Category: cancer

Ruminations on his 83rd Birthday

Published on by geriatric pilgrim8 Comments
Picture Rocks Wash, Arizona. On the right, stairs lead to the Stations of the Cross. On the left are the petroglyphs.

~

His life these days is like walking a trail,

maybe that wash* in Arizona when 

he was on retreat, when on one side of 

him were the Stations of the Cross and on

the other side the picture rocks that give 

the wash its name: 1500-year-old 

petroglyphs by the Hohokam farming

people of the Sonoran Desert.

~

On one side, 14 etchings in metal

depict Jesus’s progression to his

death: scourging and the crown of thorns, falling 

under the cross’s weight, piercing, thirst, and 

humiliation, abandonment by 

friends, followers, even God, death. And 

he thinks of the violence and cruelty

of the empire in which he lives against

the materially poor and the sick

and the marginalized, his feeling that 

God has abandoned the country he loves,

his own pains in places he never knew

he had; indignities; lashings of fear; 

the cross he carries of his family’s

disease; the piercing loss of his daughter.

On the other side, petroglyphs show the 

the sun’s progression during the summer 

solstice: swirls and spirals and strange designs, 

images of dancing people, deer and 

antelope, alien-looking creatures

(you don’t suppose…), and something that looks like 

a picture of an atom, but which might

depict life’s interconnected circle.

He thinks of the kind and kinds of people 

he’s met in traveling from coast to coast,

this country’s mountains, deserts, and rivers, 

of the smell of the dirt in his garden,

dancing with his wife, watching grandchildren

grow up, his church men’s group, his circle of 

friends, his joy in writing a good poem.

He recalls walking between the two sides

of the wash, hearing what might have been a 

cacophony or what might have been a 

choir of quails, doves, finches, cactus wrens, 

flickers, thrashers, cardinals, fly catchers, 

pyrrhuloxia, verdins…and he hears

the sounds of his life: voices of parents 

who, despite their own horrible childhoods, 

made of themselves a living sacrifice

for their children, echoes of the friends he’s 

lost, and of the friends he still has, some of 

them going back to childhood, the teachers 

he disappointed and the teachers who

were there when he needed them, the students 

he failed, and those he inspired, the sounds 

of the tortured last breaths of his daughter, 

and the glorious voice of the woman 

he loves as she reads the Sunday Gospel. 

~

He remembers the Arizona sky

which canopied both sides of the wash,

feeling the paradox that is his life 

enfolded by Something—The Holy Spirit, 

The Tao, The Great Spirit, Jesus, Buddha,

Jehovah, Allah, Brahmin, The God of 

My Not Understanding—he doesn’t care

about names, he’s grateful to be here and

eager to see what’s around that next bend.

~~

*a wash is a dry, low, sandy riverbed that only carries water during rare rain events. It’s often called an arroyo.

Mid-December’s Black Ice

Published on by geriatric pilgrim10 Comments
Photo from Wikipedia (but it could have been in front of my house)

◊

Yesterday’s snow became rain

before the temperature dropped

back into the teens, so that

this morning, sunshine glistens 

on the icy road over 

which I walk—an eighty-year-

old man trying to find his 

way during this season of 

Joy to the World, while he grieves

the anniversary of 

 his child’s death, and ponders what’s 

next with curiosity 

glazed with fear, poking along 

flat-footed, carefully pick-

ing his way, concentrating 

on not falling, focused on 

keeping that icy balance. 

◊

Broomstick Season

Published on by geriatric pilgrim12 Comments

~

The trees that can have given up their leaves—

the reds and golds you see in magazines,

(though dry and chewed and rotting with black mold)—

standing outlined against the sky: broom sticks

whose branches seem about to sweep the clouds.

~

Hard not to recall those who died this month:

a grandmother, father, mother-in-law,

Thanksgivings when their absence filled our plates.

The Ronald McDonald House Thanksgiving

of turkey, fear, anxiety, and tears,

as my wife and her sons saw my daughter

for what we all knew would be the last time.

~

Well into the November of my life,

I mourn the green and teeming dreams I had,

The gaudy colored leaves of happiness,

chewed by anger and blackened by misdeeds.

