Category Archives: Meditations

On retreat: Autumn watch

Wareham, Mass. I was sitting at the breakfast table talking to some ministers whom I hadn’t seen in a while, when Rachel, the program chair for this retreat, came around and said the morning’s program was about to begin. The other ministers filed in to hear the rest of the presentation by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd. Even though I strongly disagreed with Dowd’s presentation last night, where he described an eco-theology grounded in a grand narrative of the universe, I felt that I should keep an open mind and go hear more. Then I thought to myself:– Would I rather sit indoors and listen to someone talk theology, or would I rather go outdoors to take a long walk? I went quietly upstairs to get my coat and binoculars, and slipped out the back door of the retreat center.

Cloudy and cold this morning, a real mid-autumn day. Birds filled the bushes along the edge of the retreat center’s lawn: Gold-crowned Kinglets, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Song Sparrows, catbirds, cardinals, and even a Hermit Thrush. I bushwhacked to the edge of the little estuary. As I came down to the edge of the salt marsh, a Great Blue Heron squawked, crouched, and leapt into the air, tucking his neck back and slowly pulling his long legs up against his body. Some of the trees surrounding the salt marsh were already bare of leaves; one or two maples still covered in brilliant red leaves; the white oaks shone dull gold in the subdued light; a few trees were still green. The tide was quite high, and I skirted the high water through the salt marsh hay. One high bush blueberry, a bush about five feet high growing right at the edge of the marsh, was covered in deep, glowing red leaves; I only noticed that small bush because the trees around it were already bare and grey.

After a long walk, I wound up on the Wareham town beach. A fisherman stood at the far end of the beach, where the sand ends in a little spit sticking out into an estuary winding up through extensive salt marshes.

“Catching anything?” I said.

“Not today,” he said. “Caught a little striper yesterday.”

I said that was pretty good; it’s late to catch a striper this far north.

He was feeling talkative, and we chatted idly for a few minutes. “What are you looking for?” he said, noticing the binoculars hanging around my neck.

“Ducks,” I said. “The ducks should be here by now. But I’m not really seeing any. Maybe because it’s been so warm, and they’re just not moving down onto their wintering grounds yet.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying about the stripers this year,” he said. “They should be gone by now, but it’s still warm so they’re staying up here.”

Every year, the story is a little different. The fall migrants generally move on at about the same time, but a Hermit Thrush might stay a little later than usual. The striped bass run south, but one year that might leave a little earlier or later than another year. Some years a few maple trees hold their leaves a little longer, or a blueberry bush turns a particularly bright red. The same story is told year after year, and it’s always the same but always different. That’s the only grand narrative I care about, a grand narrative that’s not told in words.

Autumn watch

Early in the morning the sound of heavy rain on the skylight awakened me. I rolled over and went back to sleep until the alarm awakened me for good.

The morning’s drive east on Interstate 195 was spectacularly beautiful: gray, low clouds, light spattering rain, trees and bushes along the highway vividly yellow and red. One tree, a particularly transcendent shade of red, standing next to the highway, almost made me drive into the next lane.

I arrived at the cemetery twenty minutes early. About ten cars were already parked near the grave site, people sitting inside them to avoid the rain. The man who had died loved the outdoors, and really the weather was perfect: about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, light drizzle, soft breeze blowing occasional drops of rain from trees. The wet weather brought out the yellows and reds of changing leaves; but most of the leaves in the cemetery were still green, and the wetness made them look lush and verdant.

At the reception after the service, I talked with someone who repeated the truism: a sudden death is easier on the person who dies, harder on the family and friends who have to cope with the aftermath. Then one’s mind takes up the other possibilities. If you knew you couldn’t die suddenly (that is, with no real knowledge of your death except perhaps a realization that came simultaneously with death), which would you prefer: to spend a week dying and suffering (with the sudden blinding realization that this is it), or to spend six months dying and suffering (time enough perhaps to tie up some loose ends), or to spend twenty years gradually declining? Then: Which option would you prefer for someone you love?

I had to rush back to the church to check in with the secretary before she left. The fire alarm panel at the church failed suddenly and spectacularly last week. The panel sent an alarm to the fire department, but didn’t sound the alarms in the building, so when several fire trucks showed up the people in the building didn’t know what was happening. No fire, but then the fire department couldn’t reset the panel, leaving our building without an alarm for a week until we could get a replacement installed. I discovered that I would rather have a working fire alarm panel, and know when the building was burning down, than not now at all.

