My Chores

sam was a man

grinned his grin

done his chores

laid him down.

Sleep well

(e.e.cummings)

On dull Ohio mornings I throw on an old jacket and pull on old snow boots my neighbor gave me after her husband died and strike out into the cold to feed the animals. Birds feast from a feeder we’ve had for nearly 20 years; squirrels wrest kernels of field corn from cobs impaled on spikes driven through 2x4s by my father not long before he died, also nearly 20 years ago. Feeding the animals is my winter chore.

As I trudge though the snow and cold I feel the presence of generations of German-heritage farmers looking over my shoulders. My “Myers” family crossed the Atlantic in the 1750s, and in the following decades moved state-by-state from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Illinois and finally to Iowa in the 1890s. I feel those farmers walking with me. They arose hours before dawn, set fires in fireplace, furnace, or stove, put on thick layers of warmth, and headed into the dark to “do chores.” They fed, watered, checked on and tended to, and cleaned up after cattle, hogs, horses, chickens, and more. In the evening they repeated the ritual.

I sometimes went with my grandfather, father, and uncles to do chores, first just accompanying them, then later “helping” them. But I feel back beyond those I’ve followed to their barns - I feel all the way back to Christian Moyer/Meyer/Myers of York County, Pennsylvania. I convince myself that I know how he felt on bitter cold mornings, out doing chores.

But I don’t really know how any of them felt because our lives - mine, my families’, the animals’ - do not depend upon my feeding song birds and squirrels and white tail deer (in cleanup position). If I stopped doing my chores, who besides my wife would notice? It would be hard to prove that a jay died because I had stopped filling my little feeder, and who would care? He was ultimately on his own...wild. And I don’t have to clean up after any of them, which I like because I scooped a lot of manure out of my dad’s hog barn when I was young. My chores are optional; my German-American forebears did theirs to survive.

My grandparents’ Myers had six children; two became full-fledged farmers. Those six children produced 16 grandchildren, of whom two ended up farming for their livings. I am not aware that any of their great grandchildren see farming as their future. It’s a story often told in rural Iowa.

So I doubt many beyond my generation will feel what I feel when I feed the animals living in the woods behind our suburban home. If not, what will be lost? Some say nothing, but they would be wrong. Just going out in the cold for a ritualistic feeding of wild animals testifies to the interdependence of all living things, places me out in the larger world in which I live, and judges humankind’s careless excess and waste. I feed birds and squirrels so I won’t forget that we all exist together.

More personally, when I feel generations of ancestors fighting their way through snowy air to feed their livestock and their living, I know some part of them still resides in me. My remembering the long march of Myers men places me in a human lineage to whom life yielded no easy successes. I become wary of the comforts I enjoy. I anticipate tomorrow’s chores in the seriousness with which I take life and responsibility; in my attention to signs of approaching danger or threat; in my fascination with and concurrent suspicion about the ever new world we are so busy trying to create.

As long as I can think, tomorrow will always be on my mind because I feel those farmers’ early morning walks to the barn to care for their animals. They whisper to me that, each morning, I must roll out of bed to share seed and grain with our animals, and so do my part to help the world beyond my walls survive, and myself in it. I value their example.

But there are mornings I wish I’d never heard them.

Paying Attention

For as long as I can remember I have known John James Audubon’s painting of four pileated woodpeckers. A 32” tall reproduction by R. R. Donnelley and Sons of Chicago, where my grandfather worked as a printer, hung in my parents’ home until my mother gave it to us. Now it hangs in our family room, still in a plain wooden frame that bears the marks of a long-forgotten ceiling leak.

The painting communicates life and death. An adult female and an adult male perch on a dead tree trunk. The female holds a large caterpillar in her long bill. Two juvenile males, perched on a horizontal branch growing from the trunk, face and look to be calling to each other. The birds’ blacks and whites topped off by bright red crests convey bold power. A grape vine twines around the branch; from that vine hang narrow bunches of purple fruit, clustered in the center of the painting, just above the heads of the younger birds. The tree speaks of death; the birds speak of life; the caterpillar speaks of life consumed by life; the grapes and the young birds speak of generations to come. The scene’s interplay of life, death, and fecundity is dynamic and vital.

