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

DON’T BUY THIS

 

There is an impactful commercial that plays rather often on the TV stations we watch. It shows a person standing at an empty refrigerator, looking for what is not there.  The person’s feature changes, to reveal different people from different cultures, as words flash above telling us that 1 out of 8 Minnesotans are hungry, including 1 out of 5 children.  It’s an effective ad for Second Harvest Heartland, one they hope helps people make a donation to their effort.  An especially effective commercial during holiday times.

 

Today, the commercial came up again: I watched the faces change, I read the sobering statistics. We’ve been giving to groups that feed the hungry since the pandemic started, and it reminded me how important that is.

 

The next commercial was for “your Twin Cities Jaguar dealer”. No faces changing into others, just shots of the car, and words about how much you can “save”. The purpose, as with the prior commercial, is to move people to give money—in this case, a lot of it, to purchase what they want.  An especially effective commercial during holiday times.

 

It struck me that we will never make real progress in ending hunger until we see the connection between those two ads.  The first one asks you to make a difference in another person’s life, by giving $25 or $50 or $100.  The second one asks you to let Jaguar make a difference in your life, by giving them tens of thousands of dollars.

 

Both commercials, ultimately, are geared to making us feel good about ourselves.  The first may lead us into guilt first, but our donation can alleviate that into a feeling that we are good because we did something good.  The second one skips the guilt entirely, just leads us into feeling good because we can afford a Jaguar, and therefore, at some level, deserve one.

 

I have nothing against helping the hungry.  I have a hell of a lot against “helping the hungry” without taking a hard look at our consumption, and the structures that support and enable grow inequality.  If we don’t make those connections—personally and on a national and global scale—we are going to see the same commercials next year.  We will be able to give to help feed the hungry, and we will be able to buy, or fantasize about buying, the sexy power car.

 

I don’t want to feel good about that.  I want it to chafe.

 

 

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be as critical as the times demand.

 

 

Patrick

ANNIVERSARIES

October 5 would have been the 71^st anniversary of my parents, Walt and Monica.  It was also the 16^th anniversary of my mother’s death.  She died on the date she and her beloved were married, which seems fitting.  (October 5, 2004 was also the last day my hometown Minnesota Twins won a playoff game!  That’s a whole ‘nother story.)

 

Although I never thought about it exactly this way, I realize both of my parents were anti-fascists.  Both served in World War II. Mom was a WAC, and among other things helped in the training of French pilots, who were then sent to bomb their own country to free it from the Nazis.  I imagine some of those young men died doing that.  Dad was in the Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands on December 7, 1941, closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor was. He served in combat in France and Germany, and in the occupation of Germany after the war.  Then his German came in handy for his country, unlike in 1917, when he went to kindergarten speaking only German, and was told that children who spoke “the enemy’s language” would be hit.

 

I wish I could call them up and talk about our current political situation.  They voted in every election, and my mom worked for over 10 years as an administrative assistant for the county.  Dad was a barber and as I note in my poem “Cutting Away”:

 

You can learn a lot by holding

a man’s head in one hand

and a razor in another. 

 

I’m pretty sure there aren’t elections in the next life.  But if you can hear me, mom and dad, I want you to know that we are still fighting the good fight!

 

Here is a poem from my upcoming book that celebrates how my parentage came to be:

 

 

AUSTIN MINNESOTA

 

Austin, Hog-Town,

city of bent shoulders.

Maybe the hair of the men on the kill

grow more quickly over their ears,

so that you made a killing

with your scissors and clippers

and the fine hand broom that whisked

the dead hair off their shoulders.

You roomed at Maw Daly’s on Main

Street, where husband Bill left each

morning to work in the plant, and

daughter Monica checked the accounts

at Kresge’s and came home to work

for the house, cleaning the roomers’ rooms,

stuffing the laundry through the wringer

into galvanized pots.  I wonder how

often she washed your sheets, and how

much she wondered.  Mom said she thought

you were ugly and stuck up when she

first met you, but something must

have caught her heart—your mustache,

the scent of pomade and powder

on your hands, your fervency at Mass.

Somehow you ended up talking, then

dancing, then walking down the aisle

at Queen of Angels, Mom’s brothers

still alive, Grandpa Bill delighted to see

his daughter finally married, Grandma

Daly wondering who would clean the sheets.

 

 

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be anti-fascist, as effectively and peacefully as you can.

 

Patrick

GREETINGS POETRY LOVERS

For those of you who remember Rocky and Bullwinkle, you may remember that greeting from the Moose: “Greetings, Poetry Lovers!” It was meant to carry a lot of irony (as did the whole show), but I have loved that line ever since I was a kid.  Now that I’m retired, I love it even more.

 

One of the joys of retirement is that I not only have more time to write poetry, I have more time to READ poetry! Which, of course, helps writing immensely! Especially reading one volume by an author from start to finish.  In the last part of July and the first part of August, I read these works:

 

“Straight Out of View” by Joyce Sutphen

 

“Between Us”, by Margaret Hasse

 

“I” by Toi Derricotte (still working on that big one!)

