Month: September 2025

JUST SOMETHING I DID, AND REMEMBER…

It might not seem worth remembering. It was a sad time, shortly after news of Diane Harrison’s mother’s death. I remember Diane’s mother well.

Diane’s mother Claire died near the end of the last century. I believe it was April, 1999. Their relationship was loving but difficult. But they loved each other. Somehow it happened that, sometime after the word of her death came, we drove to visit Claire’s sister, Diane’s aunt Joan and her many cousins, on the Jersey Shore. There would ultimately be a memorial service for Claire at St. Agnes Church in Atlantic Highlands. But at this point in time, it was just essential to get Diane to the Philadelphia Airport for a flight to Sarasota, Florida. I do not recall at all why Philadelphia, not Newark Airport.

But I drove her, with the help of directions from one of Diane’s Philadelphia-based cousins. I recall I parked my car in the airport garage and escorted her into the terminal, said goodbye — all these goodbye’s in life, temporary or permanent. I probably wasn’t making the trip to Sarasota because I was working back in Boston.

But this is what I’m recalling about that occassion — strange, I suppose. I recall, on my way back to the airport garage, deliberately finding one of those ground-level, glassed-in areas at the base of a stairwell. It had plastic seats mounted on a steel rod, rare as it might seem for anyone to find it necessary to pause there.

I did.

I purposely sat down in that secluded, little traveled place to try to ponder, to really dwell on that moment, far from the central bustle of the airport, sitting in a place where perhaps no one had paused to sit before, or maybe since. It was odd, as I say, to have seats there — this seldom traveled little nook in the airport, and I’m not sure how I happened to come upon it, doubted if anyone had found the need to sit there ever before or ever again — if that stairwll still exists, airports being places where buildings come and go. Airports are transitory places, unlike old brick train stations where the rails never move.

I thought of Diane alone on her way to see her aging father’s side. She hates to travel alone. I thought of her sorrow, how she must have been thinking about her times with her mother., now ended forever. Airports are full of people traveling to see loved ones in the wake of a death, or a birth.

I might have though about my few other times passing through that airport — one of them among other G.I.s being shipped to Georgia for further training.

I knew that afternoon, that I had a drive of some 700 miles ahead of me, probably into darkness — probably on the Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, then the Mass Pike. Back to the cozy little house on Acton Street in Carlisle, Mass — that, though old and dear and the antithesis of tranistory — has since been demolished and turned into a weedy, bare rise leading up to a big new house. I would be alone in that house with our little dog.

I was going to welcome some solitude. But then and now, with many changes, anxieties and obligations and difficulties and life passages ahead of me, pressing down on me, as it was that afternoon for millions. Some others at the Philadelphia Airport that day were probably on a mission of sorrow to some place in the country.

…I knew this wasn’t exactly Frost’s idyllic Winter Soltice pause by woods on a snowy evening. But I did have promises to keep, and miles to go before I could sleep.

I just wanted to sit for a moment in that obscure little corner without a soul around — just a minute, actually probably not more than sixty seconds, if that – and think about what was going on.

No one ever came along. I got up, got to my car, left for my journey. Perhaps I felt fooslish.

My heart gets heavy just thinking about it. But I’m grateful for that pause. Life would go on. Busy life.

Rest in peace, Claire. I probably, above all, entertained that thought — and thought of Claire’s and my relationship. She could be wise and funny, irascible, difficult. She was bright, smoked, drank, was never in perfect health in her later years.

I’d never intended to have these relationships. But did, and go on with relationships with the living and the dead.

Claire, in that moment in that stairwell, I probably loved you, prayed for you –and your daughter, in however a broken way.

Then it was time to get up from that seat, and go on.

We all go on.

EMPTY

It is September 27, 2025, a Saturday. I read yesterday a prayerbook marginal notation from 2009. The theme of the reading was, “The Time and the Moment,” which reads toward the end, “It is the present moment which can be offered to the Lord, none other.”

Having first read that chapter in 2009 for the 25th Weeek in Ordinary Time, I read it again in 2018 and 2023, skipping the years in between, including last year.

I struggle often to remain focused on faith, and, obviously, on the moment. The years turn to moments, and rush by.

In exactly two months, I will be 79 –on Thanksgiving Day. I must be grateful.

I rose at 5 a.m., unable to sleep further. I got up and tried to do some writing. At roughly 6:30 a.m., feeling suddenly sleepy, I decided I needed to go back to bed, but I found my little dog up and staring at me in the darkness of the living room, as if desiring to go out. I let her out to forage in the backyard’s darkness illuminated only by the green, motion-activated search light, all very dim, the air soggy. Suddenly there was a flash that, to my eyes, seemed confined to the space between mine and my neighbor’s house, very strange. But the flash had come from the sky, and thunder rolled slowly over the neighborhood. My dog , though her hearing is going, sensed the thunder and came running in distress toward the shed door to be let inside the shed and then into the kitchen. All she had been doing is licking grass. It is one of those days, still to this hour, when she is not eating.

