by John

Oranges

Oranges fresh from our orange tree in Arizona

There is something about picking oranges each year until there are none left, except a few that are too high to pick, that puts one in a contemplative frame of mind.

” Ambrosia” or Nectar of the Gods is how Lilian describes our morning orange juice

I would often walk out to the orange tree in our side yard and pick four or five of the fruit to squeeze for Lil and myself. I was struck by the fact that the juice, still cold from the night air, was still living in its cellular processes. Up until a few minutes earlier, it had been absorbing water, sugar and other nutrients through the trunk; organic compounds from its leaves; and reliant upon the millions of delicate, microscopic root hairs underground that wrap themselves around individual grains of soil and absorb moisture along with dissolved minerals. A process of respiration was constantly underway in the tree’s cells absorbing CO2 and releasing the by-product of photosynthesis, oxygen, into the atmosphere. As I stood beside the tree, I was struck by the likelihood that I was inhaling atoms released through its leaves. And, as the tree released oxygen, carbon dioxide, and moisture, it sucked up large amounts of water from the ground. And the moisture came from the same sources upon which I relied to live; water from the underground aquafer as well as the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile aqueduct that diverts water from the Colorado River to cities and farms in Southern Arizona. We are also united by our need for nutrients: Chemical elements such as sodium, potassium, chlorine, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus that come ultimately from the soil and pass up the food chain from plants to humans. There is more to the orange tree that vitamin C.
And, as I sipped my morning juice, I thought of an evolutionary chain going back fifteen million years when citrus plants diverged from a common ancestor and I realized that, in the great sweep of evolution and human history, it was only yesterday that the Spanish Conquistadors introduced oranges to North America. I wonder if they tasted the same.

An orange in our Ohio supermarket

I noticed the label on an orange in the nearby supermarket. A sunny day came to mind with the image of an orange tree in South Africa where we lived and the image of a person picking the fruit then magically handing it over to us. A sharp citrus aroma escaped as Lil cut into the skin. She offered me a wedge and I had to acknowledge that it was extraordinarily sweet. Nearly as moist and sweet as our Arizona oranges. Curious about the label on the fruit, an internet search revealed that PLU#3156 referred to a refrigerated shipping container on a ship off the coast of Cape Town.

Oranges as commodities

The refrigerated containers were filled with oranges that had been picked a thousand miles to the north. They had been packed, not gently by hand into small wooden boxes, but by robotic arms in an automated warehouse the size of a football stadium, then chilled to a temperature just below freezing and loaded with 750 other containers onto the ship. They were stacked five high on the deck, then transported eight-thousand miles on a three-week voyage to Philadelphia where, together with other containers they would be shipped to dozens of distribution centers across the US. one of which is in Grove City, Ohio, where cartons of oranges would be loaded into trucks and distributed to supermarket locations throughout the state including our local store.

As I peel the perfect four-week-old South African orange, I’m reminded of our years in Jamaica:

Despite its mottled appearance and difficulty to peel with a knife, the Jamaican orange is sweet and juicy, and typically sucked rather eaten. And I remember the rough, bumpy-skinned Ugli fruit, the Jamaican Tangelo, a cross between a mandarin orange and a grapefruit with a sour-sweet taste.

Did we miss our morning juice from our years in Canada?

In Canada when fresh oranges were expensive, our daily source of vitamin C was reconstituted frozen orange juice concentrate. Yes, we were getting our vitamin C but, at the sensory level, there was no organic connection. The organic connection with the fruit in South Africa was restored during our years after Canada in Jamaica.

But the mind keeps returning to Arizona:

Through the kitchen window

Taken from outside our home during a hot summer night in Tucson, the image holds out the promise of a new day when the oranges in the bowl will be squeezed to link us closely to our environment. And so it goes.

by John

The Question

Thoughts on an early morning walk

As one ages, one seems to turn increasingly inwards: Catching images from the past that fall like confetti in a random scattering of faces, places, shapes and colors, tastes, smells and sounds. And I wonder about the purpose of it all, about the purpose of my life and the lives of parents, grandparents, siblings, nephews and nieces as images of them float by; lives so full, marked by pain and pleasure, fear and fulfilment, boredom and excitement; lives once so important to them yet gone, seemingly in an instant. Gone like the birds that built their nest in the vine outside our window last spring and gone like their chicks who survived to repeat the cycle. Gone like the squirrels and chipmunks urgently storing food for winter.

