Sing, Damn You, Sing!

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

I’m an orphan thirty years on
how I miss my father’s voice and my mother’s arms
I was you once, and now you’re me
it’s in this circle that we make a family

Jubilee, Gretchen Peters

And there are more I remember
And more I could mention
Than words I could write in a song
But I feel them watching
And I see them laughing
And I hear them singing along

The Last of the Family Reserve, Lyle Lovett

I have less reason now to visit the sky under which I was raised, but it still informs and affects my life, calling to me from memory.  My parents lie beneath this sky, snug in their graves and now of the landscape itself.  I hear their whispers in the susuration of the wheat and I feel their presence in the narrow canyons of the Blue Mountains.  I come here less often now, but come I will as long as there is the ability to do so.

Memories and Sky, Rumors of Far Despairs (www.humptulips.org), Stephen C. Ellis

When you attain a certain age, your thoughts turn to weighing the consequences and measures of the distances remaining to be traveled, and to the contemplation of the mysteries and conundrums of the distances left behind.  The future is singular: it has a route to be traveled to an end not yet attained or understood; the past is a river’s delta: it has many branches, some real and well-traveled, and others the stuff of fantasy, but no less well-traveled because of it.  When both are finally added together, the sum yields but a single life.

I need little reminder of this fact, for I have attained the age when such contemplation begins in earnest.  I will soon begin my eighth decade of life, so I feel comfortable engaging in such thoughts.  It is time for me to assess what I’ve accomplished and failed to complete, and to sharpen my focus in consequence of the results of my assessment in order to better navigate whatever lies ahead.

So far, my life has proven to be a creature of dreams composed wholly of rhythm.  There are many rhythms within my dreams: the coruscations of light captured by artists’ brushes; the raptures and lamentations of the soul sung by poets;  the individual tunes and harmonies rendered in song and symphony by the composers; and, underneath it all, the stolid thump of my own dogged tread.  Within my dreams, I am but a single member of a great chorus composed of the totality of life itself as expressed in its plentiful, myriad forms, and my worth will be judged only in accordance with whatever additive effect I was able to provide in the time allotted to me.

Some composers seem to understand this notion.  Take, for example, Gretchen Peters’ superb new album, Blackbirds.  It is the work of a mature mind, full of lyrics that resonate with meaning for someone my age.  Her summary of a life nearly lived to its full is found in the song entitled Jubilee:

there ain’t no boat, there ain’t no train
to take us back the way we came
ain’t no shelter from this hard rain
the cure for the pain is the pain
the cure for the pain is the pain

I am as certain as I can be that the pain she has in mind is life itself, and that the cure for such pain can only be found by continuing to travel that portion of life yet remaining to us with all of the fervor we can muster.  The chorus of Jubilee says it best:

so I sing holy holy from this prison where I lie
my arms reaching up to touch the sky
I sing holy holy, hallelujah I am free
come on down and join the jubilee

Lyle Lovett reached a similar conclusion in The Last of the Family Reserve.  Its chorus is lighter in keeping with its other lyrics, but it makes a similar argument for joining in as loudly as possible:

And we’re all gonna be here forever
So Mama don’t you make such a stir
Now put down that camera
And come on and join up
The last of the family reserve

None of us makes sense as the single entity we perceive ourselves to be.  We only make sense as a member of life’s grand chorus.  In the end, we must be content with a future in which we will not figure, except for the ripples we’ve left behind.  Our comfort must come from recognizing and acknowledging our part in this shared work, however miniscule or grand others may judge it to have been.

Perhaps Billy Joel summarized the content of my dreams best in The River of Dreams:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the desert of truth
To the river so deep

We all end in the ocean
We all start in the streams
We’re all carried along
By the river of dreams

So join the jubilee and sing, damn you, sing!  As loud and as long and as lustily as you can.

Posted in 'Tis a Puzzlement, Words and Music | Comments Off on Sing, Damn You, Sing!

First Walk

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“Hadn’t thought about a walk as being a repetition of a theme,” said Derek, abruptly harking back to Sandy’s string of questions and considering his own past, “but I suppose it might be.  It’s just that you learn so much more about someone when on you’re on a walk together.  I find myself saying things I couldn’t say sitting in company or if alone together in a room.  And your companion always seems to reciprocate.  It’s as if the whole world is watching, but only the two of you count – especially when it’s raining.  It’s the most publicly intimate thing imaginable, and without any mess or fuss.  You ought to try it some time.”

