Now Face West

Facing East

This is the tenth Father’s Day that has dawned for my children without their father here with them.  This year, they all are also separated from each other, occupying different spaces on two continents.

Seven years have passed since we brought his ashes to billow into an underwater cloud at Northern Ireland’s northernmost point.

And, strangely, it is just four years since my own father died on Father’s Day , after living to teach generations of students and be a grandfather to young adults.

I am a theoretical physicist’s daughter: I understand chaotic progression cannot be undone. But I can’t help feeling the world might seem a little less profoundly disordered were they here now.

Could Jim have averted this pandemic?  Perhaps not, but he surely would have seen it coming and calmly set in place and guided the communities around him to a reasoned response, adopting practices which would have saved lives, just as he did with earlier viruses which spread into human populations.  He took significant time out of his early career as a practitioner to devote himself to mastering emerging, fast-moving research about a past zoonotic pandemic, in order to be able to help people many others were at best disinterested in treating.   His hallmark always was a prescient, “Show me the data”; he would listen and always, always learn a great deal before proceeding.  

At a far smaller scale . . . .

I would not currently have a bleeding, throbbing, plum-hued thumb, embedded with a fierce circa 1802 splinter.  I would neither occupy my current home, nor have been doing a household chore involving unfinished antique wood.  And even had I been, Jim would have been able to extract the splinter.  

I would not have learned the patterns of the seasons in which flora grow and collapse before doing it all over again.  

Hundreds of thousands of photos would have gone untaken.  I do not exaggerate.

I likely would have yet to experience the agita of handling family finances.  Jim spared me quite a bit.

I would not have driven about a quarter-million miles, including the miles between Pittsburgh and New Hampshire that delivered me to an industrial park, lost in the middle of the night in Connecticut, where I found the musical score Jim made for when he knew I’d need one.  

I would not have known so many people had such depths of kindness….or that a few people I thought I knew better would be capable of so grievously disappointing me.  

I would have had a lot more sleep. 

But what else would not have happened?

Would one of our daughters not have gone into global health and recently put the final touches on a dissertation modelling the spread of spillover pandemics? 

Would one of our sons not have chosen, after hearing from physicists at his grandfather’s memorial service, to start in a new direction and begun an additional graduate program in physics?

Would I have gone back to my home state and my original job, or ever met the colleagues and friends who have brought so much to my life?

Had life not unwound as it did, I assuredly would not have seen penguins on the equator, or cliff-dwelling birds above a midnight-black sand beach in Vik.  I would not have traveled by camel into deserts on two continents,  or come perilously close to causing an international incident at the G8 summit in Belfast.  I would not have been overcome by dizzying heat in timeless Banaras, rounding an ancient  corner to stand eye-to-eye with a water buffalo.  

 

I would not have stood up alone on a stage and told more than 2,000 people about bringing my husband home to die, and I would not have met my friend Bethany, who told her story on the same stage and told shaky me to just look at her when I got up there, and I’d be OK.  

I would have slept through, or not been outside to see, countless dazzling sunrises.  

I would not have stopped being afraid of all but one thing.

I would not finally have learned how to love with no fear; had I paid more attention, I would have realized our children got there long before I did.  

The hardest thing to admit is that I would not have become a better person. The experience of a devastating illness and premature death distills a good marriage to the essence of the people who share it, and gives both a chance to know and to choose what to hold onto.

Today, for Father’s Day, I am wearing the color Jim liked best–though scarlet creates an unfortunate match in feverish feel and tone to my violent  global allergic reaction to summer’s arrival–as if he needed its bright beacon to locate me, when I know part of me accompanied him as well.

This morning I stood in the place where I now live and faced sunrise, as I usually do beginning in the dark wee hours of summer, waiting to see what kind of light and color will erupt and shimmer over the Atlantic., while feasting noseeums remind me I am indeed still here, hair-trigger immune system and all. 

I don’t usually remember to look behind me, but this time I did.  The color there was gentle, the clouds swirling and soft, without the hard bright edges of the too-bright-to-behold sun being delivered squalling into the horizon for the day ahead. 

Sometimes looking back is uncomplicated and beautiful.  

Happy Father’s Day.

Father’s Day 2020

 

Spring Forward, Fall Back Down

IMG_8249 (2)
Frozen in Time (c) Stephanie M. Glennon

 

Spring forward, fall back down…”

I know, I know: it couldn’t be much more wintry in New England.

