Faith, Grief – Page 3 – The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief

Sonnet for the new Year

Published on January 20, 2025 by geriatric pilgrim4 Comments

The hemlocks in the hollow all have toes

That curve and claw down into rocky ground

To keep them anchored when the north wind blows,

And waters rise as heavy rains come down.

But overhead, these trees sway in the gale,

Dancing a jig to nature’s stormy song,

As if in celebration while winds wail,

Of their sure faith no tumult can last long.

Great lesson, that, especially this year

When God knows what strange winds will blow ‘round me:

Grasp on to love, trees say, instead of fear;

But sway, be supple, let adversity

First rev and race and then run out of gas.

Keep faith, my soul, that this as well shall pass.

On Hope: an Admonition

Published on January 6, 2025 by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

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.

(Write this down: Don’t hope for anything

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

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!

The Snows of Christmas Past

Published on December 19, 2024December 19, 2024 by geriatric pilgrim5 Comments

After years of counseling and going to meetings, remembering Christmas when I was a kid now feels like peering through my frosted window at a soft and steady snow covering up dead leaves, discarded pumpkins, and broken branches under the diseased hemlocks beside the house.

My family’s disease was alcoholism. Mom’s memories of her drunken father passed out on Christmas Day, her shame at not being able to bring friends home, Dad’s bitter memories of Christmases in a Home for Wayward Boys and in the Army during WWII, his sense of being victimized by a social system he saw based on greed—feelings he tried to wash away with a pint of Old Crow—the arrival each Christmas of my mother’s mother, Nanny C, a large bitter woman whose acid tongue could peel paint, permeated our house during the holidays like their cigarette smoke.

In the weeks before Christmas, I’d hear Dad’s grumpy voice through the register in the floor of the bathroom asking where the hell were they going to get the money and Mom’s brittle reply they were just going to have to find a way; her children weren’t going to have the shitty Christmases she did. And I’d know it was up to me to make sure the holidays were happy. So that Christmas morning when Dad groaned because his head hurt, and Mom and Nanny perched on the edge of their chairs hovering like crows on telephone poles watching my younger brother and sister and me open our presents, and I ripped off Christmas wrapping to find a rainbow-colored wool hat that only a girl would wear, I said, “Oh, I love this. Thank you!”

Ah, but here come the snows of nostalgia, which, I’ve discovered, is not all bad, especially when it brings memories of wading up to my knees in in the white stuff to help my father cut a tree, the smell of fresh fir as Mom and Dad set up the tree on the porch, decorating it with ornaments I still have 70 years later, popping corn and stringing it on the tree, smelling Nanny C’s fudge and Mom’s cookies and bread, and hearing my grandmother playing carols on our piano.

Or of walking home from sledding in the 5:00 p.m. darkness, carrying my Flexible Flyer past the drug store and the hardware store, their neon lights shimmering, casting shadows on the snow banks, past the big white Georgian houses on Main Street with their candles in the windows, then down Bridge Street, seeing my house and our lighted tree on the back porch, and feeling the Christmas excitement when the possibilities of happiness were as many as the stars in the frozen sky.

Or of helping my father, who moon-lighted as sexton in our church, get ready for the Christmas service by picking up last week’s bulletins from the Sanctuary, alone in this great empty space, the whistling of my corduroy pants as I walked echoing in a great and holy silence, and somehow feeling safe—held, enfolded by a Great Presence.

Then Christmas day: giggling in bed with Jaye and Roger, as we wait for 6:00 a.m. when we can wake the grownups, not knowing that Nanny C is in the next room listening to us with tears of joy running down her face—“Oh, you kids are so good, God bless you!” Christmas dinners of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, homemade bread, and cranberry sauce (which is what I ate. Let the grownups eat the squash and turnips and beans), followed by Mom’s pumpkin, apple, and blueberry pies topped with Sealtest Ice Cream. In the afternoon, Dad slept off his hangover on the couch, Nanny went back to the piano and she and Mom sang “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” while I played with my new model airplane or helped my brother or sister put together their farm or showed them how to play the new Parcheesi game or took my new skates (but, gee, I forgot my new hat) which Mom and Dad had bought on time to the town rink behind the movie theater or went up to my room to read the book I’d received: maybe Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Herb Kent West Point Fullback, a Hardy Boy’s mystery, or Zane Gray.

On Christmas night I went to bed with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, turning on the radio to my favorite programs, most of which were having Christmas specials: Jack Benny exclaiming after having spent the last thirty minutes buying the cheapest gifts he could find, “Good night, everyone, and merry Christmas!” George Burns telling his wife, “Say good night, Gracie,” and her reply, “Good night, Gracie, and Merry Christmas,” and of course, a version of Dicken’s “Christmas Carol,” probably starring Lionel Barrymore. I ate, finished my milk, and crawled completely under the covers with the cookie crumbs, following Scrooge on his journey from “Bah, humbug!” to “God bless us, everyone!”

While outside the window, at least in my memory, snow fell in great white, silent flakes.

My sister, Jaye, circa 1954, with her new poodle skirt, doll, and whatever it is on her wrist.

# #

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…