May 23: Memorial Day Weekend, My Son, Poem from "Kyrie"

It is Memorial Day weekend in the United States.  That's sort of the unofficial beginning of summer in my country.

In usual times, people would be flocking to campgrounds and beaches and summer tourist destinations.  Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the interstates and highways.  Hotels would be at capacity, and the smell of barbecues and campfires would fill the air.

This Memorial Day weekend, the first of the pandemic, people are flocking to campgrounds and beaches and summer tourist destinations in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  There was an eight-mile traffic backup at the Mackinac Bridge yesterday.  Hotels are full, and barbecues and campfires are fired up.

People are going to do what they want, regardless of Covid-19 or CDC warnings.  And there will be more infections and deaths, regardless of your political or religious affiliations.  Simple facts.  I've heard more than one person recently say, "I can't live in fear."  That's true.  Living in fear is never good.  I agree.  However, living in reckless disregard of proven ways to slow the spread of the virus is a whole other ball of wax.

I'm hoping that my worries are baseless, that I will be proven wrong in three or four weeks.  I'll be the first to lift a glass of wine in celebration if I'm full of shit.  Until then, I give you this miracle . . .

I just heard my son singing a lullaby to our puppy.  Hush, little baby, don't say a word.  I went to the living room, and he was sitting next to her, petting her head.  My son looked up at me and said, "Sometimes she gets nervous, and I have to calm her down."  Then he went back to singing.

I have a son who understands about anxiety and worry.  A son who is full of compassion and love.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Oh yes I used to pray.  I prayed for the baby,
I prayed for my mortal soul as it contracted,
I prayed a gun would happen into my hand.
I prayed the way our nearest neighbors prayed,
head down, hands wrung, knees on the hard floor.
They all were sick and prayed to the Merciful Father
to send an angel, and my Henry came.
The least of these my brethren, Henry said.
Wherefore by my fruits, Henry said.
All of them survived--and do you think
they're still praying, thank you Lord for Henry?
She was so tiny, we kept her in a shoebox
on the cookstove, like a kitten.

July 31: Poet of the Week, Keith Taylor, "Sign"

A couple weeks ago, I went to hear poet Keith Taylor talk about poetry.  It was a great night.  A few years ago, I had the privilege of doing a poetry reading with Keith.  He was funny and insightful and humble that day, and he hasn't changed at all.

Keith Taylor is the Poet of the Week, and tonight's poem comes from my new favorite poetry collection, The Bird-while.  I spent most of today traveling through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, along Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.  Saw some cranes.  Lots of spruce and jack pine.  Water.  Waves and waves and waves.

As I was driving, Saint Marty thought a lot about Keith Taylor's poems.

Sign

by:  Keith Taylor

After long walks down sandy power-line cuts
looking
for wolf tracks

I hear
of a pile of scat on a trail to the bog
and find

turd-shaped clumps of deer fur
filled
with ragged pieces of bone.

November 20: Shoveling, Newt Scamander, Classic Saint Marty

Heard the snowplows go by my house at around 5:30 a.m.  About 15 minutes later, I was outside with a shovel, cleaning up my driveway and front yard.  It took me over an hour.  By the time I was done, I was soaked in sweat and ready to go back to bed.

But I didn't.  I took a shower and got ready for church.  A whole morning of practicing with my praise band and then the chancel choir.  An hour of worship.  Then I went home, got changed, and drove over to my dad's house to shovel his driveway.  I have to say that I'm already tired of winter, and it's only the first snowstorm of the season.  It's going to be a long six or seven months.  (For those of my disciples not from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am NOT exaggerating.) 

The afternoon got a lot better, though.  I went to see a movie with my kids--Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  That's right, Newt Scamander and a big bucket of popcorn did a lot to change my mood.  I will not say that it was my favorite film from the Harry Potter universe, but it was a really good way to change my rather cold and icy mood.  My teenage daughter even laughed and smiled.

Today's episode of Classic Saint Marty first aired four years ago, when my little girl was on the brink of teenagehood.  All I can say is that some things change and some things are pretty constant.

November 20, 2012:  What Did I Do?

I am tired of being the father of an almost-teenage girl tonight.  When I picked my daughter up from my parents' house this evening, she came unglued on me.  She was mad that I had showed up to bring her home.  When we got home, she came unglued on me again, this time because she had lost a notebook she needed for school.  Then, after she had calmed down, she came unglued once more because she left another school book at my parents' house.

Currently, we are sitting in silence in the living room.  We are at a stalemate.  She doesn't want to talk to me, and I don't want to be screamed at anymore.  Perhaps things will get better when we're both asleep.

I don't like fighting with my daughter.  Actually, I'm not fighting with her.  I have spoken a total of three or four times to her.  I have said "Let's get going, sweetie" and "Do you have any homework tonight?" and "What are you looking for?" and "Did you leave it at school?"  I think that's about it.  In return, I have gotten door slamming, screaming, tears, and glares.  It's like living with a skunk.  I walk around, trying not to startle her in order to avoid a big stink.

I miss the little girl who would sit in my lap while I read Charlotte's Web to her.  I have a friend who recently went on a trip to Pennsylvania.  When I asked my friend how her trip was, she said, "If I had to do it over, I would raise my kids Amish.  They're up at dawn, in the barns and fields.  They work all day and are too tired at night to cause any problems."  My friend has three daughters.  All three of them had babies when they were teenagers.

