The spring ground no longer was frozen.
We made out on a blanket we’d chosen.
Chiggers bit where elastic
Her Mom thought it fantastic:
“Well, at least you kept some of your clothes on!”
The deer is lost – out of place – in the civilized world of pavement and traffic beyond the woods. It runs past us at break-neck speed, capturing the attention of customers in the coffee shop.
Such primal fear invokes a hush. Everyone is standing at attention now, hoping against hope that the beautiful frightened animal will make it across the bridge over the divided highway to the woods on the other side.
As it reaches the overpass, a car approaches from the opposite direction, startling the deer. With high wire fences on each side of the overpass, it races toward the car and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it jumps 10 to 15 feet into the air, over the fence, plunging headlong to the berm of the highway 30 feet below. It gathers itself for a moment, wobbling up the hill to its right, and collapses on the entrance ramp like a lump of warm putty.
Fear is a deadly thing. The deer had lost its bearings in the man-made world where natural landmarks get displaced by bridges, and unnatural cliffs take the place of natural terrain.
The picture is etched in my mind. It wake me up early this morning thinking about mortality. The mortal vulnerability of a thing so beautiful and precious as a deer — the beauty and preciousness of all mortal life.
Death is the limit that binds together the viewers in the coffee shop with all other creatures. Fear is the acolyte of death – the unconscious or unconscious knowledge of our fragility, our ultimate dependence, our vulnerability to forces we cannot control, the reminder of our own ticking clocks, our time-bound nature within nature itself.
I’m sad for the deer. Sad for a civilized world that displaced it, confused it, frightened it to death. Sad over the sight of something so beautiful leaping so gracefully into the air, leaping into open space into the nothingness of death. Sad that something so lovely experiences such terror. Sad that it not know better; sad it did not take a breath and think before letting fear control its course.
Something in all of us at the coffee shop stood still for a moment at the Caribou — made us put down our coffee and touch this deeper place of vulnerability, watching this pantomime of our own inner lives, the too real to face reality of our struggles with anxiety, with fear, with death, with sudden and final extinction.
When the dear leaped from the overpass, Katie, my adult stepdaughter, put her face in her hands. Others of us could not take our eyes away, too stunned not to watch, staring in stunned silence in hope, at first, that the poor thing would get up and walk away from it all, that it hadn’t happened the way we’d seen it, plunged into the reality that the deer couldn’t just get up and walk away to safety.
Wendell Berry reminds us that we Americans are the descendants of the road builders — the placeless people who cut the forests, leveled the trees, and bulldozed their way to their ideas of what the world should be. says Wendell Berry in “The Native Hill.” Our European ancestors fled their familiar places to escape them. To build something better. Something freer perhaps, less restricted not only by law and custom but, more fundamentally, by the limits of creaturely life: time and space. They landed on the soil of the path walkers, the indigenous people whose foot paths wound their way harmlessly following the contours of the hills, rivers, streams and valleys.
Today is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, the day after the deer leaped into the air to its death, and the day Jesus walked the road-builders road in humility on a donkey. The liturgy reminds the worshipers that the grandest leaps — personal or collective —lead to tragic ends, but an essential goodness greater than ourselves surrounds every leap and every plunge.
It’s Ash Wednesday. I put on my ministerial robe 15 minutes before the traditional Service that marks the beginning of Lent with the imposition of ashes and go the drawer of the credenza.
“They’re missing! Where are the ashes?!”
Every year I store the ashes in the credenza in my office. I’ve forgotten that we’d moved the credenza from my office last fall. I rush downstairs to look for it. No credenza anywhere. Then…I remember. We sold it at the Annual Fall Festival!
“Somebody has our ashes!”
What to do with no ashes? Burn some newspapers? Smoke a cigar and use the ashes? No time.
I grab a pitcher and pour water into the baptism font.
We begin the Service with the story of the missing ashes. Smiles break out everywhere. Maybe even with signs of relief. “Instead of the imposition of ashes this year, we will go to the font for the waters of baptism, the waters of the renewal of life.”
We have some fun justifying the change in the Service, focusing on the that part of the Gospel text for the day – the words of Jesus himself. “And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen my others….But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret…”(Mt. 6:16-18).
People come to the font, one-by-one, for “the Imposition of … [Water]”. I dip my hand into the font. “Pat, (making the sign of the cross on her forehead), “Dust to dust; ashes to ashes. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. You are a child of God. Live in this peace.”
