Category Archives: Meditations

Summer

I had an hour to kill in the middle of the day, so I parked at the old rifle range, and walked up the abandoned railroad bed to White Pond. The air was thick with humidity, and everything looked incredibly green from all the rain that’s fallen in July. Cicadas buzzed. A few birds braved the heat of the day. I passed through swamps caused by beaver dams. In places, the railroad bed was almost overgrown and only a thin path led through exuberant green shrubs and grass and poison ivy. Brilliant green leaves brushed against me from head to toe on both sides. At one point I noticed where a stand of white pines had dropped enough needles and shed enough shade to kill off most of the undergrowth; aside from that, I didn’t think of much of anything at all. Once the swamp ended and the woods began, the undergrowth mostly disappeared.

On the way back from White Pond, a Golden Labrador Retriever lay panting at the side of the trail, attended by a white-haired woman.

“That dog has the right idea,” I said. “It’s too hot to walk.”

“He’s gone lame,” said the woman. She had an English accent.

“What, does he have something in his paw?” I said.

“He walks a few yards, and then he stops and lies down,” she said. “My friend has gone to get the car.”

“He’s hot, too,” I said, watching him pant. “It’s very humid.”

“It is clammy,” she said. “I’ve just come over from England last night. We’ve been having some of the same weather over there.”

We chatted a bit, and then I said, “I’ try to carry him up to the road for you, but I think he’s a bit heavy for me.”

She laughed. “Oh, I didn’t expect you to offer to carry him up. He’ll be fine.”

Of the whole hour-long walk I took, most of what I can tell you about is that three-minute conversation. Aside from that, there are only general impressions of walking hard, sweat, gentle heat, damp air, greenness, small animals in the underbrush, flies, smell of grass and leaves — but there wasn’t much to be said about such basic physical impressions.

Found

I pulled the car up to the beginning of the car wash. “Could I have the Ruby Red?” I said, handing the young man with the reddish hair ten dollars plus a tip. The guy on the other side of the car started wiping down the roof with soapy water and a brush. “Hey, did you guys find a license plate here?”

“Sure,” he said. “Which one you looking for? We got lots of ’em in there,” nodding his head towards the car wash office.

“The same as the one on the back of this car,” I said.

He started sloshing soapy water on the hood of the car. “Come back around when you get through,” he said. “I’ll take a look for you.”

I rolled up the windows, put it in neutral, and the car lurched into the rotating brushes and through the spray and then out through the big blowers that dry off the car. When I walked back around, both men were standing under a tree. There was my license plate sitting on the picnic table under the tree. My relief must have showed on my face, and both guys grinned at me.

The second guy, the guy wearing a Harley t-shirt and with his hair in a long queue down his back, said, “It was under about four others. Actually, it was the fourth one down when we found it. We got a lot of license plates. Tell all your friends to come down and check.”

A day in June

It really was a perfect day. The air was clear and dry; the sky blue, but with enough white-and-gray cumulus clouds to make it truly beautiful; the temperature at mid-day just on the edge of hot, but cool in the evening; and all faces reflected the perfection of the weather.

I walked slowly through Danehy Park, looking and listening. Three soccer games were going on, men playing in bright nylon uniforms, with a couple of boys kicking around a soccer ball on the sidelines while they watched the game out of the corners of their eyes. Three young children egged each other on and decided to run down a little hill away from their parents, wide grins on their faces, giggling, their fathers calling after them, “Slowly! Don’t get too far!”; and then the fathers talked to each other about their children in French that was laced with one of the African accents. Two girls in pink dresses tossed a frisbee back and forth with their father until at last the girls (not the father) grew tired of the game. People lounged at picnic tables, empty papers and foil in front of them, talking idly and looking at the pink clouds in the sky. A man played with his black dog, telling it to stay where it was; he picked up the ball and began walking away; the dog quivered with anticipation and excitement, and began to rise on its hanuches; the man looked back, and the dog got down; at last the man threw the ball and the dog flew after it. It was a perfect evening for being in the park….

