Drownings

            I wrote “Drownings” years ago. Everything in it is true.

 

            Drownings

 

From fifteen feet above myself unbreathing

there on the dock I evaluate those feet,

mine, splayed on the boards I painted.

The camp nurse bends over me to insert

the hard S-tube down my throat. My cool

eyes consider the restless boat,

the waterskies aligned, the tow-rope

a heap. No waves move onto the shale beach.

A benign Lake Champlain accuses me

under a Vermont sun, and I want to disappoint

all these people by dying out from under them

on such a smiling day.

                                       Fifteen years

after my drowning, Jeff chases ducks off

a dock's edge. He sinks beneath the tidal

sheen of Five Mile River. I know he must bob

soon to the surface. I pass my son going up

on my way down.

                               Phillip's drowning

finds him clinging half swallowed beneath a dock

in the Fox River. At dinner in the cottage

I almost too late hear his cries above the voices

of aunts and cousins. I pull my dripping boy

from the suck of the lazy river.

 

In a film a child falls from a high window

bounces to his feet, runs off. We can

do that on our good days: drowning

through a late spring afternoon held

to my desk by a student's whine, or

through the bed my wife avoids

like my eyes, or through a drive

to scare the boys with my braking:

to be saved, emerging into changed air

and light, or to drown down through green

water into a deeper world where we breathe

through our wounds and join all the other

drowned children alive at last.

 

            Not exactly sure where “breathe / through our wounds” came from – except, perhaps, the feeling that it’s our wounds that make us alive, like “all the other / drowned children” with whom we share the wonders of being alive.

  

Curse

 

            We recently watched a series on television where a Sicilian grandmother places a curse on a man’s family for mistreating her granddaughter. And sure enough, a couple of generations later, two identical twins are born, one of them psychotic. Their lives are miserable. The curse worked.

 

            My questions are, Why did it work? and How did it work? The simple answer, of course, is that it worked because it’s a movie. And I believe that in real life, a curse can work if the person upon whom the curse is inflicted knows about it, and he falls into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I get that. And I understand that some people might believe other people are cursed, and they treat them accordingly, fulfilling the curse. Racial prejudice may run in this vein.

 

            But what about a curse that is uttered to the universe, and no people know about it? Does it have any power?

 

            The opposite of a curse, I suppose, is a blessing. Setting aside the semi-automatic “God bless you!” after someone sneezes (a practice that started, I read, during the plague years as a way to ask God to prevent the sneezer from getting the plague), how is the blessing supposed to work? Divine intervention? If so, is that the enforcement mechanism for curses as well? Again, it may be that if a person knows he or she is blessed, that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by optimism. And if others believe a person is blessed, well, they may confer the blessing in the way they interact with him.

 

            (And of course there is a great southern expression I learned in Gainesville: When you say to someone, “Bless your heart” using the right tone of voice, what you are really saying is, “You are pathetic and need all the help you can get.” Those of you from the South may want to confirm this . . ..)

 

            What about curse words? It’s easy to see “God damn you!” as a curse, in ways we have been discussing. But how about “Fuck you!”? If that’s a curse, what’s the intended outcome? I assume that “curse words” are words used when cursing someone, but I’m not sure how “shit” fits into a curse, unless there is a missing verb in the imperative mood.

 

            (By the way, isn’t it charming that the word “mood” is used as a grammatical term? A question can be posed in “the interrogative mood,” and questioning is indeed a mood – as evidenced by my opening questions. And don’t you tell someone what to do when you are in an imperative mood?) (Please forgive this English teacher digression.)

 

            Back to cursing. (Instead of typing this, I should have written it in cursive . . ..) Despite the uncertainties about whether and how curses work, I still think it useful to issue a well-placed curse from time to time. What can it hurt? And I know from personal experience that it feels good to lay down a curse or two.

The Decision

 

            Our decision to sell our Atlanta loft in the Stacks and move back to Michigan is a difficult one. (Note that I say “is” rather than “was,” as the process is raw and new.) We have imagined a number of different scenarios, most of them starting with “What if . . .?”