By the time I got back home, it was half past one. I desperately needed a walk, and the rain was holding off at least for the moment. When I got down to the waterfront, I saw two red triangular flags flying above the Wharfinger’s Building: gale warning. But on my walk across the bridges to Fairhaven, I felt very little wind.

On the way back, I stopped on Pope’s Island, bought the New York Times, and sat down in Dunkin Donuts to drink some coffee, eat a doughnut, and read the paper. The news from North Korea is not good. Half an hour later, when I thought to look out the window, a rising wind was blowing rain at the big plate glass window. The predicted storm had arrived. I started walking back.

The wind blew hard out of the south. When I got up onto the swing span bridge, there was nothing south of me to slow the wind. The wind blew raindrops at thirty degrees from the horizontal; the raindrops looked like lines not drops, the way rain is pictured in the old Japanese woodblock prints. Rain hit my face and ran down into the corners of my mouth, and it tasted of salt; the wind so strong it picked up sea-spume and mixed it with the rain.

When I got home, my trousers were soaked, but my new raincoat had kept the upper half of me dry. I quickly changed and got ready to leave for a dinner engagement in Brookline.

Driving in nightmarish traffic: an hour-and-a-quarter drive took two and a half hours. Rain so thick it got foggy, the blower in my car couldn’t keep up with the dampness, I had to keep swiping the inside of the windshield to be able to see. Trying to drive defensively. Parked the car, got on the subway, the usual delays. Time to think.

Time to think.

By the time the dinner was over, the cold front had moved in, and I pulled up the hood of my raincoat trying to stay warm. But I could breathe freely again. The cold awakened me in the middle of the night. I didn’t come awake enough to close the window, but I managed to pull another comforter over me and then, snug and warm, slept until late morning.

Autumn watch

Another clear crisp autumn day. Another day that I spent mostly in the office. But Carol and I did get out for an hour-long walk late this afternoon. As we walked, we mostly talked about frustrations we face in our respective careers. Did we notice the gorgeous blue sky above us? –I didn’t, and I’m not even sure how blue that sky was this afternoon. Was it a gorgeous blue sky, or just an ordinarily blue sky? I’m not sure. I love my job and my career, but I can’t get used to how much my job divides me from the outdoors. My job keeps me indoors much of the time — in meetings, doing administrative tasks, visiting people, talking on the phone — and then when I get outdoors in my free time, too often I spend that time thinking about indoor things.

If I don’t remember how blue the sky was this afternoon, I am sure that the air was crisp, because I remember feeling a little chilly as we started walking. At least part of me was indeed aware that I was outdoors. I should stop thinking so much, and spend more time outdoors.

Autumn watch

After seeing the dentist in Lexington, I had lunch with my dad in Concord, and then headed off to the clothing store in Maynard where I have gotten clothes for the past twenty or thirty years. I went through Nine Acre Corner to get to Maynard, not far from where we used to live, and I decided to stop at Verrill Farm where we used to buy our vegetables.

At the farmstand I got white turnips, regular orange carrots and yellow carrots, green beans, and curly kale. I looked at all the different kinds of winter squash, and picked out a small blue-green warty Hubbard (small for a Hubbard meant it weiched eleven pounds). I passed by the bins full of tomatoes: red tomatoes, pink tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, purplish tomatoes, orange tomatoes. I meant to look for red chili peppers to dry, but got distracted admiring all the other peppers and forgot. The fingerling potatoes looked fresh and smelled earthy. They also had locally-grown fruit: different varieties of apples, Concord grapes, cranberries from Cape Cod.

Cranberries are my favorite fruit, so I bought nearly a pound.

When I got home, I ate about half the cranberries raw: washed, dumped in a bowl, eaten in spoonfuls. They crunch softly, releasing the tiny seeds from the hollow center. The first flavor, really little more than an aroma, is a little like overripe crabapples. Then they taste like a cross between apple cider and blueberries, and then the tartness begins to kick in. After you eat a bowl of them, you can feel the tartness lingering at the back of your mouth and all down your throat. It tastes like autumn, it reminds me of fallen wet leaves and damp earth and autumn rainfall.