 

The past week or so, I’ve been reading:

 

“What Falls Away is Always” by Richard Terrill

 

“Idanre and Other Poems” by Wole Soyinka

 

“The Essential Rumi” by Rumi (still working on that one, too!)

 

I didn’t set out to read all women writers at first, nor switch to all men writers later.  I just picked up their books—either because I saw it on my shelf (we’re trying to declutter and organize—still working on that one, too!) or because their book came out, or because I found their book in one of the many little free libraries I pass on my daily walks.

 

Each of these poets has their own style, of course, but each touches on one part of poetry that is essential: mystery.  I won’t try to explain each of their approaches, only to say that each of them take delight in words, take delight in putting them together, and take delight in the mysterious communication between solitary writer and unknown reader.  So I commend them all to you.

 

For those of you who are struggling with writing during this pandemic—or any other times—I leave these words of wisdom from Rumi:

 

“This is how it always is

when I finish a poem.

 

A great silence overcomes me,

and I wonder why I ever thought

to use language.”

 

Be beauty. Be justice. Be poetry. Be silence.

 

Patrick

HOW LONELY SITS OUR CITY…

How lonely sits our city…

That was all I wrote on my Face Book page this morning.  It follows after the first verse of Lamentations: “How lonely sits the city that was once full of people”.

Our city of Minneapolis is full of rage, violence, fear, anger, hatred and deep, deep sorrow.  At some moments, it doesn’t feel as if the city can hold it all.

I want to reach out my arms and hug, but we are physical distancing.

I want to reach out my hands and heal, but we still haven’t completely opened the wound.

If you want moral clarity, this is what I got:

George Floyd was murdered by the police.

George Floyd was murdered by the police.

One policeman knelt on his neck while three policemen watched and did nothing while George Floyd was gasping for breath and crying out for help.

The anger and frustration of the African American community, and other people of color is not going away, it is justified and it demands justice and compassion.  Those who have endured the lynching of its people over decades, over centuries—by a system that devalues people of color, in order to maintain a system that privileges white people (and not all of them) and the rich—they deserve justice.  Reconciliation and healing are not possible without it.

That’s what I have for moral clarity right now.

Other things are not so black and white (forgive the play on words)

The neighborhood that was so severely damaged last night is my neighborhood.  It is the most diverse neighborhood in the city, one that has suffered under police brutality and poverty, and now have been slapped in the face by destruction of its food supply, economic base and safety.

I understand that frustration can lead to rage and desperation can lead to violence.  All violence leads to more violence.  That doesn’t mean that all violence is equal.  The spark for this terrible fire was the police murder, in plain daylight of a man who allegedly tried to pass a forged $20 bill.  We may never be able to pinpoint the exact moment that the violence began in the street; but the police department made a decision before a PEACEFUL march that they were going to engage it with riot gear, chemical weapons and rubber bullets.  As far as I can tell, no attempt was made by the police to negotiate or deescalate. As usual, the people our police are called to serve and protect were seen simply as a threat.

But the looting, torching of buildings, gunshots and acts of physical violence against others is not justified.

Some will say—and have said already, “but you can’t equate torching of a store or looting as the same as the murder of an unarmed black man.”  I am not equating them.  But one can be horrified and enraged at police murder and be horrified and enraged at looting and arson.

“But they only torched big corporations’ stores,” some say.  Not true.  Many of the stores that were damaged were minority owned, many built by immigrants, some of whom do not have enough insurance to cover the loss. And who worked at the Wendy’s, the Target, the Cub Foods?  Mostly people of color, who have lost their jobs.  Many of them do not qualify for unemployment or any government help.  How does that help the cause of justice?

“People should obey the police.”  But the police are the ones who take an oath to protect and serve the people, not the other way around.  We taught our children to obey and respect civil authorities, partly so they would survive and because it is right to do so.  But we also taught them to question civil authorities when they are destructive of human beings.

One irony of last night was that the police shot rubber bullets from the rooftops on mostly peaceful protestors and did nothing to stop the looting and arson.

Another irony is that it’s becoming clear that some of the instigators of violence came prepared to do that, and had nothing to do with the protest.

A third irony: we’ve fought for years to combat gang and individual graffiti in our neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by vandalism.  It started to creep back this last year.  On building after building today, you can see “Fuck the Cops” alongside newly painted gang tags.  Put that in your progressive or conservative pipe and smoke it.

I will protest today and tomorrow.  I helped clean up broken glass and looted goods this morning.  I will pray for justice and I will work for it, but I must confess I am tired and sad and angry and feeling a loneliness though I am surrounded by people who love and who are putting their lives on the line.

This is a portion of a post this morning from a friend, Kari Slade:

“I wish for us all the ability to light up like the skies of Minneapolis last night.

With a fire for justice and the ability to see that this

was the trauma and pain of Racism ignored for far too long.”

Kari leads the Health Careers Program at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, where both our daughters graduated.  We have been working with her and her students on a public art project that was suspended by the pandemic.  A major theme of that work was using art as a way to understand and heal from trauma—individual, communal, generational.  It saddens me that we won’t be able to complete this project this school year.  It saddens me more that the students in her program have a lot more trauma to work with going forward.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be lonely, but be lonely together.

Patrick