Tag Archives: Memoir

Courage at Twilight: 60 Year-old Lace

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Arriving homing from work, I observed Mom ironing white linen handkerchiefs.  Not knowing people who use handkerchiefs, let alone iron handkerchiefs, I inquired.  She told me that when I was an infant in Brazil—(Dad was a post-graduate Fulbright law student at the University of São Paulo)—she would push me in the stroller down the noisy urban streets to the American consulate to retrieve their mail and to check out books from the consulate library.  On occasion, just for the fun of exploring, she would board the street car and ride it to the “fim da linha,” the end of the line, to see what there was to see.  Hearing of women who sewed lace, she rode to the fim da linha and walked to the little lace shop.  Beautiful hand-sewn lace lined shelves and graced tables.  With little money for nonessentials, she chose several thin white handkerchiefs into which were embroidered white vines and leaves and flowers.  Nearly 60 years later, she held them with care and ironed them free of their wrinkles.  Some of the stitching has come out, but still left are the needle holes and impression patters of where the lace used to be.  Beautiful things made by beautiful people so long ago at the end of the street car line.

Courage at Twilight: I Wasn’t There

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I am wallowing in self-reproach.  Mom fell in the shower.  She does not remember falling.  She remembers only waking up on the floor, the water sprinkling down on her, the door flung open.  And I did not know.  And Dad did not know.  I asked her at breakfast about the scratch on the bridge of her nose, but she did not know where it came from.  As she sat in her Sunday dress, ready to go to church, Dad asked her how she felt.  “Not so good,” she said, seeming very tired.  I passed it off as a symptom of the sinus infection she is getting over.  She told me later about her slumping from her chair.  That morning I had awoken with a start when I thought I heard a bang.  I could hear water tinkling.  Remembering how the shower door clangs when it closes, I thought nothing more of it.  We went to church like normal, moving a little slower.  I cooked all afternoon to give Mom and Dad a nice Sunday dinner: tilapia poached in white wine with green onions, sauced with creamy mushroom-clam sauce.  For dessert I made crepes stuffed with vanilla-cream sauced apples.  It all tasted divine.  But all I could think about as I cooked and ate and washed dishes was not being there when Mom needed me.  I was there, in the same house, on the same floor, in the room next door, with Mom lying unconscious on the shower floor, being drizzled with warm water.  But I was not there for her.  I could have revived her, helped her up, given her care and attention.  But I was not there.  All this fancy French food and the effort it took and the palatable pleasure it brought meant nothing.  What would have meant something was following through on the waking start and investigating assertively and helping my mother when she needed me.  The bruise on her cheek bone is starting to show.

Courage at Twilight: Shaping Bushes

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Dad loves his yard care tools, especially the power tools.  The only power tool we owned growing up in East Brunswick, New Jersey was the push mower, with no power drive, for the half-acre corner lot at 2 Schindler Court (named by the developer-friend of Mr. Schindler of Schindler’s List).  Now Dad enjoys a set of DeWalt battery-powered tools, including one of his favorites, the hedge trimmer.  He often trims the bushes nicely round.  But the trimmer cannot grab and cut the shoots along the ground, and bending and kneeling is out of the question.  I, on the other hand, can (barely) bend and (barely) kneel, and I like the small hand pruner.  So while Dad shapes the bushes, I kneel on a cushioned pad and reach under the bushes to cut their runners and shoots, leaving a collection of uniquely and pleasantly shaped orbs.  The hard-to-get-to places are the ones longest neglected, but turning attention and effort to them yields pleasing results.  There’s a metaphor there somewhere.

Courage at Twilight: Wall Hangings

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The negotiated terms of my ouster included me rescuing my children’s artwork from the attic storage closet.  I wanted these paintings displayed and my children honored.  They had made oil, acrylic, and collage paintings on old plywood, cardboard, canvas board, and posterboard.  Many pieces were very good.  Determined, I took a framing class at the Tooele Army Depot morale, welfare, and recreation (MWR) facility.  I learned to measure and cut the mats and the glass, assemble the frames, and apply the backing.  I felt joyful and proud to hang these excellent art pieces on the walls of my apartment, which my father came to call my “art gallery.”  They included scenes of Lisbon streetcars, Rio de Janeiro’s Cristo Redentor, the romantic streets of Paris, African villages, Korean dancers, and New York City street corners, plus a Panda Bear and a Great Blue Heron.  The most venerable painting hanging on my apartment walls was an oil Dad painted in the 1950s of two children, a boy and a girl, walking hand-in-hand down a forest path.  To move them safely, I wrapped these jewels in plastic and stacked them carefully in the Mom’s and Dad’s basement.  After two weeks, I found myself ready to decorate my two rooms, too small to accommodate all the paintings I had framed.  And I suddenly found that my connection to them was touched with old despair.  For now, I will gently store them to await a time of greater healing and permanence, when I will take them out and again proudly display them.  Now is not the time or the season.  They are like so many priceless museum pieces wrapped in protecting plastic and stowed in crates, awaiting their grand retrospective.  In the meantime, I have hung in my rooms several of Mom’s beautiful needlepoints, prints I bought on various trips, and the old oil of two children walking through the woods, holding hands.

