March 14: Pandemic Panic, Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Kyrie"

Since true pandemic panic took hold in my little corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this week, I have found myself turning to one particular poet:  Ellen Bryant Voigt.  She published a collection of poems titled Kyrie in the early 1990s.  It's about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. 

I have begun rereading this book, remembering how beautiful Voigt's writing is.  It's a book that captures the human side of tragedy and manages, somehow, to instill a sense of some kind of hope, as well.  It's brilliant.  I once went to a reading Voigt gave in Kalamazoo.  She read sections from the unpublished manuscript of Kyrie, and she had the audience breathless and rapt by the end. 

Saint Marty has decided, over the course of the next few weeks, to share this collection with you, one poem at a time.  Just because . . .

Epigraph:

Nothing else--no infection, no war, no famine--
has ever killed so many in as short a period.
                     Alfred Crosby
                    America's Forgotten Pandemic:
                    The Influenza of 1918

Prologue:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alders filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?

March 10, 11, 12: God Save the King, Anger, Coronavirus

Merton gets in an argument . . .

In the hotel at Lucerne, John Paul and I nearly came to blows (Bonnemaman being on John Paul's side) over the question as to whether the English had stolen the tune of God Save the King from My Country 'Tis of Thee or whether the Americans had cribbed My Country 'Tis of Thee from God Sae the King.  By this time, since I was on Father's British passport, I considered myself English.

This little passage from The Seven Storey Mountain simply proves two things to me: 1)  people get angry and argue over the stupidest things, and 2) anger only makes people do and say things that they later regret.  I am at a point in my life where I have no energy for either argument or anger.  I simply won't accept them any more.  (Or I will TRY not to accept them.)

Since my last post, much has happened in the world, including a declaration of a worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus by the World Health Organization and the shutting down of practically all the universities in the state of Michigan (and around the country).  Yes, that's right folks.  I am now, and at least for the next three weeks, an online, distance-learning professor.  There's no arguing about that.  It's just simply happening.

Another thing there's no arguing about:  the coronavirus is causing a kind of mass hysteria in the United States.  Companies are price-gouging hand sanitizer and toilet paper (of all things!).  There's not a roll of TP to be found at our local Walmart right now.  Ditto, bottles of Purell and the like.  Go on Amazon, and most TP brands are currently out-of-stock.  Ditto, Purell. 

First, the coronavirus has nothing to do with gastrointestinal issues.  It's a respiratory infection.  Kleenex should be the paper product that is out-of-stock.  Second, the fact that large corporations are taking advantage of people at a time of heightened fears is disgraceful, but not surprising.  Big business will always take advantage of customers, given the opportunity.  Cant's argue with that.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Coronavirus is not something to be taken lightly.  It's serious business.  It was right to cancel all the major sporting events--basketball (NBA and NCAA), baseball (MLB), hockey (NHL), and the like.  Right now, the powers-the-be are attempting to control the spread of the virus, and thus reduce the threat of an uncontrolled outbreak.  That's smart.  Can't argue with that. 

However, in the cardiology office where I work, I spoke to patients today who were cancelling life-saving procedures because of the threat of coronavirus.  That makes no sense.  Heart problems can sort of kill people a lot faster than the coronavirus.  It feels as though people think we're going to go through another Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.  Let me point out something that people seem to be missing:  IT WAS IN 1918!!  Medicine has sort of made a few advancements since then.

So, there's a lot of hysterical people out there, frightened out of their minds.  Fact.  There's nothing that anybody can do to calm people's anxieties.  That will come with time.  Fact.  It's not the end of the world.  It's a badly handled health crisis that will, eventually, be controlled.

Here's Saint Marty's wisdom for now: 

1. Calm the fuck down.
2. Wash your hands.  A lot.
3. If you are sick, stay home.
4. If you are really sick, go to the doctor.
5. Don't get angry.
6. Don't accept anger from anyone.
7. Don't argue with stupid people (it only raises your blood pressure).
8. Don't be a stupid person.

March 9: Heavy Branches of Evergreens, Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan, Bipartisan Love

Merton on travelling with his grandparents . . .

The first day was not so bad for me and Father, because we were still in France.  We saw a little of Dijon, and the train passed through Besancon on the way to Basle.  But as soon as we got in Switzerland, things were different.

