July 12: "This Land is Your Land," Bipolar Disorder, Skyway

Sorry for not posting yesterday, and sorry for not including a passage from Hitchhiker's this evening.  I don't have a whole lot of time before I go to have a late dinner with my family at a local microbrewery.

Yesterday, after work, I went out for a beer with one of my best friends.  She has recently moved to Wisconsin, so we're not going to be seeing much of each other any more.  We sat out on a sunny patio, drank, solved the world's problems, and ate some bread sticks and French fries.  It was lovely and put me in a wonderful mood.

Last night, I led a poetry workshop at the Joy Center in my home town.  It's a little artists' retreat in the middle of the woods, and it is a place that fills me with peace even at the most chaotic times of my life.  The focus of the workshop was Woody Guthrie and his music.  We listened to various singers covering Woody's songs, and then I gave the writers prompts based on the songs.  I was again with people I love--writer friends I've known for many years.  It was heart-opening, honest, and inspiring.  It filled my cup to the brim.

When I got home, my wife was out with friends.  As many of the devoted disciples of this blog know, my wife struggles with bipolar disorder.  Recently, she has been teetering on the brink of a manic episode.  She hasn't been sleeping well and has been impulsive and irritable.  At around midnight, when my wife got home, I knew it was going to be a long night.  Midnight rolled into one o'clock, and she was still up, unable to quiet her mind.  Around 1:30 a.m., she hopped into my car and went for a drive.  She came back a little after 2 a.m.

She told me that she'd been sitting by a lake close to our house, praying and talking to her mother, who died of ovarian cancer when my wife was in her first years of college.  As she was relating the story, I could sense that she was calmer, ready to come to bed, and I sent up a little thank you to God and Saint Anthony (who is my saint of choice--he's worked some miracles in my life).

It was a long and exhausting night.  Yet, through it all, I kept on coming back to Woody Guthrie, and his most famous song.  "This Land is Your Land."  I kept singing one lyric over and over:  "As I was walking that ribbon of highway, / I saw above me that endless skyway; / I saw below me that golden valley; / This land was made for you and me."

I don't know why that was stuck in my head, but it made me feel a little hopeful.  Like I was going to make it through.  That someone was watching over my wife.

She isn't out of the woods yet.  There still has to be medication adjustments and sleep.  Lots of sleep.  She's still spinning (a little less stridently), and I don't know what tonight is going to bring for us.

But, because of Woody Guthrie's song, which is still playing on repeat in my head, I think I may be able to fall asleep tonight as the moon crosses the endless skyway.

Taken by Saint Marty a little while ago . . .

June 28: Stopped Talking, This Land is Your Land, Sugarloaf

Arthur encounters a stranger . . .

He was standing with his back to Arthur watching the very last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon.  He was tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long gray robe.  When he turned, his face was thin and distinguished, careworn but not unkind, the sort of face you would happily bank with.  But he didn't turn yet, not even to react to Arthur's yelp of surprise.

Eventually the last rays of the sun vanished completely, and he turned.  His face was still illuminated from somewhere, and when Arthur looked for the source of the light he saw that a few yards away stood a small craft of some kind--a small Hovercraft, Arthur guessed.  It shed a dim pool of light around it.

The man looked at Arthur, sadly it seemed.

"You choose a cold night to visit our dead planet," he said.

"Who . . . who are you?" stammered Arthur.

The man looked away.  Again a look of sadness seemed to cross his face.  

"My name is not important," he said.

He seemed to have something on his mind.  Conversation was clearly something he felt he didn't have to rush at.  Arthur felt awkward.

"I . . . er . . . you startled me . . ." he said, lamely.

The man looked round to him again and slightly raised his eyebrows.

"Hmmm?" he said.

"I said you startled me."

"Do no be alarmed.  I will not harm you."

Arthur frowned at him.  "But you shot at us!  There were missiles . . ." he said.

The man gazed into the pit of the crater.  The slight glow from Marvin's eyes cast very faint red shadows on the huge carcass of the whale.

The man chuckled slightly.

"An automatic system," he said and gave a small sigh.  "Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks.  I think they take the occasional potshot to relieve the monotony."

He looked gravely at Arthur and said, "I'm a great fan of science, you know."

"Oh . . .  er, really?" said Arthur, who was beginning to find the man's curious, kindly manner disconcerting.

"Oh yes," said the old man, and simply stopped talking again.