Son, Stephen C. Ellis

So here’s to you my ramblin’ boy
May all your rambles bring you joy

Rambling Boy, Tom Paxton

We took our first morning walk of the year yesterday.  We might have begun our daily walks sooner since the Pacific Northwest is enjoying unusually early spring-like weather, but we’ve had reason to wait this year.  It is the same reason that caused us last summer to curtail our daily walks earlier in the year than usual: Helen’s health. 

Health is, by nature, a cyclical affair, much like the seasons.  It falls and rises in accordance with rhythms which aren’t readily understandable, but which are definite and rooted deep within the self.  During the course of a single week late last summer, Helen went from always being the one to last the longest on our walks due to my bad knees, to becoming the one wanting to quit early due to a sudden onset of seemingly chronic shortness of breath.  Endless trips to the doctor revealed that she had a hiatal hernia and a large portion of her stomach was pressing upon her lungs.

While it’s never good news to learn such a thing, it is always good news to learn that something wrong with you is repairable.  I won’t repeat the struggle to get on with the surgical repair and for Helen to recover since I have dealt with these matters elsewhere and such things are never worth dwelling upon once they are in your rear view mirror.  The important fact is that yesterday Helen felt good enough to once again attempt our morning walk.

The morning was chilly but bearable; the sun was out and the birds were doing their best to imitate a symphony performed solely by woodwinds.  We cut our walk short – about three-quarters of our usual routine – in order to see how Helen would do and to ensure that she would not become over tired.  We probably could have completed our entire regular route given her success at yesterday’s ramble, but it pays to be careful – especially at our age.

When I retired from practicing law two years ago, I retired from playing racquetball on the same day.  I began playing the sport in my small home town sometime in the late 1950s, but at that time we called it paddleball since we used heavy plywood racquets without strings and a slightly larger rubber ball dubbed a Pennsey Pinky.  I kept at it over the years because it was fun, healthful, and a surprisingly good antidote to stress.  But the health club I am still a member of is 30 miles from our home, and a daily round trip of 60 miles to play a game did not seem a good use of my time or of gasoline.  Besides, I am no longer as agile as I once was and a fear of falling while playing had cut surreptitiously into my enjoyment of the sport.  So my racquetball and legal careers proved to be coterminous.  Who would have known?

The fear of falling came from the fact of knees much more ancient than the rest of me.  This fact was uppermost in my mind when Helen first suggested our daily morning walks together.  She had often walked on her own while I was working and had frequently lamented that she had no companion.  And there I was, a newly-minted potential companion with chronically sore knees which had become noticeably less sore because of the wont of racquetball.  Because of my knees I hesitated at first, but soon came to the conclusion that I had nothing to lose by trying and much to gain from remaining physically active.  My knees have proven good enough to hoist me along our regular trek – one shorter than Helen’s former route as a single walker, but one sufficiently long to raise both our heart rates and to satisfy our shared enjoyment of the morning’s promise and light.

So yesterday’s walk marked a return to normalcy after the type of small scare that fortune throws in everyone’s way from time to time.  Not only did we survive it, we survived it with flying colors.  I anticipate another in a few hours.  I admit that we are but fair weather walkers; our enjoyment wilts in the rains that nurture the flowers.  We would rather walk the day after the rain has ended and vicariously enjoy its beneficial effects by commenting upon the perkiness of the flowers and the plenitude of birdsong that always suffuses just-cleansed air.

Yesterday’s walk was deeply satisfying simply because it proved that we persist and do so together.  Helen’s lungs seem to have recovered and her appetite has returned; my knees are still complaining, but as long as they do so I have ample proof of my own existence.  It may only have been our first morning walk of this year, but it felt like the first we’d ever taken together.  It was ample proof that our life together remains good!

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The Worth of New Friends

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“If you are at the moment struggling with a book, what you should ask your self is, Do I really care about this particular set of characters, this thing that I am doing?  If you do, then nothing should deter you.  If you are doubtful about it, then I’d turn to something else.  I knew, in the case of Charlotte, that I cared deeply about the whole bunch of them.  So I went ahead.”

