Carol and I were sitting at the table eating breakfast, Carol was telling me about something she was doing down at her office on Fish Island, when something outside the window behind her, moving in the breeze, caught my eye. Look, I said, rudely interrupting her, and pointing out the window. What, she said. The maple tree, it’s got buds, I said; our apartment is on the second floor so we look right into the branches of the Red Maple in the sidewalk across the street. The morning sun lit up the swelling purplish-red buds so that they stood out against the wall of the Whaling Museum, which was still in shadow. Carol turned, and looked. She wasn’t as interested as I was, and she turned back. Red buds on the maple tree, spring is coming, I said. She continued her story. Red buds on the maple tree, I thought happily to myself, listening to her story.
Category Archives: Meditations
Eclipse
Carol remembered that we were going to be able to see a total eclipse of the moon tonight. The almanac said the eclipse would begin at 8:43; at nine o’clock I remembered to look out our front window. It’s a little hazy here, but I could see the moon pretty clearly: already, the circle of the earth’s shadow has covered a significant portion of the bright disc of the moon.
When I was a child, I seem to remember a number of winter nights when my mother would stay up late to watch partial or total lunar eclipses; or would set her alarm clock so she could awaken in the middle of the night to see them. I only remember seeing one or two, if they happened early in the evening; I was never interested enough in astronomical events to miss sleep for one. I don’t remember the other members of our family being all that interested in eclipses, either. But in memory, my mother never missed a lunar eclipse.
Lunar eclipse as of 9:00 EST, New Bedford, Mass.
Sleepy & out of it
The chest cold that I’ve had since November has managed to come back again, with a vengeance. I didn’t go back to the church after lunch, just stayed home and took a nap. And then later I took another nap. In spite of the naps, I was sleepy all day.
This has been a bad winter for illness; Ted at church has accurately described this winter as “the winter of mucus.” I heard that more than once this winter, the health clinics here in the city had to close their doors early because they had too many people to manage. Seems like everyone has a cold, and now a nasty version of the flu is going around.
Enough said. Time to go to bed.
What happens when you get to the end of the day, and you haven’t gotten half the things done that you needed to get done? You know the feeling.
Yeah, I know, you’re supposed to be cool about it: hey, it’s not that important if thus and such doesn’t get done, after all you got some important things done.
Or you’re supposed to say: I will be mindful of all the good things in this world, I will be mindful when I do the dishes, and that will keep my mind from jumping around.
But at the end of today, I still haven’t gotten done the things I had hoped to get done: I haven’t paid those bills.
I haven’t answered all the email messages awaiting me. I haven’t cleaned the kitchen, or even done the dishes. I forgot to brush my teeth this morning.
And now it is late, and far past the time I had hoped to go to bed, and I will get up tired in the morning.
That’s what you do, day after day, just hoping that some day something good will come of it. Problem is, mostly when something good does come of it, you’re too tired to notice.
Death’s heads and sunrises
I’m giving a talk on Puritan-era gravestones this Thursday, and I’ve been obsessing over the slides I’m going to show during the talk. So I had this idea of doing a sort of music video with death’s heads and cherubs and other images from gravestones, all jumping around to the music. Well, I don’t have the time to do something like that, so I made this video instead… which I admit is a little quirky.
[For you gravestone geeks out there, the stones were photographed at Old Hill Burying Ground in Concord, Mass. (most of the ones in the first third of the video, including those carved by the Lamson family and the Worcester family), the old burying ground in Acushnet, Mass. (many of the broken stones are from there, including the one that appears to be carved by one of Stevens family from Newport), the Naskatucket graveyard in Fairhaven, Mass. (including another possible Stevens stone and the phenomenal sunrise stone towards the end), and Westport Friends burying ground (the granite stone marked “R.B” comes from there).]
2:13.
Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.
Winter memory
This must have happened when I was in fourth or fifth grade; my older sister Jean would have been in sixth or seventh grade, and my younger sister Abby would have been a baby. We had all finished dinner, and we were sitting around the dinner table talking. We must have been talking about school and our teachers, because somehow we asked dad about the teachers he had had when he was a kid. (Mom didn’t get involved in this conversation; perhaps she was dealing with Abby.) Dad said he could only remember a few of his teachers. Jean and I said we could remember all of our teachers, and then we each proceeded to name them all. And I have a vivid memory of sitting there at one end of that dining room table thinking to myself, “How can Dad possibly forget his teachers? I’ll always remember my teachers.”
Here I am, now about the same age as Dad was at the time of that dinner table conversation. Can I remember all my elementary school teachers now? Here are the ones I can remember: Miss Sheehan (whom I didn’t like one bit), Mrs. Blanchard (whom I adored, and who read to us from the “Twilight Animal Series” books every day), Mr. Hoffman (whom I had two years in a row, and whom I liked, but who failed to teach me arithmetic). But who was my first grade teacher? was her name Mrs. Witcher? or was that my kindergarten teacher? — So much for always remembering all my elementary school teachers.
How old was I when I began to forget my teachers?
Spring watch
At 6:30 this morning, I was suddenly wide awake. This is unusual, because I always get up at seven on work days. But now the days are longer, and the sun rises early enough to make me think that it’s past the time when I should be awake and out of bed, which made me awaken with a start this morning thinking, Have I slept through the alarm? I looked at the clock and reassured myself that I had another half hour to sleep.
The temperature got up to 50 degrees today, warm enough to feel like spring. But it was dark and gloomy for most of the day, and even though we got rain instead of snow the sky had all the gloom of winter. February is always a difficult month in New England: the days start to get longer, we get occasional spells of warm weather, but you can’t get decent vegetables, it’s bound to snow again, and we’re still sunk in winter gloom. People talk about “spiritual practices,” but as a born and bred New Englander I mistrust “spiritual practices,” because I know the only thing that’s going to stand up to February is good old fashioned religious discipline: so I write every day whether I want to or not (and believe me, today I don’t want to), and I religiously take a long walk every day. With a little bit of discipline, I can ignore the winter gloominess and focus on the tiniest signs of spring, like the fact that I came awake a half an hour early this morning.
Rain
1:11.
Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.
Winter
Today, at last, I saw a thin skin of ice on some protected parts of New Bedford harbor. A tiny stream trickles out of a culvert between the public access boat ramp and a marine construction yard on the Fairhaven side of the harbor, and where it entered the harbor I could see the thinnest skin of ice, broken up into tiny shards by the small waves that ruffled the surface of the water. Yesterday, when Carol and I were walking around that boat ramp, we saw no ice at all.
Thirty or forty gulls stood around on the parking lot for the boat ramp, mostly Ring-billed Gulls, with half a dozen yearling and third-year Herring Gulls. Most of the gulls just stood around under the cloudy sky, facing all different directions. One of the Herring Gulls picked idly at something green. An adult Ring-billed Gull thought about challenging the bigger, younger gull for whatever it was, took a few desultory steps towards the green thing, but turned away as soon as the Herring Gull looked at it. I walked over to see what the green thing might be — the gulls got out of my way very reluctantly — and discovered that it was one of several slices of honeydew melon, almost translucent from having been frozen, well-pecked, dirty, not at all appetizing.