True thoughts for false spring

Imagine I’m drinking this–because I am. February 2024.

American football has ended its seeming stranglehold on the domestic sports scene. A surprisingly close game last night between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs kept me up to the end. That’s pretty unusual. I quit watching football decades ago. My interest diminished with the demise of an old version of the Seattle Seahawks, the one with Jim Zorn and Steve Largent. Or perhaps it diminished with my renewed interest in baseball. Whatever.

For a baseball fan, football feels about as welcome as your ex showing up at your next wedding. Baseball has just introduced itself at the beginning of April when the National Football League holds it’s draft. When the season gets going and the annual draft of new baseball talent occurs in early June, the NFL starts rattling its sabers about pre-camp workouts. Baseball gets some clarity as good teams rise to the top, bad teams falter, and the 2024 trade deadline approaches–and the NFL opens its training camps! All of these boorish events pale to this: baseball heads into its final month to determine the postseason, a five-week celebration of near-daily baseball games ending in the World Championship, and the NFL opens its season. In a pragmatic but depressing capitulation to reality, MLB mostly avoids holding postseason games on Sundays when most NFL games occur.

(And why do we call it football? Players’ feet only intentionally touch the ball to punt the ball away or kick the ball through the goalposts. This likely reflects my ignorance, but go with me here: players hand off, run, pass, and catch the ball. Now that European née global sport has appropriately called itself football!)

Ah, but for a few glorious weeks baseball reigns supreme. Football retires from the stage and lets the sport-formerly-known-as-America’s-sport, baseball, back into into the leading role it once occupied. Collegiate basketball intrudes, true, during March Madness, but it displays the genteel manners one would expect from amateur athletics. Baseball spring training games occur in the afternoon; NCAA games occur primarily in the evening. It crowns a champion during the first week of the baseball season, turning in that assignment a week late just as college students will, and bows itself from the stage. And the professionals in the NBA? Who cares? Their interminable playoff schedule will just be starting in mid-April, a two-month slog that ends in the middle of June.

Baseball and football play nice once each year. Football crowns a champ just prior to the start of baseball’s spring training. For six weeks all baseball fans think one of two things:

My team could win the World Series this year!
My team might not be as bad as it looks!

Hope springs, regardless. Thank you, Super Bowl; thank you, Spring.

I know more cold weather remains a very real possibility. By the weekend we will see temperatures at or below freezing. Yet the ephemeral forecasts from various sources promise me I’ll see more early spring temps than I will not, and that’s something. Very soon the star magnolia will bloom, daring the other trees to follow suit. Judging by last year, we’re running a bit late. Here’s a photo from February 10th last year:

Perhaps you can tell from the photo that the star magnolia (all magnolias?) blossoms prior to putting out leaves. Our purple magnolia does this too. Those little buds appear in the fall, winter like a butterfly’s chrysalis, and then get a bit fuzzier and bigger as their imminent bursting approaches. Most pop out together, but some appear late. March sees only a few:

Like the Star of Bethlehem in Christian scripture, the star magnolia signals the rebirth of our plant world around the small plot of land we manage.

Tomorrow goes by Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday and some German name which I can’t pronounce or spell and which means Doughnut Day. All of them imply, “hey, we need to party and indulge, because tomorrow begins Lent.” Unfortunately (kind of) Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day. We’ve decided our party tomorrow will stand in for Valentine’s Day. While we nibble on a few berries, nuts, maybe a piece or two of cheese, I will prepare calas or rice beignets using this recipe. I’m looking forward to it. I love involved, authentic-in-spirit recipes, and this Anson Mills recipe promises all of that. I’ve not purchased their rice or pastry flour; we’ll hope the expensive Carolina rice I did purchase will suffice. Dinner, which we’ll start working on after our late morning calas in at least a desultory way, will be Anson Mills’ Roasted Stuffed Quail for Two with Madeira Sauce. We did not spring for the mail-order quail when we first planned this as a New Year’s Eve meal. Our local grocer carried them. Nor do we have madeira, let alone a 5-year one, and I’m not buying one for 3 tablespoons of recipe use! Some marsala and sherry will suffice. We’ll set some simply prepared asparagus next to the quail and toast our near-30-year relationship.

As lovely as that may (or may not) sound, it’s Lent which occupies my mind today and for the past few. One needs to prepare for Lent. Arriving to Ash Wednesday, opening one’s bleary, I-partied-too-much eyes, and arbitrarily picking something to give up for Lent represents a knee-jerk response to the liturgical meaning of Lent which undercuts it. Sure, you can give up caffeine or alcohol or that favorite candy or whatever because, “that’s what I always do”–and Lent will mean about as much as the thought you put into it. One’s spiritual life basically runs on cruise control (at whatever speed you’ve set) if this represents your approach.

