geriatric pilgrim

Family Triptych

Published on December 9, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim7 Comments

Weilburg

Traveling 3500 miles to a town in Germany

smaller than the one in Maine where I live—

no tours, no souvenir shops,

no one speaking English except back at the hotel,

I stand by Neptune’s Fountain

in Market Square beneath the God of the Sea

thrusting his trident into the head of some leviathan,

my lungs still burning from climbing the hill to get here,

trying to imagine 25-year-old Johann Frederich Weil

wandering the square

before leaving for Halifax, Nova Scotia,

lured by the British Government’s offer

of free passage, free land, & a year of free rations,

knowing from Ancestry.com

his descendants will anglicize the name & populate places

like Wile’s Lake, Wileville, & Wiles Road,

until the turn of the 20^th Century

when Lyman & Lester Wile

leave Canada for a shoe factory

in Marlboro, Massachusetts

where Lyman will marry Edith Conrey

& sire my father who

because his mother left Lyman when Dad was 4 years old

(apparently because of spousal abuse)

didn’t give a shit about his father or his family.

Then Johann dissolves—

if he was ever here in the first place—

into the salmon & cream-colored two-story buildings,

round-arched arcades, & a matching-colored four-story Italianate castle

as my wife and I join the half-dozen folks in leather & wool

sipping beer & coffee at outdoor tables by a small restaurant.

Still, walking back to the hotel

looking down the hill

at the Lahn River, a small waterfall, an old stone bridge,

I think of the hill I grew up on, the bridge below my house

over a similar river by a similar waterfall,

& I feel a weird calm,

connected by currents beyond my ken.

The Royal River Grill

Walking into a restaurant

with large windows looking out on the harbor

& soft lights meant to look like candles,

I see Buzz & Chuck & Ted sitting at a long oak table.

A shiver of both anxiety & eagerness

& the next thing I know it’s 1953,

when this building was the site of the Stinson Sardine packing plant

& I’m ten years old & in fourth grade

& I’m going to my first meeting of Mike’nBuzzie’s Gang

at Mike’s house just up the hill from here,

because earlier that afternoon

when it had been my turn to stay after school

to erase blackboards,

as soon as Mrs. Croudis left for the teachers’ room,

Buzzie’s brother Craig ran into the classroom.

“We’re getting a gang together

for an apple fight with the uptown kids!

Big meeting at Mike’s house! Let’s go!”

Dropping the eraser, I ran out the door—

the first time in my life I’d ever disobeyed one of my teachers.

But for the first time in my life I didn’t care.

A timid kid, raised in a family

where a miasma of alcoholic anger & anxiety

hung over us like the fumes

from the neighboring paper company,

I’d lie awake mornings before school

afraid of the day ahead,

of having my arm twisted or my face washed with dirty snow

by sixth graders like Mike’nBuzzie,

and now they want me to join them!

Never mind that the apple fight with the uptown kids never happened,

or that Mike now has Parkinson’s & stays home

& that Buzz & Chuck & Ted & I, and later, Allie & John,

have little in common these days

except our L.L. Bean khakis & plaid shirts.

I laugh & reminisce.

At home.

Still part of the gang.

The Cemetery

Under gnarled & broken maple trees,

I walk around my family cemetery plot,

taking pictures of the wedding—

of the bride, who stands 5 feet

& maybe weighs 100 pounds,

her upper chest tattooed with angels,

her dyed magenta hair, & flowing black gown,

& the groom, my stepson,

probably 6’4” & 270,

black lipstick & kilt, red-haired & bearded,

standing in front of the family stone,

originally part of the cellar of my mother’s grandfather’s house,

while my second wife,

an ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church,

performs the ceremony.

My stepson’s two daughters stand as ring bearers

near the memorial stone for my daughter,

who died at 18.

My wife’s ex-husband & his wife

stand between my grandmother’s granite stone

& the memorial stone for Nanny’s ex-husband.