Maybe my friend is on to something.  Maybe the Amish are on to something.  No zippers.  Long, black dresses.  Church.  Barn raisings.  Arranged marriages.  Horses and carriages.

The only problem is that Saint Marty doesn't look good in a beard.

This would not be a good look for me

November 17: Spreading Silence, Blizzard Brewing, Snow Days

I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as though I'd stepped not through the forest but on it.  I left the wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened.  I'll go to the Northwest Territories, I thought, Finland.

Walking through the woods.  Dillard experiences a stunning silence, as if her mere presence turned down the volume knob on the world.  No birds chittering.  No winds bansheeing through the trees.  Yet, something moves in her.  Through the quiet, she feels an urge to keep going.  Walk and walk and walk.  Through mountains.  Over tundra and glacier.  To Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Mount Nirvana.  All the way to Helsinki.

I have experienced that kind of silence.  In a snow storm.  Rising early to shovel my driveway.  The whole world is muffled, as if encased in thick cotton batting.  I used to love weather like that.  My older sister and I would pile into her Dodge Aspen and go plowing through the streets.  That early, nothing's moving.  No cars.  No people.  No dogs or skunks.  No paper carriers.

There's a blizzard brewing in the middle of the United States right now, and it's headed straight toward the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  This Saturday, the forecast is for 60 mile per hour winds and snow.  Depending on who you believe, there's going to be between 0.1 and 11 inches of white stuff on the ground by the time it's all over.

I am not looking forward to this little weather event, silence notwithstanding.  In fact, I was hoping for a green Thanksgiving.  I used to love winter.  It was my favorite time of the year.  Loved the cold and dark and wind and ice.  And that winter silence, when the whole world seems cryogenic.

Now, I'm more of a summer guy,  I prefer heat waves to blizzards.  I think it has something to do with age.  When I was younger, bad winter weather meant I got to sleep in and listen to Billy Joel and Quiet Riot mix tapes.  Now that I'm a husband and father, bad weather means I have to get up even earlier than normal.  It means over an hour of back-killing work with a snow shovel.  Then a treacherous drive down U. S. 41 to get to my office. There are no snow days when you're an adult.

So, I'm not excited about this weekend's weather forecast.  The only good thing--it's happening on a Saturday, when I don't have to worry about getting my car into the street or driving through a white tornado.

Saint Marty supposes he can be thankful for that tonight.

September 30: Days Grew Shorter, Cold, Prayer for Winter

The autumn days grew shorter, Lurvy brought the squashes and pumpkins in from the garden and piled them on the barn floor, where they wouldn't get nipped on frosty nights.  The maples and birches turned bright colors and the wind shook them and they dropped their leaves one by one to the ground.  Under the wild apple trees in the pasture, the red little apples lay thick on the ground, and the sheep gnawed them and the geese gnawed them and foxes came into the night and sniffed them.  One evening, just before Christmas, snow began falling.  It covered house and barn and fields and woods.  Wilbur had never seen snow before.  When morning came he went out and plowed the drifts in his yard, for the fun of it.  Fern and Avery arrived, dragging a sled.  They coasted down the lane and out onto the frozen pond in the pasture.

It's a beautiful picture that E. B. White paints in the space of a few lines.  The book moves from autumn to Christmas in the space of eight gorgeous sentences.  Pumpkins and squashes and red little apples.  Snow and drifts and a frozen pond.  It's a time-lapse paragraph, like one of those films you saw in science class in high school.  The flower sprouts, grows, opens, waves frenetically for a few seconds, then curls, drops petals, and shrinks back into the earth.


Weather in the Upper Peninsula is like that, as well.  For example, this past Sunday was warm, almost humid, with lots of sun and temperatures near eighty degrees.  By Monday morning, rain and fog moved in, and the thermometer didn't climb too much above forty degrees.  Last night, I could almost taste winter in the air.  Time-lapse weather.

As I was waiting to pick up my son from religion class, I listened to a little conversation a man and woman were having about the coming winter.  She was complaining how cold it was, and he said something like, "Well, the Farmer's Almanac says this winter's going to be worse than last winter.  More snow.  Colder."

I couldn't listen much beyond that.  I began having visions of snow drifted up to the roof of my house and water lines freezing solid for months.  School children trapped at home because breathing outside is like swallowing icicles.  Last winter was bad.  Usually, I don't mind the gray and white of December through early March.  When that gray and white stretches into April and May, I begin to get a little anxious.

Last winter cost the communities of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a lot of money.  In my home town, the streets are still cratered and unpaved in places, looking like bombed-out war zones.  I'm talking millions of dollars in damage from the cold and ice.  We've barely recovered, and already the cold weather is almost upon us again.

So, I have a little prayer for winter tonight.  I'm praying that it arrives late and leaves early, like a surprise visit from a irritating brother-in-law.  The quicker and shorter the visit, the better.  That's my hope.  Too many families lived without running water for weeks on my street last year.  I don't want to see people going through that again.  I don't want to go through it, myself.  So I'm removing the welcome mat from my front stoop.

When that irritating brother-in-law shows up with snow and ice and dark, Saint Marty's going to pretend he's not home.

Hoping it's wrong