Incorporeal Works

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Cheery thought from Thomas Stearns Eliot. This last day of April, a month of mixed pleasures and anxieties.

The land is not wasted, yet, but I grow old, like another of Eliot’s creations, but my trousers drag behind my feet, no waist to hold them up. Such indiginities of age and ungoverned appetites.

But April ended well, sitting with the grandchildren whilst their parents worked to earn the pleasures their children will remember long into the deepening century. Love of family is a great thing, a lesson I was long in learning.

Tuesday on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, the birthday of Harper Lee was observed, with a quotation from her book, To Kill a Mockingbird:

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird

For a number of nights lately, a bird has been singing in the middle of the night, outside our window. A bewildering variety of calls seem to be in the bird’s repertoire. We suspect this must be a mockingbird, famous for mimicking other birds’ songs. We have noticed daily a mockingbird flying in and out of a large holly bush along the front walk, ten feet or so from the bedroom window.

Such a comforting sound in the still watches of a dark night. And remarkable if there is a nest, and mockingbird youngsters survive the cats that live at our house, prowling the yard and depositing offerings of slain prey on the front step. We have seen no mockingbird corpses yet. Perhaps we will not. I hope we do not, it is still a sin for even a cat to kill a mockingbird.

Addendum: On Keillor’s page for Tuesday there is also a fine poem, “That Time of Year,” by Philip Appleman. Allusions to several poems about seasons of the year and seasons of our lives. I liked it.

On Sunday night just past, MSNBC aired a show, “Journey,” on the conditions of Arctic ice,  water temperature, and possible implications for global warming. Following an expedition centered on a ship, the Tara, deliberately frozen into winter ice in the Arctic and allowed to drift with its crew, scientists and instruments, the show presents a fascinating story, full of drama, facts and suppositions.

I watched the show, and was interested and entertained, quite enough for me. I noted that the production was primarily the work of French documentarians, a fact which will guarantee scorn from those who are disposed to scoff at global warming. For about two years, the Tara drifted with ice floes southward across the Arctic Ocean, providing compelling footage of ice, weather, polar bears and the storms whipping across the roof of the world in winter.

The overall results showed definite warming of sea water in the Arctic, thinning of ice, and large expanses of open water compared to historical ranges up until the past half-century or so. Interviews with scientists with positions on global warming, especially James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Many of the observations made by the documentary parallel stories from other sources about warming in the Arctic, and I doubt that many minds will be changed by this show. All information is incremental, however, and more examination will doubtless follow. One key prediction is that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2013. That will settle some arguments, if it happens, and raise others, about how to abandon large areas of low-lying shoreline around the world. We shall see.

If I set the Wayback Machine to thirty years ago, I can see my sons rounding the bases and chasing fly balls in the short outfields of first T-Ball then Dixie Youth Baseball. These were happy times sitting  in the bleachers at Senter Field on Lookout Mountain. (No, not Center Field, the field was named after Nick Senter, major supporter of Dixie Youth on the Mountain.) Both boys grew to men retaining their interest in baseball.

Energy to burn

Now there are grandchildren, a girl and a boy, six and four, respectively, playing softball and T-Ball. We have been to see games, and will again on into the summer. T-Ball and Softball are even better with grandchildren to watch.

For their parents, three or four games a week at far-flung parks mean long evenings following long working days for both. They are the best of parents, though, and even help coach the T-Ball team. They keep volunteering for things. I am proud of them both, they are giving their children a gift beyond price, of infinite meaning for the rest of their young lives. They are giving their time and participation. I love my sons, I love my daughter-in-law (I always wondered what having a daughter would be like, and now I know - wonderful.) I love the grandchildren

Mommy urging him on, Daddy carries bat.

immoderately, as does their Granny Babs, and we agree that this is the best of times,  among many good times, watching the girls and boys of summer.

Play Ball!

I attended this morning a breakfast meeting at the Orange Grove Center, a service agency here in Chattanooga for persons with various physical and developmental challenges. The Center provides training, classes and group homes. The organization runs recycling for the City of Chattanooga, entirely staffed by clients. I was invited to the meeting by friends of mine who have a son in one of the group homes.

While I listened to speakers outlining the goals and programs of Orange Grove, I thought of that young man, and of a little girl from long ago in my extended family. When I was fourteen, my mother re-married, into a large and close-knit family, at one stroke providing my sisters and me with a small army of step-cousins and uncles and aunts. At family gatherings, held frequently, one of the cousins was always Jane.

I don’t know the details of Jane’s condition, but the challenges she faced were formidable. Phsically, she could do pretty much what any child could, but developmentally, she remained a very young child, never mastering speech, needing constant supervsion to keep her safe. Her family loved her. All the extended family loved her. Her parents were able to keep her at home; I don’t remember if she ever participated in any Orange Grove programs.

Although Jane could not speak, she had no trouble communicating. At every gathering, her cousins flocked around her, and her face was wreathed in beautiful smiles and her infectious laugh could be heard like a bubbling stream of joy. Everybody showered love on Jane, and she returned it in double measure.