I let her out again in daylight. She went licking grass again and did not even notice that it had begun to rain. Finally she came in.

Then ,after briefly trying to resume sleep, hoping for a nice dream but usually unable to recall dreams in much detail anymore and deciding daylight and life was calling, I got up — on a cloudy, intermittently rainy Saturday in which I have a charitable chore ahead. Long story, that.

It is 9:11. I am anxious. I must travel soon — this coming week. Airports, rental cars, highways, obligations my partner has that will make her happy, and so I must be happy to make her happy.

The bed, the dreams, they all beckon us away from life, don’t they? So does the laptop, so do words, but they have worth in life — for whatever they are worth for whoever will see them. Life beckons. The present moment.

As I dressed for the day, I saw a blue jay fly into the plastic feeder on the bedroom window– and immediately fly off.

I’m out of seed. The feeder is empty.

A SINGULAR SOUL IN SEPTEMBER

I saw someone today that I decided will be famous in some circles someday, small circles, unless she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I say this, without a bit of sarcasm. We must all be aware that the voices of our national life that will turn up in small magazines, in poems, in novels of the future will be the product of the several generations of parents that were my contemporaries (though they are grandparents now) and by Generation X and the Millenials. Their experiences of life were different to some degree from us Boomers, but, of course, in many respects just the same. They have populated the planet with adolescents and teenagers who, in mind, soul, dress and demeanor, resemble this young woman. So I surmise — and imagine.

She is an individualists — though many young individualists seem to blend into a herd of expressive uniformity.

The young woman in question might be in high school — or she might have been in her late twenties. She had that universal ageless look about her. But — she had quite a look about her. Again –a solitary individual broken away from an army of individuals, and wearing the “uniform.”

She was checking the Large, Florida library screens seemingly in search of a book. Then I saw her wandering among the stacks in the second level — near the poetry and plays, but she might have been checking out the non-fiction areas, too. Or the theater.

She had clipped, short, blondish — blondish, almost boyish, seemingly natural — hair. She stood about five feet. She wore a gray top under a light gray hooded sweater — even on this Florida September day of typical humidity and heat. But — those who spend a great deal of time in library air conditioning might find their temperature dropping.

She was a study in blacks and grays.

She wore black high-top sneakers — and, in keeping with the expressive individually of our time that turns our bodies into tableaus, she had on one leg (and I did not notice this until my second glance) a thicket of black interlocking tattoos all the way up to the high-level top of her short. On the other leg, an equal tangle of vine-like tattoos only went up half way on her pale skin. Perhaps that leg is a work in progress.

She wore round glasses with clear rims. She had a bright orange sack slung over her shoulder. Her only dash of color.

She was, yes, a human study, and, I expect, rather studious in her own right.

She would soon blend back into the world external to the library, and not necessarily be easy to spot or single out for these enumerated physical attributes, for thought she caught my eye, she looks –as I’ve already said –like a major percentage of her generation looks these days — having made a conscious choice to express herself satorially and physically as an individual in that army of individuals.

Expressive Individualism! (Was it Robert Bellah who came up with that phrase?) Nothing all that unusual about trying to be unusual these days.

I will be left forever guessing –even should I chance to see her again and unless I make so bold as to approach and interview her, just what she thinks about life. I’d like to find out if such knowledge be obtained without offending her or rightly arrousing her suspicions or hostilities. (“Hi, I just think you’re interesting-looking and could I ask a few questions about, ah, your choice of dress or what’s on your mind….”)

Yeah, right. Someone call the cops.

But this future prospective Nobel Laureat or Poet Laureat or singer of ballads in New York or Amsterdam cafes– once she leaves home and becomes an ex-pat — this highly decorated, expressively individualistic soul nonethless is ( and do I repeat myself? Yes!) entirely typical of so many other late members of Generation Y, OR the ubiquitous members of Generaton Z. She just, as I’m saying here, caught my eye — and her understated, black and gray earth tones contrasted happily, to my eyes, with the splashy rainbow-colored conscientously eccentric types of her generation -like the “goth”s who must so deliberately put on a mask of primeval ugliness.Black on black.

And she seemed studious (as I said) and serene (perhaps I didn’t say that). I wonder what she keeps in that orange sack?

Let me say a very peternal thing: God go with her — to New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm — or just home to mom and dad and dinner tonight. And to her similarly decked-out bedroom. And to sleep.

May she find what has eluded so many who wished to make more than a ripple on life’s surface — including me.

Or, isn’t it far more likely she just wants to be alone? For, that was the other things about her — her solitude.

She is Young Miss Solitude. I like that, too. No jabbering of gossip, no noisy friends gathered around a table, challenging the library’s silence.

She was alone. A singular soul. On a September afternoon.