For some reason, we found Switzerland extremely tedious.  It was not Father's kind of landscape, and anyway he had no time to sketch or paint anything, even if he had wanted to.  In every city we hunted, first thing of all, for the museum.  But the museums were never satisfactory.  They were filled mostly with huge canvasses by some modern Swiss national artist, paintings representing monstrous great executioners trying to chop the heads off Swiss patriots.  Besides, it was always hard for us to find the museum in the first place, because we did not know German, and we couldn't make any sense out of the answers people gave us.  Then when we finally did get there, instead of the comfort of a few decent pictures, we would immediately be confronted by another immense red and yellow cartoon by this Swiss jingo whose name I have forgotten.

Finally we took to making fun of everything in the museums, and playing around, and putting our hats on the statues, which was all right because the place was already totally deserted anyway.  But once or twice we nearly got in trouble with the stuffy Swiss custodians, who came around the corner by surprise and found us mocking the hatted masterworks, kidding the busts of Beethoven and the rest.

As a matter of fact, the only pleasure Father got out of the whole expedition was a jazz concert he heard in Paris, given by a big American Negro orchestra--I cannot imagine who it was.  I think it was too far back for Louis Armstrong:  but Father was very happy with that.  I did not go.  Pop did not approve of jazz.  But when we got to Lucerne, there was an orchestra in the hotel, and our table in the dining room was so close to it that I could reach out and touch the drums.  And the drummer was a Negro with whom I immediately made friends, although he was rather shy.  Meals were very interesting with all this business like drumming going on right in my ear, and I was more fascinated by the activities of the drummer than I was by the melons and meats that were set before us.  This was the only pleasure I got out of Switzerland and then almost immediately, Pop got out table changed.  

The rest of the time was one long fight.  We fought on pleasure steamers, we fought on funicular railways, we fought on the tops of mountains and at the foot of mountains and by the shores of lakes and under the heavy branches of the evergreens.

Merton's father doesn't seem to like his father-in-law all that much, and Merton follows suit.  Granted, "Pop" is a little more tightly wound than the Mertons are accustomed to.  Merton's relationships with them would be akin to having Bernie Sanders as a father and Ronald Reagan as a grandfather.

I understand this dynamic quite well.  Those of my disciples who know me well would use many adjectives to describe me, but "conventional" or "conservative" would not be one of those adjectives.  My father, on the other hand, voted Republican in every presidential election except 1960.  (Kennedy was my father's favorite President.)  Yes, he voted for Donald Trump before he died.  Imagine me growing up under my father's roof.  Poet.  Actor.  Musician.  Teacher.  Further to the left than Jesus Christ.  It was tough some days.

Yet, underlying all the disagreements I had with my father regarding politics, there was mutual respect.  I know my father was proud of my accomplishments.  He went to musicals I directed.  Was in the front row when I played the Stage Manager in Our Town.  Attended poetry readings when he could.  Me?  I respected how much he was devoted to my mother and siblings.  Family values really meant something to him.

One of my best memories of my dad late in his life--the first time I was named Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula.  It was a televised event, where I sat with the other finalist, being interviewed and reading poems.  At the end of the show, Donald Hall, former Poet Laureate of the United States, announced the winner.  When Hall said my name, I though my father was never going to stop smiling.  That night wasn't about our differences.  It was just about joy--my dad was really happy for me.

I never doubted that my dad loved me.  It wasn't a question.  He loved me, despite all of my "radical" ideas about feeding the poor, universal healthcare, and taxing the wealthy.  He might have thought I was a communist, but in the alchemy of our relationship, that simply didn't matter.

Saint Marty forged a bipartisan love with his father.

March 8: The Valley of Loire, Half a Million Pageviews, Dreaming Big

Merton confronts his grandfather's slightly irresponsible spending habits . . .

It was that way all through the valley of Loire.   

When we got to Paris, having left the two old ladies from New Zealand in an obscure town called Saint Mere down in the south, we found Pop and Bonnemaman entrenched in the most expensive hotel they could find.  The Continental was far beyond their means, but it was 1926 and the franc was so low that Pop's head was completely turned by it, and he had lost all sense of values.

