Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Feb-Mar-Apr 2023

Every morning for years I've read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

February
Page Pelphrey offers her reflections from Christ Church in Connecticut and her perspective as both a teacher of languages and a mother.

Her meditations are framed with comments about Forward Day by Day itself. Her grandmother gave copies to loved ones, and Pelphrey was reading it years before she got the gig to write it. She admits that she hasn't told anyone that she's writing for the publication, in case it somehow doesn't work out. That's her usual approach to good news, but Isaiah 58 tells us to "Shout out! Do not hold back!"

Pelphrey positions scripture and her life within a broader social context. For her, Isaiah's metaphor for Israel as a ruined vineyard resonates with her own small community ripped apart by partisan politics. She has changed her registration to "independent" as a proclamation that she will not trust her "tribe" more than the Lord.

She guesses that we all see ourselves as the poor widow in the parable, but admits that others see her as rich: "I need to focus on my life, not on the person in the pew next to me."

The peeved reaction of Jesus to the fig tree that bore no fruit is one of many stories of Bible heroes "losing it." They allow us to "forgive ourselves" for our own human frailty.

By the end of her series, she tells us how preparing to write her reflections for Forward has helped her to see all of life "through the lens of Scripture and [our] Baptismal Covenant." She challenges us to write our own. [I can attest to the power of writing reflections. Our parish produced devotion books for years, and the ones I wrote stay with me. See links to them at my page Theology for Breakfast.]

March
Episcopal priest Rob Gieselman at St. Stephen's in Belvedere CA is father of two grown children, a gardener, hiker, and dog-walker. He studied law and economics.

He lets us see his shadow side: formerly evangelical, he struggled with self-loathing, self-righteousness, his need for definite answers, the hard time he has admitting he's wrong. So he's also sensitive to some ways we fool ourselves. For instance, he admits to "a propensity to obfuscate, to hide like Adam in the Garden." He confesses to us that his confessions to God can become exercises in self-abasement when they should be about being honest and honoring God's word in himself.

We can imagine late nights during his evangelical phase when he tried to straighten what he calls a "tangled knot" in our faith: "You cannot earn grace, as it is a gift, yet failure to exercise your faith diminishes grace." He notes that Jesus doesn't ask the crippled man at the pool, "Have you tried hard enough?" but "Do you want to be made well?"

For those who think faith depends on definite answers, Gieselman offers a couple of homely alternatives. Gieselman's daughter was "not a hugger," but she would lean into him. Faith is "leaning into" God, not some certain things we think or do. As Gieselman's dogs bound from side to side in the eddies of a stream, Jesus doesn't speak in straight lines, either, but in eddies of meaning.

Having struggled with ego in his faith, Gieselman offers an effective switch: Imagine how God experiences us. Anticipating the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, Gieselman imagines the Holy Spirit being able to pass through time and alternate universes as easily as wind passes through a screen. That's why the Spirit bypassed David's big brothers for a boy with potential that no one else saw. Gieselman asks us to imagine seeing others as God sees them.

April
Priest and poet Kim Becker, Cherokee and self-confessed "word nerd," has helped me out with a poem. All April long, I've been struggling to complete a poem about words, how they're insufficient to convey the depth and breadth of God. Words, I've been thinking, are like threads of a net straining to contain fish trawled from just one corner of a vast sea. Near the end of the month, Becker meditated on a word from Jesus from Luke 5.4, "Put out into the deep water." She writes:

I love the ocean, but I have a fear of deep water -- and of whatever might live in that deep water! I prefer watching the waves to being in them.... [W]hen it comes to my relationship with God, I have often stayed in the shallows. It is easy to go it by rote, without allowing myself to enter more fully into the vulnerability of a life of faith... secure in the one who is ruddering our ship.

Becker recommends others' works in some of her writings. I like the title Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler. She has reminded me of a book encountered early in my adulthood, forgotten till now, that has influenced me ever since, Morton Kelsey's Dreams: A Way to Listen to God. Then, she cites a translation unfamiliar to me from Psalm 5.1, "Lord, give heed to my sighing." A sigh speaks without words, she says, and we should listen to the sighs of others -- including those of creatures with more than two legs.

[For many, many more reflections on tradition, experiences, and beliefs of the Episcopal Church, see my page Those Crazy Episcopalians.]

Sermon Puts the Us in Emmaus

Not three minutes after I laid aside the Gospel reading because I already knew it so well, the Rev. Pat Miller (a.k.a. Mo[ther] Pat) preached that the road to Emmaus is a story we skip over because we all know it so well.

She said that it tells the story of us, the regular Christians on our life journeys. It's about all the ways we encounter Jesus -- by hearsay, by Scripture, and, at last, by sacrament. That's so obvious; why have I never thought of that before? Cleopas and the one who doesn't even get named aren't part of Jesus' inner circle, just followers. They're heading the seven miles back home from Jerusalem in "that frozen state" after the death of someone close. They're preoccupied by their cares and the road ahead and somehow don't recognize Jesus. "Jesus kept a straight face while they told him about the crucifixion and the reports of the resurrection -- which they don't believe." Then he reviews the scriptures that lay the foundations for his mission.

They recognize him during an enactment of the eucharist -- that, I'd heard before. I'd not noticed that, by blessing and breaking the bread, Jesus performs the duty of their host. Mo Pat emphasized the joy that excites them so much that, having just arrived home, they leap up and run back, at night, to Jerusalem to spread the news. When they get there, the apostles have also been visited by the resurrected Jesus. Here's where Mo Pat reminded us of that state of mourning when we're like one of the statues that the Snow Queen made of Narnians -- melted and freed. I teared up there.

Mo Pat said, "Now, we may think, Why doesn't Jesus just pop in to see us the way he did for those in that upper room?" She concluded, he does. Of course, it's in communion, it's in the church community. "Go now, run out and tell everyone," she said, "only wait until the end of the service."

The Birds: 60 Years later, a Movie for our Time

The soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds is the soundtrack of our lives. We all hear it every day, played in the trees -- chirping, chattering and cackling. The natural world thanking God for His bounty? After streaming the film, I hear the raucous war council of alien creatures.

The Birds does what the best films do, change the way I see ordinary life. Since I last saw it on black-and-white TV five decades ago, I've had flashbacks to the film whenever crows looked up from their carrion to me, or when, perched on a street lamp, they glowered down at me and my little dog. I expected the film to have lost its potency, its effects and dialogue sure to be dated. Instead, this week it chilled me more than ever. This is a movie for our time.

Screenwriter Evan Hunter (a.k.a. detective novelist Ed McBain) agreed with Hitchcock to begin the film as a romantic comedy. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) "meet cute" at a pet store in San Francisco. He mistakes her for the clerk and she plays the part, although she can't begin to find the birds he wants for his little sister's birthday. When she realizes that he was playing her, she determines to get even. Bearing the gift of two lovebirds, she traces him to the coastal village Bodega Bay in her sporty convertible, sporting a long fur coat and high heels even when she rents a row boat. She's like Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres, a classic fish-out-of-water.

For suspense, Hitchcock teases us with signs of what's to come. He starts with the eerie aural collage of bird calls that plays while silhouettes of birds in flight criss-cross behind the titles. A funnel cloud of gulls circling over San Francisco briefly draws Melanie's attention. When she's in the rowboat, a swooping gull nicks her forehead. But the characters are more concerned with their own lives.

As in all rom-coms, there's a rapprochement between Mitch and Melanie. The spoiled heiress tells sympathetic Mitch that she wants to live a life that matters.

