“By The Side of the Road”

The House by the Side of the Road
by Sam Walter Foss

“He was a friend to man, and lived
In a house by the side of the road.”
— Homer

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the place of their self-content;
There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran-
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man. –

(Sam Foss, 1858—1911, was a well-known poet in his day and a beloved Somerville resident.)

Aside from an upcoming weekend in New Hampshire with friends, my summer travels are over. So I, like Mr. Foss, will happily spend the remaining, warm days on the side of the road—or, rather, on my front porch or back yard. Grateful that my injured daughter’s on the mend, grateful for kind and loving friends, family and neighbors, grateful for peaches and summer squash and vine-ripened tomatoes, I shall be grateful for this time to be grateful.

Praise be.

Motherlove

[Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, summer of 2013*]

“Either your children are the centerpiece of your life or they’re not. And all the rest is commentary.”

I’d copied that quote so many years ago I can’t quite remember which New Yorker writer, quoting his wife, wrote it, nor know any more the name of his wife. But I do know this: For forty-four years, ever since the birth of my first daughter, that statement is me.

And yet it took a tiny, peppermint-striped, baby’s sunhat jammed into the chainlink fence to really, piercingly understand how true that is!

I’d been walking around Fresh Pond last evening, a reservoir for the city of Cambridge, when I’d spotted that sunhat. Although a popular and well-used wildlife preserve and nature walk, the actual pond is carefully cordoned off. Hence that chainlink fence.

I was there for the beauty and the solace of trees and sunflowered meadows and redwinged blackbirds and late-afternoon sunlight on water, having just gotten word that my grown daughter, who’d had been in a horrible bike accident on Saturday, had just gotten out of surgery. And that it went well.

So much to process as I walked: Lingering, still-heart-racing shock. (She lives and bikes in Connecticut; I’d been in Louisville, Kentucky when I’d heard the news.) Overwhelming gratitude that her sisters and her loving husband have been and are still so hands-on taking exquisite care of her. Relief the surgery, which took hours, went well. Anxiety. Worry. Sadness. A roiling, boiling stew.

And then, suddenly, I saw it, that sweet little hat, tucked into the fence because some baby had lost it and someone else had picked it up and carefully displayed it in the hope it would be found.

And motherlove just flooded me, primal, fundamental, incredibly powerful, central to who I am; the centerpiece of my life, indeed.

* This photo references a well-known children’s book re motherlove. Do you know which one?

Yearning for Light

Yesterday, with much help from my patient and ever-helpful husband, I moved my writing desk to the third floor—and away from the phone and the distractions of email and the Internet. (Yes. The draft I’m currently working on I’m writing by hand.) To further simulate a writing space where Jane Austen or George Sand might have composed, a brass, wind-up clock I’d bought at a yard sale sits on my desk, too, its gentle ticks calming me as I work.

My desk just fits in a little alcove under a skylight. So when I’m stuck—which happens every five minutes or so—my eyes travel upward to watch clouds or circling swallows or the wind move through the tops of trees across the street. At one such stuck moment yesterday, I noticed a tiny green bug hurtling itself against the skylight screen. The next stuckness; there that bug was, again. Preoccupied with my work—What does this character want? What’s motivating this character?—it took me a few such stucknesses to realize that the bug was trying to get out. Throwing itself against that screen again and again. Moving towards light.

As is, I realized, my character!

Thanks bug. Thanks, Light.

“The Greater Good”

For about a half-hour one night last week, a squall blew through Somerville. Drinking my coffee on the deck the next morning, my back yard littered with tree branches and leaves and a couple of sodden, plastic bags, I heard what I can only describe as a “whimper,” a plaintive and persistent cry coming from, I discovered, a baby cardinal sitting on a rock next to our tiny backyard pond. Could the high winds of the night before have blown this little creature, easy to identify by its downy crest, out of its nest? Quite possibly. And, it turned out, its brother or sister as well. Because, as I watched, two crested fledglings awkwardly moved to a low bush and then to our hammock and then to a higher bush and then to the top of our neighbor’s fence and then to a branch of the neighbor’s peach tree where a male cardinal suddenly appeared to feed one baby and then the other!

Yesterday morning, one of those fledglings zoomed right over my head and landed on the deck’s wrought-iron table—just two feet away from where I was again drinking my coffee.

“Hey, little guy,” I said. “You shouldn’t be there. You’re supposed to be afraid of me.” It didn’t move. So I stomped my foot as hard as I could. And away it flew.

Such a simple act; frightening an animal in order to teach it to be wary of humans. No big deal, right?