Alternatively, a person in touch with one’s relationship to the Presence which animated this Universe–which created life (a scientifically provable proposition which I will address in a future post), which appears to have imbued all of us with a portion of Its spirit, and which in a way not describable to me, appears to care about us–seeks with initiative and purpose to pledge oneself to one or more practices during Lent, then that person approaches the mystery of Easter with (hopefully) a clearer insight to understanding that mystery. If nothing else, they approach in a better ‘spiritual plane’ which even the non-religious believe to be a good thing.

I have for more than a decade attempted to set one practice each for the physical, the mental, and the spiritual/emotional. (I know, I know. Let’s debate the conflation of “spiritual/emotional” some other time.) This year my practices do not need to be hidden, as they sometimes do to be authentic. I plan to…

Go to the gym thrice weekly as we originally intentioned a year ago. We’ve attempted to restart the gym practice since a falling off in the holidays to limited success. I also have a more private concern here which isn’t so much a practice as a focus on what I’m already doing.
I’m going to begin reading the Bible with an emphasis on two things: the Pentateuch (the first five books) and the four gospels. I’m not sure of the juxtaposition. About seven to ten years ago I used a guide to a first-time reading of the Bible in which one read Genesis, Mark, a few other books–it gave a representation of the Bible overall, including a book from the prophets, a couple apostolic books, etc. I liked it, but I’m ready for a bit more.
Emotionally/spiritually? I’m still not sure on this one. I think my fledging effort to be more social will come into play. Of the varieties of introversion, I’m the one who avoids social gatherings among other things. This will be ….interesting.

Lent means more than Advent to me. Perhaps the focus on penance/introspection? I can definitively say there are days which anchor me to my spiritual pursuits. Ash Wednesday and its implication of Lent is one.

Our spiritual life, and therefore our inspirations, remains in this world. A focus on Jesus, Buddha, or whomever, to the exclusion of the physical world insulates us from our reality. The light poles and cell towers of our world inhabit the day-to-day milieu where we must perfect ourselves as humans. Like this photo, we must see the beauty in the context of the mundane. Ash Wednesday 2023.

All the Dearly Departed

Five days after a funeral. Lake Lynn, 07 November 2019.

Warnings & Notes: This post contains a few graphic depictions of death, some examples of socially unacceptable behavior, and is just generally a downer if you look at it a certain way. Also, some of these observations have been made before. If you read this blog regularly (there’s only a half dozen or so of you), well, sorry….a little.

This year All Souls Day, November 2nd, marked the fourth anniversary of my mother’s funeral. It’s the day I most think back upon her life and death. The anniversary of her death, October 24, I barely note. Sometimes it even slips by me before I realize it. The funeral symbolizes my mother’s love, her life, and all those influences we spend a lifetime unraveling. In contrast, the date of her death represents thoughts I acknowledge but do not celebrate, and her passing is hardly something to celebrate in and of itself. I would rather focus on the entirety of her life and death: the funeral marked that, not the death.

My mother and I lived more than 2100 miles apart at that point. My profession had taken me to the eastern United States; she remained in Spokane, WA, from where she had encouraged me to follow my dreams wherever they led. Her parents had, my father’s parents had, they had themselves, so why shouldn’t their children? Still, it didn’t reduce my guilt much for not being more available to her in that last year, indeed that span of a half dozen years when she lived on after my father’s death. My brother lived nearly ten times closer in Tacoma but it took me only a few more hours to get there by plane versus him taking a drive across the state. He encouraged her to move to Tacoma. I half-heartedly supported him. She refused, saying her friends and neighbors were in Spokane. I strongly pushed that she could move to a “retirement community” there in Spokane where some of her friends lived. She demurred, then refused. Her best support network were the good neighbors she had. She was right. We were wrong. I saw one of those retirement homes at the end of her life. I was really wrong, and–

But I’m not going to rehash that whole period. I’ll just note this: I watched her steadily decline during the five years after my father died, visiting her more and more frequently. (The Fates blessed me in several ways when 13 months after my father died, I started traveling the country for work. It became just as easy to fly to Spokane as to Raleigh.) In December 2018 my mother learned she had Stage IV breast cancer. At 89 years, she recoiled from and declined chemotherapy, threw her lot in with hormone receptor treatment (a pill, nothing more), and for various reasons was in and out of hospitals, convalescent homes, and her new apartment in a “retirement community” through the fall of 2019. She celebrated her 90th birthday in that apartment.