She gets her chance in the very next moment. They're holding hands on a green hill above the little sister's birthday party, literally the high point of the movie -- when the birds attack. Children are screaming, birds are popping balloons, and Melanie joins Mitch in rescuing little kids knocked down by birds that peck and claw at their faces.

From then on, the story is how to find shelter, how to prepare for another attack, how to help each other through this emergency.

That's how I experienced the pandemic in March 2020. We'd heard news stories about outbreaks in distant territories. We discussed contingencies such as a couple of days off from school. Suddenly, it was lockdown, and all our plans from The Before Time were unworkable, canceled, never to return.

The recurring question in The Birds is, "Why?" A drunk quotes scripture to say it's God's punishment for our sins. A woman screams at Melanie, "You brought this on! Everything was normal until you came here!" An ornithologist (Ethel Griffies) says it's mankind who have made the world so inhospitable to nature.

Today, we're aware how our lights at night disorient millions of birds on their nocturnal migrations. Our mirrored skyscrapers are death traps. We've "developed" their habitats. Man-made climate change has shifted seasons so that migrating birds cannot find the insects and seeds they need, and shifts in territory have given avian viruses opportunity to spread. Sixty years later, the real question would be, why not?

I was late this morning. I'm going out to the deck to refill my feeder.

Tippi Hedren's iconic scene, now a famous meme

Warsaw Inspiration: My Return to Poland

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Scott Smoot at Warsaw's old town today, virtually.

Pozdrowienia z Atlanta! We greeted Poland with that slogan on our tee shirts when the Westminster Schools' Ensemble toured the country. Friendship Ambassadors Foundation sent us to win Communists over to Democracy with our repertoire of spirituals, Mozart, and Broadway songs. But my strongest memory of Poland is a Communist propaganda film.

I'm remembering Poland now because I've biked 417 miles on trails around Atlanta since the end of February. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Vienna to Warsaw.

In June 1977, Poles didn't need our help to resent the Communist Party. As our bus from the airport entered Warsaw, our guide Marek pointed to an imposing skyscraper and said, "We call that 'our gift from our Russian friends,' the ugliest building in Warsaw." The union Solidarity was already resisting Russian overlords in Gdansk, a port city on our tour that we would come to love.

Our tour started, however, with a documentary film screened for us by the official (Communist) tourist agency. Grainy black-and-white film showed Warsaw's old town square thriving during the 1930s. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded. Then the people of Warsaw rebelled. Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of the city to make an example for all subjugated peoples. A Nazi soldier with a camera panned 360 degrees to document that Hitler's order had been fulfilled, "not one brick should remain on a brick."

Warsaw's old town square, ca. 1945.

Soviet soldiers are presented as liberators in this propaganda film, but the image I've carried in memory all these years is all Pole: men and women picking their ways over a landscape of rubble. They stop, survey the scope of the task ahead, and then a woman stoops to place a brick in her basket.

The kicker was after the movie. We stepped from the grim images in the dark theatre into the beautiful town square of my selfie, rebuilt as it had been pre-war, with the original bricks.

Daunted by a pile of papers to grade, a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, or any impossible task, I've remembered the landscape of toppled bricks, that woman, her basket, and the beauty of Warsaw's old town center.

[I remember our choral director Frank Boggs here.]

Miles YTD 975 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,510 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Minsk, Belarus

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Poet Linda Pastan Doesn't Get Old

Studies confirm that poets generally don't live long. We're fortunate that Linda Pastan, who died at 91 this past January, sent updates in verse from the frontier of aging for more than 50 years. In her last two collections of new poems, it's good news, or bad news with her customary wry delivery.

Age has nothing to do with me, she writes for Traveling Light (2011). Alone, she tells us,

...I am any woman
fresh from the shower,
covering the newly rained upon
continent of her body -- hills and valleys --
modestly with a towel.

She's surprised when a gentleman offers her his seat. ("Any Woman" TL 45) An undergraduate during "Q & A" asks, had she known Emily Dickinson personally? Laughter erupts while Pastan weighs different degrees of sarcasm, but Surprise, like love, can catch / our better selves unawares (TL 47), and Pastan gives the blushing young woman a compassionate response that brought me to tears.

In her 80s, Lust still raises its purple flag ("Any Woman"). A bouquet from her husband inspires an erotic fantasia on vegetables ("A Dozen Roses" TL 41). She falls in love with him afresh when she finds an unfamiliar photo from his twenties (TL 9), reflecting on youth's inherent beauty, even an adolescent boy, awkwardness / shadowed by grace, in his own / invisible force field of desire. A lovely poem takes us to "Times Square, 1944" when she was that awkward adolescent, where sailors facing deployment wore their caps / at a cocky angle, like white seabirds / about to take flight as they moved in a roiling surf / through the traffic. They looked at women, but not at the girl who longed to reach out / and embrace them (TL 53).

Still, her body is no longer her friend as in the days when sleep like a good dog / came when summoned (TL 37). She wonders why old and gnarled trees are beautiful while I am merely / old and gnarled ("The Orchard" in Insomnia 2015). For "Anatomy," Pastan sets up an extended metaphor that she follows to its punchline:

In the tenement
of the body
generations have left
their mark

On the stairwell
of bones and the
walls of flesh.

While the genes do their scheduled work, she says, Clutch the bannister / hold on tight. (TL 7).

Favorite subjects for her never grew old. One of her last books A Dog Runs Through It selects poems across five decades brightened by the presence of the dogs she loved. Her many fears show up often: we know from an early poem how she learned from her Jewish grandparents to hear "the Cossacks" coming for her, a generalized dread that never left her: she writes of panic on a plane ("Flight" TL 65) and imagines in "The Ordinary" how it may happen while she's sipping tea or feeding the dog. But she's amused by her own fears. Her uncertain walk down the aisle of the plane brings to mind her walk down the aisle in marriage with only the vague idea of love to keep us aloft.

The Garden of Eden remains another inexhaustible subject for her. Eden poems fill a section of Traveling Light called "Years After the Garden." Every garden dreams of being Eden she writes in "Pastoral," (TL 12), adding slyly to expect apples in the fall. On her patio, a discarded Christmas tree becomes an Eden for wildlife that she refuses to drag to the dump, asking, Must one of us impersonate the serpent? (34). "Eve on her Deathbed" reflects with mild pique on what little is written of her in The Book, how no one noticed in the midst of all those begettings that she had taken a lover, and how, in the end we are no more than our stories (16).

Considering similarities between artists centuries apart who could not have known each others' work, Pastan also writes a good description of her entire career:

So artists dip into a deep but circumscribed pool,
fishing for something new
but sometimes finding
(still dripping with beauty)
the indelible, unknowable familiar. ("Flora" I 50)

But the best news is that she never grew too old to write. For her last collection Insomnia, she wrote

I string words together
wherever I am
in planes, in waiting rooms,

forcing the actual to sink
and disappear
beneath the bright
and shimmering surface
of the half-imagined.

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]

On Holy Saturday, Poems of Remembrance by Dana Gioia

Good Friday at St. James Marietta, image by Android from a photo by choir director Bryan Black.

It's fitting that a cold steady rain falls in Atlanta on this day of the church's ancient calendar, a time of mourning Christ's death before the Easter morning. Also fitting is the set of poems I happened upon today when I turned the page to Part III of Dana Gioia's 99 Poems, called "Remembrance."

Gioia gives the section its own dedication "To the memory of my first son" with the boy's name and this phrase, Briefest of joys, our life together. That, and the day, primed me to receive all of the poems in this section as ones to cherish.