Courage at Twilight: Spraying Weeds

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On the way home from work, I stopped to buy a big bottle of Round-Up herbicide.  Those pesky weeds keep popping up in the shrub beds and under the pine trees.  Virginia creeper seems impossible to extirpate.  As a teen, Dad taught me to mix concentrated pesticides with water in a three-gallon pressurized spray tank.  With rubber gloves and a long sleeve shirt, I mixed the poison and sprayed the fruit trees against aphids and borers.  Dad strictly instructed me never to get the pesticide—especially the concentrate—on my skin, and if I did to wash immediately with soap and water.  He told me how these chemicals had killed people who touched them, or breathed their vapor.  I took his word for it and followed his instructions carefully.  A decade later I came across a first edition of Rachel Carson’s 1962 masterpiece Silent Spring, and carried it around for another decade before reading it.  The book exposed the pesticide and herbicide industries for the dangerous nature of these chemicals to humans, animals (think DDT and Bald Eagle eggs), and ecosystems.  Of course, all those chemicals have since been banned for home use because they, in fact, killed people.  I am still careful with Round-Up, not spraying on a windy day, and washing with soap after.  How glad I am that sensitive, smart, and courageous persons like Rachel took on the industrial complex at great personal sacrifice to share messages of truth larger than themselves.  To introduce my book Rabbit Lane: Memory of a Country Road, and in admiration for how Rachel changed the world, I wrote this poem, expressing my sentiments 50 years after she penned hers.

SILENT SPRING

Spring,
Rachel:
not silent quite.
I hear,
distinctly:
the growing hum
of humankind.

Courage at Twilight: Arctic Willow

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The arctic willow bush tends to grow wildly, a thicket of unruly blue hair.  And twigs die and turn brown in the midst, marring the uniform soft blue.  Dad has always diligently pruned out the deadwood.  This weekend he asked me if I would find that one elusive dead twig and cut it out.  After a pine branch attacked me (see prior Pruning Pine Trees post), I wrestled my way into the willow tangle in search of brown.  Like with the pine tree, once on the inside I found much invisible dead wood to cut out.  I threw each brown branch onto the lawn, cut them up in short lengths, and filled an entire garbage can.  Stepping back from the bush, there was that elusive brown twig still peeking through. Finally I found it.  What a different removing the brown made to the quality of the blue.  Nature is full of instructional principles, like how cutting out the dead keeps the living healthy and beautiful.

Courage at Twilight: Journals

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I have kept a journal since I was a teenager in the late 1970s. My journal isn’t a diary of daily occurrences, but a collection of documents containing my thoughts, insights, struggles, joys, accomplishments, activities, and feelings, and those of others with whom I am closely connected, mostly family.  All these documents go into one-inch black three-ring binders, the dates printed on the spines, lined on my bookshelves.  Continue reading →

Book Review: Rabbit Lane Memoir

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May be an image of book

My son, Brian Wallace Baker, a recent MFA graduate in creative non-fiction and poetry, wrote this kind post as a gift to me.  I am deeply touched and grateful.  Brian’s post:

As a writer, I think a lot about other writers, how some get big book deals, big prizes, and how even these writers aren’t household names. And it’s rare for a writer, no matter how popular, to be remembered beyond their generation. Thinking about this has made me realize that fame and success have little to do with being a good writer. There are so many good books out there, and more being written and published all the time, and most of them will have relatively small audiences. And that’s okay. I’ve learned that good writing has a lot more to do with changing hearts than it does with seeking fame and fortune.

Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road is one of those good books with a small audience. It has many profound things to say and good stories to tell, which is why my last book review of the year will be about this book.

My relationship to this book is different from most other books because I appear as one of the characters, and I know many of the people and events discussed in the book. Rabbit Lane is my dad’s memoir. It’s about his experience of moving to the small farming town of Erda, Utah, raising his kids there, and what he learned from the community and the landscape. The stories vary widely in subject matter from escaped cattle to encounters with skunks, from a sacred Native American sweat ceremony to giving a duckling CPR. There are also many poems and songs scattered throughout the book.