Now naked of ambition, strength, shame, guilt,

but rooted in the rocky soil of Grace,

supported by my friends and families,

I raise my bony, brittle arms to sweep

away remorse, and cry in gratitude:

Thank you, thank you, and thank you, for it all.

~ ~

On Hope: an Admonition

Published on by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

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Stop confusing it with expectation.

You’re going to be disappointed,

resentful, angry, pissed off at God

because the cancer didn’t disappear,

you didn’t get that new job you wanted,

Hurricane Hattie flooded your basement.

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(Write this down: Don’t hope for anything

you can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.)

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And even if you do get to come home

from the hospital a day early,

or the car coming right at you swerves

away at the last saving second,

or your friend’s stock tip pays off enough

to finance an Aruba vacation,

please, please, please don’t proclaim to the world

how God in His goodness answered your prayers.

You’re only setting yourself up for

future resentment, not to mention

guilt and shame for having somehow displeased

His Royal Holy Hood.

#

Instead, divest, dismantle, ditch, doff, dump

expectations, anticipations, wishes.

Take a deep breath, and go for a walk

along that path you’ve been walking all

your life. Don’t worry about what’s ahead

—Here be dragons, right?—

but have a seat on this old tree stump.

Take more deep breaths, turn, look back

at all those times when, despite all your

mistakes, your blindness to injustice,

your embracing each Seven Deadly Sin

as if your happiness depended on it

while breaking all Ten Commandments

like you were making a hash omelet,

times when, despite your screwed-up family,

the hereditary overbite,

hip dysplasia, and weak heart,

times when despite the ugly divorce,

your daughter’s even uglier death,

all those goddamn operations,

the loss of lung capacity and libido,

you love the woman you wake up next to,

you sing to Sirius FM’s ‘Fifties Gold,’

you savor your morning hot chocolate,

you look forward to lunch with old classmates,

you feed the birds, play the banjo, plant

a garden, enjoy Wordle and Brit Box,

worshiping in silence, dabbling in poetry,

watching the grandchildren grow up.

#

Hope is not about getting what you want,

it’s about seeing what you already have,

the force that makes life worth living,

that same power that is pushing new growth

from this dead tree stump you’re sitting on.

#

Now, go get those dragons!

Welcome, November

Published on by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

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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.”

Playing with Fire

Published on by geriatric pilgrim11 Comments

#

The only hope or else despair…

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

            —T.S. Eliot

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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.

# #

Ice

Published on by geriatric pilgrim8 Comments

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Last Palm Sunday, Mary Lee and I were supposed to begin a two-week retreat at a monastery in the hills of California. We’ve been going on retreats now for thirty years and I was eagerly looking forward to having more silence, being more aware of the world, doing more reading (I’m on a Buddhist kick right now), drawing closer to God of my not Understanding. Then, two weeks before we were supposed to fly to San Francisco, we received word rockslides had closed the roads, and that the monastery won’t open again until at least May. 

So instead of flying across the country on Palm Sunday, we spent the day encased in ice.

The previous evening, thanks to a day of snow changing to freezing rain, we lost power. That Sunday, we cooked oatmeal on top of our gas stove and wrapped in blankets in front of our gas fireplace. While the ice bent the trees and bushes lower and lower, Mary Lee and I read the Palm Sunday service from the Book of Common Prayer, wondering, along with the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” 

For the next day and a half, we ate beans and rice, read, played Scrabble and cribbage, drove around the neighborhood to charge our phones, and finally gave in and stood in line at a restaurant in another town for breakfast. 

All in all, it wasn’t bad. Still, it’s hard for me to find much nice to say about ice. 

I like ice cubes in my water. I use ice packs to help the bursitis in my hips. Some ice sculptures are pretty. I’m glad to have a freezer in my refrigerator to preserve food. But that’s about it. When I used to go skating, I’d divide my time between flailing my arms to keep from falling and lying prone on the ice when I did. The one time I went ice fishing, I was days warming up.

Ice has all kinds of nasty connotations. It can mean frigid, as in sexually inadequate. It can mean unfriendly, reserved, aloof, rigid, inflexible. Fear sends icy chills down our spines. We hear about the icy fingers of death.