To the keeper of the small gate who is both jeweller of the spider-web and blade of lightning harvesting the sky -- a thrilling allusion to the Grim Reaper -- Gioia writes this "Prayer": I will see you soon enough...but until then I pray, watch over him as a falcon over its flightless young. Gioia's free translation of "The Song" by Maria Rilke includes the phrase from the dedication and this amazing thought, that all that ever touched us -- you and me -- touched us together like a bow / that from two strings could draw one voice. Gioia comes at grief obliquely and all the more strongly for it in poems about a March blizzard and about myths where humans escaped the whims of gods by metaphorphoses.

In some of the poems, grief is expressed as liturgy, and sometimes in what I would call a sacramental rite -- outward and visible signs of an invisible reality. Gioia tells us of a Sicilian tradition that a father plants a tree in thanksgiving for a first son. But in "Planting a Sequoia" the poet and his brother bury a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord with the roots of the tree which he hopes will stand long past his own life. In "Pentecost," the grieving father tells the grieving mother, amid their sleepless nights and the morning's ache for dream's illusion that We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.... "Litany" is a prayer to unbelief / to candles guttering and darkness undivided, / to incense drifting into emptiness.

Few of the poems relate explicitly to the boy in the dedication, and many of the poems honor others. "Night Watch" remembers an uncle, merchant marine, so much of his life passing between continents. At "The Veterans' Cemetery" The afternoon's a single thread of light / sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow. A short poem observes So much of what we live goes on inside and our tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. Gioia imagines what he would write to long-gone loved ones in "Finding a Box of Family Letters."

There's a startling moment when he shares haunting and touching memories of terminally ill children and their parents from "Special Treatments Ward." He was there with another son. There, the doctors are like "oracles" who pass in and out. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. Then Gioia tells the reader directly that he put this poem aside for 12 years because he wanted not to remember: I'd lost one child and couldn't bear to watch another die. But he's haunted by the ones he left behind when his son recovered.

He reaches accommodation with his feelings in "Majority." Having observed milestones reached by boys born the same year as his first son, he recognizes at 21 years that it's time for the son to move on.

I'm so glad that I discovered this set of poems today when I needed it.

Atlanta's Stone Mountain Bike Trail

Weather's been warm and dry enough to return with my bike to the Stone Mountain Trail. From the Martin Luther King Historic site, including one ring around the mountain, that's 38 miles round trip. There's a variety of neighborhoods, terrain, and sights. (See map at PATHfoundation.org)

In 14 years, I've seen a lot of development and improvements to the pavement, but there's a lot I've not seen. I realized that last week when I needed a bandaid. I took a detour at a light in Clarkston and pedaled over a ridge. Like Dorothy seeing the Emerald City, I was amazed by a vast marketplace, just out of sight all these years.   Dozens of shops cater to Clarkston's wildly diverse population of refugees who've settled there ever since the town welcomed Vietnamese "boat people" in the 70s. Families strolled past in distinctive dress, none speaking English, no families speaking the same language, and all of them smiling and bantering with each other. 

A couple of pieces on my poetry blog First Verse celebrate the trail. When I ride now, I remember Atlanta, Sunrise Saturday and smile at the sights I describe when I pass the sites I describe. A sunny day's ride and the live-streaming of a funeral come together better than I might have expected in Eulogy.

[IMAGE: Android turned a prosaic selfie into a lesson in drawing.  Stone Mountain is highlighted in the background.]

Vienna after Midnight: Virtual Bike Tour Continues

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Scott Smoot at Vienna's State Opera House, virtually, with the ghost of its former director.

Sometime after midnight, my friend Mark Millkey put Mahler's Titan Symphony on his record player and asked me to be patient: "This composer's a little long-winded." I had time, although it was a week night, because Mom had lifted my curfew for the last quarter of high school.

Mark and I had passed the hours after class talking literature, faith, and music. Now he let me discover for myself that Mahler's solemn funeral march was a nursery tune, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? ("are you sleeping, Brother John?"). I got the gallows humor.

That's what makes Vienna one of "the places I've lived or loved," enough so that I've covered 184 miles on bike trails around Atlanta just to make the side trip from Salzburg. Mahler conducted there, Mark visited there, and, driving home that night around 2:30 am, I felt that I, at 17, had reached the pinnacle of maturity and spiritual depth.

To the extent that I really had grown up, Mark had a lot to do with it.  Being so modest, he probably didn't know it. Freshman year, he'd been just a regular guy. After straining his voice in his job at a summer camp, Mark couldn't speak during our sophomore year. Abstaining from gossip and chatter, he learned to listen. He became a model of empathy and tact. When Mark could speak again, he asked about things that mattered; he was everyone's best friend and confidant.

Many of us were evangelicals; he was our only Roman Catholic. When he expressed mild amusement about a prayer he'd heard, "Lord, just tell me, can I run a stop sign at a deserted intersection?" (something I, too, was torn up about), I took a new look at my belief system. We joined Mark for Christmas at the church designed by Mark's late father, architect Herbert Millkey, where the priest fed us in the rectory after midnight Mass. Another Christmas, as Mark and I exchanged wrapped gifts, we knew by heft we'd both received the collected letters of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. I ended up much closer in outlook to Mark and Flannery than to the Moral Majority.

I was honored when Mark invited me with Joe A. and Matt H. to hike the north Georgia mountains for three days in the week after AP exams. Because of heavy rain, we pushed hard to finish in half that time; when tempers flared, Mark made peace. As Flannery wrote in a story, "I'm glad I've went once; I ain't never goin' again."

I used Mark's story to teach generations of middle schoolers about asking questions and really listening to the answers. At my best, I'm still emulating him. And I still love Mahler.

Miles YTD 458 || 2nd World Tour Total 13,993 beginning June 2020 || Next Stop: Warsaw

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"Lightning Strike" and "Fox Creek": W. K. Krueger's Series 18 and 19

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Fox River

A man hires part-time detective Cork O'Connor to find his beautiful wife Dolores who ran off with a lover. So far, so noir, author William Kent Krueger channeling Chandler. It's so classic, it's a stereotype. Then we learn the identity of The Other Man. I laughed out loud.

Still, Fox Creek is full of suspense, ordeals, and moral dilemmas. As Krueger himself notes in an interview at the back of my signed hardback edition, beloved characters of the series have suffered and died. Because we can't assume they'll be okay, he can generate some genuine suspense.

But among the great joys of this series is the building up of community around Cork. His friends and family are all involved in the search for Dolores, even after Cork's wife Rainy and mentor Henry Meloux become targets. His son Stephen, whom longtime fans remember as a vulnerable little boy, now shares with his father the responsibility of being an action hero. It's a delight to see Stephen fall in love with a suitably courageous and smart woman named Belle who seems to feel the same about him.

We find another joy on the border between standard detective novel and wilderness adventure, as the action crosses from Cork's small Minnesota town into Canada.

As always, Krueger also explores the boundary between the material world and spirituality, whether that's Ojibwe or Christian. Stephen's vision and the wisdom of Henry figure in the story.

While Henry leads Dolores and Rainy through woods he's known 100 years, he misleads a tribal hunter working for the bad guys. Through the hunt, Henry and the hunter known as LeLoux ("the Wolf") come to respect each other. Their relationship becomes the heart of the novel long before they ever meet.

