August 4: "The Lodger," Depression-Era, Chronologically Privileged

Billy Collins repurposes his sword . . . 

The Lodger

by: Billy Collins

After I had beaten my sword into a ploughshare,

I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,

then beat the hoe into a fork,

which I used to eat my dinner alone.

And when I had finished dinner,

I beat my fork into a toothpick,

which I twirled on my lips

then flicked over a low stone wall

as I walked along the city river

under the clouds and stars,

quite happy but for the thought

that I should have beaten that toothpick into a shilling

so I could buy a newspaper to read

after climbing the stairs to my room.

Collins transforms a thing meant to harm/kill into things that sustain, nourish, and aid.  He plows and hoes with it, eats and picks clean his teeth with it.  Then he throws it over a stone wall.  Later, he regrets not pounding that toothpick into money to purchase a newspaper.

My parents were Depression-era babies, born right after the time the Stock Market crashed and the world started to starve.  My mother never wasted anything, especially when it came to food.  My dad hoarded everything.  In our garage, he had several shelves jammed with jars of screws and nuts and bolts, all sorted and organized.  When my dad died, he left behind an entire warehouse of stuff he just couldn't throw out.  Toilet tanks and seats.  Old Christmas trees and decorations.  I think there might have even been some used car tires.

My parents raised nine kids, too, so Mom and Dad really understood the motto "Waste not, want not."  I lucked out as the youngest of the family.  While my siblings had to wear hand-me-downs, I didn't.  Between my three brothers and myself came five sisters, so I didn't have to endure used clothing.  Some people may think that I was spoiled.  I prefer the term "chronologically privileged."  

Here's the thing, though:  I've got a Depression-era mentality when it comes to writing.  I never trash anything I write.  When I was a kid, I started keeping diaries.  I graduated to journals eventually.  I have boxes and boxes of these notebooks, but I've never gone back to reread any of them.

Maybe there are brilliant poems or short stories or essays in them.  Or maybe memories that I've blocked from my mind.  Perhaps a little pornography, especially in my high school diaries.  If someone ever decides to write my literary biography, that person will have plenty of primary source material to draw from.

There is a poem (one of the first I ever wrote) that I lost.  I even won an award for this poem when I was an undergraduate.  I know it is buried in a notebook in one of those boxes under my bed.  If you're reading this post many years from now, you need to find "In the Parking Lot at Bonanza."  (It may also be titled "Blueberries.") 

It's one of the best things Saint Marty's ever written.  He thinks.

September 4: "Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957," Labor Day, Blueberries

Mary Oliver shares a blueberry memory . . . 

Picking Blueberries,

Austerlitz, New York, 1957

by:  Mary Oliver

Once, in summer,

     in the blueberries,

          I fell asleep, and woke

               when a deer stumbled against me.

I guess

     she was so busy with her own happiness

          she had grown careless

               and was just wandering along

listening

     to the wind as she leaned down

          to lip up the sweetness.

               So, there we were

with nothing between us

     but a few leaves, and the wind's

          glossy voice

               shouting instructions.

The deer

     backed away finally

          and flung up her white tail

               and went floating off toward the trees--

but the moment before she did that

     was so wide and so deep

          it has lasted to this day;

               I have only to think of her--

the flower of her amazement

     and the stalled breath of her curiosity,

          and even the damp touch of her solicitude

               before she took flight--

to be absent again from this world

     and alive, again, in another,

          for thirty years

               sleepy and amazed,

rising out of the rough weeds,

     listening and looking.

          Beautiful girl,

               where are you?

There is so much innocence and beauty in this poem.  Oliver, asleep in a patch of blueberries, and the doe, drunk on sweetness, stumbling into her.  Neither afraid of the other.  Both reveling in this moment of solicitude and connection.  Fellow lovers of the color blue.

It has been another early September scorcher.  Labor Day in the United States.  Ninety-five degrees outside, and the smell of barbecuing hotdogs thick in the air.  These lazy last days of warmth and sun always make me nostalgic for a childhood that I don't really remember.

When I was a baby and toddler, my family used to spend two weeks every summer vacationing in a hunting camp near the shores of Lake Superior in Gay, Michigan.  Off the grid.  No phone.  No electricity.  An outhouse down the path from the camp, just after the sauna.  And the constant saw of cicada, all day, every day.  

