Wisteria around post
How does the tendril sense
a post is near? How does
it know to wrap clockwise?
A plant knows more than we
and we can even see!
We close our eyes, we’re lost–
we’ll run into the post…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 1015
Often only your tail twitched in sleep.
Now you move not at all.
When you were spry,
you batted toys (and mice)
with a blur of paws.
When snuggled into a lap,
only the felt vibration
indicated life.
Digging your grave
let me mix muscles
with tears– energy
put to some use.
Rest well, my friend.
I knew you were my friend
even when you ignored me.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 2015
The year was 1965,
and Mrs. J was 65,
and she had never learned to drive.
It was so very long ago,
but I would drive her to and fro
through the streets of Chicago.
To change lanes left, I’d turn my head,
but she would yell, “Look straight ahead!”
“When you do that I am afraid!”
She started dating a new man;
he said, “I just don’t understand,
learn to drive–I know you can.”
She took lessons, a good sport,
and told me then just what she thought:
“Now I know of that blind spot!”
‘Mortality’ knows nothing of ‘morality’.
The words are separated by one letter, but they are foreign to each other. Mortality always trumps morality. The young die before the older without explanation or moral reasoning.
Tonight 92 year-old Bob Cuthill will participate in the celebration of his younger 72 year-old friend Phil Brown. Bob and Phil became friends professional colleagues years ago. Over the years Bob had been to Phil the wise older mentor, confidant, and friend.
Phil, 20 years Bob’s younger, was not supposed to die. He was the picture of health until two months before they diagnosed a rare, hidden Lymphoma, performed emergency surgery, and watched his life ebb away organ by organ in the post-surgery ICU. If life were ordered by moral reasoning, Phil was not supposed to die before Bob.
Tonight I’m thinking of Bob and Phil’s dear wife, Faith, gathered with Phil’s local friends at the White Bear United Methodist Church for pizza, vanilla ice cream (Phil’s favorite flavor), and story-telling back in Minnesota.
The older survivors of the deceased often ask Why? Why him? Why her? Why not I? The answers never come. What comes instead to the fortunate is a great thanksgiving for the life that has passed and the life one has for yet awhile before others gather for pizza and ice cream.
– Gordon C. Stewart, friend and classmate of Phil Brown (1942-2015), July 6, 2015.
“Would you like to see Walter?” asked the funeral director to the 19 year-old college student who’d just arrived at the funeral home.
“Walter who?”
“Walter Fraser,” said Mr. Gibson, who only an hour before had recruited the 19 year-old to ask whether he owned a dark suit, and could he serve in a pinch as the greeter for the visitation the night before funeral. The staff person who normally welcomed people at the front door had called in sick at the last moment. Because the Gibsons, Stewarts, and Frasers were friends and members of the same church, Mr. Gibson turned in desperation to the inexperienced 19 year-old as the greeter’s substitute.
So far as I had known before arriving at the funeral home, Walter wasn’t dead. Mr. Fraser was a highly respected member of the community, and the father of my friend ‘Fuzzy’ Fraser, the star offensive guard on the Marple-Newtown High School football team. Last I knew, Mr. Fraser was as healthy as my father and Mr. Gibson. Mr. Fraser wasn’t supposed to die.
Suddenly “Mr. Fraser” – a man of great dignity and stature – was “Walter”.
“Would you like to see Walter?”
Stunned by Mr. Fraser’s death, I said, “No thanks,” before realizing my refusal was a kind of insult to Mr. Gibson’s work and skill. After the Masons had finished their private ritual of white gloves and strange prayers pretending that Walter was not really dead, Mr. Gibson led me into the viewing room where the guests would see Walter in his open casket.
My family wasn’t into open caskets. When you die you’re dead; you’re gone. A painted corpse, though it may console some of the survivors — “Doesn’t he look good!” they say, or “He looks so peaceful” or “Didn’t they do a nice job” — serves, as Jessica Mitford and other critics of American funeral practices have said, as a denial of death.
Seeing the previously presumed-to-be-alive Mr. Fraser laid out in a casket as ‘Walter’ came as a shock to the senses that underlined the responsibility to offer a friendly greeting at the door, all dressed up, like Walter, in a dark blue suit.
“Would you like to see Walter?”
“Walter who?” remained the question after I left the Gibson Funeral Home. Who was Walter? Was he Mr. Fraser? Or just Walter, all dressed up, like the rest of us, with no place to go, as naked as the day he was born? I’d like to see him again to ask what he can tell me that I don’t yet know.
— Gordon C. Stewart, GeorgetownLake, MT, July 8, 2015
“He was not supposed to die!”
Said Faith and Joanie when
Phil and Mac died unexpectedly
While still vigorous and young.
Our years are three score years
and ten, and if by some reason
they be fourscore years, yet are
their days labor and sorrow,
said the old sage on bended
knee, lamenting the inscrutable
puzzle of life and death beyond
the ordering of moral reason.
But I have days to live and time
enough for joy as well as toil,
for beauty as well as sorrow
before I’m not supposed to die.
Gordon C. Stewart, Georgetown Lake, MT, July 7, 2015.
Death comes
in many shapes
and sizes but
never suits us
though morticious
cosmeticians
paint the gray of
mannequin faces
to smile, and fold
life-like hands
on chests that
do not breathe
The body is
to Life what
ashes are to fire
and spirit to dust
a painted figure
dressed in suit
and tie for work
that is no more
Blessed are they
who die in the Lord,
for their works
do follow them.
– Gordon C. Stewart, Georgetown Lake, MT, July 7, 2015
At the age of three, I wanted to be the Sawgus Man.
Driving up the steep, winding road to Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park, the scent of fresh cut pine trees reaches my nostrils. Within a nanosecond I’m no longer in Wyoming, and I’m not almost 73. I’m a three-year-old back in South Paris, Maine, shoveling sawdust into the coal bin of my grandparents’ big house on Main Street.
During World War II there was no coal for heating in Maine. Sawdust from the pine trees took its place. When the Sawdust Man delivered the sawdust in his big dump truck, I went out with a small shovel to “help” him fill the coal bin with the sawdust. I loved the smell and the Sawdust Man was my hero.
Seventy years later, the aroma of sawdust transports me back to the times with Sawgus Man. Nothing then or now is as sweet as the scent of a fallen pine tree. Scents and memories are as intimately connected as time and eternity.
– Gordon C. Stewart, Jackson, Wyoming, July 2, 2015.
Lillian Weaver’s
College Class
Her eyes would glint below grey hair,
she’d lift the book so we could see
the Fine Art illustration. Her
gold wedding ring was a ruby,
even though her spouse ran a bank.
“A diamond seems so cold,” she’d say.
The Matisse to her point she’d link:
her Bible lesson for Sunday.
We students would set our alarms,
and even though we’d stayed out late
the night before, her wit, her charms
with words, her humor, made us wait
impatiently for Sunday School.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 6, 2015
Steve (Shoemaker) and Alexander Sharp, ordained clergy advocates for the medical use of marijuana, wrote a guest commentary published by the News-Gazette to set the record straight on medical marijuana. Click Weeding Out Editorial Inaccuracies to read their critique of editorial’s mischaracterizations of the Journal of the American Medical Association study of the medical use of cannabis.
Views from the Edge 