Lightning Strike

The book before that is Lightning Strike, set in the summer of Cork's 12th year. With two buddies, he discovers the body of a revered Indian man hanging in a secluded spot where the friends like to camp and canoe. Cork's father Liam, the town's sheriff, investigates. The death at first seems to be a suicide, then a murder staged to look like suicide. The victim's Indian half-brother is implicated, but so is the town's white millionaire. No matter which way the evidence takes Liam, he's making enemies.

To see the father-son relationship with Cork in the child's place is instantly rich with resonances to the other books and rewarding. Many of my favorite moments happen when Cork slips out of his bedroom onto the roof of the porch where he can think -- and sometimes hear his parents' low voices when they discuss the crime and their parenting of him.

While the setting is 1963, the novel resonates with the upheaval and uncertainty of the year of its copyright, 2020. Liam is a white cop, married to an Ojibwe woman, hearing anger and mistrust from both the reservation and the white townspeople. Young Cork feels afraid: "The world seemed to be changing in front of his eyes, and he couldn't figure out if it was him -- that he'd simply been blind before -- or if the world was, indeed, shifting, becoming unstable under his feet" (207). Later, he confesses to his mom, "Everthing's different. It all feels broken. Here and on the rez" (271). I know that feeling. His mother has no answers.

Henry Meloux does. 50 years before he's the elder we know, he's already wise. "Nothing is broken," he tells young Cork. "It is just that we see only in part" (272). Again, "Fear is not a bad thing in itself....It is what we do with our fear that matters."

Cork does some investigation on his own, and takes his buddies out to the wilderness to snoop around. The action ramps up fast.

There's a theme of empathy, here. Cork imagines the last minutes in the life of a tribal girl who drowned and understands in a flash of insight what really happened. He feels it deeply: "She'd been just a victim before. Now, she was a person and Cork felt a genuine sorrow, one he wanted to talk about but could not" (350). Liam is chagrined to see himself as his son must see him. "Even to himself he looked like a stranger, a man who could frighten children" (256). He goes to talk to his son, but Cork's asleep, and the father keeps his feelings to himself.

No spoiler alert, needed, here: Longtime fans know from the 10th book Vermilion Drift that Liam O'Connor will die estranged from his son later that summer. That subtext adds emotional substance to the entire novel.

[Find a list of links to my appreciations of other Krueger novels on my Crime Fiction page]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.

New Poems at "First Verse"

At my blog First Verse, I've posted six new poems since Christmas, with images by Susan Rouse.

• On Track| Literally, the first thing I remember; allegorically, the rest of my life.
• Expiration Date| The apocalypse, at a Publix.
• We Thank You for the Gift of Water| Puppies are involved.
• Conspiracy Theory| The great balloon panic of 2023.
• Day after Valentine's| Happy Singles Awareness Day.
• Bike, Snake| Spoiler alert: he wasn't hurt.

I hope you'll check these, and more, at First Verse. If you do, leave a comment. Feedback keeps me scratching away at my legal pad each morning.

The NEW New Music at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

The composer of a piece premiered by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Saturday night hadn't been born when minimalism was an audacious new music that inspired me to want to compose. [See my page The Minimalist Zone.] Curiosity about the new new music drew me to Woodruff Arts Center for the first time since the pandemic.

Jerry Hou conducted with joy and shared evident rapport with his players. During bows, he ran among them to draw attention to soloists and sections.

Hou, center; from top left: Tower, Montgomery, Bartok, Pratt

This was the premiere for Rounds, a piece for piano and strings by young composer Jamie Montgomery. Her program note alerted us that the form was a rondo, and that the first movement was a rondo within a rondo -- hence the title, a translation of "Rondos." But we also heard material played by the pianist echoed by the strings in the manner of what in English we call a round.

Piano soloist Awadagin Pratt and I are 20 years older than when I saw him play a recital at Georgia Tech. Back then he was a young lion with a thick mane of dredlocks. While he played, he snarled "Don't do that!" at a reporter snapping his picture and glared at the house when people applauded at inappropriate moments. He was a big guy who sat on a teeny little bench and raised his hands above his chest to reach the keyboard. Aside from the theatrics, he also made clear the middle voices of a Bach piece -- a revelation for me, and a miracle of technique, I thought.

He has mellowed. Saturday, he was professorial, with thinned hair, a gray beard, and smiles. The bench was only marginally lower than we're used to seeing. But he was sensitive as ever playing a cascade of notes tenderly one moment, beating block chords another.

The concert opened with 1920/2019 by eminent composer Joan Tower, commemorating women's right to vote and the #MeToo movement.

The new music, different as the pieces were, shared a few characteristics.

There was a great variety of textures and colors, from full ensemble sound to just a soloist or a duet, sections playing in tandem or going up against each other. Pratt startled us when he stood up to reach inside the piano to pluck and strum the strings.

Then, the composers played more with modules or gestures than with anything we could call a melody. Ascending scales in Tower's piece (not quite do-re-mi -- a couple of tones were augmented) weren't a tune but a suggestion of upward movement -- and a ceiling to break through. Montgomery gave the piano a spray of delicately arpeggiated notes (think "Rustles of Spring"), a lovely and quiet gesture that she slid up and down the keyboard and contrasted with harsh explosive chords.

Taking a long view, I think that the minimalists I loved had some influence on what I heard Saturday. Before them, the concert composer's pride was in their ingenuity developing and varying themes. Even 12-tone music was rigorously focused on what you do with a given sequence of notes. But the minimalists thinned out melody to just a module of two or three notes repeated over a pulse, drawing our attention instead to the processes of imitative counterpoint, gradually shifting harmony, and instrumental colors.

In Tower's piece, I heard the wood block's tok-tok-tok that John Adams patented in his big hit "Short Ride on a Fast Machine" ca. 1986; the repetition of a single bass note was a feature throughout the movements of her piece, sometimes slow and regular, sometimes fast, whether puffed, plucked, or pounded. Whatever the composers might say about minimalism, they would surely agree that their pieces are not about melody.

After their pieces, I picked up some of the same qualities in Bartok. In the five movements of his concerto, I recognize several gestures that make a strong impression every time we hear them. They're repeated, imitated, varied a little, but none is a tune you could hum for more than a couple of bars -- except the annoying one by Shostakovitch (or maybe Lehar) that Bartok ends with a fart from the low brass. The colors and the contrasts take me by surprise even now, more than 40 years after I first fell in love with it through an LP.

It was a joyous welcome back. The hall was nearly full, with an audience diverse in age, ethnicity, and dress. I saw a lot of young couples. All appeared to be enthusiastic. Keep the tradition alive, people, and keep the new music coming.

My Role in "The Sound of Music"

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Scott Smoot with bike in the Austrian Alps, virtually

In 1966, Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack took me and my cousins to an ornate movie theatre in downtown Cincinnati for the gala premiere of The Sound of Music: a dress-up affair, with a glossy souvenir program. I didn't know nuns from Nazis, but I saw my family on the screen, and I was pretty sure that Julie Andrews was my mom.

I bring this up now because my virtual bike tour of "places I've lived or loved" has taken me to the site where the film was made. Since January 5, I've covered 277 miles, riding bike trails around Atlanta when the weather was good, and swimming indoors when it was not. On a map of the world, that distance takes me from Venice to Salzburg.

My relationship to Julie Andrews had begun with Mary Poppins the year before. That movie about children whose father is distracted by work resonated with me, as our dad was away on business so often. Their magic nanny, being close to Mom in age, hairstyle, build, and bearing, was practically my mother in every way.

The Von Trapp manor in Salzburg was the same as the palatial home of my aunt and uncle in all things that mattered to me. Curved staircase sweeping up from marble tile? Check. French doors opening to a terrace that looks out to rolling green hills? Check. A gazebo in a sculpted garden? Gazebo, no, but sculpted garden, check.