I was the youngest of nine kids and was frequently under the charge of older brothers and sisters.  Translation:  I was the pain in the ass little brother.  My mother would kick us out of the cabin early morning, and we would disappear into the woods and beach.  Sometimes, she would send us with buckets.

Those buckets were for us to collect blueberries, which grew in abundance around the camp.  I'm not talking the chemically-fattened blueberries you can pick up at Walmart.  I'm talking blueberries sugared by sun and sand and insect.  Each one, a burst of summer on the tongue.

Again, I have no real memories of these vacations.  I only have stories, told by my parents, repeated by my siblings.  But my sister sent me a picture tonight.  Me, tow-headed, deep in a field of bushes with my other sisters and mother.  We're all looking at the camera, almost in annoyance, as if we don't want to be distracted from the sweet, blue enterprise before us.

At least, I want to believe we're picking blueberries, our mother waiting back at camp for us to return with our harvest.  Maybe to make pancakes or muffins or jam.  

We're all so young.  So alive.  So innocent.  

Saint Marty can almost taste the sand and sun in his mouth.

Sweet children, where are you now?

January 20: "Blueberries," Nostalgia, COVID-Positive

Mary Oliver picks blueberries . . . 

Blueberries

by:  Mary Oliver

I'm living in a warm place now, where

you can purchase fresh blueberries all

year long.  Labor free.  From various

countries in South America.  They're

as sweet as any, and compared with the

berries I used to pick in the fields

outside of Provincetown, they're

enormous.  But berries are berries.  They

don't speak any language I can't

understand.  Neither do I find ticks or

small spiders crawling among them.  So,

generally speaking, I'm very satisfied.

There are limits, however.  What they

don't have is the field.  The field they

belonged to and through the years I

began to feel I belonged to.  Well,

there's life and then there's later.

Maybe it's myself that I miss.  The

field, and the sparrow singing at the 

edge of the woods.  And the doe that one

morning came upon me unaware, all

tense and gorgeous.  She stamped her hoof

as you would to any intruder:  Then gave

me a long look, as if to say, Okay, you

stay in your patch, I'll stay in mine.

Which is what we did.  Try packing that

up, South America.

Mary Oliver is dealing with nostalgia here.  The blueberries she buys remind her of the blueberries she used to pick in a field near her home in Provincetown.  But Oliver doesn't stop there.  Because the poem isn't really just about blueberries.  It's about the whole blueberry-picking experience:  the sun on her back, the sparrow in a nearby woods, and a beautifully skittish, diffident doe.  Mary Oliver can't buy any of that at the market where she's shopping.

Nostalgia is a strange thing.  (I know I've written about this subject before, but humor me.)  Nostalgia is the human mind's way of taking any experience and whitewashing away all of the pain and grief and annoyances, leaving only a sepia-tinged daguerreotype of what actually happened.  That's how we can page through our old high school yearbooks and get all moony over pictures of ourselves in calculus class or with the cross country team.  Because our minds have erased all of the struggles--the late night study sessions and bruised bones, heartbreaking crushes and bullies.  Nostalgia is the reason women have more than one baby, because who in their right would reenlist for the pain of childbirth again?  They do it because they remember the first time the held their newborns instead of the effort of pushing a watermelon out of their bodies.

This morning, I tested positive for COVID.  My faithful disciples may remember that, at the beginning of January 2022, I got COVID.  What I recall of that time now is being at home and just watching movie after movie.  Going on walks with my wife, who was also COVID-positive.  And ordering pizza.  In short, I remember it as a pretty good winter vacation.

Of course, what I don't recall clearly from my first bout of COVID is what I'm experiencing right now--headache, runny nose, incessant cough, fever, nausea, and exhaustion.  Real exhaustion.  After I'm done typing this blog post, I'm going to take another nap.  That will be the fourth one today, I believe.  I'm sure I had all those symptoms last time, but it's just a blank wall in my mind.  

So, I'm like Mary Oliver right now, eating blueberries and not remembering the ticks and spiders of the field.

It's time for Saint Marty take a nap.

July 30: Ultimate Question, Emergency Room, Blueberries

Deep Thought is receiving some criticism for his answer to the Big Question of life, the universe, and everything . . .

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl.  "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer.  I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

"But it was the Great Question!  The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything," howled Loonquawl.

"Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?"