Not far from my great-grandfather & great-grandmother’s marble stone,

my stepson’s nonbinary stepson from his first marriage

& their partner also take pictures.

The bride’s parents view the proceedings

in front of my mother’s bronze marker

between my father’s & my stepfather’s bronze markers

while my second wife’s sister, her daughter & son-in-law

watch both the wedding and a grandson

climbing the near-by gravestones

of my barber, my favorite teacher,

a classmate killed in Viet Nam,

& my little league baseball coach—

all of whom, I imagine,

rolling over in horror at this spectacle

of everyone dressed in black,

everyone smiling,

one big happy family.

First Friend

Published on November 25, 2024November 25, 2024 by geriatric pilgrimLeave a comment

Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. —Luke 10:19

Staring at my 3 a.m. fears—A burning planet, a demented president-elect, disease, death—I think of you for the first time in years: first friend, neighbor, bodyguard, mentor, and, although three years older than I, my classmate from fifth through seventh grade.

Thick black hair and an Elvis sneer, Kirk Douglas dimple in your chin, sleeves rolled up as far as they’d go to show those growing muscles, your dark eyes often flashed anger at the world, but also amusement and compassion for the pudgy, awkward kid who worshipped the ground under your motorcycle boots.

Buddy Fitts, Freddy Gallant, Bucky Lapoint—none of the playground bullies—dared trip me, twist my arm, scrub my face with snow, because they knew they’d have to fight you first. And you were tough: sauntering up Bridge Street coatless in a ten-degree storm, snow clinging to your hair like chainmail on the Black Knight, carving your name on your veiny forearm with a Gillette Blue Blade.

In class, you never raised hell, never passed in a paper, just sat in the back seat looking cool until you turned sixteen and could legally split the joint. You cut CAROL into your upper arm and went to work in the cotton mill.

Playing basketball, fumbling with the buttons on Daisey’s sweater, I hardly knew you’d left. Never saw you much afterwards. Heard you and Lapoint started a paving business.

Home from college, I once walked by your house. You hadn’t grown since grade school but your tattoo was cool—a tiger’s head spanning your boney back as you banged away on a rusty Chevy. We grunted greetings. I forgot you.

At our 50th high school reunion, your cousin Roland said you lived in Tennessee, belonged to some Pentecostal church that prays with poisonous snakes to show God’s power over evil.

This dark morning, my friend, I think of how you protected me, wish you were here to keep me safe from the serpents slithering around me.

# #

How are You?

Published on November 11, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim8 Comments

Well, despite the more or less constant pain in my lower back

and the burn of bursitis in both hips,

and not withstanding my apprehension about that new smell in the garage

and the housing development going in where I like to walk in the woods,

and despite the fear that my grandchildren will live in a Fourth Reich

while this world turns to burnt toast,

and regardless of worrying about having a stroke which will paralyze the left side of my

body so that I drool down one side of my mouth and lose control of my bowels,

and in spite of my nagging fear that there’s really nothing but darkness after death,

and the even greater fear that I will be reincarnated and have to learn all those goddamned

things I’ve had to learn all over again,

I would say I’m grateful to be here.

Thank you for asking.

Welcome, November

Published on November 4, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

As readers of this blog know, my daughter Laurie died at the age of 18 from a rare cancer. In November, seven months after the cancer was first diagnosed, she went into Eastern Maine Medical Center. Living 120 miles away, I took a leave of absence from my teaching job and moved into a Ronald McDonald House where I spent the next two months with my daughter until she died on December 23.

Since then, each November as the days grow darker and colder, I can feel my body chemistry change. I’ve coped in many ways, but the most helpful has been through writing. It’s no accident that the first Geriatric Pilgrim blog appeared in November 2015.

Sonnet for November

Novembers, I would drive my daughter past

Men in blaze-orange caps, crouched on a hill,

Their 30-30’s sighted, set to kill

Most anything, just so the gun would blast.

My heart began to flutter, then beat fast

As we drove by them—silent, savage, still—

And I could feel the air around us chill.

