Living in the Moment

When my mother was at a certain point in the progress of Alzheimer's disease, she had lost the context for many things, but still was very much able to communicate. One day, as we left a restaurant, she told me how much she enjoyed simply being alive and seeing the sunset.

Today, I was reading "Living Buddha, Living Christ" by Thich Nhat Hanh. In it, he writes, "To breathe and know you are alive is wonderful . . . Every moment is an opportunity to breathe life into the Buddha . . . Every moment is an opportunity to manifest the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." It is good to think that, for a time--even if it was caused by Alzheimers--my mother was given the ability to set aside the struggles that marked most of her life to live in the moment and have that kind of wonder.

Where's Joe Hill?

This morning I listened again to Joan Baez’s wonderful rendition of “Joe Hill.”

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me.

Says I, “But Joe you’re ten years dead.” “I never died,” says he.

“The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you,Joe,” says I.

“It takes more than guns to kill a man,” says Joe. “I didn’t die.”

And standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes,

Says Joe, “What they can never kill went on to organize.”

From San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill

When workingmen defend their rights, that’s where you’ll find Joe Hill.

It is sad to think how far we have drifted from the vision that Joe Hill and people like him worked to achieve so many years ago. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, long after those early struggles to gain basic rights for working people. But I remember well how tough it was when my uncles went on strike in the Shenango Valley mills when I was a boy and how they hoped that the hardships that the strikes imposed on their families would result not just in better days, but better years ahead.

Today, the corporate takeover of American life is very nearly complete. Executives take huge salaries and bonuses, while working to rescind the hard-won benefits of the people who actually make the things America exports. Working people have been diverted by divisive social issues like abortion and homosexual rights—the bread and circuses of today’s right-wing politicians--while the corporations have undermined the fundamental rights of workers to health care, job security, and a decent wage.

I can only hope that the current recession gives us pause to consider a new social morality that replaces the neo-conservative “gilded age” with a more humble commitment to social responsibility.

"The Soul of Iran"

In The Soul of Iran, Afshin Molavi writes sometimes poetic descriptions of Iran. Example:

"In the grand square of Isfahan, I sat on a bench at dusk and listened to a young Isfahani play the tar, an ancient Persian instrument with an intoxicatingly sweet sound, like the sugary, soft center of gaz, a popular Isfahani candy. The last defiant rays of the orange sun lingered in the gray-pink dusk sky. The shining blue-domed mosques sparkled. The waters of the central fountains shimmered. The whole maidan, the public square rimmed by the blue and gold of exquisite mosques and four-hundred-year-old buildings, seemed aglow. There was a softness in the air, the kind of softness that might be scooped with a spoon and spread on the hot hard flat bread sold by Hossein, the baker down the street."

I have a longstanding soft spot for Iran, dating from when I read Olmstead's History of the Persian Empire as a teenager. Molavi's book is a wonderful insight into daily life in Iran that offers hope for the future.

He also notes that half of the Irani population is under the age of 21 and that 5/7s of the population has dim--or no--memories of the 1979 revolution. This generation, he predicts, "will dramatically change the face of the Islamic Republic."

It is a reminder for all of us to take a long view and not let our actions be dictated by the headlines.

Starting From Scratch -- A Story

It is the first day, again. Tuesday, this time. Grandpa looks beyond the porch to the still-summer yard, trying to remember if a first day had ever been a Tuesday before. He remembers the day Ruth was born, but that had been a Friday. Ed came on a Monday, early in the morning, before he got home from the mill. He had set out for Chicago on a Wednesday, he remembered, because that was the day Messersmith's had specials on pork chops. For thirty years or more, Grandpa ate pork chops on Wednesdays because old man Messersmith had a special on them on Wednesdays. There probably had been a Tuesday in there somewhere among 72 years, but Grandpa couldn't remember. Not that it mattered: Grandpa didn't take such things seriously. Such things simply come to mind when on sits all day; one sorts through them like junk mail.

It is, at any rate, the first day again.

It is the first day after the last day of summer. It is the first day of school, and Nicholas is long since off, a splash of red backpack finding its place on the yellow bus.

It is the first day back to work for Rose, after a tight-lipped, nervous summer that, once past the few weeks of immersion in his care after his accident, took on a relentless life of its own.

