I had an abscess around the root of an upper molar and the pain was intense for several days until an endodontist came to the rescue. Despite the pain, while walking back to the house from the mailbox in the darkening of evening, I noticed the pink contrail of a passing jet. The image was so striking, I dashed indoors to get my camera. It’s interesting how beauty can arrest one; how, for a few minutes, a pink line across a purple sky can anesthetize one.
The original was probably the small terracotta sculpture in the center that is now in the British Museum and dates back more than 2200 years. The bronze on the left, also in the British Museum, is an equally old copy. Our little statue is a fine art reproduction and, although there must have been hundreds produced around the time we bought it, the beauty of the original is faithfully conveyed.
We were quite poor at the time and we sacrificed lunch to help pay for our Aphrodite. Weeks later, she was the only beautiful presence in the scrubby little furnished apartment above a convenience store that was our first rented home upon arriving in Canada.
She was wrapped, packed, transported and unpackaged fourteen or fifteen times as we moved from apartment to house after Sarah’s birth, then from city to city in Canada and, later, to Jamaica where she watched our armed robbery but was herself left unscathed. Then to the United States to watch the children grow, then bid farewell to Adrian as he left home for university. Back to Ontario and then Quebec, only to return to Ohio before a final move to the Southwest where you might think she is quite out of place. Is love ever out of place?
Parents, Aunt and Uncle punting on the Cam
We are in the process of throwing things out or giving them to Goodwill: Things like a shell collection, kids’ old toys, children’s drawings, vases, books, photographs, souvenirs from trips and so on; a large conch that an early girlfriend held against my ear so that I could hear the ocean surf; things we have been carting around for decades, subliminally keeping memories alive. Some things, notably family photographs, are spare and kept in a box of family archives. As I look through them, I realize that I can still breathe life into those moments caught by the camera, but when we die, their lives that have been sustained by our memories will end more finally than before. When there are no more people alive who ever knew mom or dad, it will almost be as if they had never existed. I look at a photograph of them in their early thirties punting on the river Cam in Cambridge together with Sue and Bob McSherry. I remember mom and dad telling me about the experience and about dad’s days as a student there: I look at the McSherrys and can almost hear them talking and laughing. I see them all grow and age. Now they are gone. We hang on to the pictures. But the time will come when the photographs won’t mean anything to anyone. They will be tossed out and with them the lives of those we strangely keep alive.
Collections
In the process of clearing out, we had to make difficult decisions to get rid of boxes of toys, collectibles, documents and souvenirs that we had accumulated over forty years.
My collection of wine corks was the first to go. I had started collecting these corks twenty-five years ago in Canada when I started paying attention to wine. The corks told a story: Many were from bottles of Bordeaux: Medoc was my favorite. Some Grand Cru Classe from famously regarded appellations, many from good vintage years. The corks reflected the world of wine producing countries: Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal and even Canada and the United States. And for most of the corks, memories of the taste of the wine, and the circumstance under which the wine was purchased. The corks were carted around from home to home, saved for who knows what. Now they’re gone. I still have a collection of wine labels tucked in between the pages of a book on wine. One day the book will be thrown out.
I should mention in passing that I also had a collection of beer coasters that I threw out a few months ago. The difference between the coasters and the corks is more than the difference between beer and wine. Each coaster was picked up in a pub where I had just enjoyed a beer: Many from English pubs, some from Australia, and several from Canada and the US. I had long harbored a dream that one day I would have a pub bar in the basement of our home. The bar would also feature a collection of matchboxes and boarding passes that I had accumulated around the world during my business travels. The dream now just a dream.
Dunmanus Bay, Ireland
Another collection that I had completely forgotten about was a large box of shells. These too had been carted from home to home, country to country: Shells from the Eastern Cape and Natal in South Africa, a collection from the south coast of Jamaica, and shells from Dunmanus Bay in Ireland. The shells brought back the feel of wet, grainy sand underfoot, the salty feel of the moist air, the warmth and smell of Jamaica, the chill and dampness of Ireland’s southwest coast. In the collection were sun-bleached specimens of coral from Jamaica’s north cost, bringing back memories of family snorkeling inside the reef of Ocho Rios. I threw all of them into the garbage except for the large conch that Maria bought me many years ago in Durban. I donated that together with a box of objet-d’art to the local Goodwill store. Perhaps someone will buy it, someone who knows that if you hold it up to your ear you will hear the sound of ocean surf.
Alligator Pond, Jamaica
Now that we are in our eighties, and after fifteen years in Southern Arizona, we moved to Ohio to be closer to family . We set out to explore our new surroundings and were surprised to discover some beautiful short hiking trails within fifteen minutes of home. In the photograph above, Lil stands at the entrance to a cave in the sedimentary rock ledges of our local metro-park.
Glacier Cave, Liberty Park
This is one of the many caves that are believed to have been used by American Indians in the area. Ohio’s first people, arrived around 16,000 years ago. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and chose this area because of its high ground, proximity to water and wetlands and toolmaking resources. Artifacts found in this area indicate that later people used the land for gardening, and frequently changed encampments to precent overhunting and overfishing. Later, fur trade with the French brought the Wyandot, Seneca, and Ottawa Indians to the wetlands in the area to trap beaver and muskrat.
Mary Campbell’s Cave, Grove Trail, Cuyahoga Falls
A plaque nearby reads:
“In Memory of Mary Campbell who in 1759 at the age of twelve years was kidnapped from her home in Western Pennsylvania by Delaware Indians. In the same year these Indians were forced to migrate to this section where they erected their village at the big falls of the Cuyahoga. As a result, Mary Campbell was the first white child on the Western Reserve and this tablet marks the cave where she and the Indian women temporarily lived. Later, in 1764, she was returned to her home.”