The main character of the book is not a person at all. It’s a narrow country road called Rabbit Lane, where my dad walked day after day, finding peace, poetry, and insight along the way. Throughout the book, Rabbit Lane changes from a dirt road lined by trees and irrigation water, teeming with muskrats and crayfish, to a poorly paved one-lane road lined with backyards. Despite its transformation, Rabbit Lane is still an important place for our family.

Rabbit Lane is a place of meditation and observation, and my dad’s book is filled with both. His meditations on life have been eye- and heart-opening for me. Here’s an example:

“In the quiet of Rabbit Lane, I often ponder the purpose of life. Has it occurred to me that the purpose of life may be simply to live? Not just to breathe and have a pulse, of course, but to live the best life we can every day, slogging through the sorrow and the suffering in exchange for hope and a greater measure of joy and contentment, seeking to attain our full potential, to find the best that is within us.”

One thing I love about this book is its many descriptions of the natural world I grew up in, such as this one:

“On many an evening I strained to discern the source of a soft, ghostly, reverberating sound moving over the farm fields. But I never found it. Explaining this mystery to Harvey one afternoon, he told me to look high into the sky whenever I heard the sound. There, I would see a small dot, the ventriloquistic snipe. Flying high, the snipe turns to dive and roll at breakneck speeds toward the ground. Wind rushing through its slightly open wings creates the haunting sound. The snipe throws the sound somehow from those heights to hover foggily over the fields.”

(Yes, no matter what you may have experienced or heard about Boy Scout snipe hunts, snipes are very real.)

Toward the end of the book is a passage that has left a deep impression on me:

“Brian, home from his first semester of college, announced happily he was going for a walk. He bounded away with enthusiasm. Weary from Christmas chaos, I nonetheless determined to venture forth. A walk down Rabbit Lane, at night, under the falling snow, is enchanting and not to be missed. Proceeding down Church Road toward Rabbit Lane, I followed Brian’s footprints. At the intersection, I saw that Brian’s tracks turned north onto Rabbit Lane. I felt contented to see that his spirit had chosen the path that I have so often taken. Now my boots followed his.”

I’ll always be following your boots, Dad, but you have taught me how to “venture forth” on my own, how to find beauty. Thank you for the gift of your book and the gift of showing me Rabbit Lane, not just the road but the sacred life that surrounds it. No matter where I go, I hope to walk the way you taught me to walk down Rabbit Lane, gently, respectfully, joyously.

I highly recommend this book. Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road can be purchased here: Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.

Thank you, Brian.

(Photo by Brian Baker.)

Courage at Twilight: Second Guesses

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With the plan in place, and the miracles having come about, the time to get to work had arrived.  Boxing.  Cleaning.  Moving.  Adjusting.  Saying good-byes.  And with that work came the second guessing.  What was I thinking to invite this change?  I am moving from my home, where I am comfortable and safe.  I will be lengthening my commute from 3 miles to 53, from ten minutes to an hour, each way.  I will be working day and night, six days a week.  I will be living in someone else’s space.  I will be giving up my solitary time for reading, writing, and film.  Did I do the right thing?  And yet, I know with a conviction, as powerful as any I ever received before, that this is the right thing to do.  This is missionary work, and I have been called to this mission.  I am holding on to that sure knowledge as I enter into a time of transition, a time of belonging neither in the old place nor in the new.  I am holding onto that conviction and moving forward with faith, however weak.

Little Growler

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Little Growler

A lion sits on my bed, a little lion, named Little Growler.  He clambers onto my pillow each morning after I make the bed.  Hello Little Growler, I say.  He guards the small house all day.  And he shuffles off to his secondary perch when I draw back the blankets at night.  He does not demand anything of me.  He does not growl or bark or mewl or drool.  He does not whine or glare or fume.  Little Growler came to stay when I moved away.  She brought him with her one day and introduced us.  She knew I was alone now.  She was 9.

When she turned 10, Olaf skated home with us from Disney on Ice.  He joins Little Growler with a grin that refuses to dim.  Pooh Bear with his round rumbly tumbly completes the trio, wandering in from California when the girl was not quite 2 and we met a giant Pooh and a giant Tigger and they happily squeezed in with us in a photo of the family: together.

I wave to the threesome at night – company in the dark is comforting – and manage to smile and say Good night little friends and remember Hannah at 9 and 10 and 2 and know we have had some happy times and I am not irreparable and I am very much alive and moving into something mysterious and beautiful and that Little Growler will be perched on my pillow when I come home at night.