"A captain with seven children?" Eight, and more: Aunt Blanche and her sister Shirley raised their large families in homes side-by-side on a vast campus. During the summers, I was one of them. My siblings and I stayed with our grandmother, but when she had work selling real estate, she left us with Blanche. 

My awe-inspiring Uncle Jack would arrive home for dinner dressed in boots and jodhpurs, riding crop in hand, having worked out his horse -- just like Captain Von Trapp.

My family's relationship to Julie Andrews' movies was all very clear to me, except for the fact that Aunt Blanche was both the tomboy governess and the magic nanny. Blanche took us and my younger cousins to ride horses, to canoe, and to bicycle to the next town for ice cream. Often with Aunt Shirley, Blanche took us to magical places: movie theatres, live theatre, the Queen City Tour, the planetarium, fireworks, horse shows, amusement parks, and the first game played at Riverfront Stadium. Though I saw Blanche usually in company with little kids, teenagers, adult friends, and old people, she always made me feel special. She treated me as an adult.

I learned to ride a bike in Blanche's driveway and to swim in Shirley's pool.

I am grateful for these grown ups I grew up with, and for Julie Andrews.

[See memorial tributes to Uncle Jack, Aunt Blanche, and Dad. I remember my Cincinnati grandmother in an article Thelma Craig Maier and a poem Wingtips. My mother's story continues; see the latest portrait Mom's World and more at Dementia Diary. For photos and stories of other grown ups I grew up with, see the curated list of links at my page Family Corner. ]

←← | ← ||→ Use arrows to follow the entire tour from the beginning.

1000th Blog Post: Mom's World

Among my first blogposts in April 2006 was Shrink Age in regard to poets who wrote about the diminished worlds of their aging loved ones. I didn't know then how much their words would inform my experience for the next 16 years.

At that time, Mom's world was The World. She and Dad crossed oceans on jets and ships; they trained for 5K competitions; they got involved in the church and politics.

During a recent walk in the park outside of the memory care facility with Mom and her caregiver Laura, I took a photo that my phone app transformed into the painting below. I call it Mom's World after Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth's portrait of a disabled neighbor looking towards home. (I've known that painting 50 years and never had noticed the wheelchair in the distance.)

In the image, I see how Mom still wants to appear at her best. Laura helps her with lipstick, earrings, and painted nails. The waves in Mom's hair and the white stripes of that cute top go with the white waves laid in strips over the blue sky.

Mom's reserved smile shows amusement and judgment withheld. She laughs to hear that the staff refer to her as "the Queen." She walks when a physical therapist helps her to remember how, but she's ok now with her wheelchair.

The impressionistic scenery matches Mom's vague impression that her childhood home is in those hills. She doesn't remember what that place was (Cincinnati), but she likes to look through photos of places and people she used to know and to listen as we tell her about them.

We've made it past the years of frustration when her world was too big for her to manage -- when she placed calendars and clocks in every room and stuck memos on every surface to tell her what she thought she needed to remember.

For now, we're in a sweet spot, when the past is far off and she doesn't look beyond the frame of her present moment. What we see in this image is her world, just the right size.

[See more of Mom's story at my page Dementia Diary.]

Boomers for Bacharach

Nostalgia is the first reason for me and my fellow Boomers to like the music of Burt Bacharach, who died this month at 94.

With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote songs that we learned from our parents' radios and 8-track tape decks, including Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, Close to You, What Do You Get When You Fall in Love? and my dad's favorite, What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love). Like lava lamps and floral prints on plastic cushions, those songs are part of a Boomer's mental furniture. Like those fashions, Bacharach's blend of soft rock percussion with brass and strings gave our parents a way to stay "with it," to be "cool." It didn't work, but, B+ for effort. When I hear any of his songs, I think fondly of Mom and Dad in their prime.

Then, in my teens and early adulthood, Bacharach's advanced musical vocabulary was what I liked. I displayed my musical knowledge by commenting on Bacharach's complex harmony, mixed meters, and odd song structures. When I played Bacharach's song Promises, Promises on the piano, I pounded its dissonant chords in shifting time signatures of 3/4, 4/4, 3/8, and 4/8 to show off my musical machismo -- which, I admit, was the only machismo I had.

But I learned how to appreciate Bacharach's expressiveness over impressiveness. Bacharach told interviewer Terri Gross that he set phrases the way they made sense to him; he never realized he was changing meters in a song until he notated it. So the character in the Broadway show Promises, Promises spits out the title phrase in 6/8, disgusted by the sleazy promises he's made; when he imagines life free of moral compromises, the meter shifts for expansive declarations: I can live with myself and be proud - I laugh out loud!.

In another song for that show, Hal David wrote, Go while the going is good. / Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn. / Go! On the second phrase, Bacharach spikes the melody up an octave on the -ing of knowing and sets all the following syllables on fast notes, all one pitch, like the hammering of an alarm bell: ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Then that single syllable Go! swells like a siren for a full measure. The music conveys the urgency that the lyrics express.

The song "This Guy's in Love with You," without hook or bridge, consists of just two verses and a tag line, a structure both unusual and very effective. Read the opening phrases aloud and you've got the basic rhythm for the whole song, a slow shuffle: You see this guy? This guy's in love with you. We hear the tune played on a muted trumpet before we hear the words, with just a piano for accompaniment. The singer asks the person he loves, Who looks at you the way I do? By the end of the second verse, evidently not getting a straight answer, "this guy" is breaking down: My hands are shaking; don't let my heart be breaking.

Up to this point, Bacharach has kept a full orchestra in reserve. The strings and winds come in forte when the singer opens up, I need your love, I want your love. Same pitches as the opening phrase, same rhythm, but so different now. Bacharach expands the phrase in two more lines: Say you're in love / in love with this guy. At peak volume, the orchestra plays chords in triplet and stops. After a pause, the singer finishes softly, If not, I'll just die. The trumpet and piano repeat the intro, the musical equivalent of shuffling sadly away.

I don't remember caring about that song before Vic Bolton, a tenor in our high school chorus, sang it for our concert. I wanted to cry.

Bacharach once said his own favorite was his title song for the 1966 movie Alfie, because he liked the message. You don't have to see the movie to gather from Hal David's lyric that Alfie is a cynic who believes it's just for the moment, we [should] take more than we give, and life is for the strong. The song is an intervention, as the singer challenges Alfie's worldview and then offers an alternative. The song tickles my nostalgia for the 1960s when philosophers, poets, and theologians were part of our popular culture, along with their discussions of existentialism, "Is God Dead?" and the absurdity of life. I like the message too.

But I also like the way Bacharach's music expresses that message. Bacharach sets the syllables of the name "Alfie" on a rising fifth, like a fanfare (e.g. the Star Wars theme), perfect for the name of a cocky character. But Bacharach undercuts that confident sound with dissonant intervals (m6, M7, m2) in lines intended to discomfort Alfie, such as, if only fools are kind, Alfie / then I guess it is wise to be cruel. Two verses follow that pattern before Hal David's words shift towards the singer's creed, one that even unbelievers can believe in. The vocal lines for that part climb up and down wide intervals over shifting chords. When the singer settles back into the notes of the opening line, it's a sunny declaration emerging from clouds:

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love, we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie..