Letter from E. B. White to Dorothy Joan Harris, June 28, 1972, Letters of E. B. White, Revised Edition, Martha White, editor.

I have been at work for over two years on the draft of a novel, my first attempt at such a thing.  On occasion, I turn to some other writing, but have always returned to the novel after whatever break I’ve felt was necessary.  It wasn’t until I read the above quote that I realized why I was so persistent, because the quote makes exquisite sense.  My characters mean something to me; so much so that one of them came to me in a dream before I was finished writing the first draft to suggest an ending that I have retained through all of the subsequent revisions.  In the process of making myriad revisions (at least eleven major revisions, and several additional sectional revisions), I still find that I enjoy the characters and their ever-evolving stories.

My enjoyment of the characters isn’t a narcissistic affair.  I don’t enjoy them because I created them; I enjoy them because I find them interesting and each revision has revealed another episode of, or a deeper meaning to, their lives and thinking.  They seem as alive to me as many of my acquaintances do, and are still able to tell me, during each re-working, much more about themselves or teach some lesson about an aspect of life that I have yet to conquer.  I am learning from them just as they draw their lives from me.

The result has been the creation of a strange relationship.  It is not a paternal one, for they seem to exist alongside of me, not because of me.  It is more a fiduciary relationship – one that has created a personal obligation for me to tell their stories since they don’t exist outside of the pages I have created.  My obligation is of the moral variety – they have nurtured me through my first two years of retirement by giving it meaning and direction, and therefore I must allow others to become aware of them and the meaning of their experience.

This obligation has extended to my recently hiring a developmental editor to review my work, for while I have confidence in my copy editing skills and in my ability to write interesting descriptions, I have less confidence in my ability to tell a riveting story on paper.  I have found this process difficult, from the early efforts that involved far too many words and much too much didacticism, to the later stages of deleting entire sections that, upon first writing, had seemed vital and important.  And even after all of my own editing, I suspect the editor will have a lot to say about the number of words I’ve used and what I believe to be a key chapter that is entirely didactic.  But if John Steinbeck could get away with didacticism in every other chapter of The Grapes of Wrath in order to make the Depression a living, breathing character, why can’t I do the same for the Vietnam War in a single chapter?

Your answer probably will be that I am not John Steinbeck.  Of this, I am fully aware, and have no pretensions to be his modern equivalent – or the equivalent of any other author, living or dead.  Many of them, however, have instructed me through my constant reading of their work.  The lessons given by some have been sustained and deep, for I collect their works with an eye toward reading everything I collect.  Whatever writing lessons I’ve had resulted from my reading, for I have no formal  training in writing fiction – only the extent and breadth of my reading, and the drafting lessons learned from 40 plus years of writing spare, clear contracts meant to achieve clarity of purpose and obligation; contracts which have yet to yield anything approaching litigation among the parties to them (knock on wood, since the statute of limitations has yet to run on every contract I drafted while in practice).

This training, however successful it may prove to have been, was delightful.  I enjoyed creating the legal worlds my clients required, and enjoyed even more the untold thousands of hours of reading literary fiction as well as the collateral joy of finding first editions of their authors’ works in the nooks and crannies of every book store – real and digital – that I have ever visited.  I can only trust that the training amounted to something, but I have enough faith in what I have learned to have hired an editor to assist me in bringing my characters to life on the printed page.

Hiring an editor certainly doesn’t guarantee publication.  It may move the process of finding a publisher or agent along just the tiniest bit since I will be able to report that an independent edit has been undertaken.  But finding an agent and ultimately achieving formal publications still seems the mug’s game I earlier reported.  Nothing has happened to change my mind about that conclusion, not even the efforts of well-meaning friends to help me through the process.

So why spend the money on an editor?  There are two reasons.  First, I undertook this effort to see if I was capable of doing something I’ve long wanted to do, and the hiring of an editor seems a logical extension of the process.  After all, If I didn’t believe in myself enough to spend the money for a professional review, how serious could I be?  As my mother spent her entire life telling and teaching me, nothing is worth undertaking if you aren’t prepared to give all of yourself to it.