After the Service is over, one of the worshipers asks whether anyone has done the same for me. She reaches her hand into the font. “Gordon, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Remember…You are a child of God…..”
I’ll never forget it. Neither will they. And somewhere in this world a stranger has a credenza with a sack full of ashes. Whoever you are, feel free to keep them. They’re all yours.
Click The End of Exile to read the story of Ed, the beloved Jewish atheist communist in the assisted living facility. The story is memorable, especially for those losing their memories.
“When life gives you lemons… make something else. Tell us about a time you used an object or resolved a tricky situation in an unorthodox way.” – Not Lemonade
The invitation brought to mind an altogether different memory. It’s unorthodox, but not what the Daily Post had in mind.
The memory is “Lemonade-on-the-Lawn” at Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. During the summer months worshipers gathered on the church lawn at the corner of Observatory and Michigan for conversation over lemonade.
Visitors frequently misunderstood the pulpit announcements to be an invitation to eliminate on the lawn. They were relieved to learn about the lemonade.
We were young with no money to show,
But had patience, we want you to know:
We bought Mexican take-out,
And before we would make-out,
We looked good in the candlelight glow.
In her old age – I know we don’t use that term anymore but she was old no matter whether you called her a “senior citizen” or the more current “older adult” – my 88 year-old Grandmother came to live with us. “Us” was my father, mother, two brothers and I, the five (5) of us and Grandma in a small three (3) bedroom home in Broomall, Pennsylvania.
Grandma also shuffled back and forth between two other places – my rich Uncle Harold’s palatial home on Long Island Sound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Harold’s summer cottage in Rockport, Massachusetts, where Grandma and Pop (Grandpa’s children called him “Pop”) spent their summers.
Letitia Sophia Campbell Stewart (“Sophie”) felt welcome in our little home and would settle in during her stays with us. Everything would be fine for a month or two. She sort of seemed to like my mother, although no woman would be quite good enough for her Kenneth or her Harold, and both daughters-in-law knew it.
My mother was more than gracious, much more attentive to her needs than Rene, and they got along just fine. But there were times when something like a boulder would come crashing through the picture window into our living room, hit Grandma in the head, and turn her into a whining old goat. She became self-absorbed, self-pitying, annoying and quite unlovely.
Grandma was attached at the hip to Harold, 15 years older than my father. She hated the separation. Harold was the family hero, the nationally recognized Washington insider, the wealthy provider. Aloof and cold as ice but kind…if that makes any sense. Which meant he didn’t pay attention to his mother when she was at our house. Out of sight, out of mind.
Grandma became morose. “Was there a letter from Harold?” “No, Mom. I’m sorry. No mail today.”
“Harold never writes. He hasn’t called. Harold doesn’t love me. I’m just a burden. Why doesn’t God just take me. I’m of no use to anybody anymore.”
One day my mother couldn’t take it anymore. “Ken,” she said, “we have to do something or she has to go to Harold’s.”
Dad suggested taking Grandma to the doctor. She liked the doctor in Broomall.
“Sophie, what’s going on?” asked the doctor, who’d already been briefed on the boulder. Grandma repeated the script. She was a burden to everyone. Pop was gone. She was alone. “I don’t know why God doesn’t just take me!”
“Well, that’s not a problem. WE can take care of that,” said the doctor. “Really?” asked Grandma. “You bet. We can take care of that right now. I have gun out back. We can just go out back and end your misery right now.”
“O, doctor, you wouldn’t do that!!!” said Grandma.
Grandma came home as though the boulder had never hit her. The whole world had been lifted from her shoulders. She flashed her beautiful smile again and told us how much she loved us. But she continued to leave her leave her mark in the living wherever she sat, leaving my mother to ask why God hadn’t taken either Grandma or her, and I asking when I could get my bedroom back.
When I was 13 my parents put me on a flight from Philadelphia to Boston. My paternal grandmother, recovering from a near fatal heart attack, needed a live-in caregiver at the summer cottage in Rockport, Massachusetts. My grandfather had died three years earlier.
When we learned of her need, there was an extended family discussion. The doctor said she needed someone with her for the next month.
Who would stay with Grandma? Who could go stay for a month?
Motif #1, Rockport Harbor
Grandma insisted on going to Rockport when released from the hospital, and she did, all by herself, though she remained bed-ridden on doctor’s orders except for necessary short trips to the facility and the kitchen.
Shall we say Grandma was…just a tad stubborn, and her stubborn independence was a worry for the whole family. She wasn’t safe and shouldn’t be alone.
