The quick take: Christine Black posted a beautiful review of my book “Cities on a Hill” and the bravery of my friends here.
The long take is below.
Things to not do again. A List.
160
March relented, and blessed the land with a rain on it’s last day. The redbuds bloomed and caught each shade of the light, rejoicing towards the sky in the morning, then darting out of the shadowy roadside woods in the golden afternoon, a diving catch for the last of the sunbeams.
I drove along, smirking at myself. The post on X saved us all. A mock news photo with the headline: Poet feels conflicted about spring. Might write about it later.
Well, yeah. Doesn’t it grip you by the heart, and throw you against the wall, ready to yell like a drill sergeant, and then say…nothing?
The redbuds even bloomed along Appomattox, where Lee once stood riveted, under an apple tree long gone, waging battle with the hopes and fears of nations in silent thought, then making the call. I could almost see him, waving.
If he were a NASCAR official, he’d hoist the biggest yellow flag in the world.
Caution.
160 years is not long ago.
80
“Frederika with a K” she said in a dignified German accent.
“Have a seat, we’re talking about Chopin and Mendelssohn and music of the 1830s.”
Her Chihuahua watched silently, nestled in his sling on her walker. I continued.
“Mendelssohn moved to Berlin.”
“I’m from Berlin.”
Women’s ages stump me on the best of days, when the situation is already delicate.
“How long did you live there?”
"Till I came here in the 80’s. I was born in ‘44.”
“Oh. So you avoided most of the…fireworks.”
“Not really. It was awful. I grew up playing in ruins.”
Something about her voice, the emphasis on the u. Ruins. Visions of civilization like a dropped piece of pottery, shards piled with no hope of repair, but yet, grass springing up eternally between the cracks.
“And there were landmines. I found one once.”
The absurdity of contrasts, a sunny library and hell’s playground made me ask a stupid question.
“Did you get hit?”
She looked at me, intact, graceful.
“No, I made it.” (Leaving off the Dummkopf)
The vagueness makes me wonder what else happened.
“Seems good to remember these things, so we don’t do it again” I ventured. “My friends seem to think it’s ancient history.” She nodded.
We went back to Chopin. She helped me as I stumbled through the French, German, and Italian names that season any good story of a salon in Paris. “What’s this word?”
“Let me see it. Oh, I named my son something similar.”
The Chihuahua remained silent. I wouldn’t have said it, but she did with a twinkle. “It’s that German discipline.”
80 years is not long ago.
5
I think they’re all dead.
Five years slipped by, sometimes quietly, a current to drag you under, sometimes nosily, whitewater under the bridge, with moving and ripping and rooting and finally–a morning hush broken only by the tick of a clock and the soft pad of my bed-warm feet across the floor.
Good morning, sky.
The floor is the same color as those long halls that my friends used to live by. The COVID lockdown seems a geologic age ago, so drastic the changes.
But five years? Not long ago.
I think they’re all dead. That’s what people do, up and die on you. No matter how you cling to their papery hands, and no matter how keenly they peer back, they fade away. (Still, they slip you something in that moment, like a sneaky bit of cash, but often infinitely better. Sometimes it takes decades to figure out what it was.)
I looked at the stars last night, slewing to Mizar and Alcor, the bend in the handle of The Big Dipper. Bright, blue-white, a double with the eye, an eye test for the ancient archers, and now a closer double with the telescope. Sam and Rosie had seen that once, when I brought the scope to Statler Place long before the lockdowns. We looked at it from the parking lot, where Rosie called the Big Dipper the Saucepan. She was embarrassed at the mistake, so I fixed it by declaring it the new name. “More fitting, anyway.”
Then we sat around the table inside and talked about life and dying and now they’re gone.
I wrote about them during the lockdowns. It’s an odd thing that happens: it’s easy to forget. That I wrote it, that it happened. But then I remember. They’re all gone. I mustn’t forget what they taught me, those lessons they slipped me like a twenty in a handshake.
Christine Black wrote me out of the blue. “Got your book, and would like to review it.” We talked on the phone. She made a point that keeps me thinking: what did we learn?
Here’s what she wrote. I’m moved by the beauty and grace of this, of remembering and seeing the bravery of my friends. Thank you, Christine.
The time–and the people–changed me entirely, articulated in the book, but forgotten in the minute-to-minute (and not).
Five years is not long ago.
Special thanks to the ghost of Robert E. Lee, Frederika, and Christine Black for the reminders.