Yet this simple (and well-meaning) act makes me wonder about the not-so-simple decisions to do something difficult or unpleasant “for the greater good.” I think about decision-makers who must wrestle with much, much more difficult trade-offs, must weigh the needs of one person or group against those of others, decide who deserves the legislation, the research funding, the right to live; whatever.

(Sometimes I am just so grateful to just sit in my own backyard praising God, not being God!)

“Water is everything.”

Yesterday felt like the first, perfect summer day—probably because I spent it with my precious granddaughter. But also because it’s been rainy and/or gray around here for what seems like weeks, New England’s version of climate change.* Welcome, sunshine!

In mid-afternoon my granddaughter and I went to a shady park near my house where the older children ran in and out of jets of water sprayed by the park’s sunflower-shaped sprinklers. Not quite ready to join the delighted, screaming throng, my almost-two granddaughter hung back to quietly watch at my knee. A deep, male voice behind us, speaking with a middle-eastern accent, I’m guessing, commented on what he saw: “Water is everything.”

Yes, it is. And you—humans are 50 to 60% water—don’t have to be from a rain-parched part of the world to appreciate the depth of that man’s statement, do you!

Let’s let someone else from the Middle East have the last word: Rain righteousness, you heavens, let the skies above pour down; let the earth open to receive it, that it may bear fruit of salvation with righteousness in blossom at its side. [Isaiah 45:8]

* Bill McKibben re climate change in New England: “Rainfall is becoming steadily more intense — if we aren’t getting more rain in total, and we probably are; it is definitely coming in more concentrated bursts than we tend to deal with.”

Waiting

Outside my kitchen door, a fledgling robin sits on the deck railing. Downy, helpless, utterly quiet, the baby bird waits so quietly, so still, I would not have even seen it had not its red-breasted father—a flash of ochre on a gray day in a gray backyard—suddenly appeared. With a worm. No doubt aware of the potentially dangerous human just inches away, the father-child feeding is efficient and soundless. Off Dad flies. The fledging waits.

I, too, wait. “Final Draft 4” (?!) of Welling Up* sent off to my wise and thoughtful writing coach, told to take as much time as she needed, like that patient fledgling, I await her comments and suggestions with complete trust.

Inwardly, however, I am a mess. The focus of so much of my consciousness both awake and asleep, my creative and ever-plotting, ever-sifting brain now set on “Pause,” I am anxious and obsessive.

So I could learn a lot from that tiny, quiet creature.

Simply I am here. Simply snow falls. [Issa]

* For two thousand years, as the role of women shifts in Western culture, so does the story told of Mary Magdalene. Set in Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Welling Up offers another version of this evolving tale. My novel begins on Easter of 1997, ends at Christmas of that same year, and centers on the emerging love and trust between redhead Jewell McCormick, a formerly-homeless homecare worker, and her favorite client, Rocco Pellegrino, an elderly, wheelchair-bound Red Sox fan.

“Let It Go”*

This past Sunday I spent most of (mostly) silent worship praying over a pair of fundamental questions: Why is it so often true that death allows our species to let go of old grudges and hurts? And why can’t we, knowing we’re going to die, learn to let go beforehand?

More about the first question: We’ve all heard the same stories, right? Of estranged family members or former friends who, knowing that someone from their past they’d bitterly quarreled with is dying, show up after years of silence—and all is forgiven. We all know not to speak ill of the dead. We all have attended funerals and memorials and heard the glowing—and, yes, true—tributes to the deceased; these dearly departed’s less than admirable traits aren’t mentioned.

My discernment on Sunday was certainly helped by an early-on speaker referencing Isaac Penington’s wisdom:

Give over thine own willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know or to be any thing, and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee, and be in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.
~ Isaac Penington, 1616-1679

So I sank down.

Today, working on this post, I stumbled upon another Penington quote (that will definitely be taped on my computer Hall of Fame) that beautifully points the way towards letting go:

Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.

Amen.

* Although it is impossible for me to think or say these three little words without seeing my four-year-old granddaughter brilliantly lip-sinc to the Frozen song, I am trying to say something different here. I think.

Fill In the Blanks

Seated in Meeting this past Sunday, for the life of me I couldn’t remember the Bible passage taped on my computer! Yes, I remembered the “walk[ing] humbly” bit, yes, I remembered how happy I had been to find a version of Micah 6:8 that advised me “to love kindness” rather than “mercy” (Mercy feels patronizing to me, as in “I bequeath my mercy unto you, O Inferior One.”) but what was the verb in front of “justice”? Because, given the dire forum I’d just heard that morning re climate disruption and the urgent call to DO SOMETHING, “seeking justice” was pretty darned namby-pamby!

Nope. The verb had to be “Do.” Do justice. Now.

But, wait! Was that right? Did I remember the passage, ahem, correctly?