A recording of Alfie by Cleo Laine made this my favorite of all Bacharach's songs. It's on her 1983 album That Old Feeling. She's a virtuoso musician and an actress, and she brings out every nuance in the words as she navigates the twists and jumps in Bacharach's music. The song was recorded in her living room with simple piano accompaniment, making her quiet rendition almost uncomfortably intimate. (See my reflections on Cleo.)

About Bacharach's later work, I'm agnostic. I liked his theme from the 1981 movie Arthur, and I enjoy an album of Bacharach songs played by jazz pianist McCoy Tyner with trio and full orchestra. I bought that because I'd heard Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach talk on the radio about new songs they had written together. I've downloaded those, but they're hard for me to appreciate because -- well, I prefer Costello's talking.

[I first admired Stephen Sondheim for the difficulty of his music. Read about how his music is hard to sing, and why that's a good thing, in my blogpost from 06/2015.]

Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount: Providing Context

Our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon [see photo, from blessing of the animals] has preached on parts of the Sermon on the Mount during the last month, bringing new light from Jewish tradition on familiar sayings of Jesus.

When Fr. Daron shows how Matthew draws parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of the tribes of Israel, the sermon on the mount becomes more than just a moral teaching. The pharaoh's slaughter of infant boys, the flight of young Moses out of Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, and the crossing of the Jordan parallel the birth of Jesus, the sojourn in Egypt, the 40 days in the wilderness, and the baptism by John. So when Matthew writes that Jesus went up on the mountain, we should be thinking of Moses; and the sermon on the mount parallels the giving of the Law.

Fr. Daron explained a puzzling little phrase in Matthew: "Jesus opened his mouth and spoke." Why not "Jesus spoke?" How else could Jesus speak except by opening his mouth? But when Moses met God at Sinai face to face, the Hebrew expression for that is "mouth to mouth." Ah HA!

Like the first four commandments, the first beatitudes concern our spiritual relationship to God. The latter commandments and beatitudes guide our relationships to others. Fr. Daron stresses that the word translated as "righteousness" connotes "justice," so it's not about our own obedience to the law, but about seeking social justice. Fr. Daron challenged us to think on one beatitude a week.

Today, Fr. Daron took up the part of the sermon where Jesus couples what you have heard it said with but I say to you. You have heard it said, do not kill; but I say to you that you have committed murder if you bear hatred in your heart. Ditto fornication and lust, divorce and adultery, oaths and dishonesty -- a person's honesty should be known from his way of living, not dependent on an oath. The Pharisees' strict compliance with the law wasn't strict enough because it falls far short of fulfilling God's purpose, which was to change our hearts (cf. Isaiah and Amos).

The Pharisees had a question, Fr. Daron said. When the original temple was built in the time of Solomon, we read that the Lord's presence descended and filled the temple. Nothing like that happened when the temple was rebuilt after the Jews' exile in Babylon, in the time of Ezra and Nehemia, about 500 years before Jesus. Why had the glory of the Lord not descended on the temple again?

The Pharisees concluded from numerous scriptures that God would come down only when His people were obedient. So the Pharisees enforced obedience, and hedged the law with even more laws so that no one came even close to breaking a commandment. This would bring God down to expel the Romans and restore the Davidic line of kings. Jesus undercut their authority and their whole mission: no wonder they wanted him to die.

When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law, he meant literally, fill it to the brim. It's not about what we don't do. Every day that you don't kill someone or don't commit adultery, you have NOT necessarily fulfilled God's will. We are to move beyond anger, respect women, and live with integrity. It was never about getting to heaven when you die, but about how we live now.

[See an appreciation of Fr. Daron and a decade of his sermons at More than Skin Deep: The First Ten Years (10/2022)]

Living a Life that Matters: Rabbi Kushner on Jacob

Harold S. Kushner

Some days ago, I uncovered two unread books in my basement, Listening to Midlife and Living a Life that Matters. Too late for those, I guess. I wasn't yet 50 when I bought them at a long-gone local bookstore almost 15 years ago.

Yet Living a Life that Matters by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner still resonates. I'm especially drawn to what Kushner sees in the story of Jacob in Genesis.

Kushner compares Jacob's story to a play in three acts: boy, suitor, and patriarch. The arc of the play is implied by the character's name change. Jacob, his name in youth, relates to Hebrew akav "crookedness," while the name he later earns, Israel ("he wrestles with God") relates to yashar "straight."

In the story, Jacob masquerades as his brother Esau to trick their father into passing his legacy on to him instead of Esau, his firstborn son. Kushner speculates that it's deeper than that: Jacob wants the strength and boldness of Esau; he feels incomplete. (22)

Kushner observes that, lacking curtains or chapter headings, the ancient text marks transitions from one act to the next with dream-like epiphanies in the night, a ladder to heaven and an all-night wrestling match with an unnamed being. The first of these happens at the end of the day when Jacob fled his home where Esau has sworn to kill him. Ashamed and afraid, Jacob envisions a bridge between earth and heaven. Kushner says this image gives Jacob hope that he can reach higher (21). That night Jacob bargains with God: for divine help, he will give God a tithe of his earnings.

In the second act, he is the first (the only?) character in the Bible who falls in love. Others take wives, are given wives, coming to appreciate them later, but for Jacob and Rebekah, it's love at first sight. Rebekah's father tricks Jacob as badly as Jacob tricked Isaac, fooling Jacob into marrying the less lively older sister Leah. We're told that Jacob hated Leah. Kushner speculates that she was always a living reminder of Jacob's own malfeasance. Jacob has to wait 14 years to consummate his love for Rebekah. He builds a family and wealth, and readies himself for a return to Esau.

[My poem Angels Never Know grows from Jacob's story.]

In the second transition between acts, Jacob has sent his family ahead. We're told that Jacob was alone. But then he's wrestling with someone who doesn't give a name. Who is it? I've heard it's God, it's an angel, it's a devil, it's a spirit of the place. Kushner thinks it's Jacob's own self, equally strong, equally adept. Jacob's fighting his own fear; Kushner says he's fighting his own impulse to use some underhanded way to avoid meeting Esau face to face. Jacob's injured, but survives, a lesson to take away, that he doesn't have to be afraid. Again, Jacob prays, but this time he does not bargain with God but requests strength to do the right thing (31).

Across the three acts, Kushner sees Jacob moving from amorality and selfish ambition, shame being the only sin, to a morality of integrity, in which the primary sin is to fail to live up to your ideals (21). Kushner tells us the scripture calls him "shalem, whole, united within himself" (107). He lives the rest of his life raising the brothers who will constitute the nation of Israel, and he carries his love for Rebekah to the end.

What does Jacob's story have to do with Kushner's readers leading lives that matter? Kushner's chapter following his analysis of the Jacob story is titled "Family and Friends: We are Who We Love." Essentially, it's what I've known for years, said simply in a lyric by Comden and Green, Make someone happy / make just one someone happy / and you will be happy, too (see blogpost of 11/2006). Kushner tugs at my heart when he refers to adolescents, himself included, who were "redeemed from self-doubt" by a parent or teacher who let them know what Jacob's first dream told him: you are someone who will matter. Kushner steps out from behind his screen of authority to tell of his son killed in middle school by a rare genetic disorder, whose classmates years later cited him again and again as their inspiration and a shaping influence on their lives.

Kushner's message resonates with what I believe as a Christian: We cannot bring the Messiah down to solve the world's problems, but we can bring the Messiah down for someone else.

[Harold S. Kushner. Living a Life that Matters. (New York: Knopf, 2001.)]