I’d think, how long, dear God, will this month last?

But I’ve since learned of other ways to die,

And russet hills now fill with memories:

Her gentle, kind, abbreviated life.

These days, I treasure the November sky

Which broadens once the leaves drop from the trees.

November wind is clean, a whetted knife.

Darkness

Now darkness begins:

light dimming after lunch,

long shadows on the lawn.

I curse the old lady

crossing the street

in front of my car,

lose gloves,

feel the familiar kick

to the heart.

You’d think after all these years

I’d be over it,

but it’s always different…

this darkness…

Gone the murky numbness,

the black rages,

no more the dim corridors

of “if only” and “what if,”

lit up by Johnny Walker.

Now, who knows what waits

in the darkness ?

Another old friend’s Christmas card

to bring me tears?

More recurrent dreams of stumbling

through stony landscapes?

Another season of bingeing bad TV?

Still, the waning light

is clean and clear,

the view scoured of chewed leaves,

dead flowers, black flies.

And sometimes, just sometimes,

Love enfolds my fears,

and I hear Laurie whisper,

“Dad, let the thoughts go.

Let darkness begin.”

Wild Willy

Published on October 15, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim4 Comments

Around the time this log cabin

sold moccasins I’d see

Wild Willy Crockett

on the corner

with Pea Soup, Spider, and the Goose.

Taller than the others,

he stood with knees rigid,

pigeon-toed, gazing

up and down the street,

searching for someone with a car,

a summer chick on the make,

or Crazy Benny,

who’d buy him beer.

Balanced on a line

between cool and caricature:

the shiny D.A.

French-inhaling Camels,

rocking with Dee Dee Dinah,

whose tits stuck out

of her sweater like oil funnels,

chugging three beers before the game

and coming off the bench

to score six straight points,

graduating high school with his pants

on backwards.

Now the log cabin

sells organic and new-age produce,

and Willy Crockett stands

at the corner of tofu and prunes.

Fifty pounds heavier,

still tall.

Wears a toupee

that looks like roadkill,

carries a cell phone

clipped to an alligator belt.

Assistant manager

at the local hardware store,

divorced from Dee Dee,

He tells me he belongs

to the Church of the New Kingdom.

Says the old days are long gone

—Praise the Lord!

Toes pointed in,

he cradles his yellow basket

of flax oil and sulfur supplement,

gazes at displays

of crystal pyramids,

Himalayan incense,

and Navajo dreamcatchers,

still searching…

My One, Unfolding Life

Published on October 3, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim8 Comments

The beach just down the hill from where I used to live in my “other life.”

6:45 a.m. Driving up the turnpike from Brunswick to Bangor, headed down east to Mount Desert Island, I’m apprehensive. I’m returning to what I’ve always called my “other life”: different marriage, different house, different job, different hobbies, different self. A self, quite frankly, I’ve never liked very much.

But I’ve received an invitation to attend the 50^th high school reunion of the Mount Desert Island Class of 1974. For many of these students, I was their English teacher as well as senior class advisor. And while I have, at best, mixed feelings about this other life, I enjoyed teaching at MDIHS and have continued to be in contact with some of these former students. I’d really like to see them.

The reunion is tomorrow, but besides an invitation to the reunion, I’ve been asked to talk about my book, The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey at a gathering—which I figure will mostly be former students— in Bar Harbor a few hours from now. So, while I watch the leaves change color as I drive north, I try to figure out what I’m going to say.

I know I’ll start by saying the most important thing I learned in writing The Geriatric Pilgrim was that the physical pilgrimages Mary Lee and I made to places like Iona, Big Sur and the redwoods, Nova Scotia, Israel, Africa, and Turkey have shown me that any journey—including the one we make as we age (and these former students are now all pushing 70. Good God!)—can be a pilgrimage. Especially if looked at with curiosity and openness, as explorations to discover new facets of ourselves, seeking surprises rather than security, looking for evidence of and trusting in a power greater than ourselves.