And it came to me that Micah had never taught at Harvard Divinity School. He probably didn’t and wouldn’t care if I substituted whatever verb seemed most apt. For me. To best speak to my condition; to best guide my life. (Just as I had searched for a translation of his admonition that said “love kindness.”)

And lo, “do” Is correct!

I will lift up mine eyes . . .

[Salt Lake City’s reservoir; Easter Sunday, 2014]

A few summers ago, the teenaged son and daughter of an old friend—who now lives in Wyoming—stayed with us for a couple of days to take a look at colleges, these young people’s first trip East. At breakfast one morning the teenaged son stepped out onto our deck: “There’s nothing to see but houses!” he complained. “Back yards. How can you stand it?” Other Beyond-Route 128 residents have told us the same thing. “I just felt so boxed in,” the Washington-state father of my son-in-law complained of his college years at Dartmouth.

Gotta say, a major joy when visiting my step-son and his family in Salt Lake City is just looking up! To push my grandson on a SLC park swing and gaze at a snow-capped Wasatch mountain is always a thrill. Since I’m clearly quite content to live exactly where I live, in sardine-can Somerville, I must not require these heady, Rockies glances to sustain me. Or even, as Psalm 121 goes on to say, to be reminded of “whence cometh my help.” (Sometimes the King James version is just what’s needed, right? Or is it just me?) But these ever-present mountain views never get old.

No, as thrilling as these sightings are, my experience of Divine Assistance is inward. I know this is a construct, I know I’ve been using English, both modern and early 17th century, to explore The Unexplorable, “the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1:9)

But it works for me.

“The Deepest Thing Inside”*

Last Saturday I took the 83 bus, which was running late, to an all-day workshop on restorative justice circles** in Cambridge. Seated across from me was an elderly, well-dressed African American man; he was also blind. When the bus approached the intersection of Beacon and Washington Streets, he pushed the call button indicating he wanted to get off. The bus maneuvered towards the bus stop but was stuck in heavy traffic. So I had plenty of time to notice a young, heavy-set African-American man in a denim jacket and jeans, clearly agitated, who paced the sidewalk maybe ten feet ahead of the bus. “What’s his story?,” I wondered. (And, yes, my Flight or Flight was definitely triggered—not bigtime—but I was a little wary, shall we say?)

When the bus stopped, as the blind man, guided by his cane, slowly and carefully walked from his seat and approached the opened bus door, the agitated man brightened and quickly moved to the left side of the door so that when the elderly man stepped off onto the curb, the young man gently and tenderly took his arm and the two began walking slowly towards the corner.

“Why don’t more people tell stories like that!” I wondered as the bus pulled away.

So I did.

Naomi Shihab Nye

* “Kindness”

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

**Because as my F/friend Lynn says: “If we’re going to change the criminal justice system we have to come up with an alternative.”

Ex Libris

A couple of weekends ago, my sibs, our respective spouses, and I began dismantling my parents’ last home, a somber task made almost joyful by everyone’s good will and good humor. Coming home Sunday afternoon, I looked around my own home as if my children were to tackle the same daunting task—and began to recycle piles of files and papers no one, not even me, could possibly find valuable or interesting.

I did unearth this treasure, however:

What is “the good news”? That true life, eternal life has been found — it is not something promised, it is already here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without subtraction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is the child of God — Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone — and as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else. [Frederich Nietzche, German philosopher, 1844-1900]

“What Nourishes You?”

[Before the guests arrived; Easter dinner, 2013]

This year, instead of giving up something for Lent, I’m adding something*: every day I try to do something—in a meaningful sort of way— that nourishes me.

To be honest, this is a cheat. I pretty much always get to live my days and years doing exactly what I love, what sustains me, what feels like I’m supposed to do! (Lucky, lucky me. Privileged, privileged me. ) But, hey. When, in years past, I gave up something for Lent—cookies or chocolate usually—I inevitably forgot. Or cheated. Or once, I’m ashamed to admit, when I was reluctant to parade my spiritual practices in a social setting, weazeled. So, as I eventually came to understand, for me, this giving up something for Lent business is really about humility. About the “now face to face” moments when I have to admit my crassness, my weaknesses, my inadequacies. So why not design a Lenten ritual that acknowledges such inadequacies!

But there’s a deeper meaning around my adding-not-denying Lenten ritual. The Jesus who told of “Good News” nourishes me. The Jesus who reminded me that it rains on the just and the unjust. Who gave all of us so many confusing and intriguing parables, The Beatitudes, the story of The Prodigal Son. That’s the Jesus whose life and teachings most speak to me—not the Jesus on the cross.

So why not acknowledge and celebrate that Jesus during Lent?

* A lovely idea I picked up from a F/friend.