Flashlight Tag

Puberty had just begun insinuating its fascinations
Sparking daring acts of bravery
Like holding hands with one of my sister’s friends
Under the contrived cover of flashlight tag
As awkward as it was secret
And sweet as breakfast cereal
Better than television

Tiny Sirens

On hands and knees I enter the loft
Drawn into the slow motion
Of floating dust and bale debris
Leveraging breaths like rubber
Stretched between shoulders and ribs

The price of my admission is asthma
Which is psychosomatic
According to my grandfather

My wheezing is a descant
To the tiny sirens that guide me
Deeper into the straw world
I’m creeping through ochre shadows
To find a crèche of infant kittens

The Adhesive is Failing

Cubes of cold marimba
Clatter against the shallow sides
Of a thick-bottomed glass

My grandfather grips the Manhattan
Like a handrail
Beads of condensation
Blink between his tanned fingers

His black Oxfords tread
Worn-out linoleum
Stuck to farmhouse floorboards

The adhesive is failing

Manure & Ice

I don’t remember why I was chasing the butterscotch cat. It darted out of sunlight into the dusty shadows of my cousins’ barn. I followed at breakneck speed.

My grandparents kept a tidy barn with a floor that wasn’t slick with a film of silt, hay, and manure, but my cousins didn’t hold to such standards. So imagine my surprise when my feet slipped from under me and I found myself falling forward with arms outstretched Superman-style. My flight was not sustainable and I hit the floorboards with a smack and a splat and a long, messy skid.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t the last time I would rush into a place I didn’t need to be, chasing after something that wasn’t mine.

I also had a wintertime adventure at that farm. There was enough of a hill for sledding, and we made the most of it. With a running start, we could get up enough speed to make it across a flat stretch of yard, and then out onto the frozen duck pond.

The more we sledded, the faster the track became, until we were getting as far as halfway across the pond. Late in the day I decided to really throw myself into it and see what would happen. I hit the packed snow at the perfect angle and velocity. I gripped the steering wings of the Flexible Flyer, and held my boots up to keep from dragging on the track behind me. The sled’s red blades kicked up bits of snow and ice that pelted my face and made my eyes water.

When I reached the edge of the pond I could feel that I had enough speed to make it all the way across the ice. I squinted into the stinging draft, scanning for a good place to stop. The far side of the pond was thick with dead reeds that poked up through the mottled ice like big brown straws. It was swampy and not solidly frozen, but this realization crystallized in my mind a blink too late.

I crashed into the reeds and broke through the ice into scummy pond water. Fortunately, it was too shallow for anything disastrous to happen. I was drenched and chilled, and done sledding for the day, but otherwise none the worse for the wear.

Bookend stories of reckless abandon that ended badly, but not catastrophically: I keep retelling them, trying to decipher their meaning. Does wisdom require me to attenuate my adventurous impulses? Should I frame my curiosity within the bandwidth of safe outcomes? Can I touch the sacred without making direct contact with the stuff of the earth? Is there any faith without danger?

Baptism

The Esopus Creek runs through three hundred years of my family’s stories. It’s easy to imagine my Dutch and Palatine forbears tapping into its store of fish in order to fend off hunger. I used to fish it too on occasion, but happily, my survival never depended on the catch!

The Esopus nearly took my father’s life one afternoon when he was small. He went under, but my grandfather was watching, and pulled him back up into the air.

I was baptized in those same waters, along with my Dad and the rest of my immediate family. It was a chilly sacrament since Indian summer didn’t show up that September.

After a brief testimony, I held my nose and arched backward until fully immersed. Pastor Miller steadied me, but I still felt disoriented and vulnerable in the cold Esopus.

Baptism is a tactile poem about resurrection, which is the spiritual principle of life-from-death, and the current that carries hope forward. Faith isn’t just a wish. It’s more like counting on an unfolding of good things I can’t create for myself – an unfolding that unfolds forever.

All goose bumps and grins, and in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, we were pulled out of the water into the air. Life from death: ritually enacted and viscerally understood.

Dove

I’d been thinking about making a pilgrimage to my hometown. I hadn’t been back there for eleven years, and that had only been a brief visit. So, it had been a long time since I’d really spent any time there.

Conventional wisdom says you can never go home. I’d been warned that the area had changed considerably, and not for the better. But that didn’t really touch my reasons for wanting to go.

My memories of Ulster County had begun to fade. Their substance was wearing thin. It was more like remembering a book I’d read than a place I’d lived. I felt impelled to go back and hold a handful of dirt. As odd as it sounds, I needed to verify for myself that it was still real.

This growing eagerness to return home became more urgent when my Grandmother’s health took a bad turn. It was beginning to seem like she might be within view of the end of her journey.

She’d smoked for most of her life, and her struggles with emphysema during recent years hadn’t sufficiently motivated her to quit. Now she’d finally been forced to exchange her cigarettes for a portable oxygen tank.

Because she adamantly refused to fly, and because I couldn’t afford to, it’d been far too long since we’d visited face to face. It seemed imperative that I get there, but I couldn’t figure out how to pull it off.

The answer came in the form of an exceptional birthday gift. My wife spread the word that she would set out a “tip jar” at my party for contributions toward my airfare and hotel. Thanks to the generosity of friends and family, the trip became possible.

After settling into my hotel room, I drove to my Grandmother’s home on Old Sawkill Road. She met me in the doorway with her calm, wide smile. It was a good reunion.

We talked for a while, and then she asked me if I’d mind doing a few chores. She could still brew a fine pot of coffee, but there were other things she could no longer do. A neighbor helped her out from time to time, but as she put it, “He ain’t so young no more either.”

One of the chores was refilling her birdfeeder with seed. She stood beside the ladder, under the butternut tree and coached me through the task. The feeder was an antique, clear plastic contraption. A little door had to be worked open in order for a portion of birdseed to spill out onto the tray.

Grammy Burnett had a soft spot for birds. More than once she’d rescued a fallen robin or sparrow, and successfully nursed it back to health. I’ve heard stories about a blackbird she saved that became something like a pet. It staid nearby for a long time, and would even perch on her shoulder like a parrot.

She was still looking at the birdfeeder as I eased my way down the ladder. She said, “The dove will come around. She’s smart, she’ll open the latch. Then the other little birds will get some seeds too.”

She hadn’t intended to make a profound statement. She didn’t care much for fancy talk. But there it was, a perfect poetic image of kindness.

When I got back to my hotel room, I wrote her words in my journal so I wouldn’t forget them. They stirred up a holy gratefulness in my spirit for the doves in my life.

The Great Dove opens the latch, and courage, humility, integrity, balance, meaning, generosity, salvation… spill out into life. Then we learn to open latches for one another. We learn about kindness and grace.

That was, in fact, the way I’d gotten to be there that spring. Kind people created the means for me to spend a few days with the woman who had taught me how to handle a fishing pole. She died in December of that same year. She was one of the smartest doves I ever knew.


"I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, 'The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.' I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God."

John the Baptist, describing Jesus.