Cold with low clouds and some fog. Calling for scattered showers which could mean anything in terms of rain but so far only a few drops. I left the door to my office open with the heater on most of the morning but then it became too cold now the door is closed and Dot is raging around on the porch barking at phantoms. There is a slight westerly wind and this morning I saw Ernie and Gaylen heading north in their boat to Pelican for their home up there in Sunnyside to plant their garden and start their summer chores. Ernie has a saw mill there too and if things break well he will have a couple of grand kids to chase around up there, and the kids are loud enough to keep the bears away from the house. Gaylen plants a wonderful garden, Jan and I hope to visit them sometime this summer if the weather and the virus breaks our way.

Life goes on and friends get sick without the help of coronavirus. I remember when my parents were my age and they stopped making friends their own age. I didn’t understand it at all. They had loved having people over and we used to have lovely large dinner parties with all kinds of friends. Then it became only gatherings of family, and friends of their children. They were all interesting people but there were very few people my parents age. I asked about this once and my father wouldn’t answer. My mother waited until he was out of the room and then all she said to me, was. “Your father does not like hearing stories about peoples gallbladders. Which I probably could have figured out if I had thought about it for a while. conversation around my parents house was almost mandatorily upbeat. There was absolutely no whining allowed. If you had a problem, it wasn’t discussed at the dinner table. Problems were to be solved individually, or among ourselves. If you needed money you could discuss it with our mother and borrow some. If you were sick again you could talk with her and a doctor’s visit could be arranged, but you should never forget that other people had suffered far more than we had and we had nothing, nothing at all to complain about. Which was okay with me, of course until the time that something went wrong, then I talked to my sister or my friends.

But my parents were terrified by disease and did not like to talk about it. My mother had cancer and it was kept a secret until she got out of the hospital, when I was in the fifth grade. She had a breast removed and it was a big deal. My father insisted it mattered not at all to him and that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and he took her on a grand tour of Europe, Greece and Turkey. My father had been on a Classics kick and insisted that I read parts of the Oddesy with him. My mother was very emotional during this time and she said that I could grow my hair out “like one of the Beatles” while they were away in Europe and I could keep wearing it that way when they got back if the school would allow. That was a huge thing for her to say to me, not just for her to say it but for her to wring such a concession out of my father, which she had surely done. My chest felt cold when I heard those words, it was the first time it dawned on me she had must have been near death.

It didn’t matter, much because I had curly blond hair, and it wasn’t working for a Beatles cut but the battle of the hair and sideburns was delayed for a few years anyway.

My peers certainly talk about our diseases. Of course, we are boomers and are noted whiners, we are apt to even blame our whining on our parents repression. We blame our parents for everything. But the truth is I doubt that we are much better prepared to deal with death and disease than any generation. But of course I don’t know. My father was born in 1913. He experienced the Spanish flu pandemic World War I and II. though not in battle. He remembers Veterans day parades as a child seeing old men who were veterans of the Civil War in the parades, men without arms or legs. He had good friends who served in war and were revered. When I was young “Playing War” was a staple for boys. My best friends had fathers who kept their old army gear at home. Photos of the D Day landing hung in the house. Fathers who drank too much, I knew. Fathers that had short tempers when they drank. I didn’t know why, but now I know they had seen too much of death.

Here is how old Walt W. put it during the Civil War in Song of Myself:

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Then he goes on to say a hell of a lot more. But I’ve always like that quote. We pretend to understand the mechanism of all the emotions of this and all young poets want to be as brave in our stance as Walt Whitman, but were we ever really? We have friends who survived AIDS or live with it still. We live with war orphans of wars that aren’t recognized as “official wars.” We all have friends of all ages widowed or orphaned by cancer and we accept it as part of life, yet on we struggle, constantly afraid, constantly dealing with the blind box of our own mortality. We can say we are ready but we fear death, maybe not for ourselves but the others who grieve now or will grieve soon.

The funerals are usually dreadful, duplicitous affairs. for the families and friends. “All the grief and the pancakes after.” the Russian poet said. We talk and talk and talk as if we were not knocking on a door that will never open. Of course everything we know about death. Every thing we actually know about anything is the providence of the living. That much is obvious. That is why we have the imagination in the first place and the fiction writers to make our world bigger and broader to include the possibility of more, I suppose. It is our minds that are naturally duplicitous when it comes to death. I know nothing special about death other than surviving it and having seen some good people die gracefully and some other’s die hard and awkward. It’s not a judgement on either, it’s just how it went and I don’t have near as much experience as many. Not the fathers home from war, nor my good brother who sat by the bedside of so many of his cancer patients. There is nothing to learn from death. There are only more things to learn from living.

Okay enough. Good friends get sick and will die soon enough. The most we can do is love them while we can which, honestly we do for ourselves. Which is why my mother wanted me to grow my hair and my father took her to Europe, to which I say “Bravicimo!” She beat cancer. My father almost drown in Puget Sound around that time and he didn’t. He drifted out to sea with a friend who died but my dad didn’t. The Coast Guard Pilot ignored his orders to come back to base and landed his sea plane to rescue my dad. To which I say “Hooray and Well done!” Not every story is a modernest tragedy, nor a dark comedy, nor a bleak existential tale where the long suffering are collateral damage of capitalist greed.. Sometimes things just work out, and people survive a little longer, enjoy a good meal with someone they love a few more times, or get to pet the dog a while longer, or just get to rest some more.

Sometimes.

Fog… a bit of rain.

Boats coming in to sell fish.

Will I see you again?

jhs
Here is a recording I made this morning of me reading from a terrific novel called Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin. He is a wonderful, soulful writer who I think gets it right.