My cousin Gina would have been the most likely candidate, but Gina had married a MacDonald. Grandma – of the Campbell clan, the mortal enemy of the MacDonalds – had refused to bless Gina’s marriage to Norman, and would have nothing to do with either of them. Did I mention she was stubborn?
Partly by process of elimination and partly by reason of her grandson seizing the chance to live up the road from Old Garden Beach and the Headlands in my favorite place in the world, I boarded the plane and stayed the month in Rockport.
I took the train from Logan Airport to Rockport, suitcase in hand, walked the mile from the train station up Atlantic Avenue beside Rockport Harbor and turned left onto Harraden Avenue. It didn’t occur to me that it was odd for a 13 year-old to be on his own on his way to an onerous responsibility. Old Garden Beach, the Headlands, and nightly trips to Bearskin Neck and Tuck’s for ice cream were on my mind more than Grandma.
Grandma Stewart was in bed when I opened the picket fence gate and walked in the cottage’s unlocked door. We greeted each other with outspread arms, Grandma’s eyes big as saucers, flowing with tears.
“We’ll be safe,” she says. “I have a gun.” She points under the bed.
I pull out a revolutionary war rifle weighing about 10 pounds. There’s no ammunition. Just an old revolutionary war musket, like the ones the authors of the 2nd Amendment had in mind.
Revolutionary War rifle – requires only 13 steps to fire.
“Grandma,” I say, “I don’t see any bullets. Is it loaded?”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “It’s heavy. We’ll just hit ‘em with it!”
The rifle stayed under the bed long after my month playing long-distance nursemaid and body guard to Grandma from down at the beach during the day and from candy and ice cream shops on Bearskin Neck at night. I was the family hero.
Poor Grandma! Poor America! Wouldn’t the founding fathers be proud!
Verse — From Mid-West Farms
…In Sidney, Illinois, the Elevator
waits for grain. The corn, the beans,
arrive in wagons or in trucks the farmers
drive. The loaded truck is weighed.
…The boy was only nine when first he steered the Farmall tractor with the corn
in wagons from grand-daddy’s farm
to here. Now twenty-five tons fill
his semi-truck. The probe descends
to measure moisture in the beans–
13 point 3 percent, a little wet,
but very close.
…The operators flip the switch on side
of truck, the grain descends through grates, the augers twist, the fans begin
to dry soybeans until the days the trains
arrive. In 20 seconds each train car is filled.
…The empty truck is weighed, the receipt
given to the driver. Shift, accelerate, and steer…go get another load. From 6 a.m.
to 9 p.m., the harvest days are long,
but it is happy work.
Published with apologies to Steve for insertion of … in place of indentation.
Kay Stewart
by Kay Stewart
After 16 years of marriage you learn many lessons. But the ones on vacation are especially worth noting.
My husband and I have been given the opportunity of fulfilling a preaching assignment for a lovely little chapel named St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel located in the abandoned mining town of Southern Cross, Montana. The chapel is perched on the edge of a beautiful mountainside with a gorgeous panoramic view of Georgetown Lake, the largest lake in the area. Breathtaking beauty. A vacation of our dreams. One for the bucket list. All he has to do is provide four Sundays of sermons and they provide us with a free cabin on the meadow down in the valley below, nestled between two mountain ranges. In the morning we hear melodies of little chirping birds, and every evening soft gentle breezes waft across our side porch as we watch sunset after sunset throw a veritable light-show of color as it criss-crosses the valley below. All we have to put up with is a modern-day schizophrenic auditory milieu–pristine quiet periodically interrupted by the highway noises from cars, trucks and RV’s. We have every reason to be grateful, and we are.
