Every morning, I sit down and create a list of tasks I need to complete during the day. I try not to put more than three or four things on that list. Anything more than that, and I won’t finish off the list, and, eventually, I’ll feel like a failure at day’s end.
Today, I put twelve items on my list. Emails to send. Reports to finish up. Schedules to finalize. I’m taking off work tomorrow, so I needed to get shit done.
I was brought up this way. My father and mother were hard workers, and they instilled that ethic into all of their kids to the point that I feel guilty if I’m just sitting around, doing nothing. Like it or not, we inherit our parents’ ideals (or we rebel against them).
Sharon Olds writes about what she inherited from her father . . .
Natural History
by: Sharon Olds
When I think about eels, I think about Seattle,
the day I went back to my father’s grave.
I knew we had buried ashes, a box
of oily fluff, and yet, as I approached,
it felt as if the length of him
were slung there, massive, slack,
a six-foot amber eel flung down
deep into the hill. The air was clammy,
greenish as the old Aquarium air when we
would enter from the Zoo. Whenever we saw
a carnivore, my father would offer
to feed me to it—tigers, crocodiles,
manta rays, and that lone moray
eel, it would ripple up to us, armless,
legless, lipless as a grin of terror.
How would you like a tasty girl, my
father would ask the eel, a minister
performing a marriage, How would you like
to get in there with that, he’d lift me up the
think glass, as if I were rising
on the power of my own scream. Later I would
pass the living room, and see him
asleep, passed out, undulant, lax,
indifferent. And at his grave
it was much like that—
the glossy stone, below it the mashed
bouquet of ashes, and under that,
like a boy who has thrown himself down to cry, the
great, easy, stopped curve
of my father. Length to length I lay on it,
and slept.
Olds was obviously scarred by her father’s behavior at the Zoo. What kid wouldn’t be? Olds wrote an entire collection of poems about her relationship with her dad, working through her demons. Poets do this kind of shit all the time. It’s a lot cheaper than therapy (he writes flippantly, knowing he’s been in therapy for years).
Even when they’re long gone (my dad died in 2018, my mom in 2021), parents can still control your life, or at least influence it a lot. If it weren’t for my mother, I would never have learned to play the piano or pipe organ, and I wouldn’t be a church musician these days. I also wouldn’t be an avid reader or love musical theater.
I know that all my mother or father wanted for me was happiness. Of course, my definition of happiness is quite a bit different from their definitions. Having both been born at the end of the Great Depression, my parents equated happiness with having a steady job, money in the bank, and food on the table. My parents, for the most part, had all three of these things. Plus, they raised nine kids.
My definition of happiness is a little different. While I work hard (two main jobs plus some musical side-hustles), my happiness comes from walks with my dog, a new poem by a favorite poet, dinner with my wife and kids, and time to write. While I don’t want to starve, I don’t equate food with happiness. While I hate living paycheck to paycheck, I don’t believe that money can buy happiness. I’ve worked jobs simply to pay the bills, and I’ve worked jobs to fuel my passions.
Tomorrow, I get to rest, relax. Maybe write a little. Practice some church music. That’s it. Perhaps I’ll mow my lawn if I get ambitious. And I’ll be happy.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about his mother’s happiness, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet . . .
Write a poem in the voice of your mother or father (biological, adoptive, beloved or never-once-met). Have them share heartily their quirky memories about none other than you, for example, the time your sister cut the nipple off a baby bottle and showed you how to drip milk all over daddy’s books. If you can’t remember specific childhood memories, feel free to make up a few interesting moments.
Visitation
by: Martin Achatz
Here he comes again. I can feel
his car pulling through the gates,
past all the Marys, angels, Jesuses,
headstones. He just can’t let me rest,
enjoy the deer nibbling grass around
me. I think he’s forgotten how
much I loved my quiet times,
before the house woke up, when
I would sit with my coffee
and prayer books and God. He
never got that as a kid, my need
for quiet sometimes, his instinct
to the fill empty air with sound—
the TV or radio. But I did love
it when he sat down at the piano,
played the sun into morning with
something soft and gentle. Debussy
or an old Pasty Cline song. I would
sit there while his fingers coaxed
music out of nothing. I wish I
could tell him how much I loved
it when he played “How Great
Thou Art,” even when he made
mistakes. Especially when
he made mistakes.
