August 16: Small Changes, Wilbur's Heart, Classic Saint Marty, Confessions of Saint Marty

It is strange how much my life has changed in a year.  Today's episode of Classic Saint Marty focuses on small changes--the shortening days, changing leaf colors, resuming school schedules.  The slow slide into autumn and winter.

Last year, I was lamenting the fact that I was still part-time at the university and full-time at the medical office.  I was disappointed with my life.  Dreamed of something bigger, better.  I felt like I'd earned a few breaks from the universe after over 20 years of hard work.

Now, I'm sitting at the dining room table in my parents' house, gazing over at my sister in her hospital bed.  My mother is sitting on a chair beside her, staring at her sleeping face.  Later today, our parish priest, Father Larry, will come to pray the rosary with my family.  All of my complaints and worries from last year seem silly.

I didn't get it last year, but the passage from Charlotte's Web that starts out the post below is really about Wilbur still dealing with his best friend's death.  The bright colors of the maples and birches.  The carpet of fallen apples under the wild apple trees.  The frost in the night.  All those details mirror the winter in Wilbur's heart.

I get that now.  So, I will not bitch about work or teaching this year.  I am healthy.  My wife and children are healthy.  For that, I am very grateful.  While I am still short on cash and long on debt, I am able to work and earn a paycheck.  I have a home with a new roof.  In the grand cosmic scheme of things, I have a wonderful life, and I don't need Clarence the angel to prove it for me.

August 16, 2014:  Changes on the Way, Oliver de la Paz, "A Cupboard Full of Halos"

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 in the night and sniffed them...

Small changes pile up in that paragraph.  The days slipping away sooner.  Frost under the stars.  Green giving way to red and orange and yellow in the trees.  The harvest of pumpkin and squash and wild apple.  August into September.  Summer into autumn.

Yes, changes are on the way in the next couple of weeks.  In one week, I start teaching at the university.  The week after that, my kids go back to school.  My work hours are going to change.  My kids are going to be going to dance lessons and God knows what else.

At the beginning of the summer, I actually had hopes of having a full-time teaching job at the university.  I dreamed of teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level poetry courses.  I would have been able to set my own schedule for the most part.  Volunteer in my son's class.  Drive my kids to school every once in a while.  It was a lovely vision.

However, none of that came to pass.  I'm pretty much stuck working in a medical office and part-timing my teaching.  If I sound disappointed, I am.  However, I'm grateful that I'm still able to be in a classroom.  It's one of my favorite things in the world.

So, as the nights come earlier and frost starts forming on the pumpkins, I accept the coming changes.  Perhaps something wonderful is just around the corner.

The last Oliver de la Paz poem I've chosen is one of my favorites.  It's about miracles in everyday wrapping.  Opening a kitchen cupboard and finding an angel.  That sort of thing.  Maybe I'm doing things wrong.  Maybe I just need to look for my miracles in different places. 

Saint Marty is cleaning his bathroom tonight.  Who knows what he'll find under the sink?

 A Cupboard Full of Halos

by:  Oliver de la Paz

After he fills the junk drawer in the kitchen with wreaths made from scraps of paper, cloth, and sticks, Fidelito stores new ones in a cupboard above the stove.


He drags a stool from the garage and sets it to reach the place where Maria Elena keeps cookbooks.  In the multi-hued halos go, forced.  Some of them tumble out like hula-hoops onto linoleum.  Others become bracelets and slide down his arms as he reaches up to stop them.

When he closes the door, Fidelito forgets until his mother, ready to cook, opens the cupboard.  They spill to her from the dark, a noise of coins from another world.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 15: Like Drowning, My Dad, Incredible Guilt

Ives and Annie slept, entangled in each other's arms, their daughter sleeping alone.  Ives wold get up a half-dozen times a night to make sure that she was resting.  And every so often he would push the door open, intending to turn the radio off, but would find himself standing silently over her, his heart breaking whenever he would think about how much Robert's death must have pained her.  And he would sometimes move closer, and, brushing aside the hair that fell over her brow, plant a tender kiss on her forehead.  He would hear her sigh . . . You know what it was like?  It was like drowning.

This paragraph comes shortly after Ives' son, Robert, is murdered.  It's always a difficult passage for me to read because it's full of so much pain.  I have done what Ives is doing:  standing by my daughter's bed, watching her sleep.  It's that parental impulse of wanting to protect your child from any harm, any heartbreak.  And not being able to.


My dad visits my sister every day in the nursing home.  He drives there for lunch and stays several hours.  It's really all he can do to help her.  He doesn't understand medicine or surgery or treatment.  In fact, I would say that he has a severe distrust of doctors and nurses and the medical establishment.  Understandably.  The healthcare system for which my sister worked fired her for getting a prolonged sickness.  The doctors have really done nothing to help her.  Now, she's looking at a long-term stay in a nursing home.

My dad comes from the same generation as Ives.  Hardworking.  Devout.  Protective.  My sister's situation is tearing him apart.  He knows she can't come home in her current state, but he doesn't want to see her flat on her back in a hospital bed all day, every day, either.  As a father, it's a terrible position to be in.

I have incredible guilt at the moment.  I feel like I should be doing more to help my sister, and, yet, I have to work and teach.  My family depends on my paychecks for survival.  I don't have a whole lot of freedom in my life.  I want to be her advocate, hound the lawyer and social worker and doctors.  Yet, I can't do it all on my lunch break or after work.

It feels like all I can do is be like Ives:  stand by my sister's bed, watch her sleep, pray.

Saint Marty feels like he's drowning a little bit tonight, too.

Don't know how long I can hold my breath