They Fell from the Sky

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They Fell from the Sky

Hundreds of them.  Eared Grebes.  The birds precipitated from inside crystalline clouds where the sunlight flashed in an infinity of ice atoms swirling and refracting in a frozen explosion of brilliance, as if the sun raged coldly right there inside the clouds.  The birds became utterly hopelessly disoriented in the icy intensity, blind, not knowing up from down.  Hundreds of grebes dropped from the mists to bounce into buildings, cars, trees, yards, and parking lots.  And there she stood, unmoving, in my parking space, her olive-brown feet stuck frozen to the ice.  My office key made a crude chisel for chopping around her toes – they bled and flaked skin already.  I wrapped her in my coat and sat her in a box by my desk, with cracker crumbs and a bowl of water.

The children begged to open the box and see what was scratching inside, and exhaled exclamations of wonder when they saw.  What IS it?  She’s an Eared Grebe.  Look at her pointy black beak, her long flaring golden feathers that look like ears, and her crimson eyes.  Do you know what you call a group of grebes?  A Water Dance!  Can’t you just picture the family flapping and paddling and splashing their delighted dance on the lake?

What are we going to do with her?  Can we fill the bath tub?  Our grebe paddled around with obvious enthusiasm.  What are we going to feed her?  How about fish!  Tub-side with a bag of goldfish, the children clamored for the privilege of feeding their bird.  Our compromise: eight hands held the bloated bag and poured.  She darted after the fish in a flash of black and gold and red, a little paddling package of magnificence.  Look at her feet – no webbing.  Look at how her toes unhinge with little retractable paddles.  Wow! came in whispers.

That needling question of what to do with the bird in the bathtub?  We would try a nearby pond, and hope for the best.  The children watched her swim away and they looked sad and happy and I sensed how singular a blessing to have welcomed that bit of living feathered grace into our human home, to release her willfully, to be moved by her wildness and beauty.  And I hoped a small sliver of that exquisiteness would stay behind in memories of hinged toes and golden ears and red red eyes, and of creatures that dance on the water.

(Image by David Mark from Pixabay.) 

Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.

 

 

The Wrong Shade of Blue

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The Wrong Shade of Blue

On my desk stands an assortment of cheap pens, conference swag stamped with the names of cities and malls, colleges and garbage haulers, hospitals and law firms, architects and engineers and janitors.  Some are fat and uncomfortable to grip, like writing with a broomstick.  Some scratch the paper with stiff unrolling ball points.  My favorite boasts a three-inch ruler, a level, and a screwdriver bit in the top: the engineer.  The pens rise from a rough clay jar we turned so awkwardly on a wheel when we were together and laughing and making a memory – Continue reading →

Dragon Patrol

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Dragon Patrol

This was his modus operandi:

arriving at a mountain lake and settling the family with picnic baskets and chairs and tackle boxes and poles, our father walked the perimeter, heading off on a trail if there was a trail, through bushes and over-and-around tree trunks if there wasn’t, to scout the best fishing and to gather perspective of lake and forest and meadow and bog and picnicking family from every vantage point to find what he could find.  He looked small on the opposite shore Continue reading →

Curtains and Veils

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Curtains and Veils

Only a cloth curtain separated the little boy’s anticipation of surgery from my own.  But he was only two and didn’t know what was coming and had two kind parents who spoke in cheerful optimistic soft voices and kind nurses and kind doctors who smiled and were soft and kind.

I am always very careful to say nothing when awaking Continue reading →

A Tree to Remember

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A Tree to Remember

At the time, I felt proud and childlike and utterly cheerful to plug in the new two-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree with multi-colored lights pre-strung—just slide it out of the box and plug it in—and skirted with a checkered flannel pillowcase hiding three plastic feet.  I hung fragile little ornaments I keep in an egg carton.  This lighted loaded twig brightened my living room, a quiet understated new friend demanding nothing of me, content to glow and keep me company.  Continue reading →

Resistance

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Resistance

That was the morning I awoke late and feeling groggy and foggy and depressed and sluggish, as in, like a slug.  And I had been feeling so well.  I will never take melatonin again at one o’clock in the morning, or for that matter at any other time of the day or night again ever.  Which I also said the last time this happened.  The tablets I have flung in the trash, and the bottle tossed into the recycling box for the next time I visit my parents, who have a giant green plastic recycling can the city empties Monday mornings.  Saturday is a good day to do the laundry, I shrugged,

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