ABOUT A YEAR AGO

 

In on-line worship at our new church on Sunday, I was reminded that about a year ago we switched to on-line worship, on-line work meetings, on-line poetry readings, not knowing how long before we would be able to meet together again.  It made me think about where I was, where we were a year ago, and what has happened since.

 

About a year ago, we were wondering about where the country and world were going (that hasn’t changed!). Disastrous wildfires were destroying so many homes and wildlife.  It had been two months since Iran and the US teetered toward war, and a month since the impeachment trial of President Trump had ended in acquittal. I was worried about what else Trump might do, but had no idea what was in store.

 

About a year ago, my wife and I were preparing for retirement.  We had talked about travelling to Chile, travelling to different parts of the country.  I had started researching working as a volunteer in a swing district in the fall election.  We talked about renovating the house for a studio for Luisa. We talked about going to the movies every week, a date we love to have.

 

Then, about a year ago, COVID-19 arrived.  Our pension and retirement savings dropped to 70% of what they had been at the beginning of the year. We met with our financial advisor to adjust our plans, and wondered how—or if—any of the plans we had discussed would happen.

 

About a year ago, I ordered seeds for the garden.  Overly optimistic as ever, but hoping that being retired would give us a chance for a much more well-tended garden.  (That one proved true!)

 

About a year ago, I was working with three young women I had known for over a decade, preparing them for confirmation.  Many parents in our congregation had already lost their jobs or had their hours severely cut.  We did not know when we’d be able to return to in-person gatherings. I didn’t know if we were going to see the three young women or the two children preparing for first communion.

 

And about a year ago, we were in the thick of planning our summer program: day camp, youth leadership program, block party, art installations, neighborhood celebrations, puppet shows—planning without knowing what we might be able to do.

 

A year ago, our funders suspended most grant applications.  We kept planning for the summer (our busiest time), not knowing if we could pay for it, or what we would be able to do safely.

 

Almost exactly a year ago,  the high school from my home town, the Austin, MN Packers was one win away from another trip to the state tourney.  The section finals were with their historic rivals, Albert Lea. Though the Packers had a better record than the Tigers, they had split the two games between them that season.  Each game had been won by one point.  The finals never happened.  About a year ago, I was in the thick of my research for NCAA March Madness, planning to smash Marty, a dear friend who had run a pool on the tourney for nearly four decades.  That tourney never happened.  The Olympics didn’t happen.  Opening Day for the Twins with two friends I’ve known since kindergarten didn’t happen.  The State Fair did not happen.

 

About a year ago, I was visiting Charlie, a faithful member of the congregation in the hospital and a rehab center, until suddenly I was not.  I had met him on my very first day at the church, visiting him in another hospital.  For a while I could call him on his cell, when he remembered to take it with him as he went from the hospital to the care home back to the hospital.

 

And at the same time, I had my last visit with Mary, another faithful member of the congregation, not knowing it would be my last.  She had had a stroke, and problems with her legs.  She couldn’t swallow well, so I couldn’t offer her communion.  She asked me to read Psalms to her: 91, 121, 51, 21.  All ending in 1.

 

March 7, 2020: saw my first robin, harbinger of an early Minnesota spring.  Checked my log of robin sightings going back to 1998 in Philadelphia.  Earliest sighting there: February 6.

 

About a year ago, I was working on cleaning out our office at church, a job that continued until our very last day.  Not quite like Hercules and the Aegean Stables, but monumental.  I had to wear a dust mask most days, before wearing masks against the virus were required.  I found something like $47 in cash.  Photos of youth who were now adults.  Records of meetings going back a decade and a half.  Some of the same issues and conflict:  what is our mission, who gets to decide.  An inordinate amount of time spent on property and finance. Lots of rubber bands, paper clips and pennies in places I had forgotten existed.

 

That was March 2020.  We had some idea of what was to come, but nothing like we expected.

 

In April, I went to anoint Charlie and give him communion after he came to his home on hospice.  I wore double gloves, a mask and clothes I took off on our porch (except underwear), put in a bag to take to wash, and took a long shower.  The next day Charlie died.  The day after that, we learned that his wife and two adult children were positive for COVID 19.  That began two weeks of quarantining from my wife and daughter, in my own house. I never missed hugs so much!