Finding Allies at "Desolation Mountain" : Cork O'Connor Series #17

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A plane carrying a Senator crashes at Desolation Mountain in William Kent Krueger's novel of that name, 17th of his series featuring detective Cork O'Connor. The crash is a partial fulfillment of a vision that has kept the young man Stephen O'Connor awake, in which he sees an eagle with red-white-and-blue tail shot out of the sky by an arrow. But, then, why does he continue to have the vision after the incident? And what is the presence Stephen senses behind him in the vision, so monstrous that he's afraid to turn and see it?

From that beginning, this story has a strong downward tug into chaos and malevolence. The little Minnesota town of Aurora is overwhelmed with investigators from a half-dozen federal agencies. Good people disappear, and (sad to say) dogs die. There are white nationalist vigilantes and also a para-military group commanded by Gerard, whose allegiance we don't know. Even Cork's adopted grandson Waaboo (Ojibwe "little rabbit") is troubled by a vision of a many-headed monster.

But there's an equally strong tug upwards towards light, even lightness. Cork's grown children are inured to threats and know how to fight back. From the families of everyone who disappears, Cork picks up an array of allies who grow into their roles as ad hoc crimefighters. Cork's old friend Bo Sorenson joins the team. As always in this series, there's also Henry Meloux, a mide or "healer" now over 100 years old, whose hermitage swells with visitors as de facto HQ for the good guys.

The most thrilling part of the story is also slapstick funny. Cork assigns his son to take their least-favorite Ojibwe relative to a safe place. Beulah, a product of the Federal government's efforts to expunge Indian culture out of Ojibwe children, is a Christian of the sour judgmental kind, innocent of both wilderness and physical exertion. It's already funny to see her in a canary-yellow helmet bundled into Stephen's ATV clutching the safety bar; when the bad guys force them off-road, it's fun to see that Stephen -- formerly a frail and needy little boy -- is now an Ojibwe action hero saddled with this prim and panicked sidekick. (Think African Queen.)

Stephen also reaches out to Winston Harmon, a "willowy" young teen of Ojibwe descent, an artist in whom Stephen sees some of his own sensitive nature.

I laughed and, yes, I cried. Great addition to a great series. I'm half way through Lightning Strike; the one after that is still in hardback. Don't look behind, Mr. Krueger: I'm catching up.

[Links to my reflections on other Krueger novels are listed at my Crime Fiction page ]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.

Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry

Never get used to this begins Derek Walcott in a poem from The Bounty (1997). That could mean, "Wow, I never do get used to this" or, "Note to Self: never allow yourself to get used to this!" Walcott always means both/and not either/or.

This in context means both sunrise over the ocean viewed from the Caribbean island St. Lucia, where he was born, and the craft by which he explored that ocean -- craft meaning both a boat such as the one he sees on the horizon and the craft of writing poetry. Though he feels his gift fading out of this page and gently mocks the poetry of his younger self -- what did it know of death? Only what you had read of it -- he is grateful. He plays with phrases from Roman Catholic practice, the Ave Maria when he replaces ocean "waves" with Aves, the rosary in regard to the surf fingering its beads, and "Hail Mary full of grace" with hail heron and gull full of grace. Joking aside, he tells himself that he has come to his end praising and giving thanks. By the end of the poem, he's thinking of the same seascape at night, and the yachts studying their reflections in the water like black glass -- which suggests both literal boats and a peripatetic Nobel-prize-winner pondering his life.

This poem set off fireworks in the margins of my copy from Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., 2007), where my pen made arcs, stars, and circles to mark all those both/ands and other features: the stately iambic pace; rhymes and other wordplay; his painter's eye for visual details; healthy self-deprecation; the horizon where, in numerous poems, he sees both his home when he's away and the world beyond when he's home; and gratitude that toes the edge of faith but never wades in. I wrote a note on the back flap that this one poem encapsulates what I've learned to enjoy in all of Walcott's work.

I wrote the same note about a dozen more of his poems, at least. In all my notes, I've been telling myself Never get used to -- and never forget:

• His visit to Arkansas, ca. 1986. Walking before sunrise from his hotel past a Confederate memorial, he is suddenly aware that police nearby would likely take interest in a large black man out at that hour. In the silence that falls when he enters the diner, A fork clicks / on its plate; a cough's rifle shot / shivers the chandeliered room. The allusions to a rifle and trigger bring an overtone of violence into a mundane scene, typical of how Walcott regularly layers metaphorical meaning over literal details. ("Arkansas Testament" 203)
• A belfry like the exclamation point at the end of a Swiss village (from The Prodigal 289)
• A hotel worker in Rome who also embodies Rome in herself:

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs. (from Midsummer, II, 174)

• Coming home from the beach with his twin brother used to be such a thing! he remembers in The Prodigal (295): The body would be singing / with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin and iced water was a gasping benediction
• A walk up a hill to a baptism at an Episcopal church in Laventile, Trinidad in a 1965 poem is also a journey through class and time. To go downhill from here, he writes, is to ascend in socio-economic class. Thinking of the Middle Passage through which all their ancestors arrived here, Walcott sees that the poor there are still clamped below their hatch, / breeding like felonies / whose lives revolve around prison, graveyard, church. Walcott mocks the pretensions of the Episcopalians who have given themselves whole-heartedly to the rites and ways of their old colonial overlords.
• The comedy of a middle-aged poet, world traveller, jostled on public transport by working-class people from the neighborhood where he grew up. He admires the beautiful young woman across the aisle as if he were painting her, calling her the light of the world. After a basket-laden old woman on the street yells at the driver, Pas quittez moi a terre, literally, don't leave me on this earth, Walcott rings changes on her phrase to the point of feeling guilty for having abandoned his people on this earth. Ready to weep, he exits the bus at his luxury hotel, only to be given another light in an act of kindness by the driver. ("The Light of the World" 184)
• Gentle assurance from beyond the grave to a family grieving for a child

  I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

  snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle
  of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

  dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces
  howling like statues, you call a goodbye

  is--I wish you would listen to me--a different welcome... ("For Adrian" 196).

Allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after Walcott's death in 2017. I'm not surprised: I don't sense that he took women seriously. Except for Walcott's mother, women do not have a voice in the poems I've read. They are described by their attractive parts. In contrast, Walcott writes long poems dedicated to his male friends, including Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, in which he focuses on their writing, their ideas, their conversations, their virtues. Even Walcott's numerous wives are mentioned only with passing regret for his not caring enough for them.

So, like many poets, he may not have lived up to his best work. I know little about Walcott beyond what's in the verses. Some of those got too specialized for me -- I couldn't make headway through Omeros, his Nobel-prize winning transposition of the Odyssey to the Caribbean of his childhood. Tiepelo's Hound, which is both a biography of a Renaissance painter and a memoir of his own artistic development, has great moments, but reading it was like solving a puzzle.

Even so, his precise language and rich layering of metaphor on reality serve largely to express praise and gratitude. As Robert Frost said about poetry in general, reading the poetry of Derek Walcott "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

Trust No One in "Sulfur Springs," Cork O'Connor Series #16

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To keep his crime series fresh, author William Kent Krueger takes his detective Cork O'Connor somewhere new around every five novels. In other books, we've come to know Cork, his growing family, and his hometown of Aurora on the edge of the Ojibwe reservation. He's spent some time in Chicago, mountains out west, and north of the Canada border. But Krueger sometimes takes us deep into communities far from Aurora in Copper River (#6 in the series), in Northwest Angle (#11) and in one I've read most recently, Sulfur Springs (#16).