Speaking of death, while Hell (which is where some of my Fundamentalist friends tell me I’m going to go when I die) is usually pictured as a place of fire and brimstone, in Dante’s Inferno, the center of Hell is a vast lake of ice, in which Satan, along with sinners who committed treason and betrayal—such as Brutus, Cassius, and Judas—is incased.

from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, I Hell, translated by Louis Biancolli, 1966

Makes sense to me. Ice is cold. Ice is heavy. (The reason we lost electricity was because ice-laden trees fell on power lines). Ice prohibits movement. During the most hellish part of my life, after my daughter died, I couldn’t get warm. I felt as if I were carrying a 20 cubic foot freezer on my shoulders. My body was rigid and tense. Only after I’d had two or three large tumblers of scotch did I feel as if I were thawing. 

And yet. For someone who dislikes ice, I realize that one of my tendencies is to want to freeze experiences and beliefs, preserve them the way we preserve meat and vegetables. 

After those hellish first years when Laurie died, my life began to get better. I thought I was learning to live with loss. But five years later, at this time of year, it was as if my daughter has died all over again. I plunged back into rage and tears. I spent evenings drinking my tumblers of scotch (or maybe it was Wild Turkey 101 proof, at this point), going through old photograph albums of the two of us and listening to Laurie’s old tapes of Tracy Chapman and the Grateful Dead. The only difference was that those I was most angry with were people who talked about their own grief. I remember being at a retreat at a monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts where a woman talked about almost losing her son in an automobile accident. A spasm of rage surged though me. I thought, What are you moaning about? He’s alive, isn’t he?

Then on Easter Sunday after this retreat, I heard a sermon based on the Gospel of Mark’s account of the Resurrection, which, unlike the other gospels, ends with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, fleeing from the empty tomb, “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Why fear, asked the preacher. Well, there might have been a lot of reasons—fear of soldiers, fear of grave robbers—but he also wondered if it wasn’t human nature to fear the unknown, to become used to, even comfortable with, our lives even if they’re full of pain and suffering. We prefer what we do know to what we don’t.

And I realized that over the years since Laurie’s death, I had grown comfortable with my image of myself as GRIEVING PARENT; I had made Laurie’s death MY STORY, trying to preserve memories of her, as in the old photograph albums I’d been perusing. And if anyone else had a similar story, I felt threatened. 

In other words, I was trying to freeze my sense of myself and Laurie rather than let them evolve, flow. I wasn’t angry about the death of my daughter, I was angry at the possible death of my grief, thinking it was grief that was keeping me close to her. 

That Sunday afternoon, sitting in Harvard Square amidst cigarette butts and pigeons, looking up at the sycamores and the brick buildings, listening to voices babbling in a half-dozen languages, I tried to focus on my daughter in the present moment. I don’t know where you are, Kid, I remember praying, but at some level I know you’re fine, and I want you to know that I love you.

And the sights and smells and noises of the Square seemed to fade and I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I knew it was Laurie’s.

I don’t care whether that hand was from another dimension or from my imagination. What I do know is that the great spiritual traditions are right: love transcends death. That is, if you don’t try to freeze it like leftover meatloaf.

But I’m still learning. Working a 12-Step Program, I’ve discovered traits that I developed to survive growing up in an alcoholic family—judgmentalism, people-pleasing, perfectionism—traits which no longer serve me, but have, in essence, remained frozen, damaging my relationships with others.

And I’m wondering if I may be trying to freeze my retreat experiences, and that Life, the Universe, or God of my not Understanding isn’t telling me by having this retreat in California canceled that I need to let the retreat experience—the silence, the awareness, the reading, the closeness to God— flow into my everyday life, here at home, even in the middle of an ice storm.

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13 Ways of Looking at a Door

Published on by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments

1

For Christmas one year, Mary Lee gave me a wooden wall hanging called “Doors of Yarmouth,” to remind me of the Maine town in which I lived for so many years. These are doors to old houses that have had careful tending (not to mention extensive and expensive remodeling). The doors come in a variety of colors. Most feature types of cross—sometimes called Christian—paneling. Three are plain wood with long hinges and latches. There are a couple of double doors and one shutter door. Some doors have glass windows, others are framed by small windows, shutters, cornices, lattice work, or flower vines. There’s a gothic arch over one door, a wooden fan over another, and several Greek canopies held up by pillars. All in all, they reveal how Yarmouth has changed from the working-class community I grew up in to the suburbia by the sea it is today. 

