December 24, 2024: "Unholy Sonnet #1," Christmas Eve, Dearest Friend

I may be in the minority, but I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas itself.  

I spent most of today getting ready.  Some of the things on my list:

• Straighten up the house.
• Take my puppy for a couple long walks.
• Make and decorate sugar cookies with my son.
• Finish wrapping all the presents.
• Practice music for a Christmas Eve church service.
• Sit crying on the couch for a half hour.
• Play keyboard for a Christmas Eve church service.
• Sing in the choir at my wife's church for Christmas Eve.

Note that everything on that list involves waiting, hoping, preparing, hunger, longing.

Billy Collins writes about death . . . 

Unholy Sonnet #1

by: Billy Collins

Death, one thing you can be proud of
is all the room you manage to take up
in this Concordance to the Poems of John Donne,
edited by Homer Carroll Combs and published in 1945.

Mighty and dreadful are you tall columns here,
(though soul and love put you in deep shade)
for you outnumber man and outscore even life itself,
and you are roughly tied with God and, strangely, eyes.

But no one likes the way you swell,
not even in these scholarly rows,
where from the complex fields of his poems
each word has returned to the alphabet with a sigh.

And lovelier than you are the ones that only once he tried:
syllable, and porcelain, but also beach, cup, snail, lamp, and pie.

The former choir director at my wife's church was a one of my dearest friends.  A second mother, in a lot of respects.  When I attend Christmas worship services at my wife's church, I think of her a lot.  I can still see her in her Christmas black (she always wore black, even in summer), standing in the choir loft, saying, "Remember, we're trying to sing a lullaby to the baby Jesus, not scare Him out of his wits."  

I saw my friend's daughter at church tonight, and we hugged each other long and hard.  I wanted to ask her if she was cooking a pigeon tomorrow (which is what her mom always called a turkey).  It was a good moment in the midst of the Christmas Eve chaos.

And now the presents are under the tree.  All the lights in the house are out, except the Christmas tree.  Everyone is in bed, asleep.  According to the NORAD Santa Tracker, the big guy's flying over Texas right now.  Like it or not, Christmas has arrived, in all its messiness.

In his poem, Collins writes about all the words that appear frequently in John Donne's poems:  death, God, pie, life, and soul, among others.

Here are the words that appear in Saint Marty's mind tonight:  cookie, peanut butter ball, Santa, family, love, and spinach.  (Don't ask him where spinach came from.)

December 13: Long Winter's Nap, Mary Jo Salter, "Advent"

I don't have a lot to offer tonight in terms of deep thought.  I'm going to leave that to Mary Mo Salter.

Saint Marty is ready for a long winter's nap.  Wake him up in 2018.

Advent

by:  Mary Jo Salter

Wind whistling, as it does   

in winter, and I think   

nothing of it until

it snaps a shutter off

her bedroom window, spins   

it over the roof and down

to crash on the deck in back,   

like something out of Oz.

We look up, stunned—then glad

to be safe and have a story,   

characters in a fable   

we only half-believe.

Look, in my surprise

I somehow split a wall,   

the last one in the house

we’re making of gingerbread.   

We’ll have to improvise:   

prop the two halves forward

like an open double door   

and with a tube of icing   

cement them to the floor.

Five days until Christmas,

and the house cannot be closed.   

When she peers into the cold

interior we’ve exposed,   

she half-expects to find   

three magi in the manger,

a mother and her child.   

She half-expects to read   

on tablets of gingerbread

a line or two of Scripture,   

as she has every morning   

inside a dated shutter

on her Advent calendar.   

She takes it from the mantel   

and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,   

as if her future hinges

on not tearing off the flap

under which a thumbnail picture   

by Raphael or Giorgione,   

Hans Memling or David

of apses, niches, archways,   

cradles a smaller scene   

of a mother and her child,

of the lidded jewel-box   

of Mary’s downcast eyes.   

Flee into Egypt, cries

the angel of the Lord   

to Joseph in a dream,

for Herod will seek the young

child to destroy him. While   

she works to tile the roof   

with shingled peppermints,

I wash my sugared hands   

and step out to the deck   

to lug the shutter in,

a page torn from a book   

still blank for the two of us,   

a mother and her child.

