Category Archives: Meditations

Too busy

I wound up talking to an old friend today, someone I hadn’t talked to in two years. We exchanged news (she now has a grandchild!), and then she said something about being sorry about not having called me. Well, I said, it’s not like I called you, and besides we’re both workaholics. That’s true, she said. But what I really called you about, I continued, is this…

…and then we got down to work, because of course I didn’t call her just to socialize. At this point, I guess I’m supposed to apologize for working all the time and not socializing enough. In his book Walden, Henry Thoreau opines, “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence.” The hell with it, I’m not going to apologize to the likes of Henry Thoreau. I like to work, and if I take a thousand stitches today it’s because it gives me joy and pleasure to do so.

Autumn watch

We got up early so we could take a walk before we started driving up to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was unusually calm; in places the water of the harbor was almost completely smooth, in other places it was barely riffled by the smallest breeze; the barges, cranes, fishing boats, and heavy machinery along the Fairhaven side of the harbor were beautifully reflected where the water was still. Some blue sky began to show in the west, and it grew bright enough to cast shadows. Carol decided to turn back about halfway to Fairhaven. A dozen or so Buffleheads bobbed in the water between Pope’s Island and Fairhaven, the black and white of the males showing brilliantly in the growing sunlight. A couple of roofers stood on the flat roof of the old motel on Route 6, ripping up the old roofing; supposedly the new owner of the building is going to renovate it, and reopen it. I kept walking, but by that point my mind settled down and stopped thinking.

Beech nuts

Yesterday I wound up walking past the fast food joint at the corner of Elm and County. No, I didn’t go in to the fast food joint — even though I crave fatty food with the onset of cold weather, I’ve sworn off fast food for a while because of what it does to my digestive system (you don’t want to know). I walked under the old beech tree that grows along Elm Street across from the fast food joint, a big old tree that somehow survived the decline of the neighborhood. Its branches spread out over the sidewalk, and the sidewalk was almost entirely covered in beech nut shells. A fat Eastern Gray Squirrel idly hopped towards the tree, just out of my reach, keeping a weather on me the whole time. I thought, That’s what I should be doing for fatty food instead of fast food hamburger products, I should be eating nuts.

But then when I was in the supermarket tonight, I forgot to buy a jar of nuts.

Autumn watch

Out, as usual at this time of year, about an hour before sundown. I went out behind our building to look at our little raised bed of Swiss chard. The cold snap of the past few days has pretty much conquered the chard. One or two plants were still standing up, but the rest had fallen over, and the leaves had a dull look, no longer the bright shiny yellow-green of early this week. I planted the seeds too late, and even though it stayed unseasonably warm up until a few days ago, there weren’t enough hours of daylight to allow the plants to flourish. They never got much bigger than three inches tall. Late last week, Carol said we could eat them even though they were small. Lulled by the weeks of warm weather, I decided to wait. And now the plants are pretty close to dead.

I got to the Fairhaven side of the harbor, and walked into the parking lot of the motel right off Route 6. I was walking towards a black pickup truck when I saw a small head peering over the hood at me. It was a Mute Swan. It had extended its neck all the way up, until it was nearly five feet high. When I got around to the other side of the truck, there was its plump white body waddling around on big black webbed feet; its neck, incredibly long when sticking straight up, accounted for about two thirds of its height. I walked past it quickly — Mute Swans can be aggressive, and I didn’t relish the idea of having an absurd-looking bird pecking me in the chest. I walked down to the edge of the parking lot, and there, squinting into the setting sun, I saw a flock of Buffleheads — the cold weather had finally driven some of the wintering waterfowl to the ocean.

On the way back, I walked through the park on Pope’s Island, startling a couple dozen gulls into flight. They settled down and fluffed out their feathers. As I passed the little playground in the park, there was a used condom lying on the ground, torn and disintegrating. I thought, What a hell of a place to have sex, so cold and bleak. Then I thought, Well maybe that condom has been there since summer when it was warm. Then I thought, Even if it was warm, it’s still a hell of a place to have sex. Much better to have sex in a nice comfortable bed.

I paused briefly to watch a reefer ship being unloaded at the Maritime Terminal. A couple of people were standing around, maybe on break, dressed in coveralls and hardhats. I remember those first really cold days of late fall, when you’re working an outdoors job — it was always tough for me to get used to it. Then after a few days you get accustomed to it, and it feels good. I miss working outside in winter. True, when it gets really cold, well below freezing, it wears you down. Even then, it’s better than sitting indoors all winter long, except for the hour you can steal to get outside and take a walk.

Three pieces of trivia

This afternoon I went to talk with someone in hospice care, someone I just met, someone just a few years older than I am. I don’t know how to describe her except to say she is someone with real spiritual depth. I knew this because I could see how she made the nurses and health aides feel good just by being in her presence. She and I talked for nearly an hour, and though I couldn’t tell you what exactly we talked about, I still feel good from listening to her.