The second reason is, of course, my obligation to my newest friends, those of the printed page.  They wish to be heard and it is up to me to make that happen.  And while I cannot issue commands in the manner of Captain Picard or wave a wand as Gandalf does, I can keep trying to fight my way through to publication.  While the process is not nearly as enjoyable as the writing itself, it is worth undertaking it in order to fulfill my obligations to them.

Besides, I am quite likely to be reminded of the twin values of humility and patience while undergoing the process, so I will lose nothing in the attempt.

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The First Faint Breath of Spring

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day

California Dreaming, Michelle Gilliam, John Phillips

Make no mistake, it is still winter in Humptulips County.  As I write, we are in the teeth of a Pineapple Express which is drenching the West Coast, causing flooding from California to Washington.  It is only February, after all, and we have not yet reached its midpoint.

Yesterday began in a deluge.  It was one of those  wintry weekend days when nothing outside calls for you to emerge from shelter, when the very thought of going outside holds no magic whatsoever, when the only attraction is the notion of a day spent sheltering in the company of a good book or a favorite movie accompanied by popcorn.  We did both for much of the day, with chocolate chip cookies the perfect substitute for the popcorn we never enjoyed.  I finished one book and began another by the same author, something (two in a row by the same author) I am usually loathe to engage in for its lack of variety, but a choice that somehow fit the cloistered mood of a gloomy day.  A hedgehog couldn’t have felt more snug in its own burrow than I did on our living room couch, safe and warm in the lamplight.

By late afternoon, my only foray outside had been a quick, pajama-clad morning’s trip in the rain to refill our bird feeders.  When I climbed out of the fictional northern England by which I’d been enchanted, I checked the status of the feeders and noticed it was not raining for the first time.  The weather had been such that the birds hadn’t yet flocked to the restocked feeders; the depth of its inclemency evidenced by the untouched layer of peanuts I’d left on top of each feeder for the jays.  The jays were hunkered down somewhere, unwilling to be enticed from cover even by the thrilling prospect of a daring theft of their favorite treat.

Inactivity due to pouring rain having been the order of the previous two days, I decided to go get the morning’s newspapers and the two days of mail left unretrieved in our rural mailbox while the rain-free opportunity persisted.  I dressed carefully for a long walk in adverse conditions, and set out.  When I got outside, it was no surprise that water was everywhere, fogging the air and pooling on the asphalt; it was a complete surprise that the day was warm and friendly, courtesy of a Chinook wind blowing in from the west.

As I walked, I found that if I turned my head so that I was momentarily freed of the wind’s constant susurration, scattered birdsong could be heard from all directions in unwinterly quantities and an unseen  tree frog was croaking a repeated, harsh greeting from somewhere on our driveway’s hillside.  In response to the warmth of the wind’s invitation, I unzipped the coat I had so carefully done up prior to leaving the house so that I might more intimately enjoy its caress.  The space surrounding me was a bubble of spring on such a winter’s day; each small stirring around me seemed evidence of a primal restlessness – as if Persephone was sighing heavily in her winter boredom, ill content to be cloistered away in Hades and anxious for her annual romp in the sunshine to begin.  But there was no sunshine to be enjoyed, only the first faint breath of spring barely perceivable in the midst of a watery world.

There was hope in that wind; its hints are sufficient for now.

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The Sound of Winter

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

Nestled, as we are, next to Puget Sound, a winter walk on the Farm is generally a saunter through a muted world; a walk where my own thoughts are likely to be louder than most   things external.  Humptulips County’s climate is wet and relatively warm.  Temperatures often hover in the high 40s or low 50s, and, when it isn’t raining, the sky is leaden and cloying mists linger in the hollows eager to capture and deaden sound.  It is not a climate designed to elicit rapturous joy; instead, it is one promotive of bundling both within home and burrow which seeks to create the sort of atmosphere of isolation in which self-reflection is king.

When I walk outside on winter days, I must listen carefully to assure myself that there is life abroad other than my own.  The lack of leaves on the deciduous trees allows the faint bluster of the swollen river in the distant valley behind the house to combine with the intermittent engine growl from the equally distant freeway to create the white noise in which self-reflection may flower.  Birds, not humans, are the only other species usually heard from, but the relative infrequency of their calls attests to the small size of winter flocks and serves to remind me of my relative isolation.