While the story of Mary Campbell’s abduction and release some six years later is true, an archeological dig at the cave found no evidence that it had ever been used as a dwelling by American Indians.
Dammed section of the Cuyahoga River
This view just ustream from Mary Campbell’s Cave won’t last long. The sixty-foot high dam that was constructed a hundred years ago will be demolished this year and the river will return to its normal course and experience improvement in aquatic life.
Blue Henn Falls, Cuyahoga Valley National Park
A thirty-minute hike takes us to another beautiful location close to home. The fifteen foot waterfall gets its name from a ferocious bluish chicken that was bred when cock fighting was legal in the US. Legend has it that a local farmer found the carcass of a blue hen in the pool below the falls and named them after it. The Blue Hen chicken is the state bird of Delaware
A multiple exposure Christmas photograph I took during a 1960 visit to my grandparents’ home in Concord, NH
Childhood memories
still linger
as family ghosts
at two-seventy-six North Main
where, in the dark half light
of winter’s morning,
a sound awakes me.
Is it the snapping crack
of ice-encrusted elms
or rattle of storm windows
in the wind
or just the creaking floorboards
as my grandmother descends
the dark back stairs
into the cold kitchen?
I listen carefully now
and hear the poker-prodding sounds
of wood shifting on the andirons
as she stokes last night’s embers
into hopeful flickers
in the old colonial hearth.
The smell of coffee
draws me down,
the first awake,
to join her in the warming kitchen,
my place set with fresh toast,
and with her
catch the sunrise over snow
in this our special time.
Saturday mornings as a kid
I saw him sitting on the sidewalk
in front of Woolworths
with his wind-up record player.
He had no arms.
Today, Moroccan “mule ladies” strain
under loads lashed to their backs
at the barbed wire fence
that separates Europe’s wealth
from Africa’s despair.
He had no arms, but it was amazing
what he could do with his feet and toes.
We watched with fascination
not understanding why mother whispered
‘move on’.
The bundles on their backs
are as big as washing machines
though this they do not know
never having had one
in their five-dollar-a-day world.
He would take a record
his ring toe and his pinky
and place it on the turntable
while with the other foot
he would crank the handle.
“Yes, the bundles they are heavy,
heavier than each woman,
but to close the border
would leave them destitute.”
So said the official from Melilla, Spain.
Then he would gently move the arm
with his first toe and the second,
softly settling the needle in the groove,
and the record rasped
as if clearing its throat before the song.
They carry the pain of the world,
bending under its weight
because they have to live.
And the tears of the white man
are as dry as desert dust.
And the music floated from the gramophone:
Sammy Kaye singing Harbor Lights,
and I nearly wept,
not for the person with no arms,
but for the music, and myself.
I can say only what I saw:
A migrant, black, dust-laden,
With a basket in the store.
He’d picked out bread
Then looked at the tomatoes
Ripe, plump and red.
He didn’t take the freshest
From the stack, but reached
Behind the juiciest to the back
For the tomato with a blemish,
A spot of rot where once
A splinter in the wooden box
Had snagged its silk smooth skin.
He turned it over in his hand,
Squeezing gently, then placed it
In his basket with the bread
I watched him at the counter
When his turn came round.
Pointing to the tomato,
As if it were a treasure found,
He asked, “How much?”
The cashier set it on a scale.
“43 cents,” she said, “on sale.”
The laborer checked his change,
Shook his head and mumbled
He’d just take the bread.
I saw him leave the store
With only half-a-loaf
And watched the red tomato
As it was tossed into the trash.
In the style of Mary Oliver
When I am among the trees
especially the acacia and mesquite,
the cottonwood and willow,
in the bosque beside the desert wash,
silently welcomed home –
a family member after a long absence,
shedding the fictions of my other self,
the painfully sustained deceit…
It has been so long, though only yesterday:
Home again with these old friends,
sharing their breathing space,
standing in the intensity of the moment
beside the softly bending winter grass
under the welcoming arms
of gnarled old branches that reach out
in a gesture of embrace.
Words take flight like the startled hawk
flycatcher, finch, or sparrow,
alarmed at my footfall,
who flutter away leaving a silence
where the giant granite boulder lies,
unmoved for a hundred years or more
since tumbling down the mountainside
to settle in among the agave and saguaro
for me to lean on, rooted as we are
in this place.
On an icy January morning, during my daily pre-dawn walk to the gym, I heard a cardinal singing from high in the branches of a leafless tree. “That’s strange,” I thought. “Spring is still a long way off in Ohio.” This morning, the same cardinal sits singing in that same tree more than two months later as I walk past at 5:30 am. I’m reminded of the mockingbird that would sing through the night in a tree outside our window in Southern Arizona.
Cardinals were known as Virginia Nightingales in eighteenth-century England or Winter Redbirds because of their stark red contrast against white winter snow. Then, and now, they have had a variety of symbolic meanings, have been named state bird in seven US states, and serve as mascots for many sports teams. For me, the bird conveys the sense of a solitary observer, patiently waiting.
I
Confucian poets
never knew the
gentle jacaranda
never basked
in the amethyst shade
of its springtime
branches
never sang of its
fragrant blossoms
soft as mulberry silk
floating in the breeze
never tried to capture
its illusive hue
purple gently poised
somewhere between
violet and magenta
not quite blue.
The Final Stretch 