayed flat out in the garden. But there’s some hope in there. The little green buds.

The Hellebores look like I feel because after I read about Starbuck’s, I read that the Apple watch will soon be strapped around the wrists of my countrymen. They will strap them around their chests and foreheads, too. Boomp, pa, boom. Boomp, pa, boom. Click. Click. Hummm.

What keeps you alive?

After a long walk in the woods, I stroll my garden. It looks like hell alright. There are cracked and dropped branches. Lots of prostrate, spent, plant debris begging me to bend over and get to work. A woodpile still needs to be stacked. It’s a security blanket. I’ll wrap myself up in that work on a day when I think about something else I read in the newspaper–that no one wants a garden anymore. It’s too much work and everyone is too busy. I know it’s true.

I only received three garden catalogues in the mail this year. I don’t want to look at them on line. I want to read them and hold them in my hands and smell them. Like my Weekly Reader back in grade school. Something fun, delivered. I want to dog-ear the pages that have all my dreams four-color-separated onto them.

*****

I’m going to wait for my Hellebores to get it together. But I saw some pictures in one garden catalogue that got me all two-stepping about ordering new ones. The pictures have been spread out across my desk for many days now. I’ve never ordered a plant nor seeds from any garden catalogue.

They look like so much fun! Next follows a picture of something I might buy from another catalogue I got from a place called Logee’s in Danielson, Connecticut. I took an excursion to their greenhouses in wintertime. It was like walking through the hollow of a tree, in a hidden forest, into a flowerscape of foliage and blooming weirdness. I felt like a bug, crawling around, smelling, dodging, getting lost, not caring if anything stepped on me or ate me.

What will happen if I grow this tropical freak-out in my New England garden! It will remind me of the first time I went to Hawaii. My children were so little. We didn’t allow electronic games in our household. Not much television, either.

My babies in Hawaii!

*****

Come May, my Hellebores will be thriving again. I will float them in crystal bowls filled with water.

*****

Katharine S. White’s garden writing included recommendations for hand-held, real books. She wrote about The World of the Japanese Garden, from Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art, by Loraine Kuck: “This unusual book is my nomination for the most beautiful of the big, expensive garden books…”

She goes on to make a claim about the book’s photographs: “Takeji Iwamiya is Japan’s leading color photographer and his color plates are bright and airy, or cool and dark, and all of them are haunting.”

I bought the book. Seduced by all things Eden–I can’t help it–I have already begun to swipe my tongue across the pages.

I’m going to order Elephant Ear, “Thai Giant”, Colocasia gigantic, too.

I have some seed packages and I hope to get more for Mother’s Day.

My green thumbs are twitching like crazy.

But I’m a garden geek.

No matter how busy I get,

I will always long to remain immersed,

in this poetry of confusion called life.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Literature

Ghosts Of Christmas Peace.

Bah Freakin Humbug.

Twenty Fun.

Giving Thanks.

French Entrance. French Exit.

Doing Lines in NYC.

The Monster Inside That Will Never Be Crushed.

Herzog For Halloween Week. Do You Have A Soul?

Where is God?

Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.