The most clearly heard sound on my walks is the crunch of my own shoes on our gravel driveway.  When I stop to look around and listen, it disappears and the muted world reasserts itself as if to ask who I think I am to disturb its cloistered silence.  For this is a time of resting and dreaming, a time when nature is content to abide within the stillness of expectation; this is a time when nature prefers to meditate upon endless possibilities in self-absorbed satisfaction even as the sources of those forthcoming circumstances which will limit those possibilities are being ground to dust by the pestles of fate and mixed together within the crucibles of chance.  Humanity’s vague scrabblings are not welcome within this cathedral of repose.

But I persist of necessity, for I have no way to return to my own womb of self-contemplation but to complete the walk which I’ve started.  And as I resume, the crunch of gravel returns to defy the prevailing norm and intrude upon nature’s somnolent dreams in the same unapologetic way that mankind has exhibited throughout the decades of human existence.  And thanks to the rhythm of this lonesome song, I realize I am not alone nor have I ever been.

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Enchantment and Ground Fog

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“After much wandering and search they found a way that they could climb, and with a last hundred feet of clawing scramble they were up.  They came to a cleft between two dark crags, and passing through found themselves on the very edge of the last fence of Mordor.  Below them, at the bottom of a fall of some fifteen hundred feet, lay the inner plain stretching away into a formless gloom beyond their sight.  The wind of the world blew now from the West, and the great clouds were lifted high, floating away eastward; but still only a grey light came to the dreary fields of Gorgoroth.  There smokes trailed on the ground and lurked in hollows, and fumes leaked from fissures in the earth.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The nooks and crannies of the Farm have been beset by all-day ground fogs the last few days.  Ground fog rises from the earth as if steam from a boiling kettle, but there is no fire to sustain it.  It is too cold and dreary, as it is January in Humptulips County.

This morning’s pervasive fog is of a different nature.   It does not derive from the river, despite our nearness.  Instead, it has descended from the sky.  It may be, for all I can see, a lowered sky come to kiss the earth and declare its love.  Up close, the fog is loose rather than dense; I can see for a hundred yards or so before it acquires enough opacity to block my vision.  Were I to go walking, it would be as if I were within a mobile tent of grey moisture moving with me everywhere on the Farm.  Where it ends, I cannot tell.  It usually gives out a mile or so from the Farm, but from my library windows it appears to be the endless stuff of existence.

This morning’s fog is of the confluence of heaven and earth; the ground fogs that have persisted throughout our January days spring only from the earth.  They hug the hollows and wet places from which they emerge, reminding us that these are places of mystery.  Are they poisonous places where earth spews its bile, or sporadically appearing entryways into places of enchantment ?  I cannot be certain, but find the latter to be much more agreeable in these drear days.  This is a time when a sense of mystery is all that matters; a time when all of the answers which you may conceive beg any question you might take the time to formulate.

On our first trip to England many years ago, we stayed in the Cotswolds in a little hamlet called Buckland.  Being an avid fan of Tolkien, I was struck by the name and looked carefully for Hobbits or any hint of The Shire.  I saw neither Oldbucks nor Brandybucks no matter how carefully I looked, and there was nothing nearby that resembled the village of Bree – but The Shire seemed all around us nonetheless.  Tolkien did use Cotswold and Oxford area names in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as we discovered one evening listening to the BBC while in residence at Buckland, and I wondered then if he had ever visited our small hamlet.  Indeed, the rehabilitated flour mill in which we stayed for two weeks could have graced a Tolkien story, and might well have been the inspiration for The Prancing Pony.  At least, I prefer to believe so and care not to be discouraged in my belief.

January is a time for enchantment: the weather keeps us close to home and fuels our imagination, while the library at the center of our home sends us to far away places real and imagined.  Only in January can the here and there of ground fogs become entryways into differing magic realms – entryways which beg to be opened if only we can find and interpret the magic runes written thereon or nearby.  The weather has been too poor for me to explore their possibilities on the ground, and, in any event, my imagination would not care to be disappointed.  But from here – from the windows of our library, from the very center of our home – their mystery serves my purposes all too well.