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
    The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
    We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the Devil’s booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
    For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul’s tasking:
    ‘T is heaven alone that is given away,
‘T is only God may be had for the asking;
There is no price set on the lavish summer,
And June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?
    Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
    And over it softly her warm ear lays:

— lines 21-36 from the prelude to the first part of The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell

Iris

A small thunderstorm passed by overhead. A few raindrops darkened the pavement of the road and the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later, another small thunderstorm, a few more raindrops. The sun came out in the west, and I decided to take a walk.

A few raindrops were still falling as I stepped outside. The sun was shining brightly, and I looked up at the dark clouds to the east, and there was the rainbow. Rainbows have been co-opted by feel-good New Agers, and adopted by nine-year-old girls, but the rainbow I saw was not the kind that gets painted on tchotchkes or printed on decals.

The rainbow was brighter towards the ground, but even at its brightest it did not look like something substantial or corporeal. It was sublime:– both in the sense of a solid thing that turns immediately to vapor, and in the sense of an experience that can overwhelm our rational selves. The rainbow changed with the changing light, it was both part of and separate from the clouds, and as the storm clouds moved farther away it faded, beginning at the top, and ending with the lower leftmost or southern end. Of course the rainbow brought to my mind the promise made by Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, a promise which sounds hollow in light of the promise of global climate change. Then I thought of Iris, the messenger of the Olympian gods and goddesses, who was also the rainbow:– the rainbow as the messenger of that which is transcendent. Iris does not always bring good news, but she always brings something of great importance:

On this Iris fleet as the wind went forth to carry his message. Down she plunged into the dark sea midway between Samos and rocky Imbrus; the waters hissed as they closed over her, and she sank into the bottom as the lead at the end of an ox-horn, that is sped to carry death to fishes. She found Thetis sitting in a great cave with the other sea-goddesses gathered round her; there she sat in the midst of them weeping for her noble son who was to fall far from his own land, on the rich plains of Troy. [Iliad, Book XXIV, 77 ff., trans. Samuel Butler]

In twenty minutes, after I had walked a little more than a mile, it was gone. During all that time, I did not notice anyone else looking up at the rainbow.

Summer impulse

A perfect summer day. It was so beautiful that after I finished visiting a shut-in, I decided to drive back to the church via back roads, instead of the divided highway. My route took me through Lakeville and Rochester, past farms and suburban sprawl and fields and woods and suburban sprawl and cranberry bogs and shopping plazas.

Driving back roads took me an extra fifteen minutes. When I got back to the church, I realized that I should have just driven straight back, and gone for a fifteen minute walk — that would have been much more satisfying, and would have burned less gas. On the other hand, if I had driven straight back, I would have skipped the fifteen minute walk and just gone on to make my next visit.

Death on the rooftops

The Herring Gulls who nested on our rooftop this year hatched out two chicks, but the chicks didn’t survive for very long. There’s a skylight in our bedroom, which goes up through a part of the roof with a very shallow pitch. That’s the part of the roof where the chicks like to spend their time. We have discovered that they like to sneak in under the skylight and stand on the insect screen above our bedroom, to get out of the sun and the rain. We don’t like them to stand their, because we don’t want their droppings coming down through the screen into our bedroom, so while the chicks are running around on the rooftop we keep the skylight barely open.

But somehow they crept in anyway. Then it started raining. The skylight has a rain sensor that closes it automatically. The chicks got crushed to death. It gave Carol a nasty shock when she went in to go to bed, and there were two dead gull chicks trapped between the insect screen and the sash of the skylight.

I got the stepladder and pushed them out of the way. While I was cleaning up the gull droppings on the floor under the skylight, the two parents stood on the skylight and screamed and hollered. I’m not sure I would attribute grief to Herring Gulls — they are fairly non-social animals. Yet the disappearance of their chicks, and then the sudden appearance of the dead bodies, must have been disconcerting to them:– all their energy had been devoted to parenting, and then suddenly it became quite clear to them that they were no longer parents. They screamed and hollered for about twenty minutes, and then flew away.