It is the first day in his memory that Grandpa can feel the heat from the sun-washed cement porch burn right through the moccasin leather into the soft soles of his feet. He had forgotten the sensation completely. It brings tears to his eyes, so that he has to steady himself on the back of the chair he had taken from the kitchen. The warmth, the connection between the rough cement of the porch and the sun that warmed it-- and, by virtue of that -- warms him, astounds Grandpa. He feels a oneness that perhaps he had felt as a child, but only perhaps. Tears are tears.

Grandpa clutches the backrest of the kitchen chair more tightly in his left hand and, using the warmth as bait for his willpower, tries to press down his left heel to make contact with the cement. It hurts like hell. He rests a few seconds, surprised by how the pain put an end to the tears, and tries again. His foot begins to shake, and then his whole leg begins to shake. He fears that he might lose balance and fall, so he stops again. Maybe later, he thinks.

He absorbs the warmth from the cement, imagining it flow up from his feet. He closes his eyes and tries not to think about what a poor job Paul had done on the porch. Thirty years ago, Grandpa had trimmed the old porch neatly in brick around the edges. The new one, Paul’s handiwork, is bare cement foundation blocks, the holes filled roughly with cement. A hasty job, done when his eldest son had other things on his mind. Weeds had sprouted in the cracks between the blocks of the steps. He imagines Paul, a mill foreman, working fast to get back to Farrell for supper. But the warmth is a different matter. Nothing hasty here. It is an affair among the sun and the cement and his old, flaky-skinned feet. It can’t be ruined by hasty work. He tries his foot again. It seems to go down farther this time before the pain came.

Now the sun is warming his shirt, too, and the brim of his cap, the top of his arm and of his hand. He becomes restless to get seated. He wants to think about the day ahead. Slipping the chair ahead of him with each step, he makes his way to the other end of the porch, where the edge is level with the yard. Positioning himself carefully, he sets the chair ahead of him on the grass, steps down slowly, cautiously, testing his footing on the dry ground. The grass, dry since early August and brown as February grass, crackles under his feet. A startled cricket hops out of Grandpa's way, startling other bugs among the blades of grass and broad dandelion leaves. Grandpa stops and tries for a second or two to stir up others with the chair without losing his balance. He laughs out loud and makes his way on the slow trip down the length of the porch, between it and the forsythia that has taken over the side yard like a monster weed in a science fiction film. Then, he turns away from the house, toward the wire fence that separates the yard from Mrs. Myers' yard or what used to be hers, to the glider.

He looks around, careful that he could not be seen easily from the street, rubbed his leg a bit against the light green paint of the glider to make sure it had not become sticky in the head, and negotiates his way around the chair and into the glider. Where had they gotten it? He removes his hand from the kitchen chair, in triumph, with a flourish, and sat. Bold. Proud. Defiant. In his yard. It is the first time in seven years that he has been outside on his own power without a wheelchair or the company of women.

He had thought often about the feel of sun-warmed metal against his back and thighs. His imagination had not exaggerated. His delight is tempered only by the knowledge that it would not feel nearly so good the next time. He sits stone still while the initial warmth fades, then turns his attention to the slight breeze flowing from the shade of the choke cherry tree. He had planted it forty years ago in hope of shade for Florence and the kids, no thought that it would still be a climbing and jumping tree for his grandchildren.

When he looks up and sees the house, facing him broadside along the edge of the yard, he can only stare in dismay at the destruction neglect had wrought.

I've got to begin, he says to himself, letting the thought slide into the constant ebb and flow, the attic rattle, the disarray of memory, internal conversation, self-reprimand, and, often, bitter fantasy that had kept him company in his later years. I've got to begin. Then:

As if it matters.

Reproach overpowers his planning. He fights it. He tries to think of other beginnings and how he had begun then, but those thoughts get lost in the shuffle. He tries to find his earliest thoughts, his first beginnings.

He remembers a scene, lit like the painting on a plate. It is morning and probably winter. His brothers and sisters have gone to school, his father to the mill. He is too young to go anywhere. His mother sits in a chair next to the wood stove in the kitchen. She sits him up on her lap and plays patty cake. He thinks there should be something like joy about the scene--a pure and innocent joy. He tries to remember the feeling of joy, amid the jumble and wreckage of his memory.

Grandpa sits, having begun again, and prays for the will to go on.