Posted in Humptulips County, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 1 Comment

A Christmas Greeting

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

“It seems to me that I have always wanted to say the same thing in my books: that life is one, that mystery is all around us, that yesterday, today and tomorrow are all spread out in the pattern of eternity, together, and that although love may wear many faces in the incomprehensible panorama of time, in the heart that loves it is always the same.”

Robert Nathan 

In the Boston region of Humptulips County, Chloe and Emma are tired of waiting for Santa and are probably already up and sneaking a peek at what he might have brought them in the night; here in Snohomish, it is dark and still too early for the quasi-adults to have wakened, and only the eldest of the lot is up and about and entering into his third hour of wakefulness.  The imagined laughter and excited whispering in Boston can be heard clearly here in my Snohomish library, and in the background I can hear the cheerful faux grumbling of two caring parents as they realize that sleep on such a morning is not only an unachievable luxury, but a waste of time in the presence of so much unrestrained joy.

In various homes scattered throughout Humptulips County my siblings are probably still asleep and dreaming.  Well, not Mike of course; he may have been up longer than I have, but it will be a close call as we are kindred spirits in that regard.  Barbara and Frank may have thought about getting up, but are probably lying abed remembering Christmases past and anticipating the arrival of various of my nieces and nephews and their respective children.

In my memory (and, no doubt, in that of my siblings), my parents are here as well.  Don, my father, is still playing with Mike’s intended train set as he did every night during the two weeks prior to the Christmas Mike received it many long-gone years ago.  The sound of the train wheels and its lonely whistle came through the floorboards of our old farmhouse each night, but we could never find the damned thing in the daylight – until the Christmas morning when we came downstairs to discover it fully set up and traveling slowly around our Christmas tree.  I can still hear it here in my library this morning, a morning infused with the same love of family and childish high spirits that caused Don to expend such a great deal of effort creating a little magic for his children.  My mother, Betty, is with him, exhorting him not to tease us in such a way while secretly delighting in his manic enthusiasm for the sustained joke.  They are together at the far end of memory, looking my way and standing in front of the large fireplace in the living room on Boyer Avenue, illuminated by the colored lights in the tiny cardboard houses populating the snowy cotton hills extending the length of the mantle and adjoining bookcases behind them.

On Christmas mornings, past and present tenses are always of a piece, and my library becomes a crowded space as family joins in celebration of the season with Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet, Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf, Tom and Ma Joad, Mr. Whittle and his evening star, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim, and so many others.  They are all here, all welcome on such a day as this.

These are just a few of the memories and incipient memories of my family; I wish you the joy, pleasure, and contentment of your own.

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The Messy House

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Our house is an ungodly mess this morning.  Boxes are piled everywhere, and bags (large white plastic or heavy paper with handles) are  strewn around with apparent abandon in accordance with some scheme known only to Helen.  Such messes are normal in late November and early December, but not in mid-December.  By this time of the month, the boxes and bags have usually been emptied and put out of sight, their utility at an end until early January when they will be returned to our living room to be refilled with their usual contents.

It is holiday decoration time, albeit two weeks late.  This year the entire rigmarole was delayed due to the necessary preparation for Helen’s surgery, the surgery itself and the following hospital stay, and the first week of her recovery.  It is beyond anyone’s concept that I should decorate the house; I am only good as a beast of burden and not very good at that, truth to tell.  The decoration process was far better for all concerned when I worked, for I could disappear and the elves were able to decorate in my absence without having to endure my suggestions, comments, and complaints.

The house is Helen’s canvas and her designs are confined to her imagination.  To imagine what the house would look like for the holidays without her hand involved would be like a single person being asked to imagine the whole of infinity.  She gives verbal clues in the weeks of run up – suggestions of themes and combinations of tried and true decorations with the new things she purchases each year.  But they are only hints, not riddles; teasers, not previews – they lack enough substance to create a vision of anything other than vague, hazy outlines.  The scheme’s entirety is clear and entire in her imagination, but, like most good visual artists she expresses it best by the doing, not by using words.