Then, I think, Okay, if any journey can be a pilgrimage, that means this trip back into my other life is a pilgrimage. How?

When Mary Lee (who is sitting beside me, looking at a map of Maine—she loves those big unfolding maps that take up half the front seat) have gone on a pilgrimage, we often talk about what new insights we’re bringing back with us which we can use in the future. So, what lessons did I learn during the seventeen years I spent at MDIHS that have stayed with me?

Well, I’ve always said that those years were the best teaching years of my life. I’ve taught in other schools, some with more impressive teachers, some with smarter students, some with better sports programs, a wider variety of extracurricular activities, more opportunities for materially or intellectually challenged students. But what made MDIHS different was that, despite the annual arguments about the budget and the tensions about dress codes and what was being taught, the parents, the school board, the administration, the faculty, and the students all agreed on one thing: MDIHS was a good school. And because we all thought it was a good school, it was—winning national awards for excellence.

MDIHS in the early years. My room was the closest on the end.

Making a pit stop at the rest area outside of Bangor, I realize how I frame the reality of my life determines how I see that reality, which in turn determines how I live that reality. Thinking we had a good school, I went to work each day excited and proud to be there (okay, not every day, but I can honestly say, most days) which made me work harder, which made me a better teacher and the students better students. Fifty years later, when I can think of my aging not as a problem, but as an opportunity for growth, I’m less anxious about what I can no longer do and more curious about finding new things I can do, more grateful for those things, which makes me more pleasant to be around.

Back in the car, however, turning on to Route 1A and heading for the coast, I ask: if MDIHS was such a great place to teach, why did I leave, and in the middle of the school year? What’s the lesson there?

It probably begins with that guy I used to be—the one I’ve never liked. Come to think of it, he didn’t like himself either. Despite the accolades (one state evaluator said my Advanced Placement English class rivaled the one at Phillips Exeter), I was not a happy camper. I’d created this persona—loud sports coats, matching ties and pocket handkerchiefs, green ink corrections symbols and sarcastic comments in the margins of papers, pictures of sixty-four famous authors glaring down from the walls—which began to feel like a body bag.

Soon after waking up one morning gasping for breath as if someone had their hands around my throat, I resigned. In the middle of the school year. Moved out of my house, divorced my wife, married another woman, and moved 120 miles away to teach not AP seniors but freshman juvenile delinquents (one of whom as far as I know is still in prison for murder).

And I think the reason I’ve never liked that guy in my other life is that I’ve always thought he was a fraud. But thinking about it, I honestly liked my job, and I wanted to honor my profession by looking and acting my best. I recall reading in David Whyte’s book, Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, something to the effect that the things which once served us can imprison us if we remain with them too long.

Which, as I think about it, is also true as I age. I can’t hold onto those activities, that self-image, those beliefs that once sustained me. When I think about making a new pilgrimage, I can’t plan—or I shouldn’t, anyway or I’m going to be disappointed, either that or die—to hike the Appalachian Trail or climb Mount Katahdin, but I can continue the journey toward what I might, for lack of a better word, call my true self. A journey, I realize, that began when I left Mount Desert Island, maybe even before.

Speaking of which, I can now see MDI on the horizon, its rocky silhouette reminding me that this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I remember, especially in those days when most of the tourists went home after Labor Day, how many afternoons and weekends I spent walking the trails and beaches there. And I realize that those walks were the beginning of what I call —somewhat euphemistically perhaps—my spiritual journey. Sitting on the top of one of the mountains, looking out over the neighboring islands, I experienced not only the inchoate presence of a Higher Power, but also a vague sense that everything belongs.

I needed help interpreting these experiences. Which led me to religion. When I first began teaching on the island, I hadn’t been in a church since I was married in one, and by the time I left seventeen years later, I was not only a member of a church but a member of the Board of Deacons. I sang in the church choir. I advised a church youth group.