The Donnelley print holds special meaning for me, because it helps me remember my maternal grandfather, James Bohaty. I do not know if he himself worked on this particular print, but I am confident that if he did it is perfect. I recall grandpa’s exacting person and standards when I see “Pileated Woodpeckers.” Once I saw the original Audubon in a natural history museum; it meant no more to me than this reproduction, one of many avenues by which his life has come to mine.

Though I have been aware of “Pileated Woodpeckers” all my life, I have not always paid conscious attention to it. Like most things that hang around our lives, I regarded it more as background to real living than as living itself. But it was always watching me and my families grow and change, even if we did not know it.

One afternoon I was vaguely staring out our kitchen window when a flash of black and white and red caught my eye. It was near a stump that pokes out of the ground under an evergreen tree. I immediately knew the species of bird, though I had never before seen a living one.

Our backyard’s pileated woodpecker foraged there for no more than 30 seconds, and then, as quickly as it had appeared, it disappeared into the woods beyond. Large as it was, the woods swallowed it completely. Active as it is, I have never seen it again, but I know it lives nearby.

As soon as it flew away I walked into our family room and studied our Audubon reproduction with renewed interest. Then I checked out Peterson’s Bird Guide – yes, a pileated woodpecker really can be a foot and a half long. I had finally seen the living bird. I was grateful for the six-and-a-half decades that had prepared me to know it when I saw it. I may not have recognized it “in the feathers” had I not been passively aware of its picture for a lifetime.

Which is more real: the reproduction of the painting I have always lived with, or the actual bird I saw for a half a minute?  I have learned that awareness over a long term is just as real as attention given to the present moment.

Two Winter Tales

Two Winter Tales

“Cold Pew”

Predestined, we are so comfortable with
where we are going in this life and the next
that we hardly notice how our padded pews
have frozen our privates.

                          

“Snow Journey”

January's snow caterpillar shimmers toward sky,
bearing no idea what will become of him next.

“...it will decide EVERYTHING” (re: my previous post)

When I was in school everybody was reading (or at least carrying around a copy of) Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. I didn’t read it (nor did I carry it around to make it look as if I might be). I am not bragging about this; it is one of many wonderful things I missed while getting “my education.”

Recently The Sun magazine ran an excerpt from Siddhartha on its “Dog-eared Page” page. That’s where the editor prints “selections...from works that have deepened and broadened our understanding of the human condition.” It seemed time to read a small portion of something I’d missed, and what I read made me miss it.

Siddhartha says to his friend and fellow truth-seeker Govinda:

“Love, for me, Govinda, is clearly the main thing. Let seeing through the world, explaining it, looking down on it, be the business of great thinkers. The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself - being able to regard it and myself and all things with love, admiration, and reverence.”

I wonder if my life and outlook and “in-look” would have been different had I read and incorporated those few words forty or fifty years ago. Maybe they would not have struck me then as they strike me now, because idealism was everywhere when I was young. And they are idealistic words, are they not? ...though I wonder what viable alternative there is to them if we expect to live with ourselves and with one another in this world.

Merry Christmas...or else

There are those among us who believe that, at this time of year, everyone should say and/or be willing to hear, “Merry Christmas.” It’s as if there’s something wrong in not celebrating this distinctly Christian holiday, even you happen to be Jewish, or Moslem, or Hindu, or something else, or “none of the above.”

In the hands of some, “Merry Christmas” is not just a greeting, but a challenge, even a threat. “What, you don’t celebrate Christmas? Well, shame on you. You must not be a real American.”

Retailers who instruct their employees to greet customers with “Happy Holidays” or the like are absolutely doing the right thing. If I were greeted at checkout in the local grocery store with “Happy Hanukah” I’d probably think it was a joke, unless I were terribly offended. Public schools that do not allow Christian celebrations of the holidays are right as well; frankly, I don’t want my tax dollars being used to promote my religious tradition by someone who may understand it in a way that I believe is wrong.

