It occurs to me…

Things stick in our heads.  I don’t mean the things we TRY to remember.  A spouses’ birthday, the PIN for my bank card, our Social Security number or driver’s license number.  Those are things we have to remember, or used to before we had all that on our phones.  But no, I am talking about those things we remember for no reason — maybe things we don’t even want to remember – yet we do.  Why?  Why, out of all the information that is passed before me in an hour, in days, weeks, months, years, decades, why do some things stick in memory, and others (many I want to remember) are as elusive as (here’s another one) “the bright elusive butterfly of love.”

So today is the day I think of this each year, all because:

“It was the third of June, another sleepy dusty delta day.  I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was bailing hay.  And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat.  Momma hollered at the back door y’all remember to wipe your feet.  And then she said, I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge.  Today, Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”

Curse you, Bobbie Gentry, and your Ode to Billy Joe!

More from the poet, Jack Miller, this from Failing and Flying:

“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It’s the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake.  That everybody

said it would never work….

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

It is almost, if not fully, impossible to be grateful for failure in real time.  As the birdie putt I played to breaks left breaks right as it passes the hole, it is simply not within my ability to be grateful as the ball rolls to a stop.  Mumbling expletives, wondering why I play the game, those are within my grasp at the moment, but not an appreciation of failure.  But then, as Miller suggests, it is merely an end to my triumph.  I am still out on a golf course and enjoying the day.  If I pull another ball out of my pocket, I may just make the putt – and there’s always the next hole.

I just like that phrase.  I have not failed, I have only, at that moment, come to the end of my triumph.  Yet, here I stand with another chance to triumph.

This, from Jack Gilbert’s The Lost Hotels of Paris, settled in my soul this morning:

“The Lord gives everything and charges

by taking it back.  What a bargain.

Like being young for a while….”

It occurs to me that that the referenced exchange is the ultimate bargain – yet one I don’t fully appreciate.  I get what the Lord gives me free of charge.  The only “charge” is that someday, I have to return it.  Say my next door neighbor has a lawnmower, and I don’t.  Every time I need to cut my grass I borrow his lawnmower.  One day, I neglect to return it.  He rings the doorbell and asks if he can have HIS lawnmower.  When, on God’s green earth (as my mom used to say) would I ever be justified in not letting him have HIS lawnmower back?   Or maybe I could think of it this way.  I go to the store to buy a lawnmower, but the salesperson tells me to just take it, free of charge, but I have to bring it back when he calls me.  Some decades later, I get the call.  Do I return with gratefulness?

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing….”  Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

In the pinball game of thought that plays in my head, this passage (used in a Byrds song, Turn, Turn, Turn) came to mind after Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle popped into my head.  (Boy, am I dating myself here!)  Croce’s song contains both a wish (“If I could save time in a bottle”) and a lament (“But there never seems to be enough to do the things you wanna do once you find them”).

Anyway, what jumps out at me today is the “a time to break down, and a time to build up” part.  It just occurs to me that we have had enough breaking down recently and it is damn well time to build up.  In life’s vending machine of response, when faced with the “break down” or “build up” choice, it is time to opt for the latter, not the former — if for no other reason than “there never seems to be enough time to do the things you wanna do once you find them.”

Memorial Day – not a time for mattress sales, but a time to remember those brave men and women who have given their lives in service to our country.  From the first time I heard Let Them In, John Gourka’s musical tribute to them it has stayed in my mind.  And while I listen to it year round, I always make it a point to listen to it more around Memorial Day.  I don’t need a new mattress, but I do need to remember those men and women for their sacrifice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCX1cULwal8 (This version by David Wilcox)

Let them in, Peter
They are very tired
Give them couches where the angels sleep
And light those fires

Let them wake whole again
To brand new dawns
Fired by the sun not wartime’s
Bloody guns

May their peace be deep
Remember where the broken bodies lie
God knows how young they were
To have to die
God knows how young they were
To have to die

So give them things they like
Let them make some noise
Give dance hall bands not golden harps
To these our boys

And let them love, Peter
For they’ve had no time
They should have trees and bird songs
And hills to climb

The taste of summer in a ripened pear
And girls sweet as meadow wind
With flowing hair

And tell them how they are missed
But say not to fear
It’s gonna be alright
With us down here

Let them in, Peter
Let them in, Peter
Let them in, Peter

I stumbled across a poem today — A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert – through a very indirect route.  I say that because it seems to add to the feeling that I particularly needed to hear it today – which is what I feel.  You have to read on with trepidation any poem that begins as this:

“Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere.  If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else.”

But it gets better:

“But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants.  Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine.”

And ultimately hits what I needed to hear:

“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation.  We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure, but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world.  To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

It is, it seems, easy to “deny happiness, resist our satisfaction,” in remembering the suffering in the world, and thinking just how f’d up the world seems at times.  Being afraid to send your children to school, to eat out at a restaurant….  It becomes easy to “make injustice the only measure of our attention.”  But to quote from one my my favorites, Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann, Gilbert reminds us: “With all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be caresul.  Strive to be happy.”

“Forgiveness does not chance the past, but it does enlarge the future.”  Paul Lewis Boese

Forgiveness is an amazing thing, isn’t it?  Here, I don’t really mean FORGIVENESS, as in what God provides, but the lower case, forgiveness, forgiveness that we humans dispense and receive (though sometimes that looks and feels like FORGIVENESS).  I mean, in the ins and outs of life we all encounter those “slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune” on a fairly regular basis on both the giving and receiving end both, yet somehow we continue to function.  More than that, we actually (in most cases) interact again (whoa here) even continue to have relationships with those we forgive/those who forgive us.

It occurs to me that if, instead of forgiving them, each day we all just lessened our circle of friends and family by casting out of our circles those who offended us, those we needed to forgive, pretty soon we’d all be alone in our circles.  In that way, forgiveness can enlarge our lives, “enlarge the future.”

From the poet, Wendell Berry:

“The past is our definition.  We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

Reading this, I am reminded of this admonition, which is attributed to Seneca:

“Don’t stumble over something behind you.”

Still, I like Berry’s approach.  They way to deal with bad things from life’s past is to add some goodness to life today.  It may or may not resolve the past issue, but it just might make today better.  And if that sounds a bit like denial, then so be it.  Delusion is like a habanero pepper in the kitchen.  It can serve its purpose, if used sparingly.

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Proverbs 22:6

Sad, but true, I guess, that only in retrospect can a child (though not then a child) truly, fully appreciate the role of the parent in shaping and creating what he/she becomes.  Though perhaps that is best, lest we become intimidated by the thought/peril of raising our own, and procreation of the species ceases.  Thanks, mom!

“Every time I see the bumper sticker that says ‘We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,’ I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.”  Anne Lamott

I can relate to Anne Lamott here.  It is so easy to get tied up in knots about life and miss the life going on around me.  That it takes a bumper sticker, or worse yet, a tragedy or misfortune of some type to bring me back to these realities, to point out what is important in life, is a bit embarrassing.  But then, compared to the alternative – continuing on obliviously – I’ll take the embarrassment and the perpetual Homer Simpson, slap on the forehead “DOH!”