It dawns on me that without Mount Desert Island, there’d be no Geriatric Pilgrim.

I also see that I have no “other lives,” only this one—one that has been unfolding, like one of Mary Lee’s maps, from the beginning until now and will keep unfolding (I’m guessing; I’m curious to find out) after my earthly death.

Wow! Now, if I can just remember to talk about some of this an hour from now…

# #

Swimming Upstream

Published on September 16, 2024September 17, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim3 Comments

Because once upon a time

despite the threat of my mother’s hairbrush

I swam in the river below our house

dog paddling through chicken carcasses

rotting perch and raw sewage

drifting downstream

from the falls that from a distance

was this white rush of water

spilling over great gray rocks

I attend church despite the disdain of old friends

fight the undercurrents of doubt

dodge the dead fish of boredom and

theological questions bobbing like chicken guts

pray to catch a glimpse of Spirit

flowing from the chalice.

Beginning Again

Published on September 9, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim5 Comments

I’m walking the grass loop around our housing development. Under the power line toward the community garden, I pass through what is now a shoulder-high host of Queen Anne’s Lace, golden rod, milk weed, bracken, and many other plants I can’t name. The flies swarm. The sweet songs of the cardinals and tufted titmouses (titmice?) have given way to the screeching of blue jays and crows. Monarch butterflies flit from flower to flower. The air smells ripe. Shadows crawl like the incoming tide over the landscape. Summer is ending.

And I feel myself coming alive. Beginning again.

The reason is simple. For seventy-five years—as a student, as a teacher—the golden rod, the lengthening shadows, the Monarchs, have meant the beginning of another school year. More than New Year’s Eve, more than the first warm day of the year, this is the time when, at some deep cellular level, I can feel myself waking up, ready to start anew.

It’s a good feeling. At my age, it’s easier to focus on endings than beginnings. I now celebrate—if that’s the right word—more birthdays of the dead than of the living: my grandparents, my parents, my daughter, my first wife, close friends. Ended are my long hikes, long distant driving, lifting anything over forty pounds, staying up after midnight, jumping into bed with my wife after a sexy movie (jumping anywhere, for that matter), five-course meals, Cuban cigars, Laphroaig Scotch… the list grows longer each year.

But as T.S. Eliot wrote, “In the end is my beginning.” (Hey, I’m an old English lit teacher, I remember stuff like that.) You can’t begin something until something else ends. School can’t start until summer ends (Yeah, I know, there’s summer school, but I’m trying to make an analogy. Don’t confuse me with technicalities.) It took the end of a disastrous year of studying forestry in college for me to begin my studies in English (which is why I’m quoting T.S. Eliot and not The Journal of Forestry.) It took the end of an unhappy 20-year marriage for me to begin a happy going-on-forty-year one. It took the end of a career in public education for me to go back to school for an MFA, write a couple of books, a bunch of essays, and going on nine years’ worth of blog posts.

So, what will I begin this year? Well, Mary Lee and I have a couple of trips planned (knock on wood: last year, we had three planned and they were all canceled). I will scrape and repaint my front door and clean out the garage.

But the biggest change I want to make is with The Geriatric Pilgrim.

When I began these blogs, I was fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage: how a pilgrimage differs from a vacation, or from going on a retreat, or from study programs (what I called “edu-cations”). Besides traveling to retreat houses and other spiritual sites in the United States, Canada, the British Isles, Israel, Turkey, and Africa, I collected pages of definitions of pilgrimage and of common characteristics of pilgrimages. I read a raft of books about various pilgrimages people had made.

Along the way, I became intrigued by my fascination with pilgrims and pilgrimages. What was in it for me?

Stature of a “Jakobspilger,” or St. James’s pilgrim: Speyer, Germany

Well, probably the main thing at the time was the idea that pilgrims are often searching for a source of healing. As you know if you’ve read these blogs, I was looking for healing after the death of my eighteen-year-old daughter from a rare cancer. And I found writing about the various pilgrimages Mary Lee and I had made even more healing than the pilgrimages themselves.