 

            There is a lot to like about where we live in Atlanta: the neighbors we have met, the striking architecture of the Stacks and, especially, of the unit where we live – and it would be even better if we went ahead with the kitchen and bathroom remodeling that Kim has been planning for weeks. We have also, thanks to Genne´, discovered some really cool places not too far from here – the Beltline, for one, with its wide sidewalk lined with restaurants, bars, and interesting people cruising by on skates, scooters, bikes, or on foot. And today we visited a great farmer’s market, open Saturdays year-round. My new friend John, a long-time resident here, shows me a new lunch place just about every week. And as we’ve said before, our Cabbagetown neighborhood just has a good vibe.

 

            But still, there are some strong negatives for us. One of the main ones is the traffic. No accidents yet, and the problem might be my 81-year-old brain navigating unfamiliar streets, but I am afraid I might feel stranded in our home, unable to get out for simple shopping – though I am confident about access to groceries.

 

            Another negative is the heat. True, we have not yet experienced it, but Atlanta summers are, from all reports, still a concern – and that might make us hole up with our air conditioning.

 

            A third major negative is the missing connection with the natural world. Out our living room windows – the only ones we have – we see traffic, which includes quite a few ambulances and fire trucks. Yes, a tree outside our windows is about to put out its spring leaves, and we see the occasional robins, but it’s not at all like what we saw daily at the Bark House. Kim spends time looking at her bird and butterfly photos on her computer, as we are unable to see them in person.

 

            And a fourth negative is the lack of space in our condo. Kim has no room to do her artwork – and she is an artist at heart. There is no room for her collections. We have known for a couple of months that this cannot be our one and only home, though if either one of us dies first the other might possibly live here. But there is simply no storage here, and we have a house full of stuff in the Bark House on Torch Lake.

 

            With both the Bark House and our Stacks condo on the market, we have a number of “What if . . .?” plans:

 

PLAN A: Keep the condo here and the Bark House and become snow birds, driving back and forth. The problem is that it’s a 1,000 mile drive, and though family members and friends have offered to drive us, it’s still a long ride, and we’d still have to deal with the Atlanta problems.

 

PLAN B: Sell the condo, move back to the Bark House, and buy a condo in Traverse City where we would live in the winter and rent out in the summer. We have been looking hard at the Commons – the former mental institution where we lived for a couple of years while building the Bark House. So far, we have not seen one that would work, but we will have to look in person.

 

PLAN C: Sell both the condo and the Bark House and find another house or condo, probably in Michigan, that will architecturally interesting and livable, and with room for our furniture and our stuff. We’ve been looking for over a year, including in North Carolina and Ann Arbor among other places, and we have yet to come up with one that works for us. We have made the sale of our house contingent on our finding a suitable place to live, which is a lot like taking it off the market.

 

PLAN D: Sell the condo, move back to the Bark House, find the help we need, and just live there. The house works for us in so many ways. Help is hard to find – for what we need both inside and outside the house – but the money we get from selling the condo will allow us to pay what is needed.

 

            Of course, all of these plans make it sound like selling the house or condo are decisions we make, but of course, buyers are required, and that might be out of our control.

 

            Thinking, planning and (for me) worrying about all of the above, each attached to a “What if . . . ?”, has led to an increase in my level of stress. It’s hard to make a decision with so many unknowns at play, and moving itself, as we know, brings its own dose of stress. I find that having a to-do-list helps, and it helps knowing that Genne´ will be here looking after our condo while we are in Michigan. We (Kim) are starting to pack – mainly small stuff and essentials for the car. We’ll need a mover if and when the condo sells, and if it doesn’t, we may drive down here for the winter.

 

            Who knows?

The Triumph of Icarus

            Lately I’ve been thinking about the fall of Icarus. The myth is usually taken as a lesson about the danger of flying too high, as the sun will melt the wax holding your wings together, and down you go. Moderation is best.