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

That is the crux of the whole problem.  They have an answer, but they don't know what the actual question is.  For example, I could type "blueberries" right now, with no context.  You, my dear disciples, have no idea what the significance of "blueberries" is, although you can probably guess they are going to be important considering the photo at the beginning of this blog post.  So, knowing a question is important to understand the answer.

If I typed "Emergency Room" right now, you would not know that it is the answer to the question "Why didn't Saint Marty write a post last night?"  Yes, my wife and I were at our local ER for almost seven hours last night.  We arrived at around 3 p.m., and we didn't leave until about 9:30 p.m.  It was a long, exhausting night.

As I said in earlier posts, my wife has been teetering on hypomania/mania for a good portion of this summer, if not longer.  After some events this part week, it was suggested to me by the nurse of my wife's psychiatrist that I try to convince my wife to go to the Emergency Room for an evaluation.

I broached the suggestion with my wife yesterday afternoon, and, to my surprise, she agreed.  Her one worry was that they were going to try to keep her in the psychiatric ward at the hospital.  She has been there before, and she isn't particularly fond of the idea of returning.  I had to keep reassuring her several times, "Honey, they can't keep you if you don't consent."

At the end of that long, long afternoon and evening, a really nice ER doc, who seemed to know his stuff about psychiatric medications, suggested some changes in dosages and added Vistaril, a drug that will help her sleep at night.  Frankly, walking through the doors of the ER yesterday afternoon, I help little hope that anything constructive was going to come of the visit.  I was wrong, I think.

Ten o'clock last night, we were home, and my wife was taking her first dose of the new medication.

Now, as much I would love to say that Vistaril was the answer to all the problems that have plagued us this summer, it wasn't.  There isn't a drug that exists that will have that kind of effect.  No, the medication changes are part of a very complex solution to a very complex problem.  There is simply no magic pill for bipolar disorder and its attendant problems.

However, my wife did get a really good night's sleep last night.  That's makes me happy.  We are not out of the woods by far yet.  Sleep is just one of the first steps for my wife's recovery and stability.  I will not go into the other issues that revolve around this particular episode.  They are personal and difficult and not for me to share.  That is up to my spouse.

This afternoon, my family and I went blueberry picking at a friends' property.  There were six of us, including my wife.  As I sat, squatting on my haunches, I began to find a little peace of mind.  (My mind has been on overdrive for about two or three weeks.)  It was just me, the blueberries in front of me, and my bucket.  After about an hour or so, I mentioned to my wife how peaceful it was collecting blueberries.

"It's meditation," she said.

And she was write.  I was breathing more easily.  The worries that have been plaguing me weren't present in my thoughts.  I just moved from one spot to another, hunting for patches of blue on the ground.  As I picked berries, I prayed a little, had a conversation with the Almighty.  Asked Him to take away all the doubts and fears that have stressing me.

When I left my friends' house, I was more relaxed that I have been in a long time.  It was a perfect kind of evening.  I love being with my family, sans television and cell phones.  Just a man and his bucket and his kids and his wife.  It's a memory I will hold onto for harder times.

This evening is going to help me with the stresses coming my way tomorrow and the rest of this week.  Because I have this one perfect moment to hold on to.  A couple hours of happiness.

Saint Marty will take that.

May 25: Frayed and Nibbled, Potluck, Another Good Day

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...

Dillard is talking about living in a broken place.  A world after the apple.  She speaks of getting old, the planet getting old.  Everything is frayed and nibbled, eaten by time.  Time is starved and ferocious.  It devours without any discrimination.

I needed a passage about eating this evening, because that's pretty much all I've been doing all day.  My coworkers at the cardiology office organized a going-away potluck for me today.  There were pretzels with cheddar beer dip.  A tray of fresh fruit--grapes and blueberries and melon and pineapple.  Grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta salad.  Some Christmas cookies (because of my habit of playing Christmas music on my workstation computer all year long).  My contribution was a brownie trifle.  It's my signature dish.

It was a lovely day.  I know, I know.  Two days in a row I'm sharing a post that is relatively happy.  It's a little unheard of.  But the food was really good, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy.  Like a breathing Hallmark card.  Plus, I worked at my new/old job this morning again.  One of my best friends in the world works there, and we talked a lot about my sister.  It wasn't sad talk.  We shared stories about her and laughed together.

Mark your calendars again:  Saint Marty had another good day.