The beginnings of this year’s mess began two days ago.  On Friday, Ilene (Helen’s sister) came by with the intention of helping me pick out a tree and bring it into the house.  The initial plan had been for the two of us to search out our usual tree lot (now moved for the first time in 8 years) and bring a tree home in hopes Helen would find it acceptable.  When we began to get ready to leave, it became clear that Helen was accompanying us.  No amount of persuasion would convince her otherwise, so off we went.  The lot was found after much driving and wandered by all, a tree was selected and tied to car’s roof by the lot attendant, and a wreath for the front door placed carefully into its back.  When we got home, Helen hung the wreath with Ilene’s assistance, and Ilene and I untied and unloaded the tree.  Helen supervised our placement of the tree into its stand, a most useful act in that it materially shortened the time I usually spend tilting the tree this way and that while Helen alternatively lies flat to tighten the stand’s eye-bolts and stands up to interpret and judge progress.  With the tree up, Helen’s stamina was at an end and we all had lunch while the tree rested.

Yesterday morning before Ilene’s return, I began the process of finding boxes and bags whose contents, general form, and suspected location were described vaguely to me by Helen.  Nothing was where she remembered or directed me, but it never is.  This is an annual occurrence and unrelated to surgery or the necessary drugs taken is support of her recovery.  Every year she clearly remembers where some particular something was two or three years ago and how it was boxed or bagged at the time, but has no recollection of how she prepared it for storage last year or where she put it in the inevitably improved yearly scheme of storage.    The annual house decorating process would be incomplete without such confusion; none of us would be satisfied without it.  The only thing I am certain about is that Helen will reconfigure the decorations’ storage again this year, only to remember, a year hence, what it used to be last year – or the year before.  In truth, it is a little easier to find things each year than last, so perfection is always nearer to hand even if never achieved.

And so the house is a mess this morning, and will be for longer than usual during holiday decoration time.  By bedtime last night, the tree was only partially decorated as Helen must take her time to rest, take her pills, and eat every hour on the hour as the doctor demands for the next several weeks.

But I am content with this year’s mess; in fact, I am reveling in it.  This year’s mess is special: it is both evidence of December normality (even if it has turned up late and will rule the roost for longer than usual) and proof of the artist’s integrity and continuing creativity.  There is always great joy in the confusion of creation, but there is so much more satisfaction to be had in this year’s mess in the knowledge that the artist is once again at work producing beauty from its primal sludge.

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The Silent House

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

The silence is the most noticeable thing.  It looms and swirls just beyond human comprehension.  It is a caged, infrared beast seeking to reassert its dominance over the premises it rules whenever we are not in residence.  I am almost too weak to keep it at bay by myself, but I do not lack weapons – I can stomp about, play music, talk to the cats or lovebirds, or listen to the television if I need assistance, but my partner in the daily struggle to keep it at bay is not here.  She is in the hospital recovering from surgery, so I am left to my own inadequate devices.

I am always startled by the weight and shape of absence.  It has a presence – a presence of the kind that the remainder of a rolled out sheet of cookie dough has after the cookie cutters have been fully utilized and there is no single remaining expanse large enough for one more cookie to be cut.  Silent shapes remain to hint at personality, but the personality itself is absent and engaged in something you can only share in sips and snippets.  These remaining shapes are transitory, quickly disappearing into the dough as soon as it is rolled up, mounded, and rolled out again for new shapes to be cut.  But they somehow remain there in the new, smaller sheet of uncut dough; the weight of their absence is palpable and could be measured on an accurate scale.

I think about what she is going through, but it is beyond personal experience.  I have shared in it in the sense of being present in the hospital while she was being operated on, but I cannot really relate to what she is experiencing except by imagination – an imagination impaired by the fact that I am not undergoing, and have never undergone, anything similar.  While it has changed her in a way I cannot yet fully comprehend, it has also served to re-emphasize the things I know about her and love best: the ‘nobody can take me down but myself” attitude that always makes itself known in times of personal physical danger; the determined effort to heal faster through aggressive effort as evidenced by her long walks up and down the hall outside of her room while her roommate – the person who had the same surgery from the same surgeon immediately after my partner vacated the operating table – remains seated in her chair or lying in her bed and walking only when required; the sense of humor that is her best defense against pain and the poking, prodding, and sundry personal indignities suffered at the hands of nurses, therapists, doctors, dietitians, and the other mysterious beings that flit to and fro in the halls of modern hospitals only to be seen when you least expect them or want to pass through; her apologies for putting me through the discomfort of her surgery as if I had been the one on the operating table instead of her.

