Memoirs
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Post-Valentine’s
At our age, my wife and I almost don’t notice Valentine’s Day. The only exception in our entire marriage when February 14th was a significant day was nine or ten years ago when my wife surprised me with an elegant dinner at a swanky little restaurant and then walked me across the street to a tiny venue where we enjoyed a wonderful concert with less than 50 other couples. The star of the show was one of my favorite singers, Mandy Barnett, and it was an evening I’ll never forget. But my strongest memory of Valentine’s Day stretches back to when I was seven years old. In Miss Stewart’s…
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Waiting For The Ram
I didn’t know Terry well, but what I did know of him I liked. He was gentle, good-humored, a careful listener, and had large, expressive eyes that watched the world without cynicism. I also knew that he was troubled, with a history of admissions to psychiatric wards and rehab facilities. I used to watch him and wonder how one so young could be so weary. Terry always seemed to be fighting to suppress a wince, as if his interior bruises were being palpated by an unseen and uncaring hand. And so while I was dismayed, I was not very surprised when I learned of his death by suicide. The day…
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Pages
It may be a cliche, but even cliches can be true. Each of my days is like a new page in the book I’m simultaneously reading and writing. I get to the bottom of one, my stub dull and whittled down, almost too short for my fingers to grip it, and then I blink my eyes, and in the quick space of that blink, a Hand has reached down and covered that page with a fresh one, and in the groove between the previous page and the new one sits a new, sharpened pencil. With the aroma of good coffee hanging in the air of the house where I think…
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Yule Sea
Adrift now, wishing it was already deep into January, past the vulgarity of the present. Behold, I show you a mystery: the death of an old dog can unsettle a man to the point where he sees fissures in all that he stands on. It can make him fight for balance. It can make him weary beyond sighing. When I was a boy, we got our Christmas trees from a lot one block over, next to the railroad tracks. The tree, holy and perfect and aromatic, was nailed to a wooden cross, and we saw it as a being both aware and benevolent. My honor as a child was to…
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Farewell, Miss Barbara
I stopped at the grocery store on the way home yesterday to pick up a couple of things. The store, part of a small, local chain, sits at the foot of a mountain next to a bank, a gas station, and a fast food joint. The adjoining mountain is part of the store’s charm; in all weathers, the sheer slope with its trees and crags rises up in a dramatic sweep when one steps out of the store to return to one’s vehicle. The mountain looks almost like a dormant volcano, with its near-perfect cone shape and its accompanying sense of looming and watching. Waiting. Patient as a jove. When…
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Advent And Loss
Our old cat died today. Purrl was 14 years old, a Texas cat as rangy and prickly as a mesquite tree, as spastic as a rabid coyote, as affectionate as a lovestruck Lulabelle. She had been going downhill since Bonnie died. So skinny…when she sprawled out in front of the wood stove, she looked like a tractor wheel had smushed her down flat. She was nervous, restless, unhappy. And today, she left this world and went into the next. Purrl was an extraordinarily sweet cat. She used to pat my wife’s face with the pink pads of her paw, pulling my wife’s face to look directly into her eyes —…
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Thanksgiving
The birds were thankful today, crowding around the ones in the front and back of the house. Among the doves on the ground were some juncos, which we rarely see here. The day was clear and crisp, and I was glad I had filled the bird bath, because several of the little ones took baths, including a female goldfinch. Odd for this time of year. While filling the feeders in the hummingbird & butterfly garden, I noticed a tuft of Bonnie’s hair caught in the grass between two of the fence staves. Stave The First. Thanksgiving day means its time to pull down a beloved volume of Dickens and step…
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Passages
There’s snow on the ground today. I wish you were here to see it, girl. When I walked up to your grave after I got home from work, I thought of how much you loved the white stuff, how you’d throw yourself into banks of it and run around like your tail was on fire, how you once tricked your Mama by hiding a vole in the snow and then redirecting her attention, and how you’d scoop a small pile of it onto your nose and run to me, knowing that I’d laugh like a fool. I used to accuse you of being a Viking dog, do you…
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Time Spent
I spent a couple of hours last night rearranging the furniture in the family room in anticipation of the coming cold weather. I moved our chairs near the wood stove and moved out some of the other fixtures. A bit of sweat, a lot of groaning, and it almost looked like a new room. My old dog sat at my feet after I was done and looked at me as if to say, “Well, that was interesting….” Today is an anniversary of sorts. On this day, way back in the Seventies, I boarded a jet for my first airplane ride and streaked out west to stand on the yellow footprints…
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Recoverable And Precious
I have been working for some time now on a memoir, a memoir focused on a particular area of my life and a particular person. As the stack of pages grows incrementally, I find myself remembering things long forgotten, and discarding memories that I once thought important but now see as distractions. As with all the things I have ever undertaken in my life, I feel inadequate to the task, but I also feel a strong compelling hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward as certainly as my own fingers push the pencil along the page of my notebooks. Reading this evening in one of Frederick Buechner’s…