July 4: Independence Day, Barbecue, "After the Fireworks"

It was a strange Independence Day.  No parades or community picnics.  No snow cones or cotton candy.  No corn on the cob dripping with butter and salt.  And, at dusk, no huge fireworks display to "ooohhhh" and "aaaahhhhh" at.

Instead, I slept in.  Got up and made my family breakfast.  After running a few errands, I took a nap.  Played the pipe organ for a Saturday evening Mass.  Then, I drove out to a camp on a lake, where I feasted on shish kebob and bratwurst.  As dusk crept in, we shot off some fireworks purchased at a road-side stand.

As I said, it was strange.  Unlike any Independence Day that I can recall in my adult life.  Its sedate pace brought to us by the pandemic.  But it was also wonderful, full of the miracles of family and togetherness and laughter.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

After the Fireworks

by:  Martin Achatz

We walk to our car in the dark,

blankets cradled in our arms,

stars as distant as the morning

we first met, marriage and kids

not even ingredients in the roux

of our thoughts, just longing for

when we could come together

on a beach, wade into lake

water, hands and lips weightless

as jellyfish on our bodies,

stinging, pulling back, gliding

over and in and around, skin

a night sky on July fourth,

full of comet, spark, tail, waterfall.

Peony.  Chrysanthemum.  Diadem.

Crossette.  Kamuro.  Bengal fire.

Afterward, as we dressed, we

still smelled our combustion,

tasted potassium, nitrogen, copper

on our tongues for hours.

Tonight, we load belongings

into our Ford.  Books, sparklers,

half-eaten bag of cotton candy,

our daughter, still dazzled

by Summer Storm and Pyro Glyphics.

We drive home in silence

after the fireworks, think of how

we, on this Independence Day,

depend on each other, how we

still climb into bed each night,

hungry to be blinded again.

July 3: The Laws of Romance, Happily Ever Afters, Eve of Independence Day

Thomas Merton's heart gets broken . . .

She told me how once she was in a famous night club in a famous city when a famous person, a prince of the royal blood, had stared very intently at her for a long time and had finally got up and started to lurch in the direction of her table when his friends had made him sit down and behave himself.

I could see that all the counts and dukes who liked to marry people like Constance Bennett would want also to marry her.  But the counts and dukes were not here on board this glorified cargo boat that was carrying us all peacefully across the mild dark waves of the North Atlantic.  The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.

We made Nantucket Light on Sunday afternoon and had to anchor in quarantine that night.  So the ship rode in the Narrows on the silent waters, and the lights of Brooklyn glittered in the harbor like jewels.  That boat was astir with music and with a warm glowing life that pulsated within the dark hull and poured out into the July night through every porthole.  There were parties in all the cabins.  Everywhere you went, especially on deck where it was quiet, you were placed in the middle of movie scenery--the setting for the last reel of the picture.

I made a declaration of my undying love.  I would not, could not, ever love anyone else but her.  It was impossible, unthinkable.  If she went to the ends of the earth, destiny would bring us together again.  The stars in their courses from the beginning of the world had plotted this meeting which was the central fact in the whole history of the universe.  Love like this was immortal.  It conquered time and outlasted the futility of human history.  And so forth.  

She talked to me, in her turn, gently and sweetly.  What it sounded like was:  "You do not know what you are saying.  This can never be.  We shall never meet again."  What it meant was:  "You are a nice kid.  But for heaven's sake grow up before someone makes a fool of you."  I went to my cabin and sobbed over my diary for a while and then, against all the laws of romance, went peacefully to sleep.

What Merton wants is a happily ever after.  On a dream voyage across the Atlantic, he meets the love of his life.  They spend days in each other's company, and he burns for her in his cabin at night.  At the end of this ocean crossing, Merton declares his love for her, and, if he was writing the fairy tale ending to a Hollywood love story, she would throw her arms around his neck, the music would crescendo, and they would kiss passionately on the lido deck.  (That could also be the conclusion to an episode of The Love Boat.)

We've all grown up with these tales.  We all want happily ever afters.  What this little passage from The Seven-Storey Mountain teaches, however, is that fairy tale endings don't really exist like this.  They are fabrications, taught to us when we are very young, and they lead us, in adulthood, to broken hearts, broken relationships, broken marriages, broken families, broken lives.