The first five minutes in that hotel room in Paris told us all we needed to know about the way it was going to be for the next two weeks, in the whirlwind tour of Switzerland that was just about to begin.

The room was crammed to the doors with so much useless baggage that you could hardly move around in it.  And Bonnemaman and John Paul let it be known that they had sunk into a state of more or less silent opposition and passive resistance to all of Pop's enthusiastic displays of optimism and pep.

When Pop told us about the Loire campaign and the largesse with which he had showered every village from Orleans to Nates, we realized from the mute pain in Bonnemaman's expression, as she turned an eloquent and pleading look to my father, just how the rest of the family felt about all this.  And, seeing what we were in for, we more or less instinctively took sides with the oppressed.  It was clear that every move, from now on, was going to be rich in public and private humiliation for the more or less delicate sensibilities of the rest of us, from Bonnemaman who was extremely touchy by nature, to John Paul and myself who were quick to see or imagine that others were laughing at Pop and felt ourselves included in the decision by implication.  

And thus we started out for the Swiss frontier, travelling in easy stages seven or eight hours a day in the train and stopping overnight.  There was the constant embarkation and debarkation from trains and taxis and hotel buses and each time every one of the sixteen pieces of luggage had to be accounted for, and the voice of my grandfather would be heard echoing along the walls of the greatest railway stations in Europe.  "Martha, where the dickens did you leave the pigskin bag."

On every piece of luggage, by way of identification, Pop had pasted a pink American two-cent stamp, a device which had aroused sharp and instantaneous criticism from myself and John Paul. "What are you trying to do, Pop," we asked with sarcasm.  "Are you going to send that stuff through the mail?"

I have a relative very much like Merton's grandfather--a person who spends more than she earns all the time.  Don't get me wrong--the person I'm talking about is wonderfully generous.  She has bailed me and my family out of a lot of tough financial scrapes.  Yet, she often finds herself in as many money difficulties as I do, and that's quite an accomplishment, since I'm a poet.  Not many people can claim to be as  pocket-poor as a poet.

I have learned over the years to be grateful for the blessings in my life, large and small.  It's the only way I'm able to stay sane most days.  I have to count every moment of grace that comes my way.  By doing this, I'm reminded that God hasn't forgotten me or my family.  Those graces come in many forms--a lick in the face from my puppy, a funny e-mail from a good friend, an unexpected text from my daughter that simply says "I love you," watching The Godfather any day or time.  Like I said, grace comes in many guises.

So, tonight, I'm celebrating a small grace/blessing.  Logging in to type this post, I happened to look at how many pageviews I've received over the past ten years.  I noticed that I just surpassed 500,000 views.  That averages to about 50,000 pageviews every year since 2010.  For some reason, that made me feel really good.  Like what I do on this little blog actually makes some kind of impact in people's lives.

When I wrote my first post ten years ago, I knew nothing about blogging.  It was simply a way to force myself to write something every day.  The idea of faceless readers tuning in every day to read my thoughts really drove me to my keyboard.  I felt responsible to that spectral audience.  And, like most living/breathing entities (yes, I believe blogs sort of have a life of their own), they grow and develop and evolve.  Try a little experiment.  Jump into the time machine.  Go back and read the first blog post I ever wrote.  February 19, 2010.

Here's what I noticed:

• I was a neurotic mess in 2010.  I'm still a neurotic mess.
• I confessed in the first sentence of that first blog post that I didn't know what the hell I was doing.  I still don't know what the hell I'm doing.
• I started out with the idea of writing about the lives of saints.  The original name of this blog was Feasts and Famines.  I changed it after a year to Saint Marty, and now I write mainly about myself.  I became more self-centered over time.  Go figure.
• I had big dreams back in 2010.  I still dream big.
• My daughter was ten when I started this blog.  My son was only two.  My daughter is now majoring in biology with her eyes on becoming a doctor.  My son is in sixth grade, about to become a middle schooler.

Things change.  I've tried to adjust to the changes of the past ten years.  This blog is the record of all the mistakes I've made over the years.  There have been plenty of them.  There will be plenty more in the years to come.

So, thank you all for a really great ten years, and 500,000 views.  I look forward to the next ten years.

Saint Marty is eternally grateful to all his faithful disciples.