Gradually, I began to realize that pilgrimage is a frame of mind—an attitude of curiosity, detachment, wonder. It’s “traveling light,” as one writer says, of risk, of living in liminal space—leaving one location but not yet arriving at another—of exploration, the end of which, to quote T.S. Eliot again, “Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

Since COVID arrived, with all its restrictions on travel, followed by my 80^th birthday, with its expanded waistline and diminished abilities, my blogs have focused more on applying the lessons of pilgrimage to my current life of walks in the neighboring woods, planting peas, tomatoes, and pumpkins in our community garden, and of exploring the twelve steps of my Al Anon program. This, too, has been healing.

But now I find myself no longer as interested in finding new ways to describe my pilgrimage, as I am in describing and exploring in more depth the landscape through which I’m traveling, a landscape that is always changing, sometimes in ways that please me—autumn color is just around the corner, the grandchildren are growing—sometimes in ways that piss me off or frighten me—the start of my favorite woods walk has been clear-cut, I’m finding it difficult to sing without coughing.

Writing about these joys and sorrows, I find I’m writing more poetry. I’ve just finished an on-line workshop for poets, and one of the highlights of my week is another on-line group of poets from all over the country, where we share our favorite poetry as well as poems we’ve written. I’m now subjecting my longtime writing group here in town to my poems.

So, I’m going to be posting more poetry here in these blogs as well as other experiments—prose poems, flash fiction and nonfiction—trying to look more closely at the physical and emotional landscapes through which I’m now traveling.

The way I see it, my pilgrimage continues, but the lens through which I’m seeing it and the voice in which I’m describing it is changing.

I’m excited to see where this journey will take me.

And hoping you’ll continue to join me.

So, let part of my life end, and another begin.

As Quakers say, when one door closes another opens.

For all my losses, I’ve also had wins;

let part of my life end and another begin.

Sure, it’s tempting to focus on what has been,

but I don’t want only to go through the motions.

Let part of my life end and another begin,

as one door closes and another opens.

# #

Playing with Fire

Published on August 5, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim11 Comments

The only hope or else despair…

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

—T.S. Eliot

I’m aware of how old I am when I recall that one of my chores when I was kid was to lug old newspapers, magazines, cards and letters, anything paper, out to the old oil barrel in the back yard and burn them. No curbside pickup in those days. (Hell, our town didn’t even have curbs.) It was not a job I liked. Sometimes, I burned myself; sometimes my fingers went numb in the cold; sometimes it took me two or three or more kitchen matches to get a fire started, depending on the wind, which sometimes blew acrid smoke in my eyes.

In those days, fire was a physical force to be endured, and I was more than a little afraid of it.

Sunday School didn’t help. Mrs. Raines warned that if I wasn’t good and didn’t do my chores, I might go to Hell, which was a place of fire and brimstone (I didn’t know what brimstone was, but I was pretty sure it burned)—words I often recall when I think of the fires around me these days: the ecocide of our planet, the continued threat of nuclear annihilation, riots on our streets, countless false messiahs fanning the flames of our differences.

A dozen years or so after Sunday School, I saw worlds—or at least woods— go up in flames. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service on a regional Hotshot Crew based in McCall, Idaho. (The term “hotshot” describes those who work on the hottest part of a forest fire.) Looking back, it was hot, dangerous, and grueling work, and my lungs carry the scars from those fires.

But at the same time, I loved the physical challenge. (Hey, I was 20!) And there’s been nothing in my life like the thrill of watching a forest fire racing through the tops of trees. It was frightening, but at the same time enthralling.