The reality of love is that it is work.  Hard work.  If you are lucky enough to meet the love of your life, you can spend years getting to know each other.  You will get on each other's nerves.  Maybe not speak to each other for days.  There will be shouting.  Sometimes, Prince Charming will turn back into the frog for a while.  And Cinderella will end up sweeping out the fireplace again.  Those are the hard, day-to-day facts of love.  And, after all that struggle, it may not conclude with a happily ever after.  That's why Disney princess movies usually stop at the wedding scene instead of the golden anniversary. 

It is the eve of Independence Day in the United States.  A celebration of the founding of the United States.  Usually, there are parades and community picnics and fireworks.  Everyone wears red, white, and blue clothes, and we imagine America is the greatest place on Earth to live. 

Of course, this one-day love affair with patriotism is a little like a happily ever after.  It ignores things like the genocide of Native Americans and institutionalized racism.  Black people dying in the streets as they just go about the business of living their lives.  LGTBQ people whose inalienable rights are still being assailed in Supreme Court cases.  I live in a land deeply divided.  White supremacists marching into state capital buildings, toting automatic rifles.  A President who tear gasses peaceful protesters at a church in order to stage a photo op, who wants to mobilize the military against his own people.  And a pandemic that is raging out of control while the rest of the world seems to have a handle on it.

Independence Day isn't about who we are as a people.  It's about who we could be.  A shining example of hope for the entire world.  We aren't there yet.  Like every happily ever after, there's hard work to be done.  We have to face some ugly truths about our past and present, make drastic changes, in order to have a future where we really are what we claim to be:  the land of the free and home of the brave.  For every one of our citizens, indigenous and immigrant.

So, I will barbecue hot dogs tomorrow.  Shoot off some fireworks.  Maybe even feel a little patriotic, not for who we are right now, but for who we could be.  Because our fairy tale isn't done yet.  Right now, we're at that place in the story where everything seems at its darkest.  The glass slipper is lost.  Aurora Rose has pricked her finger on a spindle.  Snow White has eaten the poison apple.

There's work to be done.  Difficult work.  Change is painful.  Always.  But we can be better.  I still have enough optimism to believe that our story could have a happily ever after.  Martin Luther King, Jr., marched for that.  James Baldwin wrote for that.  Dennis Banks went to Wounded Knee for that.  Marsha P. Johnson picked up a brick for that.

And Saint Marty gives thanks for all of them.

July 2: Poetry Workshop, World U. F. O. Day, "Big Bang"

Greetings disciples!

I just got home a little while ago from a poetry workshop I led this evening, outside, at a local park near a lake, face-to-face.  Of course, all the poets were safely distanced.  It was beautiful, warm, sunny, and pretty much bug-free.

Today is World. U. F. O. Day, so, in honor of this face, I planned an evening of all things cosmic and poetic.  Aliens and moons, abductions and invasions.  It was wonderfully and miraculously strange.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

Here is something I wrote this evening that I'm not too ashamed of . . .

Big Bang

by:  Martin Achatz

My dad hunted with Kevin,
Uncle Kevie, to us,
a man hard as slag rock
who used to fish
with dynamite he stole
from the mines, threw it
into the lake, let it pound
trout out of the water
like the hungry
fist of God.
Kevin drank a lot,
so much that Poncho,
the local grocer, paid
for his annual Yosemite
trips with Kevin's beer money.

July 20, 1973, at a campfire,
Uncle Kevie looked up
through pine branches, searched
for something.  When he found it,
he took a pull
from the long brown neck
of his beer, declared,
"It's my birthday."
Uncle Kevie never drew
attention to himself, avoided
it like Sunday church.  He stared
up at the bright sickle
of moon.  His ice-blue irises
swam with fire.  He nodded.
"I remember it.  That day."
He pressed his lips together.
"Nineteen sixty-nine."
He pulled on his beer again.
"They walked on that."
Raised his bottle, pointed.
"On my birthday.  Today."
He smiled.  He never smiled.

I saw Uncle Kevie draw inward,
the space around him collapse.
Then he started to expand,
getting bigger, bigger,
reaching out and out,
spinning, spinning
over Europa, Ganymede,
leaping Fornax, Lyra, Lupus
chasing Cigar, Pinwheel
toward a distant somewhere
at the edge of comets, stars, moons
where no boot had ever stepped.