I visited my mother a dozen days into October 2019 as she lived her final days. I returned home only to receive The Call two days later. It was a Thursday. Knowing my brother could drive there quickly, and emotionally exhausted from watching her exist in a morphine-induced stupor, I rolled the dice, told him I wouldn’t come until Monday, and I let him spend Friday through Sunday with her. I flew back on that Monday, and sat beside her bed a lot until she passed away on Thursday. My brother had returned to his home and job. Thus it fell to me to handle the first round of details.

From the moment a loved one dies, those closest to them experience a bewildering whirlwind of details thrust upon them which must be handled immediately. As the elder of two children, the most controlling of us, and frankly, just because I was the one there, it fell to me to make those arrangements. Again, I shall refrain from a step by step accounting of it. This is supposed to be an accounting of All Souls and a celebration, not a macabre dwelling on those days of death. One example shall suffice: on Thursday morning, the day she died officially at 10:22 a.m., I had to leave her to be at the bank when it opened at 9 a.m. The instruction manual entitled “What You Will Have To Do When Your Second Parent Dies” never made it into my mailbox, I guess. If it had, maybe I would have been better prepared than to learn in her final hours that her investment accounts would be frozen for disbursement when she died, and that as her executor I would be paying bills with whatever sat in that bank account for the foreseeable future. The bank account had less than $3200 in it when I dumped a huge amount in there. Take note if you’re ever in this position: for the next year, I had to pay bills from that account. If I hadn’t done that, my brother and I would have had to agree on splitting the bills. Really, take note.

My mother’s death came as a relief. I’m saddened to admit her death came as a relief. I know many have said this, but I feel as I feel. She had suffered with increasing pain from the breast cancer for a year. I doubt anything can prepare you to listen to your mother slowly drown and die, to realize the fluidic sounds of her breathing come from her lungs as they slowly fill, to watch from a removed perspective as your voice sharply criticizes the health staff which insists on turning a patient even when this obviously makes the breathing worse. Beyond prayer, I simply endured. I carry with me that immense relief I felt when I re-entered her room after a short phone call from her cousin and discovered my mother had died. I also carry with me the commensurate load of guilt for not being there at that moment. The part of me formed by social mores scolds me perpetually; the accepting, independent side of me simply says, “that’s the way it happened. There’s nothing which could have been done at the time, and there’s no shame in feeling relief.”

In contrast to the anniversary of her death, which represents a smorgasbord of feelings, few of them good, even fewer comforting, the anniversary of the funeral represents a day of love. It’s the day remaining friends and family gathered to mark how much they loved your mother and how much they would miss her. It’s the day you created all the little remembrances which would afterward become powerful symbols in your life. It’s the day you got to reminisce about all the times: mostly good, some bad, some funny, some sad. It’s the day when many told you “You did a good job by your mother,” even if they were lying a little bit. And it’s the day you closed the door, for just a bit, on all of those things which just have to be done. It’s the day when you looked forward to a few days where nothing about your mother’s funeral and estate needed to be accomplished: those things would wait a few days–with luck, a few weeks.

Each All Souls Day since that time refreshes all these memories. It’s the stem that gathers all the roots of remembrance and supports the branches of What Has Come To Be. For me, it’s inextricably bound up with my decision two weeks after her funeral to retire. Those twin events, her passing and my retirement, have become tied to those crazy years when a pandemic changed our society, or perhaps, when it revealed who we had come to be. All Souls Day, which exists quietly in the immediate shadow of its more important sibling, All Saints Day, and is heralded by All Hallows’ E’en, tells us it’s important to mark the passing of those we loved and to pray for them, to remember them, to honor them. By its existence, it says to ignore the ones who have been declared important, and that we must instead recognize the importance of each of us.

Mostly, though, All Souls Day reminds all of us of the death of those we loved. It picks at the scab of a wound which will not scar over and which has become part of who we are.

Heart To Hang Onto

Johnny boy, he's always propping up the bar
He sees life crystallized through his jar
He says he only lives for beer
But deep in his heart is a cry of fear

Give me a heart to hang onto
Give me a soul that's tailored new
Give me a heart to hang onto
A heart to hang onto

--Pete Townshend, "Heart To Hang Onto" from the album Rough Mix with Ronnie Lane

A better Valentines Day

Clearwater Beach on the Gulf of Mexico. February 13, 2013.

Sure, flowers are nice–especially the two dozen roses I handed my wife a few hours ago. But warmth, white sand, palm trees, the Gulf, and a previous visit to the Phillies Spring Training Camp? Priceless. “Bouquet” is a fluid term.