2

A little research on the web tells me that doors were conceived in ancient Egypt around 3000 B.C.E. but another site says that archeologists in Zurich Switzerland discovered an oak door possibly dating to 3063 B.C.E. Long before that, at least according to the Bible, Noah put a door in the ark. One assumes a pretty big one. (I’m curious how it opened and closed.)

3

 From the beginning, doors have had more than the utilitarian purpose of protection from nasty weather or people. They’ve identified the occupations of those living in the dwelling and served as marks of power and status. According to the Bible, when King Solomon built his great temple to show God’s power and prestige, he made doors of olivewood, covered with carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, which he overlaid with gold. While technically not a door, I suppose, novelist Stephen King’s two iconic wrought-iron gates embellished with bats, a three-headed dragon and spider-like motifs have become a pilgrimage destination for King fans from all over the world.

4

Speaking of pilgrimages, when Mary Lee and I were walking St. Cuthbert’s Way between Scotland and England, we passed a sheepfold, a circular wall of stones with an entrance, which for centuries, served as a place for shepherds to herd sheep at night for protection against predators such as wolves. To keep the sheep in and the wolves out, the shepherd would lie down across the entrance, becoming, as it were, a human door. 

5

Jesus uses this image of the shepherd protecting his flock by becoming a door when he refers to himself as “the gate,” who “lays down his life for the sheep.” Which may be why cross or Christian paneled doors are so prevalent in New England (all the units in our Housing Development have them, inside and out). When my wife Mary Lee—who is a Deacon in the Episcopal Church and a lover of icons—was teaching the in a local high school, she wanted to put up an icon in her classroom but realized it wouldn’t be appropriate in a public school, so she hung a large print of a door on her back wall where she could see it when she taught. It was a great comfort, especially with certain classes. 

6

 Besides Jesus, the Bible refers to other kinds of gatekeepers: those appointed to control who came and left the city through the gates. Thus, the term “gatekeeper” has come to mean a person who controls access, someone in authority who acts as an arbiter of quality or legitimacy, or someone who blocks you from speaking with a decision-maker. Gatekeepers access who is “in” or “out.” I’ve had a few of those in my life, athletic coaches, teachers, whom I’ve had to please in order to succeed. I suppose, as a teacher myself, I’ve also been a gatekeeper. 

7

I’ve also let others become gatekeepers, to whom I gave away authority, surrendered, as it were, the keys to doors I could have opened for myself. Growing up in an alcoholic family once limited my choices when I faced a decision to “What will the neighbors think?” to quote my mother. Through working an Al Anon program and learning to put the focus on me instead of on the me I thought you thought I was, I’ve found keys to open doors I never knew existed.

8

Some of those early Egyptian doors symbolized entrance to the afterlife. Doors can represent transition, confinement, new opportunities. Doors can be metaphors for the choices we make. We learn early on in life that we can walk through some doors and not others. As a WASP male, I know that I have more doors available to me than women, people of color, people of other religions. My destiny has been shaped by the doors I’ve walked through.

9

Or doors that have closed behind me. For a while, Mary Lee volunteered as a chaplain at the local prison. One Christmas, I helped her with a service. My clearest memory is of going through a series of doors and hearing the loud, definitive clang as each door closed behind me. I’ve had a few of those definitive door closings in my life: the death of my daughter, a divorce decree, a couple of retirement parties. Most of the time, however, I find that doors close behind me without my noticing. One reason I took early retirement from teaching high school English was that I saw too many colleagues still standing in front of their classes, even though, emotionally, they’d shut the door on their students years earlier. One of the things I dislike about the geriatric life is that doors keep silently closing, until suddenly I realize, I can’t do this anymore! Can’t climb that mountain, can’t reach that note, can’t eat that food, can’t…

10

On the other hand: My Quaker friends say that sometimes a door needs to close before another can open. That’s certainly been the case with me. I had to close the door on a forest management program before I could open the door to what’s been for me a fulfilling teaching career. I had to retire from public education before I started writing. After my daughter died, I had to lose every image of God I’d ever had before I encountered the Grace of God of my not Understanding.  