It’s a balmy -6 degrees, enhanced by an order of magnitude for those who dally with windchill.  Boston had its highest recorded tide, sweeping an icy gray lagoon into waterfront streets.

My big boy beagle gazes at me with recrimination when I am compelled to turn around and whisk him back toward home.  He clearly has places to be, but unknowingly relies upon my limited capacity to exhibit adult common sense.  My less than-scientific measure of when I have ventured half as far as we safely can go is the loss of  sensation in triple-gloved hands.  The outermost layer belonged to Jim: enormous blue-green knitted wool  gloves into which Rufus still pauses to press his snow-dusted nose, retrieving scents of his puppyhood.  I am violently allergic to wool. Angry winter welts encircle my right wrist, which one over-sized glove accidentally touched as I struggled to shovel a path through blizzard remnants.

Even my camera is too cold to do its job.  I dare not risk its delicate inner mechanisms’ life for a picture–even of wavering sea-smoke etched in bright gold across the horizon, or planes of dazzling white which migrate across eye-level snowdrifts, or tree branches encased in ice glittering under a super moon.

Other than at sunrise and sunset, which in winter tend to take place during work days, when they rarely can both be seen, bright color has disappeared from the landscape.  It may visit in the form of  a scarlet cardinal or blue jay, or a burst of berries holding fast for them to find.

But this lyric spanning the other seasons has taken its place as resident ear-worm.

I first heard the Weakerthans’ song on the radio while driving back from a solo trip to Bar Harbor.

My city’s still breathing (but barely, it’s true)
Through buildings gone missing like teeth
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
Sparkled with broken glass
I’m back with scars to show.
Back with the streets I know
Will never take me anywhere but here

My status could be the answer to a riddle: I occupy a new old home in my old home state, having left our old old home in a new home state.

But I am back with streets I know.  In a place I never before lived, I feel I am back home.

Wait for the year to drown
Spring forward, fall back down
I’m trying not to wonder where you are

One daughter came to my new old home for Christmas, bearing a discrete tattoo she explained to me is based on Slaughterhouse Five.

Spring forward, fall back.  I realized it’s not just a handy trick to set clocks to mark time in the seasons that bookend winter’s essence, but a Tralfamadorian progression through life–including waxing and waning grief and hope.  A (Billy) Pilgrim’s progress, if you will (HT Mr. Vonnegut).

I shall try to seize on those glimmers, bright traces which foretell spring or commemorate fall, even when blanketed by colorlessness–the orange fish which glided underneath inches of pond ice as we skated at the old home we shared, the leaf  whose lime stem tilted toward the sun as if it still could absorb light when my beagle’s front paw sank ever-so-slightly into a frozen puddle’s surface, leaving in uneven colonial bricks’ lacuna a ghostly misshapen cameo, a reminder of our presence there made possible by a New England winter.

 

 

Autumn’s Cathedral

136

“What’s she doing, mommy?”

The little boy nudges his mother, who is navigating a grassy park.  The rubber wheels of the stroller she pushes whoosh through leaves leached into shades of mustard and tan.

The boy peeks around his mother at me and at the ground beneath my feet.

I’m an oddity here.

016

At a preschooler’s eye level, brilliant vermillion fall flowers still hold ballet poses against a seamless blue sky.

I am fixated on “gorgeous ruin,” like that on the pathway where poet Carol Ann Duffy’s child-self trailed her dead father.

fall2014 006

 

fall2014 016

 

222

Changing Seasons: Summer to Spring Segue

HPIM6803
Fall  Edging In (c) SMG

My husband Jim’s diagnosis hit us along with summer’s pulverizing heat.  Coming out of the air-conditioned hospital to lean against a cement pillar and weep was like stepping through a portal onto the tarmac in San Cristobal.

For me the summer was a whirlwind: physicians, surgical procedures, hospitals, chemotherapy, pharmacies and prescriptions, paperwork, imaging and re-imaging.

It was exhaustion–not pain or nausea, nor even a side-effect that made drinking cold liquid feel like swallowing crushed glass–that most distressed my husband as he endured the worst of the treatment attempts: having to sleep for so long meant to him a day slipping through his fingers, among precious few seasons of such days. Continue reading “Changing Seasons: Summer to Spring Segue”

%d bloggers like this: