Month: November 2024

It is blue and cloudless, the neighbor’s flag and the fronds of his palm are lofting and twirling and untwirling gently, so gently. In between, they are still. So very still. What more can you ask in the way of peace?

It is three days, or now slightly less than that in terms of hours, from the feast of Thanksgiving in the United States of America. It might rain where you are — rain on that big parade up north. Can’t help the weather.

Time for gratitude.

Thanks all around. God bless us, everyone! (That’s Tiny Tim and Christmas — but, whatever.)

So, I begin to let all things settle. Conflicts within and without, my own reluctant, anxious, turbulent inclinations, in traffic, at the supermarket, wherever, always looking for trouble –tamped down at this hour, like one pressing on a great bulging, pulsing surface of a dam near bursting — which is the world and me, always near bursting — but holding firm at least for the present moment. Living with it. Living with tension.

Be still!…

And it is still, a still moment in the turning earth at latitude 27,9095 north and 82,7873 west, Largo, Florida. It is one minute to five. The sun shall set at 5:35. I and every inhabitant of the planet shall barely perceptively turn away from the sun while those in other hemispheres are turning back toward it. All that I behold out a small window in this hemisphere is at peace, composed.

I choose to see and think only of that window-framed patch of universe, of the present moment in this present place, for it has been a good several hours, despite every lurking conflict, sickness, anxiety –a day in which I began helping distribute food for Thanksgiving to those who need it. ( Yeah, being a do-gooder.) And I brought one grocery bag to my partner Diane’s friend, because she needs it. We need it, for that matter. But we have enough. She doesn’t. She needed more.

Of course, who needs everything they think they need?

The friend has called to say that now, she and her multi-layered household of people and dogs will have a Thanksgiving, for she had not been entirely certain she would be able to celebrate the day, due to the presence of considerable shifting finanancial domestic fortunes.

I’m so glad of that! That she and hers might be brought together in a communal meal, abide amid the stresses and strains.

So there you have a small, good thing, as the sun around here tilts toward the horizon, or the earth away from the sun on this November 25, 2024 in the early quarter of the 21st Century in this place, time and moment.

I have a birthday in two days. I am not much thinking about it. I am in that time of life when you don’t. No, you certainly don’t.

My brother has, early in this month (in which we traditionally honor and remember the dead), passed from this earth after 89 years; finally, peacefully. And the prayer goes, “now and at the hour of our death” may we have His grace….

We go on wondering who He is.

Love, they say. Perfect love. I’ll buy that. Show me the alternative.

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last. –Saint John Henry Newman

I was born the day before Thanksgiving. My father cooked the turkey for my eleven-year-old brother Bill (rest in peace), my sister Anne, just four days short of her eighth birthday (rest in peace), and my twin brothers Doug and Ron, just fifteen days short of their seventh birthday. That must have been a raucous gathering!

I believe, as I think on it, that it might have been my godmother Eleanora Lenahan (long deceased and who I rarely saw through much of my later life) who came to help Dad. (Rest in peace –Eleanora, and dad.)

But all that is past. A memory, reported to me who, of course, was not cognicant of the universe I was entering and in which I was destined to move about. That moment is gone. This is the present moment, after moving about for many decades, edging toward sunset on a day when I will recall the two exquisitely beautiful African young women — women from another world and hemisphere — who came for their free food this morning at the food give-a-way, each dressed so colorfully. The one in particular will stay with me — her floor-length dress and her head wrap, or gele, covered with a rose pattern. She was pregnant. She was likely poor, but beauty, within and without, can abide in poverty.

But that was then, that moment, gone. This moment, sweetly, slowly darkening, is a moment in which I choose to be content; to be at peace, seeking God’s presence, peace and security against any useless anxiety. Forgetting the jerk I can occasionally be. Who isn’t a jerk now and then?

Stillness.

I am, in Newman’s words,’safely lodged’ on the earth, if not yet in heaven, the latter still to be earned, sin to be resisted.

I might watch a little news. That should burst the big ‘peace’ bubble, learn of all the sin that goes unresisted.

But, hey! Whatever! I might as well know what’s going on — I guess.

The shades are lengthening, the (Monday) evening is coming….

May we stay – in the moment. It’s all we’ve got.

And, really, is it so bad?

Hey! It’s 5:38!

I’m doing the math. The sun set three minutes ago, and it’s glowing red and pretty out there.

Now, can you ask for more than that?

Now, it’s 5:39. Getting darker.

No, you can’t stop time. No one’s figured out how to do that. If they had, I wouldn’t be having another birthday. But then, I’m gratefully glad to be having it. For time, in which we live and move and have our being, is the trial before the hoped-for, ultimate safe lodging.

Have a great evening, one and all.

And a great Thanksgiving, wherever you are lodged.

It is a narrow, thin memory, barely surviving, buried in my long, overloaded memory. My sister, with teenage friends, somewhere in Boston. They had gone to stay in town –we always called it “in town” — and, together, at a hotel. No moral compromises, no boys around, all girls, together.

I wish I’d asked her about it while she was alive — asked her, was there a time when you went off to downtown Boston and stayed somewhere in a hotel?

I picture one of those old hotels, maybe some lost places, like the Avery or the Essex or the Turraine that once stood ornate and tall deep in the city’s core. I’m imagining a time when the newer, shinier hostelries were yet to be built.

And what I remember hearing my sister tell my mother is that she went to the window in the dead of night and, though the city was sleeping, she could hear sounds –I was going to say, ‘the sound of silence.’ But, yes, it was the sound of a seemingly empty and asleep city’s breathing — just that mysterious, constant sound of far, far off traffic or wind or hidden life within a somnolent city.

And I might have thought about this as I woke in the hotel at Logan Airport this past Monday night, staying just a night in a hotel in the city of my birth. It is always a strange experience to stay in a hotel, like a visitor or stranger, in a city you once –or even presently — call home. The airport had, as always, been frantically busy with rushing strangers and vehicles and comings and goins, but I woke at 12:10 a.m. — I knew I must wake in just hours for a flight to Tampa where I roost now and would be constantly, or almost constantly experiencing a frightening kind of dementia, forgetting that I was due to fly (back) to Tampa, not “up” to Boston, where I was at that moment (and feeling like a stranger) and where I had been for two days that felt, at that moment, like a week. Perhaps it was because what I really wanted to do was to go down the elevator to the empty lobby and catch a taxi to my childhood home, walk to the door at 210 Neponset Avenue, pull out my key and let myself in and creep up the stairs to where I was supposed to be sleeping — where my former childhood self was sleeping — in the top floor bunks with the sloaping ceiling where my brother Bill, who I just saw in repose at a funeral home, would be sleeping in the front and my twin brothers in back — and I would go and quietly slip iinto my metal and spring bed pushed into the corner by the window. It would be dark and silent in the house, my mother and father on the second floor where, though so small, there is a bathroom and three bedrooms off the hallway. And my sister’s room would still the one at the top of the stairs and it would become my room once she married in June of 1959.

I would go to sleep in my narrow bed in those”top floor” rooms where my three brothers slept….

I still lived there, didn’t I? That was still the Wayland home, wasn’t it? Everybody was alive, weren’t they?

But I was back in Boston because my brother Bill had gone to sleep forever.

In truth, as I stood looking down at the silent, empty airport roadways and overpasses, all brightly lit – but empty — I could hear nothing except the air conditioning, because rarely can you open a window in a modern hotel. I would go back to the bed and, though having no memory of drifting off, go back to sleep to await the 5:30 alarm getting me up for the 7 :15 a.m. flight — to fly to Tampa. Why was I going to Tampa? This was home. I was home….

And my family is across water and fields and tall buildings in that house at 210 Neponset Avenue which I had just seen that day — but occupied now by strangers. I was coming from the funeral home where the service had been held for my oldest brother whom I had just seen lying in a casket right across the street from the former site of the Adams Street Theater, now an apartment building.

But, if it truly happened, if only I could remember more or could have asked my sister — who died in September of 2016 — just what she and her friends were doing in that hotel. Had they, in fact, traveled to another city, not Boston, with some group like The Catholic Daughters? Or perhaps this was a high school graduation trip?

I will never know, because I cannot remember.

But I know that she, and maybe the other girl or girls who were her roommates, excited to be in the heart of a city, any city, and be up talking and laughing to the wee hours, had perhaps finally turned out the lights for bed and gone to a window that, in the old days, you could still open. They might have been on the seventh or the eighth floor. And they would have leaned out the window overlooking perhaps a street, perhaps an alley.

Perhaps my sister was the only one awake, a young teenager having not yet met the man she would marry, perhaps kneeling at the open window alone, listening–and fascinated by the sound coming from a seemingly sleeping city. Life out there, stirring at ever hour.

Life. My sister at the window, alone. Her name was Anne. And she called my brother Bill when she was dying. And he had said, “I was supposed to be first!”

She would have laughed. She is gone. Now he is gone, too.

But I remember her now, at 10:47 p.m., November 13, 2024.

Alone. In a dark room of sleeping girls. Listening to the city in the dead of night.