The precipitating action is a phone message to Rainy Bisonette, longtime lover of Cork, now his wife. Her son Peter out in Arizona leaves a garbled message through heavy static about someone named "Rodriguez," that he has "killed him," and "they'll be looking for me." He doesn't return urgent calls from his mother and Cork, so they board a plane for Arizona.

The town of Sulfur Springs is Aurora's opposite: oppressively hot and arid, on edge because of drug trade and illegal migration from the southern border. Nearly everyone who speaks to Cork tells him to "trust no one but family" in Sulfur Springs. Trust and doubt color the entire novel, leaving no one untouched, not even Rainy, whose previous marriage to a drug lord named Mondragon is news to Cork. Still, Krueger gives us rich description to show the beauty and danger of nature in this unfamiliar setting.

In this novel, Krueger develops further the theme of the ogichidaa, an Ojibwe word for the kind of person Cork is, a "guardian" for his people. Rainy's son Peter turns out to be one of these, a leader who is safeguarding migrants from both a rapacious drug gang and a racist vigilante group. Watching the relationship develop between Cork and Peter is a highlight of the novel, especially when Peter is involved in a confrontation between his natural father and his adopted one. When Cork tells him he's a part of Cork's life, now, Peter asks, "Like family?" "No, not like. Family." (276)

I come away from the novel with impressions of two strong scenes that parallel each other. In both scenes, Cork, Rainy, and her ex face a young man involved in the drug trade. In the second instance, it's the son of drug lord Rodriguez, a privileged young man shielded from consequences until the moment that Cork gets the drop on him. At the earlier instance, the young man is younger than 20, shares the name Pedro with Rainy's son, and sobs when Mondragon orders him shot. Rainy intervenes, and Cork tells us

I saw what Rainy saw, a kid way over his head in something that he regretted now because of the present consequences but that, if he survived and grew wise, he might regret later for all the right reasons. (171)

Later, Cork reflects on how he has often tried not to think of his opponents as human beings, to shield himself emotionally when having to use deadly force.

But Pedro had had a profound impact on me. He wasn't much younger than my own son, Stephen. He'd come from a small village, and God knows how he'd gotten himself mixed up with people like the Rodriguezes. Maybe those [other gang members killed in a shootout] were no different.... Every child is born a clean sheet of possibility, and no mother dreams of her beautiful baby ending up dead in an alley or rotting in the black of a forgotten mine. (175)

Krueger has always orchestrated his stories to reach suspenseful high-impact showdowns. This is no exception.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

←← | ← || → Use arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.

Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" Nov-Dec 2022 | Jan 2023

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

November 2022
English teacher Todd Hague of Tyler, TX began his meditations on All Saints Day with the confession that he experienced a lot of suffering in the preceding 12 months. With that in mind, I was drawn to comfort he finds in harsh sayings:

• The raging seas that cover the earth symbolize chaos in Sirach 43.23, but "the Lord places islands in it." Hague says friends and church can be "islands" in our lives.
• "Sometimes guilt is like a physical malady," Hague writes, and the nightmares in Revelation can help us stay awake (Rev 16.15) to "keep watch over our thoughts, intentions, and actions."
• Anyone unwilling to work should not eat is tough love from Paul (2 Thess 3.10-11) also proclaimed to the upper-class idlers at Jamestown. (For middle schoolers, I called it "the thesis sentence for America.") Hague finds its spiritual application:"when fulfillment comes too easily, it sours...Empty pleasures that require nothing of us fail to feed us."
• When Paul seems harsh, Hague remembers that "much of Paul's ministry involved breaking through old centers of tribalism and traditions." Hague admits, "I have very little in common with many people in my congregation... But we kneel at the same communion rail and confess our sins to the same Christ."
• Zebedee was probably dismayed when his sons James and John left him in his fishing boat literally holding the bag: there went all of his expectations for the future. Hague asks, "What expectations can you let die so that you might live more fully in Christ?"
• Psalm 102.2-4 expresses misery, My days drift by like smoke, but Hague offers an image from cowboy author Louis L'amour's book of poetry Smoke from this Altar. A lone figure sits at a campfire under the stars, smoke rising. For L'amour, it's an image of prayer.

December 2022After a career in marketing and communications, Sallie Schisler was called to ministry in southern Ohio. What stands out for me in her meditations are practical ways to tame demons in our personal lives.

Schisler remembers "The Devil made me do it," a catch phrase for comedian Flip Wilson. But "no one's laughing" when Satan enters Judas, who then betrays Jesus. Rage is one reaction to betrayal, but Psalm 37.9, appointed for that same day, reminds us, "rage... leads only to evil." Schisler recommends we get help with our feelings of anger and "set small goals" for dealing with our sense of powerlessness. (I'd just had a financial setback; a small goal to save just $60 a week helped me to regain a sense of security.)

The small blossoms on a fig tree are signs of the coming of spring, Jesus observes. Schisler reminds us how our "smallest actions" can be signs of God's love for others.

In a couple of scriptures, Schisler simply warns us that these aren't just stories of the past.

• 2 Peter 2.19 people are slaves to whatever masters them goes with the scientific conclusion that we're "wired" for addiction. Schisler cites addictions to work, shopping, and various substances, and I recognize myself and people close to me in that list.
• We can't take comfort in the fact that Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents was long ago: "There are many ways to kill our children," Schisler cautions.

January 2023 Elis Lui is the youth minister at Christ Church in Bronxville NY. She finds messages that appeal to youth and retirees alike.

New things I now declare (Is 42.9) puts Lui in mind of the "quirks and different perspectives" her church members "bring to the shared table." We're not to pretend we don't see those differences, but are to allow love to supersede them. Likewise, Eph 4.9 gives us Paul imprisoned telling us that "captivity is captive." We can't pretend not to suffer, she says, but pain and loss do not have to "define our lives."

Rabbis gave Lui some insights. When God asks Cain what's happened to Abel, Cain answers sarcastically, "Am I my brother's keeper?" One Rabbi said that all of scripture and the rabbinic tradition can be summed up in God's unspoken response: Yes, you are your brother's keeper. Another Rabbi told her that we should carry two slips of paper with us at all times, a different message on each: the world was created for me and I am but ashes and dust. "Wisdom," he told her, "is learning when to read which slip of paper."

Lui tells how she suddenly heard familiar scriptures in new ways. God shall give you your heart's desires (Ps 37.4) sounded to her like a promise to give her stuff; with a shift in emphasis, it means that God will let her know what her heart truly desires. That saying by Jesus that only those who do God's will are his brother and sister and mother sounded like he's disowning his family; Lui takes it as an opening to imagine God the Father as also God the Mother, the Sister, the Brother -- and she challenges us to begin our prayers to God from those different angles.

Lui recounts times when disciples do not recognize Jesus until he makes a small word or gesture: walking on water unrecognized, he tells them not to be afraid; mistaken for the gardener, he simply says Mary's name; at Emmaus, he breaks the bread to share it. Lui concludes,

Where might you be overlooking Jesus in your life? Saint Benedict reminds us to welcome every stranger as Christ himself. At every turn, it is a small intimate action that only Jesus would know that reveals God to us: the breaking of bread with our community, the quiet reassurance to take heart even in times of trouble, the quiet whisper of our own name.

A line from Gal 4.9 about coming to know God [and] to be known by God recognizes that we are works in process. By coincidence, I read that just after I'd run across an analogy by crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (friend of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien), who sees similarity between God's relationship to us and her relationship to the characters in her novels: they exist solely by and through her, yet her intentions for them change as they develop through their stories. Lui writes a reassurance that must be especially welcome to adolescents, "God delights when we grow and change into more of who we were created to be."