And I remember catechism classes taught by my teachers, the Irish Christian Brothers in Pretoria where the Jacarandas bloomed each spring: “Why did God make you?” “God made me to know, love and serve Him in this world and be happy with him forever in the next.” There wasn’t a question in the catechism asking why God made sparrows. So, I don’t know the answer to a question that wasn’t asked. And the Christian Brothers came to South Africa from Ireland in 1897, interlopers, about the same time Jacaranda trees were imported from Brazil. Interlopers. And the bees still buzz among the Jacaranda blossoms and the school is now coeducational and multi-racial, and the Christian Brothers have gone, and my grandfather who once was a Christian Brother died seventy-eight years ago. And the question remains: “To what end? For what purpose? And does any of this matter; not in the abstract, but to MY wife, to MY children, or to anyone? And should I apologize for using the possessive MY? Is anything MINE? I remember my Irish grandfather, though I scarcely knew him. Those who knew him well – his wife the tennis-playing homemaker, his father the farmer, his mother whose place was in the kitchen, his sons, a lawyer and a doctor, his brother, the well-known cleric who sent him shamrock from Ireland each March– all have died, while I remain the last embodiment of a memory that is all that is left of him. When I die, all memory will be gone as if he never existed. And the bees whose habitat is at risk will still buzz among the Jacaranda blossoms in Pretoria for a while to come. Which will be the first to end, the sound or the memory? Does it matter?

Does it matter? This, perhaps, is the most important question. And, as my early morning walk ends, it is a comfort to suddenly realize that the answer doesn’t matter.

by John

Love Sonnet for a daughter

Lake Ontario shore, 2007

When summer joy has been in short supply
and cloudy days outnumber all the rest,
is it some lingering loss, a love denied,
or sun’s sad absence puts us to the test?
Perhaps no longer have we a claim on bliss,
our once new loves since lost with passing time
and youth’s achievements hidden in the mist
of long-forgotten days like last year’s wine.
But something sadder still is cause of pain
if joy of those we love is our joy’s measure:
It’s love itself our loved one cannot find
that makes us settle for more modest pleasure:
A cup of tea, some melody, a gentle frame of mind,
a prayer our love by love one day is found.

Ten years later, an answer to prayer. And the sun still shines.

by John

Weekend Music

Some student musicians were kind enough to visit our community during a local music festival and play for us. It was a perfect way to spend a summer afternoon, and a reassuring message about the hard work, talent and generosity of many young people today.

Then I saw a young man in the audience in front of me scrolling on his iPhone. “Oh no,” I thought. “This is a sad commentary on the youth of today.” Then I looked more closely:

He was following the score. My faith was restored.

Earlier that weekend, I had read a blog post that beautifully described a fig tree. A folksong about a walnut tree came to mind, a memory of at least ten years ago, and I spent a lot of time trying to find it on the internet. Success! Here are Luciano and Fernando Pavarotti singing La Giana with the Rossini Chorale of Moderna in 1990.

by John

The Song of a Bird

Perhaps one shouldn’t write about the song of a bird. Certainly not a poem. The birdsong is enough.

And yet, I’m compelled to share my early morning experience, walking under the trees in the half-light before sunrise last spring under the dark shapes of maple, oak, and fir. I couldn’t see any birds but I heard them, above and on the sides. Different sounds, males calling females and birds claiming their territory. For a moment I was pulled into another world. A world bursting with joy and with life.

I had my phone with me and I photograph the sky as if to say, “I see you”. Then I recorded the birds singing, as if to say “I hear you.” There was a magic dialogue.

The phone then analyzed the sounds and gave me a report. The spell was broken. Technology should have no place in the contemplative experience, at least not for this eighty-two-year-old.

by John

Notes while listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth

The first record I ever bought was a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6. It was 1968, and I found myself alone in Pretoria, South Africa. I listened to the music on a cheap stereo record-player. I heard it on the car radio a few days ago. It took me back to those years in the late 60’s. The brooding music resonated deeply. I was lonely then, in an inarticulable way. I had chosen that life and so the music simply described what I had chosen.

Several years later, my mood had changed as I listened to Tchaikovsky: Not his Sixth, but Swan Lake. I had met a woman who introduced me to the ballet. We listened to it together. I found the music liberating. Both set me on a new path.

The path, a long one, took me to Kingston, Ontario, to the shores of the St. Lawrence River and Fort Henry in Canada, a fortification constructed during the War of 1812 to protect the Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard on Point Frederick from a possible American attack.

Year after year, we would take our children to a Sunset Ceremony at the fort for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with canon, that temporarily obliterated any recollection of the Pathétique or Swan Lake. But today, the memories return and, with the help of the internet, I access a 2017 performance of the Sixth under the baton of Kirill Petrenko and, in our living room a long way from the little parish rectory in South Africa, I watch and listen to the Berlin Philharmonic.

And so, I listen once again to the Sixth as I type these notes and learn that Tchaikovsky died at age 53, just nine days after he conducted the premiere of his final symphony in 1893 in St. Petersburg.

And here he lies with his sadness and his secrets on a sunny autumn day with Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov and Mily Balakirerv.

by John

When Bats Come Out To Fly

This is the thin time
in desert’s diaphanous dusk
when blackened shapes
stand stark against a liquid sky
faintly marked
by the early evening star
pinning night’s silk shroud
over a dying day.

This is the thin time
in twilight’s warp
when bats come out to fly.
Like shuttles weaving frantically,
they stitch up vespers veil
and pick at threads of memories
embroidered long ago
in the fraying fabric
of a slowly fading mind.

This is the thin time
between the chatter of the quail
and the coyote’s fearful cry
when our gilded mountains
turn their greasy grey
and I slip quietly
into darkness
at the dying of the day.