May 17, 2025: "Why My Mother Made Me," Hold On to Things, "Momento Mori"

What makes a person?  It's an interesting question.

Do past traumas?  Old relationships?  Physical challenges?  Movies?  Television shows?  Parents?  Teachers?  I guess it boils down to nature versus nurture.  Are we born with our personalities, or do our personalities develop over time?

Sharon Olds meditates on why she was born . . .  

Why My Mother Made Me

by: Sharon Olds

Maybe I am what she always wanted, 

my father as a woman, 

maybe I am what she wanted to be 

when she first saw him, tall and smart, 

standing there in the college yard with the 

hard male light of 1937 

shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that 

power. She wanted that size. She pulled and 

pulled through him as if he were silky 

bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and 

pulled through his body till she drew me out, 

sticky and gleaming, her life after her life. 

Maybe I am the way I am 

because she wanted exactly that, 

wanted there to be a woman 

a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she 

pressed herself, hard, against him, 

pressed and pressed the clear soft 

ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream 

against his stained sour steel grater 

until I came out the other side of his body, 

a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp, 

but with milk at the center of my nature. 

I lie here now as I once lay 

in the crook of her arm, her creature, 

and I feel her looking down into me the way 

the maker of a sword gazes at his face 

in the steel of the blade.

We all hold onto things--trinkets from the past that seem too important simply to throw away.  I still have a People Magazine from the week River Phoenix died.  I've been keeping diaries and journals since I was in middle school.  I have boxes and boxes of them.  I've been posting on this blog for close to 15 years now.  Well over 5,000 posts.

My poems and posts and stories and journals are my my mementos.  They remind me of who I am, where I come from.  And now this post will be another of those reminders.  Twenty years from now, I may reread these words and not remember a single thing about their composition.  Or I may remember everything.

What I want to remember about today:  my wife and I watched an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tonight.  Being happy.  Feeling blessed.  Not wanting the night to end.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about all those things that remind us of life . . . and death, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Find an index card and turn it vertically.  Write a poem about something that doesn't last long.  Writing on an index card vertically will result in much shorter lines--see how this added structure changes how you normally write.  For extra credit, turn the index card over and write horizontally about something that lasts a long time.

Memento Mori

by: Martin Achatz

My sister's hospital badge,

from when she was still saving

people's lives.  A polaroid

of a cocker spaniel, blue ball

in his jaws, as if he's waiting

for me to toss it one last time.

My grandfather's wedding ring,

worn smooth as an old tooth.

My grandma didn't want it, 

told me it belonged to his first

wife, as if love was a well

that could run dry.  We all keep

tokens like these in dresser

drawers, closet boxes.  I bet

Mary Todd kept the silver

half-dollars from Lincoln's

eyelids.  Maybe she worried 

them all day until her fingers 

burned, slept with them 

under her cool pillow at night 

until she couldn't remember

the sound of his voice or 

the smell of his 

whiskered cheeks.

March 1, 2, 3: Onion in the Garnishing, Good Husband and Father, Goodness

Merton writes a little bit about friends and weddings and food . . .

Our friend the teamster Pierrot was a huge, powerful man, but he did not play on the football team.  He was too lazy and too dignified, although he would have been a decorative addition to the outfit.  There were three or four others like him, big men with huge black moustaches and bristling eyebrows, as wild as the traditional representations of Gog and Magog.  One of them used to play whole games wearing a grey, peaked street-cap.  I suppose if we had ever played on a really hot day he would have come out on the field with a straw hat on.  Anyway, this element of the team would have made a fine subject for Douanier-Rousseau, and Pierrot would have fitted admirably.  Only his sport was sitting at the table of a cafe imbibing cognac.  Sometimes, too, he made excursions to Toulouse, and once, while we were standing on the bridge, he gave me a bloodcurdling description of a fight he had had with an Arab, with a knife, in the big city.

It was Pierrot who took us to a wedding feast at a farm up by Caylus.  I went to several of these feasts, during the time when I was at St. Antonin, and I never saw anything so Gargantuan:  and yet it was never wild or disordered.  The peasants and the foresters and the others who were there certainly ate and drank tremendously:  but they never lost their dignity as human beings.  They sang and danced and played tricks on one another, and the language was often fairly coarse, but in a manner which was more or less according to custom, and on the whole the atmosphere was good and healthy, and all this pleasure was sanctified by a Sacramental occasion.  

On this occasion Pierrot put on his good black suit and his clean cap and hitched up a gig, and we drove to Caylus.  It was the farm of his uncle or cousin.  The place was crowded with carts and carriages , and the feast was a more or less communal affair.  Everybody had provided something towards it, and Father brought a bottle of strong, black Greek wine which nearly pulverized the host.  