            But there are other ways to see the story. First, Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus:

(You can see the legs of Icarus just below the stern of the ship.)

            

    Auden’s take on the painting:

Musee des Beaux Arts 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

Our suffering, even our death, takes place, for the most part, unnoticed: “how everything turns away.”

            And from William Carlos Williams:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned 
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

The landscape is “concerned / with itself.” Not us.

            But then there is this, from Jack Gilbert:

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. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

 

            I sent this poem to a recently divorced friend. He said it didn’t help. But it’s not about marriage and divorce – like the other two poems, it’s about how we see our endings. Everything will “turn away,” and the world, natural and human, is “concerned / with itself.”

 

            None of this, however, diminishes the triumph. The challenge is to identify and appreciate our triumphs.

            I am posting this now as we are planning to sell our loft in Atlanta, as much as we love it, and move back to Michigan and the Bark House. I’ll get into the reasons in a later post – still doing a lot of processing. But our decision to go on this adventure, and the creative energy we put into it, is our triumph. 

“That’s Not Fair!”

            This expression struck me when some teenaged character in a movie was complaining about being grounded by her parents. In this case, and many like it, “fair” refers to some sort of basic moral feeling with which we evaluate the outcome of decisions. We, supposedly, have an inner sense of what is “fair” and what is not. Someone accused of a crime should get “a fair trial,” and my non-attorney understanding is that the legal system has a long list of rules and procedures to try to make sure that the outcome is “fair.” At the very least, the judge should be fair – as in, unbiased. These established rules apply “fairness” to the world of specific incidents and decisions. The phrase “moral compass” is sometimes used to describe how we determine what is fair. I think of it as a matter of conscience, but applied to the larger world. You may know someone who has a vacuum where a conscience should be.

 

            There is a problem in judging fairness by using established rules when the established rules might themselves be suspect. Think of the Jim Crow laws, or of Manifest Destiny. Calling them “unfair” is a vast understatement. In looking over American history, including recent history, it is sometimes difficult to see “fairness,” though I admire our struggles to achieve it.

 

            If judgment about an action’s “fairness” can be rendered by something as high-flown as a moral compass, then why does “fair” also mean “mediocre”? As in, “That glass of wine was fair,” by which is meant “only fair – not excellent.” And in baseball, if the batted ball is in “fair” territory, that means it is in play, and the teams can compete to take the next step toward winning, using their own skills, strategy, etc., supposedly leading to a fair outcome.

 

            But what about a fair complexion or fair hair? What makes them “fair”? Difficulties with words often drive me to etymology, and the dictionary tells me the word derives from the Middle English “fager,” akin to the Old High German “fagar,” which means “beautiful.”

 

            Yes! Setting aside thoughts about blondes, I find something very satisfying about seeing beauty at the heart of the word. Yes, a world that is fair to people is beautiful, as is a person who has a functioning moral compass. And a ball hit into fair territory allows the intricate beauty of baseball to present itself.

 

 

 

 

            

 

            

Workout Room

            We have a gym, a.k.a. “Workout Room,” in our building. I know this is true because I have been to it four times since we moved in 10 weeks ago. Fortunately, the Workout Room is several flights of stairs below our condo, which is quite a feat since we live on the first floor. This is fortunate because I don’t feel the need to do all that much working out because I know I have all those stairs to climb to get home.

 

            Our Workout Room features 24 different machines, most of them made of heavy black metal. When I look at them, I see “potential injury,” mainly because I heard a young guy behind me grunting and groaning as he repeatedly did something with weights (I didn’t dare look at him) that were obviously too heavy for him. I’ve made the excuse that I don’t know how to use the machines, but Genne´ has offered to show me how to use them, and to suggest a workout that would be good for a guy my age. So far, I have not been able to work this into my schedule.

 

            No, I pretty much confine myself to two devices – one that simulates rowing, the other more or less like pedaling a bicycle, except you move your arms back and forth at the same time. (This is what I see as multi-tasking.) When on the rowing machine I get to watch a video of muscular young men and women rowing away, interrupted by an invitation “to open a free account,” an invitation I declined. Instead, I counted my strokes until I reached 100 and then dismounted, account free.