 

I was never able to visit Mary again, but every day of a beautiful spring, I wrapped myself in the prayer shawl she had given me, and prayed on our porch as the cardinals sang their blessed hearts out and a pair of downy woodpeckers set up house in one of our trees. Mary died peacefully, and her family was able to bury her in the Texas cemetery, where several generations of her family have been laid.

 

On May 25, George Floyd was murdered a little over a mile from our house.  We participated in protests starting the next day. The following day, looting and graffiti covered the neighborhood of the church.  Fires were started. Over a thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed in the next few days, including every grocery store, pharmacy, bank, library and post office near the church. Luisa and I slept in the church for two nights as a part of our neighborhood group.  The police and National Guard occupied our community: constant helicopters and sirens, smell of tear gas, SUVS with tinted windows and no license plates racing through the neighborhood.

 

This was all less than a year ago, and I don’t think the tension has yet left my body.

 

Then the attack on democracy ramped up.  I couldn’t travel to a swing district, but was able to write postcards and send texts to people I probably will never know, in PA, AZ and GA.  In our on-line training to be election judges, the policy for confronting disruption and violence was emphasized.  The election went smoothly, not one incident of fraud or intimidation.  Then the tense wait for the results.  I was out doing yard work that Saturday, when I started hearing children shouting and bells ringing and laughter.  I checked my phone, and thought it was finally over.

 

Would that were true.  The flurry of lawsuits, the attack on elections by elected officials, finally the insurrection on January 6. 

 

Today is International Women’s Day.  Violence against women has increased this last year.  Today was supposed to be the start of jury selection for the trial of Derrick Chauvin, the chief murderer of George Floyd (postponed for motions).  The city and state have put up massive concrete barriers and barbed wire, and the Guard is at the ready.

 

I don’t know if I ever want to go through another year like this one.

 

But then yesterday, Luisa and I got the first shot of the vaccine.  It was 62 yesterday, and may hit 66 tomorrow.  I ordered seeds again today, and we have plans to almost double the size of our garden.  I saw a pair of downy woodpeckers in our back yard.  There is almost as much daylight as there is night.   My second book of poetry was published this year, and I have more time than ever to work on my third.

 

So what else can I say about this?  I’m sure that all of us have stories about what happened and what didn’t these last 12 months.  And I’m sure there’s some important things I’ve forgotten, it has been that intense.  More than anything, I hope we can grieve, celebrate and keep working for justice together.  Whatever happens.

 

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be alive.

THE SOUNDS OF MORNING

I begin my mornings by meditating on our three season porch.  With a blanket and a warmer on my neck and back, it has become and three and a half season porch.  I doubt I will sit there next Sunday morning, when it’s forecasted to hit 16 below.  But today, at a balmy 24, it was quite nice.

 

I usually bring a mug of hot tea, light a candle, arrange the blanket and try to just listen.  It isn’t always easy; my mind often seems to be sitting on a lake of liquid hot magma that throws fears, questions, doubts and random thoughts up into my consciousness.  Maybe you have all experienced that at some point.  When it gets real bad, I tell myself that my “job” is to just sit there and not worry about what my mind throws up. Just sit there and listen: to God, to my body, to the world around me.

 

This morning, there was a train whistle, quickly departing. A single sparrow, chirping.  The crows started coming in, returning from their night in community.  They seem louder in the morning, even though there are fewer of them.  Near sunset, when they all begin to gather, there are so many of them, their raucous caws turn into something like a giant OM: a multitude of crows keeping festival.  Yes, I know that a group of crows is a murder.  But murder doesn’t seem what they do in the early evening.  Rather, family, communion, solidarity.

 

When the crows return after dawn, their individual greetings stand out, sharp and somewhat harsh. I imagine they are greeting each other with words like Blessed morning.  Good fortune on the hunt.

 

I had mostly tuned out the crows this morning, when I heard a pleasant bird song.  I was pretty relaxed into meditation at the time, and my semi-conscious mind thought that’s a pretty song.  And then it hit me: it was a cardinal singing—the first one I’ve heard this winter!  The cardinals usually begin singing in our south Minneapolis neighborhood sometime in February, but I don’t remember ever hearing them sing on the first day of this shortest month.

 

It seems quite likely the groundhog will see its shadow here tomorrow, and the high for Super Bowl Sunday is forecasted to be 3 below.  But with the change in administration, the arrival of vaccines, and especially this solitary cardinal singing this morning, I can hear spring. I can listen for it, even when it is far from coming.