She is my best defense against the silence, but she is temporarily resident in a world of constant motion, light, and sound and unable to help.  There she dreams with longing of the silence I dread, hoping to return soon and working as hard as she can to speed up the process.  And here in the uneasy silence, I await her.

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A Letter to My Sons on the Occasion of the Day after Thanksgiving

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

  1. Share everything.
  2. Play fair.
  3. Don’t hit people.
  4. Put things back where you found them.
  5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
  6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
  7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
  8. Wash your hands before you eat.
  9. Flush.
  10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
  11. Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
  12. Take a nap every afternoon.
  13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
  14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
  15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
  16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first worked you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.”

Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Dear Don and Peter:

I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri to be disturbing and sad as they once again remind me that people rarely take the time to really listen to one another and show empathy for someone they are predisposed to distrust or fear.  Similar personal sadness was generated by the shootings at Newtown or, more recently, Marysville-Pilchuck.  These all-too-human failures to listen can be tiny or great: can be as simple as hurting another person’s feelings inadvertently due to a failure to hear what was sought as opposed to what was said; can have enormous consequences on a human scale such as those that result from the genocides or religious wars in which our species all too frequently engages.

I wanted to use the occasion of this piece to talk to you about things I have learned in the course of a long life; to tell you how powerful it has been for me to speak and listen to people from different cultures with differing goals from the one in which I was raised in the 1950s.  But as I pondered the possibility of doing so, I concluded that I would be guilty of preaching – thereby closing off what was intended to be the basis for a healthy discussion.

There are experiences I have had which have taught me much about the ways of the world, imparting life lessons so profound as to constitute an epiphany.  At their core, each of these experiences proved the rightness of the simpler truths that ought to govern human relationships rather than the flawed logic of complexity that we often use to avoid being reminded of the obligations these simpler truths demand of us.  But they happened to me – not you – and to offer them will likely evoke anything from boredom to active hostility of the “there he goes again” variety.  Such is the fate of anyone inclined to tell stories, especially stories with a message.

It is not in the ways of the world that you should believe me about the truth of my own epiphanies.  As did I, you prefer to learn from experience.  This is true of each member of each generation, and this tendency is at the heart of much that is wrong in human society.  If we had the luxury of a shared human experiential memory into which everyone could tap, perhaps much evil could be averted: perhaps a shared memory of the pain of the Holocaust could prevent atrocities from bullying to segregation to genocide; perhaps a shared memory of the beauty of a more primitive earth and the process by which we have defiled it could prevent our continuing efforts to destabilize the very planet upon which we depend for our survival as a species; perhaps a shared memory of what it means to be lonely would remind all of us to be gracious and thoughtful to one another at all times.

But it isn’t your fault that you have such a preference; it is a fault of our species.  Since each person is locked within his or her own mind and must learn from personal experience, each generation is prone to repeat the harmful behaviors human nature seems to demand and thereby experience the ill effects that consistently result from them: wars, bias, discrimination, fear, religious intolerance, and so on – and on.  At the heart of this failure to respect the lessons of history lies the fact of our mental isolation from one another.  We cannot read minds and are left to share by less effective means of communication.  Speaking and writing require effective listening and discerning reading, and the more fear we have of the speaker, the speaker’s state of being, or the motives we ascribe to the speaker, the less likely we are to do either very well.

Should it seem that I am trying to burden you with guilt, be assured that I am not.  I was, and am, guilty of the same thing after all, and am aware that burdening others with guilt has never worked well over the long haul – not with me nor anyone else I know.  I am simply reciting facts, and what you do or don’t do with them is up to you.  I have faith in what I preach, even if you yet have no referent by which to value some of it.  Perhaps you will come to understand my dilemma better as you have children and they grow and prefer to depend upon their own experience in preference to lessons hard-won by you in the course of time.

So, for now, I am simply satisfied to urge you on your way, to advise you to choose the paths you travel with care, and to remind you of your mother’s belief in the truth of Robert Fulghum’s words.  Since your mother and I are only human and not gods, we must depend upon you to decide which whispers from our hearts you will or will not accept.

With grateful thanks for your existence, love

Dad

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