Then and Now

I suppose it's only Now and Then that I compare the Then and Now. Maybe it was visitors and correspondents, denizens of the Last Quarter ... people in their Sixties or beyond who precipitated a rainstorm in my head as I was rising, this morning ... or maybe it was just me reaching about as anniversaries come and go ... 35 years in my office and my home, too .... 35 years, too, since I resigned from running a school for disturbed inner city adolescents ...  40 years since M, Kazimierza the St. Bernard, and our older two kids were bivuaced in a 50 foot single-wide on the campus of a residential facility for very disturbed kids ... 40 years since OPEC's oil embargo ... must be about 45 years since we had a choice of Wet Diapers or Woodstock, choosing the former .... 48 years of marriage ... 50 or thereabout years since that whole collection of assassinations and Cold War Showdowns ....  I generally don't like comparisons ... neither those between different Beings nor those contrasting different times in the same Beast ... c'est moi!

I guess it's the one about me that was kindled by these meetings ... on line and in person ... by my fine fellow travellers in our 60's, 70's and 80's of life. In any case, the light sleep of the Fourth Quarter (can it really just be Melatonin depletion) had me reminiscing about the differences ...

I'm sitting in my office, as I write. The office is not so different from 1979 when I set it up, except for the bathroom that was built in 1993 after a tornado decided to drop a Beech Tree on that corner of the waiting room ... as if some voice had called out from Isaiah's (Is. 41? or is it 40) Wilderness: Howard! Upon this corner shall you build a better office bathroom.

The bookcases are the same, except for the ones in the new bathroom and the one that came in the early 80's ... one that my Grandfather and scriptural mentor left to me when he died shy of his 100th birthday sometime in the early 80's. Perhaps, half the books are different but half, I suppose, are the same. Old writings from antiquity and from the first half of the 20th Century and last half of the 19th. When I moved in, there was just enough space for the library ... now many shelves are two books deep and others have stacks of horizontal books. Many books over the years have been borrowed to seek homes in other libraries -- hey! how many times can you read a book. I suppose books are like most homes .... whatever their legal status, they're in actuality short term leases ... held in trust, so to speak.

There's a scroll that the same Grandfather brought from Hungary about 100 years ago. It still needs some repairs that I have promised myself that I will carry out before I place it in the hands of its next keeper. It, too, is being held in trust. Half of the furnishings are replacements or additions, though the waiting room looks much as it did.

If the books are the same, the eyes that read them are notably different. Oh! And it's not entirely my office, any longer. Our youngest child, who would toddle in to occasionally visit, herself, when I moved into this office, now shares the sign at the foot of the office path and this chair that I sit on as I write when she greets her own visitors to this office ... when she holds court, so to speak.

For me, I suppose, I need to talk more about this but the tasks of the day wait for no one and no thing. And so, I'll end with two ditties written 20 years ago. I suspect I may have shared them earlier in these notes about aging that began less than three years ago, but they resonate with my feelings ... this morning .... sitting here an hour before the Sun rises to bring the teperature above freezing for the first time in several days.

Thoughts of Leaving Someday

Six bookcases lining the wall and filled on the inside with jacketed books and above with two philodendrons (one split-leafed), two senseveria that bloom every third year or so, an old microscope, test tubes on a rack, an oak bowling pin, a bulb that he found on the beach. On another wall is a glazed bookcase from his grandfather — a shaman of a different ilk — that one filled with sacred books. Hanging are diplomas and certificates and pictures of der Alte Hexenmeister from Vienna. There are, as well, five chairs, a desk, a couch and an awareness that he will and must leave this office some day.

Witnesses

On the bottom of his closet, like two soldiers they stood
A layer of dust demanded “You’ve seen these before”.
Witnesses for what he now couldn’t and once could
When he bought them.
Was it nineteen sixty four?

One at a time, he picked each up, turned it around,
“Look! The pattern on the toes is just the same,
The leather’s still good, the color still brown,
And inside
The author hadn’t changed his name.Yet they spoke of different times and of a different man
Who wore them then more than a quarter century ago.
These shoes were now witnesses to god’s sinister plan,
That from vibrant forms,
Takes man and transforms him to Lore.