I'm not a fan of Sundays. They fill me with melancholy. I don't like the sound of church bells, and, even though I'm a church organist, I find traditional church hymns (even the happier ones like "Ode to Joy") depressing.
My wife and I have been slowly making our way through the television series The Crown on Netflix. This afternoon, at lunch, we watched the final episode where Imelda Staunton, playing Queen Elizabeth, wrestles with existential questions about the meaning of her life and impending death. It was incredibly moving. (Yes, I did cry a little bit.)
And it put me in a deeply thoughtful mood about my own place in life and the world. I even made a comment to my wife about our daughter moving away for medical school and our son talking about getting an apartment with a friend when he graduates from high school next year. "I think we're becoming obsolete," I said.
Sharon Olds feels her daughter slipping through her fingers like pool water . . .
The One Girl at the Boys' Party
by: Sharon Olds
When I take our girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they'll plunge in the deep end, she'll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she'll be doing her
wild multiplying, as the drops
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
It's difficult when you realize that you can't protect your kids from all the cruelties of the world. Olds can't save her daughter from becoming an object of sexual desire. She has to let her daughter dive in and tread those waters alone. Olds is on her way to becoming obsolete as a mother, and all she can do is write a poem about it.
My wife told me this afternoon that we won't every become obsolete as parents. Speaking about our daughter, my wife said, "Who's the first person she calls if something good or bad happens to her?" As for my son, my wife said, "Who did he come to for help with his English paper this afternoon?"
Thus, I guess it's not a matter of being unneeded. It's a matter of feeling unneeded. I've been a father for close to 25 years. Frankly, I can't remember NOT being a father anymore. However, that role is quickly shifting. Pretty soon, my wife and I are going to be empty nesters. (I hate that term, by the way.) Then we're going to have to figure out who we are again. It's almost like graduating from high school all over and deciding what my major in college is going to be.
Unless I live to be 114, I am well past the halfway point in my life, quickly sliding into my "golden" years, although, I'm not sure how golden they're going to be, thanks to the Dictator Tot. I'm also not sure what, if any, legacy I will leave when I die. A couple of poetry collections. A whole lot of unpublished poems and essays. My daughter. My son. A bunch of books that my kids will probably pitch or give to Goodwill. And this blog, which currently stands at 5,858 posts.
Aside from my kids and wife and family, nobody is going to remember me even five years after I'm gone. And that's okay.
But I'm not dead yet. I still have a chance, like Ebenezer Scrooge, to make the world a better, safer place for my children. And to write a few more poems.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about becoming obsolete and extinct, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
On this day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter. To give a nod to this book, choose a letter of the alphabet plus an interesting color, and write a poem where the color and letter repeat throughout. The poem can be about anything, but you're welcome to make it scandalous, perhaps about an affair.
Resurrection X
by: Martin Achatz
Christ is tall as Mighty Joe Young
in the painting behind the altar.
Haloed in resurrection gold, shaking
off the mold of the tomb, he towers
over the Roman centurion who stoops,
crab crawls away, afraid Christ's foot
will flatten him like Godzilla flattened
Tokyo or Little Boy flattened Hiroshima,
leaving behind just a smudge, an X marking
the spot where he once was. Or maybe
the soldier isn't afraid of oblivion, but
the whirls, loops, arches in Christ's toes,
a divine map of the universe showing
just how insignificant he is--a sandstone
grave marker with its name eaten away
by wind and rain and time, now only
a rocky blank face, mouth open, ready
to accept anything from the heavens:
salvation, radioactive breath, or the tender
lips and tongue of an old, old lover.
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