I also learned that despite Smoky the Bear’s telling me, “Only you can prevent forest fires!” (What a burden to put on kids!) most of the fires I fought were caused by lightning strikes and that the occasional fire was actually good for the forest. When flames consume organic matter, nutrients are released back into the soil. Fires can thin the canopy allowing more sunlight to reach the forest floor, encouraging the growth of native species and eliminating invasive weeds. Fires can promote species diversity. (Some species, such as the karner blue butterfly and the wood lily depend on fire to survive.) Fires can improve habitats for wildlife by reducing dead vegetation and stimulating new growth, which can provide food and cover.

During my first marriage, I used to help my then father-in-law burn brush in the winter. It was an all-day activity. We gathered all the limbs and underbrush we’d cleared during the year from around his house, piled them on a couple of old tires filled with gasoline and set it ablaze. I was still in good physical shape, and I enjoyed the exercise. But I experienced another aspect of fire as well. Poking at the burning brush in the gathering darkness, gazing into the flickering shadows cast by the fire on the surrounding snow, I sensed my ice age ancestors dancing around the flames which protected them from wild animals and the cold.

A couple of weeks ago, Mary Lee and I watched two fireflies sparking the summer night. A little research told me that fireflies produce light in special organs in their abdomens to find mates. When a female sees a male making a signal, she flashes back. Then the two reciprocally signal as the male flies down to her. If everything goes right, they mate.

All I could think of was the Bob Seeger song, “They got the fire down below.”

Another kind of fire I remember.

Now, it’s been sixty years since I’ve seen a live forest fire, let alone fought one, and probably forty since I’ve burned a pile of brush. I’m tired out after an hour in the garden. Often these days, a romantic evening is playing Scrabble or Canasta until 9:00 p.m. But I’m still drawn to fire: I can spend hours staring at the flames in our fireplace.

I’ve also become more aware of what I think of as the fire of Presence, represented, I think, in the Bible’s Old Testament by the burning bush that drew the attention of Moses and in the New Testament by the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus’s followers as “Divided tongues, as of fire….”

One of my old spiritual directors used to tell a story from the Desert Fathers in which a young monk said to his teacher, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?”

His teacher stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire. And he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

So far, the closest I’ve come to experiencing this fire happened during the last two months of my daughter’s life. After spending the day in the hospital by Laurie’s bedside, I’d go each afternoon to the hospital chapel. I was almost always the only person there. Upon entering, I’d light two pillar candles on the altar, sit in the front row of chairs, and stare between the candles through a large round window looking out over the river. After a while, the candles would sometimes seem to glow more brightly, their light dancing. The flames would come together, enfolded by the stained glass around the window. Then, I too would become enfolded in a fiery feeling of being scoured of fear and anger and shame, which allowed me to face the next day.

These days, as I sit by our fireplace, it’s hard not to identify with the dying flames. But I realize even glowing embers can still, like forest fires and fiery brush piles, like altar candles in a hospital chapel, purge away what is false, promote new growth, light someone’s way in this burning world.

May it be so.

# #

Another G… D…. Learning Experience

Published on July 15, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

Henry Fonda as Norman Thayer lost in the woods behind his house.

It started when I left my phone behind.

I’ve always known that my phone provides many of the same comforts cigarettes used to. My phone fits easily into my pocket so it’s handy. It gives me something to do with my hands if I’m nervous or bored. If I’m waiting for someone, I can check on how the Red Sox did, or when I need to use a bathroom, I can do something besides look out the window, assuming there is a window, and if there isn’t, I don’t care because I’m checking my email on my phone.

But until now I’ve never realized how, like cigarettes, psychologically addictive a phone can be. All that weekend, I felt tense, anxious.

Now, the reason I suffered for an entire weekend was that Mary Lee and I spent it in Vermont celebrating my sister-in-law Anne’s birthday. I couldn’t very well say, “I left my phone in our bedroom. Would you excuse me while I drive four hours back home so I can see how many ‘likes’ my last post got on Facebook?”