 

            The bicycle machine did not offer a video. Instead, I got to watch a machine keep track of how long I was pedaling and how far I hypothetically traveled. My goal was to go for five minutes, and I always succeeded – all three times. The trick, I think, is to slowly increase my stamina despite the ways my age decreases it. Maybe breaking even – not doing worse – is a worthwhile level of success.

 

            I’ve heard from a number of people that old people should lift weights, a.k.a. “weight training.” I suppose this is important because when you are old you (by “you” I mean “me”) don’t want to fall, but if you do, you want to have strong bones and muscles to protect you. Kim told me about a doctor who said that he would not do shoulder surgery on one of his elderly patients because “she had bones like graham crackers.” O.K, I’ll do it but I’m not going to grunt like that guy behind me.

 

            Our Workout Room has several collections of weights, some of which I recognize as dumbbells and barbells (not sure what the difference is). So, I walked over and picked up a couple of small ones with the number 15 on them and did a few what I remember as “curls,” each one followed by a thrust straight up. I did these until it became unpleasant – and then I did three more.

 

            A few weeks ago, we got a message from our management company saying that some of the mirrors in the Workout Center were going to be replaced. This made me wonder why the mirrors were there in the first place. It might be to check your form. Or, it may be to see if your muscles are bulging properly. Or if you are wearing the right outfit to work out. Or how old you appear to be. I chose not to look, just as I hope others choose not to look at me.

 

            It’s difficult for me to come to solid conclusions about the Workout Room because the most people I ever saw there at one time is four. Still, when we look at listings of places for sale in our complex, they always feature photographs of the Workout Room. I suppose the calculation is that people want to live in a place where neighbors can make themselves physically fit, but there is no pressure to be like them.

Y’all

            We’ve been y’alled. We hear it all the time, here in Georgia. I don’t think I ever heard the word (if that’s what it is) in Michigan.

 

            What does “y’all” mean? Well, first of all it does not mean “you all,” as if to be referring to an inclusion of an entire group of people. “Y’all should get a flu shot” does not mean “You all – every one of you – should get a flu shot.”

 

            And it’s, in our experience, a positive term – almost an affectionate one. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said in anger. This may be because of the friendliness we have found here in Georgia, but still, I like being “y’alled.” As I think about it – not hard to imagine it said in an unfriendly way: “Y’all better get your ass off my porch.” Still, for me, the “y’all” gives it a faint positive vibe . . ..

 

            Maybe the meaning is that the speaker is talking to all of me – not all of us. “Y’all come on in” invites my total self, conveying a kind of acceptance of my whole self that feels rather nice – maybe the way a child is supposed to feel when being loved by a parent.

 

            On the other hand, “y’all” might just be a way that a Southerner announces that he or she is a Southerner, and proud of it – willing to announce it with a particularly Southern word.

            My friend Rex commented: A tour guide in Texas explained to us that "y'all" is singular. The plural, he said, is, "All y'all." As in, "All y'all need to get out of that lake right now! It is ate up with gators!"

 

            I’m not sure if there is a racial factor at play here. My clearest memories are of white people saying it – especially Chase, my Atlanta realtor – but I just don’t know. I’ll have to listen for it. The Black people we’ve met here, mainly waiting on us in stores, have been universally friendly, but I just don’t recall hearing one of them saying “y’all.” I’m curious.

 

            Please be clear that the word “yawl” has a completely different meaning from “y’all.” From Wikipedia: “A yawl is a two-masted, fore and aft rigged sailing vessel with the mizzen mast positioned abaft the rudder stock, or in some instances, very close to the rudder stock. This is different from a ketch, where the mizzen mast is forward of the rudder stock. The sail area of the mizzen on a yawl is consequentially proportionately smaller than the same sail on a ketch.”

 

Just thought I’d share that information with y’all.