So, if you meet me on the street and we are strangers and you want to share some sense of the joy of the season with me, just wish me “Happy Holidays.” I will know you wish the best for me, however I take “the best” to be, and that will be enough. I trust Jesus would approve your respect for me as a fellow human being, and I will strive to show the same to you.

Several years ago we received a Christmas card that carried a poem by Pedro Arrupe, SJ. It was produced by the Sisters of Joseph of Baden, Pennsylvania. I offer it to you, in the  broadest, most inclusive sense of what Christmas means.

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, that is,
than falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.

It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in Love,
Stay in Love,
and it will decide
EVERYTHING.

Happy Holidays to you, my gentle readers.

A Wonder of Artists

Our Cleveland Singers’ Club sponsors an annual competition for male college and beyond student singers...male classical student singers. Aspiring rock, country, hip hop, jazz, and folk singers need not apply, or so it seems.

These young men dream of careers in opera, oratorio, art song, early music, and such arcane musical forms as are hardly noticed by the media and merit only the barest mention at the Grammy’s. For years they work and study and practice and then practice some more. If they succeed they may earn a comfortable living. Only the most wildly successful make it big and strike it rich. They know that the odds are against them, that most of American society doesn’t care, and that few of their contemporaries have any idea at all about what they are pouring their souls into.

I heard two of our contestants sing last Sunday afternoon. They sweated out their few minutes before four judges and a handful of an audience, but were worked very hard to make it look easy. One of them was an African-American in his 40’s - twice as old as many of the others - who’d apparently just started his studies. I’d love to know what drove him to want to learn pieces by Handel and Ravel at this time in his life. Perhaps he walked away with a $1,500 prize; but whether he won anything yesterday or not, he also received the invaluable experience of having been heard and critiqued. It’s something these artists do countless times on their way to any sort of success at all. Their art is exacting and its standards are astronomical...yet still, few notice.

Why do they do it? The question is close me because one of our daughters is perfecting her craft in the world of classical music. It was one thing when she worked for and earned a bachelor’s in music education, but when she wanted to go on and get a master’s in vocal performance I really wondered about her sanity, even though I had no doubts about her gifts. She earned that degree, and is indeed doing what she loves to do...and working retail to help pay the bills. It’s the way of classical singers. Why do they do it?

Let me guess from the outside listening in: it’s because they have fallen in love. Someone, somehow got them to listen to - maybe even put before them - a piece of music and they fell in love with a rare beauty. The object of their love is the power, the intricacy, the diversity, and the passion of the most extended and complex of Western music’s expressions.

They might have had other infatuations on their way to finding their true love, and they might still eye and enjoy and even be good at other forms of music. But the reason they do what they do is that have given their hearts to that enormous body of classical music that has moved generations of listeners,and even today continues to inspire and challenge and bring joy to people around the world.

I applaud all young men and women who are pursuing careers in art forms that continue to celebrate and to shape our understanding of human nature and history, of how and why we are here and for what. They are among our greatest hopes for our future. They deserve our notice, our encouragement, our gratitude...and a decent living.

Home to Ghosts and Memories

We spent two nights in northern Wales last summer, staying at Galedffrwd Mill B&B near Bethesda. Our host told us about a long-abandoned graveyard near the crumbling foundation of a stone church, and we went to find it toward dusk of a gloomy day. The next morning we returned to take a few pictures, which in no way capture the eerie aura of the previous night's visit.

Bethesda is part of a huge slate quarrying area of Wales. Whole sides of mountains remain ripped and shredded as a result of once-thriving, now lost, industry.

Most of the markers in this cemetery appeared to us to be made of slate. They surely mark the resting places of tough quarrymen and their equally tough families. They seemed to be in as good a shape as they day they were cut and inscribed...lasting monuments to the people whose labor blasted and cut them from earth's grip.




If you want to remember me, make me a grave marker of slate, not granite. In the meantime, if you want to wonderful place to stay in a fascinating corner of the British Isles, book a room at Galedffrwd Mill B&B.

Happy Halloween!