Jane did not live to physical maturity, the problems of whatever had limited her development gradually affected her health, and at eleven or twelve, I don’t remember exactly after so many years, Jane died. She suffered a panic attack, which precipitated heart failure. Her physical heart failed, but her wordless love and joy carried on in the family; I am sure it does still, although I am no longer in contact with many of my steps.

Some lives may seem limited by the sort of circumstances that faced Jane and her family, but I can guarantee that not one person who knew her felt that life was not a gift for Jane, and for her family. Orange Grove exists to facilitate that gift for each client, and their families.

Following the horrors of four years of civil war, the more strident and extreme elements of the Republican Party pursued a policy of vengeance and retribution against the defeated Southern Secessionists, especially after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Any suggestion of conciliatory measures in the conduct of Reconstruction led to cries from the Radical Republicans citing the blood and sacrifice of Union dead and wounded in defeating the Confederacy. The extremity of these measures undermined the recovery and healing of the Union, and led to support for similar radicalized die-hard apologists for the secessionist and racist elements in the South.

Something similar is shaping up with the insistence of ideologically rigid Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, who insist on pursuing investigations and prosecutions of Bush Administration leaders who framed the policies on torture of suspected Al-Qeda terrorists. With the tremendous challenges domestically and abroad, economically and diplomatically, this sort of tunnel vision is destructive.

Let it go. Codify humane standards for interrogation in the future, but do not devote inordinate time and resources to punishing from ideological motives those who made decisions often either ignored or tacitly supported by those who now cry for punishment.

President Obama needs to face down his compatriots in the Houses of Congress, exert leadership and forge compromises with his opponents, not tolerate waving the bloody shirt of past excesses.

Last year I posted on this singer/songwriter who impressed us at a local tavern. Recently my appreciation for bluegrass has been given a boost by encountering the Country Doc/bluegrass mandolin picker/writer Dr. Tom Bibey. Among other facets of Shannon Whitworth’s music is a strong bluegrass streak. Whitworth lives south of Asheville, NC, in Brevard, a few hours east of here, up in the mountains, a good place for the arts in general.

Picking

She picks a mean banjo, as well as an acoustic guitar. Her band last year used electric guitars and a pedal steel, so the music is eclectic, with a bluegrass flavor.  On her MySpace page she has some audio tracks from her last album, No Expectations, which I downloaded from iTunes and have been playing since last year, more often recently. She also has a Facebook page. I lifted a picture of her working out on her banjo, left.

I see on her page that she will be back here on May 8 at a local venue for drama, alternative music and other good things, the Barking Legs Theater. I  have been meaning to check this place out for years, maybe we can drop in for this fine music.

I don’t believe there will be a golf match on TV to compete, this time, unlike last year.

I also need to check out the Mountain Opry on Signal Mountain, another venue I have been meaning to try for a long time. Odd how you neglect places in your own neck of the woods and then travel elsewhere to be entertained, but that seems to be pretty common, with other folks as well as with me. Live music has a lot to offer, and we are blessed in Chattanooga with quite a bit of it.

Another birthday today, it would have been my father’s 89th. Nine years gone, we marked his birthday with a lunch, my mother, his cousin Upshur, my Barbara and I, reminiscing about Fegi. And about Miller, his cousin, who died shortly after his own 23rd birthday, on October 8, 1944.

I gave Upshur some letters sent from Miller to Fegi in the summer of 1944, first from England, then from France, as the Allied armies pushed eastward through France. Wry, joking young man’s words, telling amusing stories of England and a girl. More somber thoughts when Miller was deep in France.

We talked and laughed and remembered my father, and his lost cousin. Then we left the club and Barbara and I eventually went home, after a stop for provisions. It was time for the final ceremony of the day, mixing memorial martinis, my father’s favorite drink. I used to do this solo, but now we would share the moment. We toasted my father, sipped our martinis, and I introduced my father’s spirit to his daughter-in-law of two months’ official status. Daddy often told me how much he liked Barbara, and I think he is smiling somewhere now at how we finally observed our own ceremony, and tied ourselves to time and each other.

Happy Birthday, Fegi. We love you.

I like music…for listening, many kinds, from rock to folk to country to bluegrass to classical. I have no knowledge of how to read, play or understand in any significant way music or how it works. I know it works in my ear, and with two exceptions I have been content not to attempt making it myself. I don’t count singing at church, when at least I was covered by the rest of the congregation and the choir.  My mother, the choir member and graduate of a gentlewoman’s music conservatory, didn’t count my hymn singing as music, either. She would sigh as we left church, and say, “Well, at least, Son, you can say that you made a joyful noise to the Lord.”

Continue reading ‘My Martin Guitar’ »

I am still listening to my most recent music acquisitions, especially to Ricky Skaggs. My favorite cut on the Brand New Strings CD is “My Father’s Son,” the first stanza sets the tone of family, tradition and the past which is also the present:

My history is no secret, it’s written in the stones
In the hill beside this river rests my mother’s gentle bones
And Daddy there beside her, home among his next of kin
And their legacy passed down to me the sons of mountain men.

Roots and tradition are important, more so to me as the years pass.

Here is a clip of this song, ain’t YouTube grand?