There were too many guests to be contained in the big dining room and kitchen of the farm, with its blood-sausage and strings of onions hanging from the beams.  One of the barns had been cleaned out and tables had been set up in there, and about one o-clock in the afternoon everybody sat down and began to eat.  After the soups, the women began to bring in the main courses from the kitchen:  and there were plates and plates of every kind of meat.  Rabbit, veal, mutton, lamb, beef, stews and steaks, and fowl, fried, boiled, braised, roasted, sauteed, fricasseed, dished this way and that way, with wine sauces and all other kinds of sauces, with practically nothing else to go with it except an occasional piece of potato or carrot or onion in the garnishing.  

My favorite phrase in this whole passage is ". . . all this pleasure was sanctified by a Sacramental occasion."  Yes, there's coarse language and lots of alcohol, people playing tricks on each other, and enough food to choke an army.  Even with all of this excess and indulging, there is still something holy about the festivities,  Two people, pledging to be there for each other, in sickness and health, richer and poorer, in good times and in bad, for better or worse.

I have always tried to be a good husband and father.  Worked hard to provide for my family, holding two and three and four jobs at a time.  I try to be present at all my kids' big occasions--concerts and sporting events and plays and musicals and recitals.  Plan special occasions with my wife--plays and movies and dinners.  I'm not perfect by any means.  I have made tons and tons of mistakes.

Yet, I have done my best, in the face of a lot of struggles.  I have a beautiful, smart daughter who wants to be a doctor.  I have a son who makes me laugh all the time and is smarter than he realizes (all A's and B's on his last report card, and the kid doesn't even try).  And I have a wife whom I love very deeply.  All of those things make me pretty darn lucky.

I can describe myself in a lot of ways.  If a person asks me, "What do you do?"--I may answer that I'm a poet or teacher or professor or church organist or medical office worker.  Each one of those titles describes a certain part of who I am.  But the two most important jobs I have, or will ever have, are father and spouse.  My family is the reason I do all those other things.

Maybe I'm old fashioned.  I believe in love at first sight, because I've experienced it.  I believe that fatherhood is more than biology--it's about sacrifice and commitment.  Putting the needs of my family above everything else.  That's who I am.

Goodness is hard work.  In fact, it can be fatal.   Think Mother Teresa working with the poor in Calcutta.  Oscar Romero assassinated for preaching peace and human dignity.  That doesn't mean that goodness isn't worth it.  It means that goodness comes at a cost, no matter what.  Whether you're a saint or father, poet or martyr.

Saint Marty will always choose goodness, for better or worse.

November 13: Reluctantly Becoming Interested, To Be Heard, Great Gift

Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boohooing noises.

Which is why the epigraph of this book is the quatrain from the famous Christmas carol.  Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol:

          The cattle are lowing,
          The Baby awakes.
          But the little Lord Jesus
          No crying he makes...

Billy traveled in time back to the hospital in Vermont.  Breakfast had been eaten and cleared away, and Professor Rumfoord was reluctantly becoming interested in Billy as a human being.  Rumfoord questioned Billy gruffly, satisfied himself that Billy really had been in Dresden.  He asked Billy what it had been like, and Billy told him about the horses and the couple picnicking on the moon.

The story ended this way:  Billy and the doctors unharnessed the horses, but the horses wouldn't go anywhere.  Their feet hurt too much.  And then Russians came on motorcycles, and they arrested everybody but the horses.

Two days after that, Billy was turned over to the Americans, who shipped him home on a very slow freighter called the Lucretia A. Mott.  Lucretia A. Mott was a famous American suffragette.  She was dead.  So it goes.

Billy finally gets to tell his Dresden story to Rumfoord, who listens reluctantly because Billy's truth doesn't gibe with his truth.  Yet, Rumfoord allows Billy to talk about the bleeding horses on the surface of the moon.  He listens to Billy Pilgrim.

I think that's what every human being really wants in life:  to be heard.  There's nothing more frustrating than to voice some story and have nobody listen.  I write these blog posts, send them out into the ether of the Internet, and hope that they find some willing listener.  I don't care if the listener agrees with what I'm saying.  Don't care if the listener voted for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.  Don't care about the listener's skin color or sexual orientation or religious affiliation. What I care about--I want someone to listen, acknowledge, understand.

That's why I write.  That's why any writer writes, I think.  I'm trying to make people understand who I am, why I am.  In fifty years, when I'm worm food, I want my kids and grandkids to be able to read these words and really know me as a person.  They might not like everything they find out, but, in the long run, they will hopefully appreciate my hopes and dreams and struggles.

So, to all the Rumfoords listening to me right now, I want to say thanks.  I'm not the most interesting person in the world.  Not the most talented writer or poet.  My life usually verges on boring.  Yet, you're taking time out of your day to read these words, hear my voice.  That is a great gift.

Saint Marty is full of gratitude on this gray, cold evening.