Some things leave you speechless in life.  The Grand Canyon.  Times Square.  The Pacific Ocean.  The Atlantic Ocean.  Yosemite.  The aurora borealis.  The first time you watch Star Wars:  A New Hope.  (Okay, that may just be me.)  And encountering a stranger on a supposedly dead planet.  All these things can rob you of the ability to speak.

This afternoon, my son and I went on an adventure.  I told him last night that we were going to climb a mountain together.  He was a little skeptical, but he went along with it.  After I was done with work, I picked him up, and, while my wife went grocery shopping, we hiked Sugarloaf Mountain in Marquette together.

This was not the first time the he'd climbed Sugarloaf.  Several years ago, when he was quite young, he climbed it.  However, he didn't remember the experience at all.  But when we first started up the trail, he said something like, "Oh, yeah, I think I remember this rock," looking at a huge boulder in the path.  It was my turn to be skeptical.

Now, climbing Sugarloaf does not require a Sherpa guide, crampons, or bottles of oxygen.  (Well, when we got to the top, I could have used a little jolt of O2, but that's just me.)  It's a fairly well-worn hike, with stairs and railings to help you up the steepest parts. 

When we started, right near the base, my son and I started singing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"--"This land is your land.  This land is my land,  From California, to the New York Island."  Again, we had just started, so we had plenty of air as we crooned--"From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream wa-a-a-a-ter.  This land was made for you and me!"  We were having a great time.

And then things got real.  The tree roots and rocks became a little harder to traverse, and the incline became steeper.  My son was sucking his water down like he was crossing the Gobi.  "You might want to save some of that for the top," I warned him.  He didn't listen.

Up and up we went, and the whining started.  "How much longer?" he huffed.  Eventually, he was saying things like, "Just go on ahead and leave me here for the bears" and "I hate all these bugs" and "My legs are attacking me" and "God, is that you?" and "I see a tunnel of light."  I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

When we finally reached the summit, he threw himself down on the closest bench and said, "I'm not going back down.  I'm going to sleep."  Eventually, he opened his eyes and looked around, at Lake Superior on one side, and the vast green of the forest on the other.  "What do you think," I asked him as he stared at the trees, "is Bigfoot down there?"

He thought for a moment and said, "It's too hot for Bigfoot to be out."

It was a wonderful adventure, even if my son was having near-death experiences on the way up and down.  And the view from the top of Sugarloaf always takes the words away from me.  I live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Next week, Saint Marty is going to take his son to see a waterfall.  Don't tell him, or he may run away from home.

Jne 20: A Few Facts, Poet of the Week, Peter Balakian, "Ellis Island"

I have found out a few facts about Fred Trump, the father of the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States.  (These facts were not difficult to locate.  Simply type "Donald Trump parents" into Google.)

First, Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants.  (That's right.  Donald is only second generation American.  His grandparents came through Ellis Island.)  Fred built a real estate empire in New York, building low income housing.  In 1927, Fred was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but he was released without being charged.  Much later in his life, he was investigated and cited by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations.  It seems Mr. Trump didn't like renting apartments to people of color.  (He instructed his rental agents not to rent to African Americans and also to encourage African American tenants to vacate his properties.)  Folk singer Woody Guthrie, who once rented one of Fred's apartments, wrote lyrics about Fred Trump, accusing him of stirring up racial hatred "in the bloodpot of human hearts."

That's where Donald Trump came from.  German immigrants.  Ellis Island.  A self-made real estate tycoon who had more than a little problem with African Americans, just like his son has problems with Muslim Americans.

This week, I have chosen Peter Balakian as Poet of the Week.  Peter is the son of Armenian immigrants and grew up in New Jersey, not far from Fred and Donald Trump's stomping grounds.  He recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Ozone Journal.

Saint Marty thinks we should all celebrate immigrants this week.

Ellis Island

by:  Peter Balakian

The tide’s a Bach cantata.

The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac.

The tide’s a lamentation of white opals.

The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out.

Here is everything you’ll never need:

hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk,   

a porcelain cup blown into the desert—

stockings that walked to Syria in 1915.

On the rocks some ewes and rams   

graze in the outer dark.

The manes of the shoreline undo your hair.   

A sapphire ring is fingerless.

The weed and algae are floating like a bed,   

and the bloodless gulls—

whose breaths would stink of all of us   

if we could kiss them on the beaks—

are gnawing on the dead.

The immigrant hospital on Ellis Island