I took a walk down by the waterfront late this afternoon. It was already getting dark. A thought came to me as I was walking — I can only remember the shape of that thought, not any of its content except it was about something I saw and heard. My older sister, the writer, always carries a notebook around and would have written that thought down. But I didn’t write it down, and it got lost in all the mundane and even trivial thoughts about my job, about shopping, about how I don’t exercise enough.

My partner Carol read my blog the other day and gently mocked me for writing about trivia. She’s right, I do write about trivia. But that’s where I find the transcendent, that’s where my religious life unfolds. Some people need to see the face of a divine being, or have an out-of-body experience, but I’m fine just sitting at home doing nothing.

Sky

Between one thing and another, I didn’t get outside to take a walk until it was almost four o’clock, and already getting dark. It was windy, and overhead dark clouds were blowing across the sky. As I got down to the waterfront, the sky cleared out in the west, and across the harbor suddenly the town of Fairhaven was all alight, the towers of the Congregational church and Town Hall and the Unitarian church, a big white ferry docked at the Steamship Authority maintenance terminal, all shining bright against the dark clouds. I looked up, and the bottoms of the clouds were being lit up here and there with rosy light. I walked down to Merrill’s Wharf and along the New Bedford side of the harbor all was in shadow, except the smokestack at the old power generation plant, and a big American flag flying over one of the housing projects glowing redly. The light shining on Fairhaven faded out. The clouds overhead glowed orange-pink, then pinkish-gray, then they were just gray. I walked back home, and I could feel the cold air coming in, and I took big deep breaths of it — dry cold air from the north sweeping out the damp, warm, moldy air that has been hanging over the city for days. I could feel myself coming alive again with the new air, and I hoped for snow. It was nearly dark by the time I got home.

Dream

I drifted up out of sleep this morning still in the middle of a dream. In the dream, I was talking with this woman Sue, a jazz pianist and piano teacher whom I knew a dozen years ago from the church where I was then working.

Nothing really happened in the dream (I think Sue was telling me about ninth chords, which was the sort of conversation we had in real life). Her boyfriend was in the background somewhere, except I think they were married. It was some kind of social event, because there were other people there too.

Even though nothing happened in the dream, it kept reappearing in my consciousness all day long. Every time it popped up, I wondered why. I drove up to Newton for a meeting, and during the hour-long drive I realized that the last time I had spoken to Sue was when I was living in Newton, and she called to say hi — this was in the late spring of 1999 — and before we hung up she told me, “Hey, don’t be a stranger,” but I never called her back. Was the dream about me feeling guilty about not calling back someone who was a peripheral friend? That seemed unlikely.

I went to the meeting, and as we were all heading off one of the people at the meeting, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, asked about my mother, and I said that she had died nine or ten years ago. Then as I was getting my car I remembered why I never bothered to call Sue back — because in the summer of 1999, my mother was not doing well, and then she died that fall. And then I remembered that my mother died nine years ago yesterday, and I had completely forgotten that fact all day. Except that I hadn’t really forgotten, because that’s what the dream was doing, it was telling me that I really had remembered, and that’s why I had been so distracted all day long. This may sound nonsensical, but the human soul is not governed by linear logic.

If only…

Boy, do I hate lifting weights. I don’t have this attitude towards the other exercise I do — I like taking a long walk every day, no matter what the weather, and I even like doing some easy yoga and calisthenics in the morning. But even though I know I need to do it, I have never liked lifting weights.

Then I got bronchitis last winter and really was too sick to lift weights, and somehow I just never started up again. This past Thursday I finally dusted of the weight bench and the barbell and the dumbbells and spent forty minutes lifting. I was surprised at how good it felt. My body does not like sitting at meetings, and sitting at bedsides, and sitting at more meetings, and sitting in front of a computer; my body likes it best when I’m doing moderately hard physical labor. I lifted weights again tonight, and once again I feel great — more cheerful, more alert, happier.

If I could only keep it up, keep lifting weights three times a week like you’re supposed to do, I’d probably feel that good all the time. If only…

Autumn watch

It has been peculiarly warm this fall, even warmer than you’d expect in this era of global climate change. The days are short and sunset comes at 4:30, but the air feels like late spring, not early November. Because it’s so warm, the wintering birds haven’t bothered to come to the ocean yet — they’ll stay inland as long as there’s no ice on the water.

There may not be many wintering birds on the harbor, but there have been a number of freighters coming into the Port of New Bedford. In the middle of the day, we heard a huge deep horn sound once down on the waterfront, and when we walked down to the waterfront in the late afternoon, we saw Brazilian Reefer (IMO 8300377), a big refrigerated cargo ship, berthed at the end of the State Pier. I looked her up online, and discovered that she measures nearly 475 feet in length overall — she took up the entire end of the pier, and even stuck out a little bit at each end. We stood for a while and watched as they unloaded the ship. Being a bird nerd I guess I’d rather look at wintering birds, but it was pretty good watching two of the four ten-ton derricks on a 475 foot ship unload fruit onto the pier where waiting forklifts scooped them up and put them into waiting semi trucks.