And for those of you who don’t live in New England, the reason it takes four hours to go 160 miles, as the crow flies, from Maine to Vermont is that you can’t go by crow. The most direct route cuts through western Maine and central New Hampshire—a narrow two-lane road through small towns and past lakes and cabins and antique shops and combination hardware stores/greenhouses/ice cream parlors—and takes two hours longer than the quickest route which is to first drive south for 85 miles then west for 31 miles, then north for 69 miles, then west again until you get lost.

And you will get lost, because while the first 185 miles are doable if your car has a GPS and you follow the signs, once you get to Vermont, you’re driving through small towns and along one lane dirt roads through mountains that baffle even the best GPS systems. At least, you do if you want to get to my sister-in-law’s place.

But although I left my phone behind and got lost for a bit that weekend, I remained reasonably calm. It was a nice day and Vermont was beautiful. As I often do (hence these blogs) I tried to think of the trip as a pilgrimage, this one honoring my past. I lived in Vermont for four years and my first teaching job was actually in the town just down the mountain from Anne’s. The wide, shallow streams paralleling the roads, the cow pastures under the green hills, the sweeping vistas were worth dead ending in a driveway. Especially when the nice lady there gave us directions to Anne’s, saying, “You couldn’t follow the damn GPS even if it worked… not unless you have a Humvee and a chainsaw.”

Still, while we had a lovely weekend celebrating my sister-in-law’s birthday, the anxiety of smart phone withdrawal grew. It was like I wasn’t me anymore—a feeling that metastasized when I tried show Mary Lee the first apartment I ever lived in. It was as if someone had moved the street to a completely different part of town.

It certainly was hidden. (I lived on the second floor.)

By the time we headed back to Maine, I was feeling unhinged and uncertain. To regain my manly sense of mastery (at least that’s the only reason I can think of) I decided I didn’t need any help from any GPS getting from Anne’s to the paved road to the interstate to the Maine Turnpike to home, thank you very much.

Setting the car radio on “50’s Gold,” I drove south on the interstate, missing the exit for New Hampshire and Maine, and continuing for another ten miles before I turned around and headed north. After an hour of ignoring Mary Lee’s suggestion that it might be time to find out where we were, I pulled off the interstate and plugged our home address into the GPS, which informed us that we were almost fifty miles north of where we should be. Surrendering to that damn voice (which I swear was snickering)— “In one half-mile, prepare to turn left… turn left in 100 yards…turn left”—we eventually came to that cow path I talked about earlier through New Hampshire and Maine, the one that got us home two hours later than we would have if I’d used the GPS the way I should have. By that time, my hands were shaking, my stomach was in knots, and my head was pounding. Even the familiar roads near home looked strange and forbidding.

At one point on that interminable drive home, we drove by Squam Lake, where the movie On Golden Pond was filmed, and since then, I’ve been thinking about Henry Fonda’s 80-year-old character getting lost picking strawberries in a place he’d been going to for years, stumbling through the forest, become more and more disoriented, more and more frightened.

And I ask myself: Is that who I’m becoming?

I’m trying not to panic. I tell myself that as I’ve become 80, I’ve been focused on my physical diminishments, and maybe God of my not Understanding is telling me it’s time to prepare for the mental changes ahead—that I should think of that weekend as—to use a 12-step term—another “Goddamned learning experience.”

I’ve just read David Shields’s book, The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. Normal geriatrics, he says, don’t have poorer memories, but it does take us longer to retrieve those memories. We’re more susceptible to distractions, have trouble coordinating multiple tasks, and suffer decreased attention spans. In simple duties and common situations, we’re fine, but when stress is added (loss of a smart phone, for example) we often struggle. “Perhaps,” Shields writes, “this is why some older people, finding it harder to cope, tend to start searching for comfort rather than excitement.”

I’m tempted, but I’m not ready. Instead, I’m going to send my ego to the store for a quart of milk and do what Mary Lee does and make a checklist for when I travel:

Underwear? Check.

Pills? Check.

Phone? Check.

And at the top of the list, I’m going to write:

Don’t assume you know where you’re going.

Ask for help.

Actually, that sounds like pretty good advice for any pilgrimage.