July 1: Tortured Me in My Cabin, First Loves, Ecstasy and Agony

Thomas Merton in love . . .

I would rather spend two years in a hospital than go through that anguish again!  The devouring, emotional, passionate love of adolescence that sinks its claws into you and consumes you day and night and eats into the vitals of your soul!  All the self-tortures of doubt and anxiety and imagination and hope and despair that you go through when you are a child, trying to break out of your shell, only to find yourself in the middle of a legion of full-armed emotions against which you have no defense!  It is like being flayed alive.  No one can go through it twice.  This kind of love affair can really happen only once in a man's life.  After that he is calloused.  He is no longer capable of so many torments.  He can suffer, but not from so many matters of no account.  After one such crisis he has experience and the possibility of a second time no longer exists, because the secret of the anguish was his own utter guilelessness.  He is no longer capable of such complete and absurd surprises.  No matter how simple a man may be, the obvious cannot go on astonishing him for ever.

I was introduced to this particular girl by a Catholic priest who came from Cleveland and played shuffleboard in his shirt sleeves without a Roman collar on.  He knew everybody on the boat in the first day, and as for me, two days had gone by before I even realized that she was on board.  She was travelling with a couple of aunts and the three of them did not mix in with the other passengers very much.  They kept to themselves in their three deck chairs and had nothing to do with the gentlemen in tweed caps and glasses who went breezing around and around the promenade deck.

When I first met her I got the impression she was no older than I was.  As a matter of fact she was about twice my age:  but you could be twice sixteen without being old, as I now realize, sixteen years after then event.  She was small and delicate and looked as if she were made out of porcelain.  But she had big wide-open California eyes and was not afraid to talk in a voice that was at once ingenuous and independent and had some suggestion of weariness about it as if she habitually stayed up too late at night.

To my dazzled eyes she immediately became the heroine of every novel and I all but flung myself face down on the deck at her feet.  She could have put a collar on my neck and led me around from that time forth on the end of a chain.  Instead of that I spent my days telling her and her aunts all about my ideals and my ambitions and she in her turn attempted to teach me how to play bridge.  And that is the surest proof of her conquest, for I never allowed anyone else to try such a thing as that on me, never!  But even she could not succeed in such an enterprise.

We talked.  The insatiable wound inside me bled and grew, and I was doing everything I could to make it bleed more.  Her perfume and the peculiar smell of the denicotinized cigarettes she smoked followed me everywhere and tortured me in my cabin.  

Ah, young love!  There's nothing like it.  Thank God!  That summer blush of passion that makes every waking moment pure ecstasy and agony at the same time.  Merton is right.  It can only happen once in anyone's lifetime.  After that, a person becomes guarded, unwilling to endure it again.  To feel too much of something is reserved for young lovers and saints.

I, myself, never really recovered from that time.  At moments, I find myself thinking of my first love, and all the turmoil that hurricaned around me that summer.  I remember the heat, the need I felt for this person's smell and voice and touch.  It was something akin to addiction.  Like I couldn't survive without those things.  And, at night, I burned in my bedroom thinking about this person's body next to mine.

I know I'm expressing some unsaintly things here, but I don't care.  I think there's something very pure about first loves.  You go into it with your eyes wide open, not wanting to miss anything.  There aren't any barriers to overcome.  You don't hold back anything.  From before dawn to beyond dusk, you are consumed.

I suppose it's the same with all firsts in your life, though.  Your first car--all you want to do is get behind that wheel and . . . drive.  First dog--the long walks, hours of fetching and belly scratching.  First fireworks--lying on your back, blinded by light and noise.  First reading of The Catcher in the Rye--feeling like you've lost and found yourself.  It's about obsession, I guess.

I'm sure saints feel the same thing, when they get their first taste of God.  Like a cold drink of water after seven years of drought.  A thirst you didn't know you had.  Overpowering.  Either they surrender or live in despair for the rest of their lives.

It is night two of my Star Wars marathon with my daughter.  The Empire Strikes Back.  Another first for my daughter.  She came bouncing down her stairs around 9 p.m. and announced, "C'mon, Daddy."  She was the same way with the Harry Potter books and movies when she was younger.  Every night, until she was done, full, quenched.

Me?  Right now, I'm obsessed with the miracle of this moment, in the middle of a pandemic:  me and my daughter on the couch, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

For this, Saint Marty gives thanks.