11

In late 1960’s, I listened to a rock group, The Doors, who named themselves after the title of Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, in which he reflects on his psychedelic experiences. Huxley himself had based his title on a line in English poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”

12

These days I’m trying to clean the doors of my perception through contemplative practices such as meditation, going on more retreats, walking meditation, contemplative reading, sessions with my Feldenkrais teacher, journaling, music, working on my listening, writing these blogs, and of course, making more pilgrimages, even if they’re only to the compost pile. 

13

And I’m not done opening new doors. I’m hoping I have a few longer trips left ahead of me. Speaking of trips, I note that interest in psychedelic drugs is again increasing, thanks to books like Michael Pollen’s book How to Change your Mind.Indeed, I have a 92-year-old friend who’s seriously considering a guided psychedelic experience. That’s another possible door. 

And, of course, there’s the Big Door ahead of me. That, too, will be quite a trip, I suspect. 

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Our Rite of Hope for January 7, 2021

Published on by geriatric pilgrim7 Comments

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“…. by participating in a ritual, … [y]our consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. —Joseph Campbell

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Yesterday we celebrated Epiphany,

When wise men worshipped the Christ child. 

& recalled the goons in MAGA caps who trashed the nation’s capital.

Still rattled today, we observe our annual ritual:

  We play The Christmas Revels 

                                                            Wassail, wassail, all over the town

  We strip the tree of 

   Ornaments:

     From pilgrimages—

                 2 wooden sheep from Scotland 

          (my ancestors died for Bonnie Prince Charlie)

                          2 olive wood crusaders’ crosses from Jerusalem

                                    (Christians & Muslims slaughtered each other for centuries)

                          1 porcelain nazar from Istanbul

                                    (protection against evil)                      

Here come I, old Father Christmas

             From childhood—

                          1 wooden and tin mesh angel from the turn of the 20th Century

(2 world wars, 2 flu epidemics, the Depression, Korea, Viet Nam, 3 assassinations, Watergate, 9-11, yesterday)

               

        1 plastic Santa from WWII                             

           (Dad in Belgium building bridges for tanks)

The boar’s head in hand have I

3 shiny ornaments my parents bought with green stamps 

                                    (To brighten memories of their broken childhoods)

                                                                                                There was a pig went out to dig

                                                                                                Christ-i-mas day, Christ-i-mas day  

            From children & grandchildren—

                        4 yarn & toothpick God’s-eyes

                        1 fuse-bead heart, 1 fuse-bead cat, 1 fuse-bead turtle, 

                        2 black felt cats honoring my step-son’s first pets

                        1 brown fur diarrhea microbe 

(from my daughter-in-law who helps impoverished countries improve water quality)

                        1 embroidered-flower ornament from my 16-year-old daughter

                                    (2 years before she died from cancer)

                                                                                                            The holly and the ivy…

     Lights:

            3 strings of red  blue  green  orange  bulbs

                        (The big painted ones long gone, but at least these aren’t white)                              

            1 yellow star

                        (“For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”)

Dance, then, wherever you may be

                                                                                                I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

So, we dance

between

Christianity & paganism

Past & present

Light & dark

Death & life

Sorrow & joy

Arms clinging to our rite of hope.

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Stick Season

Published on by geriatric pilgrim9 Comments

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As New Englanders know, each year has six seasons: the usual spring, summer, autumn, winter, plus mud season—between winter and spring—and stick season—between autumn and winter.

I’ve written about mud season before (https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2019/03/). Now it’s time to talk about stick season. 

You know about our autumns and winters. These are the seasons in all those lovely photographs of New England. You know, the flaming foliage ones, mountains ablaze in orange, yellow, and red, and the snowy ones, white trees bowing as skiers whiz past. But in between—usually it’s the entire month of November but it could be December as well—the leaves have left, the snow hasn’t arrived, and the trees become stick figures. “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” to quote Mr. Shakespeare.

Stick season has been getting a lot of press these days, thanks to a young singer named Noah Kahan, whose song “Stick Season” about the pain of lost love—“And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks/ And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed…”—was a viral hit in 2022. (And as synchronicity would have it, as I was planning this blog, he sang it on Saturday Night Live, December 2nd. Check it out on YouTube.)

