Interesting Times

Full of disappointments of sorts. It's a sentiment that I don't typically appreciate. Maybe I don't put a lot of store in the reliability of the outside world. I would like to think of certain others in my world as being all that good stuff ... true to their word ... dependable ... faithful to jointly agreed upon tasks ... all that stuff. I remember my father saying "promises, promises, promises!" There was some humor about it. Don't rightly know and didn't seem appropriate to ask about the topic .... to what was he referring? The reliability of his bedroom? the reliability of his bowels? implicit promises he imagined coming home a father of three after WWII? Who knows. People die and take their secrets with them. They (those "people" ... whoever the Hell "those people" are?) will often explain their thinking for the decisions they made or the things they said.

As I sit in this office, now, I can recall both overly friendly and outrageously hostile visitors. Those who thought me a Saint and those who imagined me to be a Devil. Of course, none who live on the extremes get the complex humanity of any Other -- me, included. I not so many years ago wrote a lengthy piece on what I considered health to be ... more or less, the relative capacity to recognize just how complex certain others are -- those near and dear to us, mostly, but others, as well. They have relationships with their families and loved ones ... they have, even, idiosyncratic relationships with their own thought and both their theoretical and divine gods. They have their own sadnesses and the word "they" is dispassionately reductive. The very fact that they have these complex internal lives makes them different, one from the other. Those who emphasize the "they greyness" of others, fail to see those those differences ... fail to differentiate others, except, perhaps, as they meet one's needs or fail to.

Yesterday, I attended two meetings, one at night with M and the other, in the afternoon, with our youngest child, Mother of half our grandchildren. The afternoon meeting was a theoretical one ... a meeting about theory, that is. My daughter shares a profession with me ... oh! and, sometimes, an office. The presenter had something to say ... it was fine. She had some interesting ideas and was reporting on some of the methods she had employed in her work.

The evening meeting was one called to discuss the prospects for continuing another meeting that had been going on weekly for 30+ years. Recently, attendance had been poor. While when we started attending 16+ years ago, their was a healthy sanguinity about each meeting, more recently it seemed that the old blood was a bit anemic and the new blood was regularly absent or late. There was a voiceless Collie and a "half a poodle" there to keep me going ... they became my security blankets as it became clear that the vote would be to move away from weekly meetings and that, like everything else, this group's future was in question. "This too shall pass."

I thought about the poem I have quoted frequently in these notes ... Stanley Kunitz's The Layers .... that admonishes us all to "live among the layers and not upon the litter." Still, I hold firm to my wish that things would remain the same ... that parents would never die, that armistices would be forever, that lovers would hold tight forever, that siblings would play with each other long after the cows come home, and that groups would never lose their vitality. I hold to those desires even if that wish comes with a recognition that all things must pass -- as George Harrison, I think, opined and that I'll never be privy to what my Dad had in mind when he voiced his own humor-laden disappointment with his plaint: "promises, promises, promises."

The Layers

The Layers

By Stanley Kunitz 1905–2006 Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.