For Gerry

For Gerry

Comments 0 Comment


He was graceful on his feet, a runner, a tennis player. He loved to sing Linda Ronstadt songs in a funny falsetto — “I’ve been cheated. Been mistreated. When will I be loved?” He was funny and he was smart. The map of Ireland was on his face.

He was the boyfriend I broke up with two years out of college. The one-sentence reason was that I wanted children and he didn’t. But there was a longer story, the sort of painful lesson you learn in early adulthood, that love is not enough.

When I heard Monday that Gerry passed away, I felt, after the initial shock and sadness, a sort of reflective remorse. We’d only communicated via Christmas cards for decades; could I have been a better friend?

So I pulled out my old journals and read about those days. I laughed and I cried. I learned some things about Gerry that I had forgotten, and I realized that I had worried about him for years. I had done all I could. He was one of those people who never really found himself, a lover of life with skin too thin for this world. I wish him eternal peace.

A Meadow Begins

A Meadow Begins

Comments 0 Comment


Is it a matter of omission, the simple act of not mowing? Or is there something else involved, some sowing of seeds? I’m wondering about meadows and what makes the one I visit so kind on the eyes.

It is not the regularity of the plantings. There are no rows of tulips, no artful arranging of azalea and dogwood. No, it’s the very randomness that appeals to me, I think. The buttercups, the chicory, the tall grasses gone to seed, the flat blades and thin blades, even the occasional cat tail — all mixed up together. Like a bouquet of wildflowers that draws its beauty not from any one blossom but from all of them mixed together.

Lost Dog

Lost Dog

Comments 0 Comment


Yesterday, when I was on a woods walk, an unleashed shelty ran by me. I’ve seen this dog before and thought he might be allowed to run along the paths unsupervised. But when I saw him 20 minutes later trotting down the main street of our neighborhood, I knew I had an escapee on my hands. The little guy wouldn’t let me close enough to read his tags, so I followed him until he darted into a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. He was safely home.

What impressed me about this dog was his self-possession. He seemed to know where he was going. He was never lost. He was just out exploring. He was the perfect illustration of what self-defense experts tell us: Always act like you know where you’re going, even when you don’t.

Making Plans

Making Plans

Comments 0 Comment

 Today — on the date some Christians predict the Rapture will happen, believers will enter heaven and non-believers will be left behind until the world officially ends October 21 — we decide to hammer out the dates for a family vacation. Which puts us in the ranks of the nonbelievers, or at least nonbelievers based on the predictions of Christian author Harold Camping.

When I was a kid I worried a lot about the end of the world, a result of strict Catholic schooling and an overactive imagination. But since then I’ve fretted about all sorts of other things — from finishing my homework and finding a job (when I was younger) to the myriad concerns of raising children, which if you’re looking for things to worry about, are pretty much unlimited.

What keeps us sane, what keeps us going, is making plans anyway. Lighting the candle in the darkness, that sort of thing. It’s the only way to go.

Morning Rights

Morning Rights

Comments 0 Comment


The cars are unloaded, the bags unpacked, the laundry, well let’s just say it’s “in process.” The young adults are back, sort of. And it is a culmination, is it not? A glorious jumble of conversations and cooking styles and inside jokes. It is like surfing a very big wave, though I have never surfed. It is, I should say, like that drawn-out pause at the top of the roller coaster, catching the breath before the fun begins.

On these mornings-after I tiptoe quietly through the vanishing darkness. I turn off movies, put away cereal boxes, even (supreme pleasure) tuck blankets around sleeping children.

And then I claim the early morning. It is still mine.

400 … But Who’s Counting?

400 … But Who’s Counting?

Comments 0 Comment


My blog post counter is a little off, but sometime in the last few days I wrote my 400th post. To celebrate, here’s a photo of a favorite woodland path. It’s not one I’ve walked often lately because it’s part of my “short loop,” but looking at it here, the late day sun slanting through the trees, I think I’ll find a way to include it more often.

What you don’t see in this photo is the dog pulling on his leash, my attempts to hold him and the camera, or the thicket you must plow through to reach this canopied clearing.

What you do see, I hope, is a landscape that asks for understanding and that offers, at least on clear May afternoons, a brief measure of peace.

Water World

Water World

Comments 0 Comment


Yesterday, I drove through torrents of rain, along slick roads, past swollen streams and sodden fields. I came to appreciate as never before the merits of the windshield wiper, its various speeds barometers of my mood: intermittent meant a light mist and hope of dry pavement to come; medium speed was a persistent drizzle that I could handle, stupefying in its metronomic regularity; fast meant a heart-pounding deluge, truck spray all but obscuring the road ahead.

For hours I drove with wipers on and then, almost home, a benediction, a clearing, wisps of fog on a mountaintop, a brief show of sun and a shy, hesitant rainbow. I wish I could have photographed the hills as they emerged from cloud cover; they looked as fresh as new creation.

Postscript

Postscript

Comments 0 Comment


Late yesterday I learned that the space shuttle Endeavor blasted off for the last time yesterday. I knew its final lift-off was in the works, but hearing the news on the way home from Suzanne’s commencement was a fitting way to cap a day that was about endings and beginnings, about leaving the known for the unknown.

Commencement

Commencement

Comments 0 Comment

Today Suzanne graduates from college. Family and friends have gathered to wish her well, to celebrate her achievement and to send her off into this new time of her life. A phrase from the baccalaureate yesterday stays with me: We are who we are because we were here together.

I think about my own college friends — one of them my husband!— and how I treasure them more every year. I think also about my own college graduation. Once my parents arrived it was the beginning of the end.

Suzanne said as much to us yesterday. The real Wooster, the Wooster that has been changing and sustaining here these last four years — that ended a few days ago. So this weekend has been a long goodbye to the campus and the way of life she had here; to friends who (though she will stay close to many) will not be here, in this particular composition, again.

For us it is a goodbye to a place that seems tucked away in time and space. While Suzanne will undoubtedly return here we most likely never will. As of today, she is an alumna. We are just “the parents of.”

Due to the rain and cold, graduation exercises will be in the gym today instead of the oak grove. But the azalea and lilacs are thriving, the rain will soon give way to sun and fresh-washed air, and this place is filled with exuberance of lives that are just beginning. It is a happy, happy day.

(The girls four years ago, after Suzanne’s high school baccalaureate.)

Circle Route

Circle Route

Comments 0 Comment


Yesterday I went for a walk in the suburbs of Lexington, Kentucky. Growing up I didn’t think of them as suburbs; we called them “subdivisions.” If pressed, we could walk downtown from our outlying area. But suburbs they are, with the wide lawns and good schools to prove it.

I squeezed in yesterday’s stroll before the rain, and the entire walk had a sense of fullness and portent that sharpened the sensations. I have a circle route I walk when I’m here, and it takes me through an older neighborhood, into a new one and then back into the older one again. I noticed the locust trees, their fallen petals dried in piles on the street. Phlox is blooming here, and roses in profusion.

A circle walk is a calming practice; it brings you back quite naturally to where you started. Not unlike a visit home.