Before It's Over

Before it's over I wanted to stick up for this month in which we still find ourselves. It was way back at November's start that I made a last-minute dash to the supermarket and passed a house entirely decorated for the glow-fest known as The Holidays.I have to admit my heart sank at the sight. “What about November?” I yelled, though I was totally alone in my car. What I meant was, "How did we go from Halloween’s wild and jokey motifs straight to reindeer and snowmen, without giving November her rightful moment on the stage?" Because November has a beauty all her own.Maybe it’s dark as you read this. If so, close your eyes and picture what lies just outside your window:

• The branches of the bare trees that make of the sky a span of leaded glass.
• The leaves that still do cling to the trees dressed now in muted shades of bronze and copper.
• The green of the grass that, somewhere in the last ten weeks, woke up from its heat-flattened August swoon and returned to the party, looking as fresh and springy as the grass of April.

Only it isn’t April. The grass knows it. We know it. Every living thing knows that one day soon we will wake to find that a hard frost has taken hold of the earth. Then, our long hibernation will have begun.And that’s fine. It’s fine that winter comes each year. It’s fine too that the soil locks down tight and the temperatures dip so low they make your very fillings.It's fine because when winter comes it will bring us winter joys. We will make more stews. We will gather around the hearth, even if that hearth is just one of those nice fat candles that burns for hours. Heck, if we haven’t forgotten how, maybe we will do what they used to call “entertaining” and ask some friends over for a visit.We have a good 14 weeks of such pleasures ahead, all of which will be ushered in by these bulbs and snowmen and reindeer that I was so surprised to see in the days just after Halloween.I am more ready to see them now, though, and for sure I am seeing more of them every day on my route to the grocer’s. It was just that it hurt to think of November’s muted beauty going uncelebrated.November feels to me like that quiet guest at a social gathering who draws no attention to herself and so maintains a silent presence at the edge of things. I guess I just kept thinking: if I were that guest, wouldn’t I want somebody to come over with a smile and greet me too?

On Death and Acceptance

Last month I wrote a column about the way we all used to tan so madly, all heedless of the consequences.  It was a humorous piece, or so I thought – until, this email about skin cancer arrived from a reader:“Parents and middle-aged adults can quip about how fun it was to tan, or do all the stupid things we did as kids and then ask coyly how we made it this far. The answer is that those who didn't make it aren't here to write an article.”Her words led me through many long corridors of regret and ended by bringing me to this memory: of an essay someone wrote for a class I once taught in which he described the final days of his robust 40-something son, who died of this disease, leaving his own young family to live on without him. The slightly shortened piece appears here below:

Our son’s death was a sledge-blow, but from the gentle way he told us of his diagnosis until those final days he lived his time with grace.He had no illusions about his illness. He recognized that this sudden ambush attack by a cancer of unknown origin had made his body a battleground.Doctors hoped he would have a few weeks of relative ease, and though his body lost the battle in a matter of days, his spirit remained undaunted. “It’s a good day to die,” he told us on one of those days. “‘I have just seen my beautiful place and I want to go there.’We knew he would, because anything he ever wanted he worked for, and he was working for this.There were important papers to be gotten together which would require his signature. If we worked all night, we saw that we just might have them ready. We asked him if he could hold on and he said, “I will wait.”On the road home that night, we received a call from his sister, herself an RN who had been in constant attendance. She said we should come back. Then our son insisted she hand him the phone  and his voice came clear through the night:“Mom. Dad. Don’t rush back. Don’t do any more work. We’ve said our good-byes. Remember when the children came in? Have you ever seen such a day?  I love them! And I know you love me. Good-bye!”We cried.Then his sister had the phone again.  We talked it over there in the dark and decided maybe it wasn’t yet ‘a good day to die.’ So we kept on, collected what we needed, and gave it to the lawyer who worked all night. The next morning we presented the papers to Scott. Propped up with pillows, he signed them with a barely legible signature.He and his mother talked for the last time. Then he smiled at her and said, ‘Night ‘night, Mom,’ reminding her that, as in childhood, he felt loved and unafraid as he went to sleep.When it was my turn, I told him I only wished I could have been as good a father as he was. He asked me to kiss him. As I bent down to his bed, he squeezed my hand, smiled, and said, ‘On the mouth, Dad.’Then something wonderful happened: As we held each other, a great clear aura of love filled the room. There seemed to be no furniture, nothing physical at all, and I saw that all the love he would have shown had he lived was now here, to be felt and used by us all. That love has already bound our family closer together, given us more understanding and more consideration. As John Lennon wrote, ‘All you need is love.’  Love is here for us all. Believe it , feel it, use it and add to it from your own stores.”

My thanks go here both to the wise reader who led me back to this story and to the brave grieving father who first set it down.

Alive & Talking

In the park, a leashed and bounding pup gave his master a pretty bad case of bark-burn when it suddenly shot toward a tree and climbed six feet straight up it. Then a fat worm, just pulled from the soil, provided two small birds with a dandy workout as they dribbled, and intercepted, and hip-checked each other for ownership.It was morning, when all such strivings seem called for. By evening though, most striving has ceased.It had surely ceased at the little pond to which I came at that day’s end as so many others had done, to quiet myself, and take a final sip of daylight and look out across the water.

• Here, two primary-school girls in bicycle helmets were skipping stones across that liquid dance-floor. There, a boy and a girl were fly-fishing. Their lines spooled out from their extended arms with a long graceful flick to land – splish! - on the pond’s burnished surface.
• A fleet of ducks set sail from shore, the high-necked mama leading her twelve small charges in such a straight line it looked like sewing, she the needle and they the stitches, all small and evenly spaced and perfectly following.
• A human mother arrived, a brightly-colored palette of tattoo painting both bare arms from shoulder to elbow. With her was a tiny child, the skirts of a pink sundress belling around her legs. She squatted in the easy way little kids can, and plucked up first duck feathers and then a discarded bobber from someone’s tackle box, all the while naming the world in loud unintelligible syllables and making the same approval-inviting, one-hand-up gesture that a magician makes at the completion of yet another astounding feat: Ta-Da!
• A beefy dude in his 30s appeared then, attended by a beefy child who marched up within six inches of this small magician. “Say hello to the little girl,” the dad advised.

“Hi, little girl.” the child said.“How old is he?” asked the young mother.“I’m fwee!” declared the stout child sternly, and then, turning to the baby, said, “What YOU got?”“It’s a bobber,” said the mother. “Like in fishing.”This registered not at all with the child, who decided to try again.“How old are you?” he shouted, as if to a deaf person.“She’ll be two in October.”This he also ignored.“Why don’t you talk?” he cried, now nose to nose with the toddler. “CAN'T YOU TALK?”I’m not sure  of course, but what I think the toddler was saying, with the deadpan look she gave to her mother, was something along the lines of, “Is this person insane?” Because of course she could talk, in a way that both she and her mother understood.Late that night I dreamed about my new grandbaby who, settled in my lap just post-nap, yawned sleepily, then alerted and brightly remarked, “Well, hello there!”“I didn’t think you babies could talk!” I exclaimed.“I didn’t think you big people could think,” she replied in perfect parody.I smile to recognize in that dream the day’s lesson repeated.Because don’t we all think at first that we’re the sole stars of the show, and that everyone else is just…. scene design? But then, after some time here, we see the truth: this bird, dog and duck; that worm and babe and trout are as alive and feeling as any one of us, whether at busy striving dawn or restful end of day.