Carol felt bad about the dead chicks, but I told her that the mortality rate for Herring Gulls in their first year is something like eighty percent. In the three breeding seasons that we have lived in our apartment, only one chick out of six has even survived long enough to fledge and fly away — three fell off the edge of the roof, two were crushed to death by the skylight. Even with such a high mortality rate, the population of Herring Gulls is rising in Massachusetts, so I am not tempted to feel sentimental about it.

Sitting on the bridge at night

Coming home late at night from the supermarket, I saw the sign lit up to say “Bridge Closed.” I drove across Pope’s Island and pulled in behind a pickup truck stopped at the bridge, and turned off my engine. Damp cool air came up off the harbor. The driver of the truck in front of me turned off his or her engine. A few cars pulled in behind me.

To my right, I could hear the faint sound of a radio being played in one of the cars in the right-hand lane. To my left, I could hear two crickets chirping somewhere in Captain Leroy’s Marina. I don’t think I have ever heard crickets on Pope’s Island before. Usually, the sounds of traffic on the four lanes of U.S. Route 6 drown out most other sounds.

The bridge began to swing back. We all waited. I could hear two young women chatting and laughing in a car behind mine. A faint cool breeze blew in the window of the car. The crickets suddenly began chirping a little faster.

At last the gates blocking the bridge went up, we all started up our engines, the light turned green, we surged forward and were gone.

Dealing with the heat

On Saturday morning, it went from 55 degrees Fahrenheit at 6 a.m. to 85 at 2 p.m. High temperature yesterday was 90, today it was 95.

As always, Ted showed up first for choir practice tonight.

“Hot today,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “But what’s bad is that it went from fifty something to eighty something in a day.”

Talking about the heat was depressing, so we started talking about the economy. That got depressing, so we talked politics. That got depressing, so we talked about New Bedford. That got depressing, but by then there were enough people for us to start singing. The first really hot weather of the season always makes me depressed and crankier than usual. Good thing we had choir practice tonight, because the music made all that crankiness disappear.

At lunch hour

“Whoever’s next I can take you down here,” said the nice young woman who works at the cafe. I walked down to her cash register. “Hi hon, what can I get you.”

“Could I have a tuna salad plate please and…” I placed my order.

“That’s nine seventy, hon,” she said, friendly, but a little too busy to smile.

I paid, left a better tip than usual, and stepped back to wait for my salad. All of a sudden there was a long line. The two women at the cash registers worked as fast as they could.

“I can take the next in line down here,” said the nice young woman.

A man shouldered his way past the people in line. A woman at the head of the line looked at him, and sort of shrugged. She could see his face (I couldn’t) and apparently whatever she saw there made her decide not to challenge him. He was tall, a slight stoop to his broad shoulders, casually dressed but well dressed. He eased over to the register. As the nice woman at the register handed over some change and started to turn to him, he swung a bottle of juice back and forth, and it slipped out of his hand and smashed on the floor. He looked at it for a moment, kept his head down, and walked towards the table where the extra napkins are. But he kept walking past that table, and towards the door, and he slipped out the door with his head down.

Maybe he’s going to the security guard at the entrance to the building, I thought to myself. Maybe he’s going to ask for a mop. But he didn’t come back. The line was still long, and the two women at the cash registers just ignored the puddle of juice and the broken glass for now. Two women were standing waiting for their orders to come out, as I was, and one of them said to the other: “Did you see that? He just walked out!” The other woman shook her head.

“I can take whoever’s next,” said the nice young woman. A man with a grizzled beard and a worn t-shirt walked down towards her register and stepped on a piece of broken glass. “Watch out hon, don’t step on the glass,” said the nice young woman. “What can I get you?”