May 26: Waiting, Crappy Day, Poet of the Week, Joshue Mehigan, "The Professor"

Then they [Ives and his son, Robert] were silent.  They walked up a stretch of the block, across the way from the projects, a nerve-racking experience, even with a guard in a booth, because people were always getting held up, sometimes stabbed on that street.  They had reached Broadway when Robert added:  "You know, sometimes I think about what it would be like to be dead.  All I know is that He [Jesus] will be waiting.  It scared me for a long time, but you know what, Pop?  It doesn't anymore."

Of course, this little exchange between Ives and his son foreshadows Robert's fate.  In about twenty or so pages, Robert will be murdered, and Ives will be thrust into a world of grief and anger.  The rest of the novel hinges upon Ives' acceptance of what Robert says in the above paragraph.  It takes Ives over thirty years to accept the fate of his son.


Back at work after the Memorial Day weekend.  It was a crappy day.  Busy beyond belief.  I barely had time to sit down at my desk before the phone started ringing.  And it rang all day long.  It was three days' accumulation of patients' anxieties.  Lapsed prescriptions.  Chest pain.  Shortness of breath.  I even had someone call and ask me why they hadn't received a phone call yesterday from a nurse.  "Because it was a holiday," I said, hopefully not sounding incredulous.

Yes, most people are like Ives.  Plagued with worry and doubt.  I count myself among that crowd.  I haven't reached a point in my life where I can just let go and let God.  In fact, I kind of despise that expression.  It sounds too much like resignation to a shitty situation.  I think, as human beings, it's our duty to try to make the world a better place.  I work hard so that I can provide for my wife and kids.  It's not that I don't trust God.  I think God expects us to try to make ourselves--and our lives--the best that they can be.

I just came from the gym.  While I was running on the treadmill, my office mate (who'd just finished an exercise class) came over to talk to me about the new faculty contract proposal at the university.  After discussing it for a few minutes, we both looked at each other and said, "I'm voting 'no.'"  I simply can't accept it.  I'm not ready to put this one in God's hands yet.  I want to see if my vote will make a difference in a shitty work situation

I do have a new Poet of the Week.  His name is Joshua Mehigan, and his most recent collection, Accepting the Disaster, sort of fits right in to my discussion this evening.

The only thing Saint Marty will accept tonight is a $100 bill or a pizza.

The Professor

by:  Joshua Mehigan

I get there early and I find a chair.
I squeeze my plastic cup of wine.  I nod.
I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod
and second an opinion I don't share.
I think:  Whatever else I am, I'm there.
Afterwards, I escape across the quad
into fresh air, alone again, thank god.
Nobody cares.  They're quite right not to care.

I can't go home.  Even my family
is thoroughly contemptuous of me.
I look bad.  I'm exactly how I look.
These days I never read, but no one does,
and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was.
Everything I know is from a book.

That's a lot of acceptance

January 27: Shopping, Waiting, Wanting

Apply within

Well, I just finished my weekly grocery shopping at Wal-Mart.  I used to enjoy my trips to that emporium of capitalistic slave labor, but I'm not as fond of them anymore.  As the budget tightens, trips to Wal-Mart, or any place that involves the expenditure of money, become less appealing.  Also, being aware of how crappy Wal-Mart employees are treated on a first-hand basis, I've started to view the store as Dante's tenth circle of hell.

I'm currently waiting for my daughter to finish up her dance classes tonight.  I was a horrible father.  I forgot to grab her dance bag when we left the house.  Therefore, she had to go to her tap class without any tap shoes.  She was not happy with me, especially when I told her that she needed to be more responsible for her stuff.  That comment earned me a grunt and a car door slam.  She'll be over it by the time I pick her up.

Tonight, I'm wanting something special to happen.  I don't know what that something special is.  It would be nice if the people from Publisher's Clearing House showed up on my doorstep with a check.  Considering I didn't even enter the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes, the chances of that happening are pretty slim.  Therefore, I need to aim a little lower. I'm thinking a nap and maybe some ice cream are more within the realm of possibility.  However, I would accept a call from the Swedish Academy telling me I've won the first ever Nobel Prize for Blogging, as well.  Either way, it's a win-win in the "something special" category.

Saint Marty needs to go pick up his grumpy daughter now.