 

Here’s a poem with a cardinal in it, part of my book “Quitting Time”.  It officially launches February 18 at 7 pm CST.  Here’s a link to register for the webinar:

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Bha30g3AR6S-9eKL81PDVg

 

 

YOU ARE IN NEARLY EVERY DAWN

 

You would love these cardinals

in late winter, courting from

the highest branch, the rabbits

that race the backyard snow,

sparrows who never abandon.

I sit on the porch and imagine

your face, a child I have never seen.

I have no photos of you as a boy,

no First Communion, no lost

teeth or family picnic, and yet

I see your smile as clear as wind:

a breeze that arises in the east,

messenger in a cloudless sky.

 

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be kind in listening.

 

Patrick

MEMORIALS

 On the first day of 2021, I went for a walk around sunset.  It is a favorite time of the day for me, especially in the winter, with the sun so low in the horizon.  The light is delicate and enchanting. As light leaves and darkness comes on, it is one of those liminal times.  The border between the past and present, the living and the dead, becomes more of a membrane. We can be fed with what we don’t comprehend.

 

A short walk from our house is Matt’s Bar at 35^th and Cedar, where the Jucy Lucy was born (sorry, 5-8 Club, but it was here). On the semaphore pole are the remains of a memorial to three people, killed by an 18-year old driver who had stolen a car.  The three people were coming from a family gathering; they had no knowledge of the young man, nor of how their lives would connect in that one awful moment.

 

I walked down one block to the Holiday Gas Station, where a small memorial sits in the snow. A 23-year old man was killed by police on the last day of 2020. The police released footage that seems to show he fired first at the officers who had pulled them over.  The young man had had some knowledge of law enforcement, with a few “run-ins” with the law. But none of his family and friends saw this coming.  I don’t know if he knew the officer who shot and killed him.  The gas station is less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by police on Memorial Day.

 

I walked a block west, watching the sky, then turned back north on 18^th Ave, the street we live on.  At 35^th and 18^th is the parking lot of the Hope Temple Foursquare Church.  The low sign on the corner of the lot has been fully repaired since a hit and run driver struck it. The same driver, a young man drunk and going close to 70 miles an hour, hit a car at that intersection, killing a young man.  The victim was a scientist, and a musician who played in a local band.  He lived with his wife one block as the crow flies from our house.  There was a memorial for him for a long while, but now that has gone away.  The house he lived in has gone away as well, made unfit by a huge tree that was felled during a storm a year after his death.

 

On the second day of 2021,  I thought about these memorials, and I thought about the places where happenstance or fate or a terrible coincidence brought the lost lives to their end.

 

At Matt’s, a Jucy Lucy is a concoction where cheese is sealed between two thin hamburger patties and then fried.  It comes with a warning to watch the first bite, because the cheese is so hot.  It’s been a neighborhood cornerstone for years.  I remember back in the 70’s, it was so smoky you couldn’t see to the end of the bar.  Since Minnesota outlawed smoking in indoor establishments, it has become a place where families as well as young adults hang out.

 

The gas station has a long pit to the north of the car wash; I assume it is to eliminate stormwater runoff from entering the storm sewers and then onto the river. We’ve bought gas there many times; our Cub Foods reward card gives us 10, 20, 30 cents off per gallon, depending on how much food we buy.

 

The sign on the Foursquare Church parking lot has a logo with white silhouettes on different color squares: a cross on red, chalice on blue, crown on purple, dove on yellow.  I assume they represent the four core beliefs of every Foursquare Church: Jesus is our savior, healer, baptizer and soon coming king.  The members of the church have planted several trees in the boulevard on both sides of 35^th Street..

 

One square block, three memorials to needless death, at three random places. 

 

Our soon to be departing president vetoed the defense bill, not because he wants to limit our death-making machine, but because he didn’t want the part that eliminated the name of traitor racist generals from military bases.  Those memorials of Confederate generals are not outpourings of sorrow, or rage at injustice, or the hope of keeping a loved one’s memory alive.  They are about glorifying terrorism.

 

This is not the blog post I anticipated writing in this new New Year.  But there is still grieving in my soul, for what we’ve lost this past year, and during the life of our city and country.  It is serenity we need to accept our losses; it is courage we need to work to change the things we can, it is the wisdom hidden in the evening winter sky that gives me hope.

 

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be memory.

 

Patrick