June 25: I Was Born For, Strawberry Picking, My Son

Santiago thinks of the thing he was born for . . .

Now is no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for. There might be a big one around that school, he thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding. But they are working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast and to the north-east. Can that be the time of day? Or is it some sign of weather that I do not know?

There's really only two things I was born for, I think:  teaching and poetry.  I'm not bad with music, although I have to work hard at it.  I'm decent at acting and directing, but I'm no Orson Welles.  I'm not even Kevin Costner.  I can draw pretty well, but, again, I'm not going to give Picasso or Norman Rockwell any competition.  But, put me in front or a group of students or hand me a fountain pen and my journal, and I am in my element.

This morning, when I woke up, my wife said that she wanted to go strawberry picking.  Now, I used to go strawberry picking a lot with my sister, Sally.  Strawberries were her favorite, and she insisted we go picking every summer.  However, I was not born for strawberry picking.  Neither was my son.  But, because my wife was so excited about the idea, we drove an hour-and-a-half to a farm, and we spent 45 minutes harvesting four gallons of fresh strawberries.

It was a fun time.  We bought breakfast at McDonald's, listened to podcasts on the way there and back, and told our son stories of strawberry picking with my wife's grandmother and my sister.  Like I said, I wasn't born to pick berries, but (like acting or directing or sketching) I can make due.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about picking strawberries quite a while ago . . . 

Strawberry Picking

for Sally

You took me strawberry picking
once, drove out to a farm
where we paid to squat in green
beds laced with tongues of red.
I could feel my ears and neck
tighten under the punishing
sun as we filled Morning Glory
ice cream buckets with our
harvest, each berry looking to me
like some vital body part,
an organ or muscle necessary
for life. You sat on your haunches,
fingers staining red, as if you
were some battlefield surgeon
patching up the fallen with only
your hands. Every now and then,
you would lift a berry to your lips,
eat it in a hummingbird moment,
smiling the smile of the freshly
healed at Lourdes, where miracles
are common as empty wheelchairs
or dandelions in a July field.

The days since you’ve been gone,
I see strawberries everywhere,
in a welt of blood on my lip
after shaving, a stop sign,
a friend’s dyed hair,
my son’s sunburned shoulders,
oxygen in the gills of a perch.
Last night, I stood outside, under
ribbons of borealis, watched
them glide between the stars
like garter snakes in a midnight
Eden. The Bible says that, in the cool
of the day, Adam and Eve heard
God taking a stroll through
the garden. There were probably
peacocks nesting in the pines,
a stream talking with moss and stone,
the scurry of mole and spider
in the ferns.

That’s what I believe you heard
in your last moments of breath.
You heard peafowl screams,
brook trout leaps. Grasshopper wing
and corn silk. And you heard
his divine toes in the grass, walking
along. When he came to you,
he couldn’t resist. He reached down,
plucked you from the stem. You were
ripe. Sweet. Ready. He put you
in his Morning Glory bucket, continued
on into the dew and sunlight.