For years, Shakespeare and Kahan described the way I felt about this time of year. As readers of this blog and my book, The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey, know, my daughter Laurie entered Eastern Maine Medical Center in November of 1988 and died there on December 23rd. For those two months, I lived at a Ronald McDonald house about a mile away and walked back and forth to the hospital twice a day along the Penobscot River, where the skeletal maples, elms, birches, and oaks mocked any hope for Laurie’s recovery.

Over the next 30 years, each stick season was the backdrop for my anger, sorrow, withdrawal, guilt, and shame, exacerbated by a holiday season, which now starts about November 1, with its Hallmark images of healthy happy families gathered round a perfectly shaped Christmas tree. Throw in the Christian season of Advent—four weeks of paradoxical readings about Christ the child and Christ the judge, sin and grace, justice and mercy, comfort and challenge—and I came to dread this time of year.

But about five years ago, thanks to my Al Anon program, I was able to separate my shame, guilt, and anger from my grief. I saw that because of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism, those noxious emotions were there long before Laurie died. And I realized that I didn’t have to hang on to them to grieve the sorrow and emptiness that one must accept when they lose a loved one. That I could feel sad without feeling angry. 

At the same time—and I’m sure it was no coincidence—as I walked the woods behind our house, I began to appreciate the stark beauty of stick season. Without all the foliage, the sky is larger, and sometimes it’s a November blue unlike at any other time of the year. The wind is bracing. The flies are gone. Unlike in mud season, the paths are still dry. Even the sticks themselves—the tree branches—have a stark beauty, like Japanese calligraphy. 

 I started to see the departed leaves as images of my departing shame, guilt, and anger.

Which helped me see Advent as a time for letting the spirit blow away what the Bible often calls our “iniquities,” but what I think of as my “survival mechanisms”: those behaviors I developed as a kid to survive family disfunction, but which have become injurious not only to my health but to those around me. 

These days I think of stick season as a time to simplify my life. Which has been especially easy this year. After 37 years of hosting a Thanksgiving for anywhere from ten to 24 people, Mary Lee and I turned over the apron to her younger son, who, along with his fiancé, did a fantastic job feeding and making us all feel comfortable.

Last week, Mary Lee retired after 22 years as the ordained Deacon at our Episcopal Church. For 22 years, churchy stuff has filled not only our Sundays, but other days of the week, as I have also been an active member of St. Paul’s. Now, as is our diocesan policy, we will worship elsewhere for a while. We will listen for other callings to where—as Aristotle said—the needs of the world and our talents cross.

Sadly, but I guess appropriately, our cat Zeke has used up his 9th life (I didn’t think he’d make it to 2023), leaving our house pet-less for the first time in our marriage.

I have given up driving 30 miles once a week to play in my old-time music jams. Mary Lee and I have decided we no longer enjoy going out for dinner once a week.

So, I suppose, I am in the stick season of my life. If so, it’s not bad. 

Let’s talk about Advent again. One thing I’ve always had trouble with is this idea that not only are we awaiting the celebration of the birth of Jesus, but we are supposed to be awaiting the Second Coming of Christ, when, according to some scripture passages, Christ will come to judge us and send some of us to hell and some of us to heaven. 

Sorry, I can’t buy the judgment thing. My experience is that I’m surrounded by Grace, if I can just (“just’? Ha!) open my eyes to it. So that when Jesus tells his disciples to “Keep awake!”—which he does a lot—I think he’s talking about opening our eyes to what’s already there, not what’s going to suddenly appear descending from a cloud.

Sort of like seeing the sky that’s always there, but only fully visible during stick season. 

(Or the water, for that matter)

So, for me, the Second Coming is an invitation to awaken into a new consciousness, a new appreciation, a new seeing, of life, the universe, and everything.

I watched a YouTube interview with Noah Kahan, in which he said that his hit song  represented a new musical path for him. And as blogger Mitch Teemley wrote recently about Advent, the word serves as the root of our word “adventure,” which, of course, I like because that makes me think of “pilgrimage.” “In short,” as Mitch wrote about Advent and I would write about pilgrimage,  it is “an experience that can change a person forever. If they let it.”

I’m going to stick with that for a Wile.

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