After two weeks of our four week almost-ideal vacation here in Montana, we decided the vacation could be expanded, enhanced–an improvement on perfection. “What we need is an adventure,” I said. This dynamic is better known as “the grass is always greener on the other side”. My husband didn’t really need an adventure, he was liking his Montana vacation just fine. But I was getting restless. I am seven years younger and think it is due to this age difference that I am being deprived of adventures to which I am entitled. It didn’t take long to convince him to break camp (cabin) in search of something else. I used the regret-reduction argument. It works every time. “When we get home, won’t we wish we had done more exploring of this part of the country?” Avoiding future regret is my argument of choice–it burns like a slow wick, providing a living breathing phantom of anxiety forecast into the future when you won’t be able to do anything about it. So within 24 hours we dismantled our “ideal” vacation in search of a relocation of our vacation spot. We chose a trip to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
We are experienced travelers and have always felt comfortable using Trip Advisor to book a motel reservation. With the correct box checked filtering “pet friendly” venues, we booked a motel for $179.00 a night plus fees and taxes. It seemed a bit high, but Jackson, Wyoming is a high ticket vacation destination. After all, that’s why we were going there. Our internet provider doesn’t have enough cell phone towers in the hills of Montana, so my husband did not get an immediate confirmation number and we got worried. Avoiding any problems, we called the motel to verify only to find out they were not pet friendly after all and we could not stay there if we had a dog. They directed us to another motel close to them that was assuredly pet friendly and we immediately called to book with them for two nights, sight unseen. They articulated right off that under no condition would we be allowed to leave our dog unattended in the motel room. “Fair enough” we thought, we can leave Barclay in the car, for short breaks, going to restaurants, leaving the windows open, we do it all the time when the weather is cool enough. Barclay loves to “go for a ride in the car”; he simply takes naps in the front seat where the Alpha Dog sits.
Five hours of driving later, we rolled into Jackson. We were thinking five hours wasn’t such a bad drive, since it was much less than the 19 hours it took us to drive to Montana from Minneapolis, but we were wrong. Five hours is a long day of driving any time you do it. Especially under a hot 95 degree sun. It’s July. The sun does that in Wyoming in July. This leads into another complication. It’s about our dear little dog. Barclay is a wonderful 14 pound, 2-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. His Cavalier breeding makes him adorable and affectionate, but Barclay has a psychological disorder—he is a “shadow chaser”. I prefer to call it by its more obvious name–Barclay is a “light chaser”. The disorder is not rare, it causes obsessive compulsive behavior in a dog, drawing him, like a magnet, to wherever and whenever there is a difference between light and its accompanying shadow. Barclay is a serious light chaser and intensely loves all light. He actually has no choice in the matter; it’s a compulsory lifestyle for him. When light happens, it immediately activates Barclay. He positions himself as close to the light as possible. Then he, well, just stares at it, or paws it, or licks it. When the light changes, as light often does, Barclay changes too — he moves on to his next favorite piece of it. He never goes looking for different light, better light. He is totally satisfied with the light that happens in his midst. Barclay plays with light like a young child plays with an imaginary friend, but one he will not outgrow. But, after five hours of driving with light careening off of everything metal or electronic, we are pretty much “lights out”.
We arrive at our destination in Jackson worn out and find that our $200 a night motel room would rent for about $80 in any other city but Jackson. The quality is just not there. The room is pitch dark when the heavy musty-smelling curtains are drawn which must occur at all times unless you want the 100’s of nearby tourists to look inside your motel room. But for a family with a light obsession, dark is better for us. As we listen to the roar from the room’s air conditioning unit, which can barely keep up with the afternoon heat, we decide there is nothing else we’d like to do than take a nap.
We read in our motel room the travel brochure provided us explaining Grand Teton National Park’s rules concerning pets. They must be on a leash at all times—we are used to that. But we read further to find that dogs are not allowed at all on any of the park’s trails or public attraction areas. That’s just great.
This being a spontaneous vacation get-away from our primary vacation, we had not realized we were choosing to spend it at Grand Teton National Park on the lead-up to the 4th of July holiday weekend. The city of Jackson gets 3-4 million tourists a year. We were spending the day driving around in our air conditioned car with our beloved dog in bumper to bumper traffic with a great portion of those 3-4 million tourists.
As the vacation wore on, we became grouchier and grouchier. The tourist attractions became mostly distractions because of the tourists. And although The Grand Tetons were magnificent, “when you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen ’em all”. We couldn’t hike the trails. Bumper to bumper traffic in 95 degree weather. We wanted to go home.
We chose to travel home through Yellowstone National Park. It made us sad watching the devastation to the forests from the 1988 forest fires. The forest was indeed “coming back”, but it just wasn’t there yet. We tried to stop and see “Old Faithful”, but gave up when we couldn’t find a parking spot. We couldn’t wait to get home so we kept driving.
In 72 hours, we drove 750 miles, spent $700, slept in a dungeon for two nights, and drove home through countless forested areas with dead trees and no parking spaces. Once back in our original vacation location, we discovered something uniquely wonderful. We saw the light of what had been in our midst the whole time–the natural beauty, rolling hills, fresh breezes on our side porch and chirping birds heard even as the highway sang its tune. This lesson learned is one we will keep for years to come.
Views from the Edge 