Autumn watch

Some fall days chilly melancholy sweeps in like the chill air following a cold front sweeping down from the north. That happened to me yesterday. By early afternoon I was feeling sorry for myself because it would be dark by six, instead of staying light until eight as it did just a couple of months ago. I knew that the best thing to do would be to go for a walk. The stiff cold northeast breeze that I encountered crossing the bridges from New Bedford to Fairhaven almost drove me back home, but I plodded on. When I got to the short stretch of beach at Fort Phoenix, that same wind blew some of the melancholy out of my head — that, and seeing a Great Blue Heron, its head hunched down in its shoulders, standing on a rock in the water and staring out to sea — but melancholy came rushing back in when I left the beach to walk through the neat gridwork of residential streets in that part of Fairhaven. Something about suburban streets can seem so gloomy. Each street with its neat houses looked pretty much like the last street, to the point where I wasn’t quite sure where I was, or where I was going; I had to find my way by keeping the sun over my left shoulder, as if I were walking in a trackless waste somewhere.

At last I made it to the bike trail, which follows the route of the old railroad grade. Following the bike trail, I walked through an old industrial area, with big open spaces, an old beat-up brick factory building, occasional pieces of heavy equipment to look at, a row of empty red Dumpsters lined up. After crossing a little side street, the trail passed through a swamp, with a few red maples still glorious with crimson leaves and silver maples thick with with yellow and green leaves. Asters growing together in a loose clump stood nearly six feet high, covered with the most amazingly purple flowers; their flowers stood out against the brilliant red leaves of a thick growth of poison ivy growing over shrubs and trees. The intensity of those colors, the purple flowers and the red leaves, drove most of the melancholy out of me. That, and getting out of the urban gridwork of streets. Immature White-crowned Sparrows flew to and fro in the tangle of brush on either side of the bike trail, chirping merrily to each other as they went.

I climbed up the old road to the top of the hurricane barrier, where the wind hit me again, and I looked out over the green-gold salt marsh hay, over the blue water of the bay, to the Elizabeth Islands shimmering in the late afternoon warmth. Then I turned and walked back, the setting sun in my eyes the whole way home.

Autumn watch

Each time the weather gets cool I think to myself, this is the first real autumn day.

Today we had more clouds than sun, a stiff breeze out of the northeast, and the temperature never got above sixty degrees. On my way back from an errand at about lunch time, I stopped to talk with Patrick, the contractor who’s renovating a historic house a few doors down from us. I asked him if he had gone to the meeting on Wednesday where the National Park Service presented their plans for the Corson building which stands between his house and the building with our apartment. He had, and he pointed out where there would be an emergency exit from the fifty-seat theatre they’re going to build, and where there would be a retail store. I asked him about the house he’s renovating, and he said he decided to put in two residential units, instead of one commercial and one residential unit. I started to say that made sense because you don’t see many vacant apartments downtown but you do see lots of empty commercial space, when suddenly Patrick shook my hand and said, Hey, good to see you, gotta run.

I realized that he had been standing there wearing nothing but a t-shirt, while I had on a long-sleeved shirt and fleece vest. He must have been freezing. The warm days when you could have long conversations outdoors are about over. Maybe this was the first real autumn day; except I know it’s going to get still colder, and soon this will seem like one of the warm days.

A remembered painting

I happened to think about someone I knew years ago when I was studying sculpture. A couple of her student paintings stuck in my memory, though I have little enough memory of the woman herself. The paintings were sort of abstract landscapes, meditatively dark. I remember one in particular that was mostly black, with dead branches applied to the canvas, framing the center. My description makes the painting sound funereal, but in my memory the effect was mostly introspective and thoughtful. If you remember the artwork that was being shown in the New York galleries in the early 1980’s, you’ll realize that her paintings were derivative (dead branches and all), but they were well-done nonetheless.

As I said, one or maybe two of these early student paintings stuck in my memory, and in a moment of boredom that old visual memory came to the surface. I wondered what sort of paintings she was doing now — or maybe she had turned to sculpture, for when I last saw her work, in 1987 while she was doing her MFA, she was making sculptural constructions rather than paintings. I remember one in particular, an intricately woven, amorphously-shaped web or mass of delicate wires and fibers that hung from the ceiling of her studio. Looking back on it, I would describe it as thoughtful.

Her name came right up on a search engine, bringing up a Web site with her domain name. But this was not an artist’s Web site: the site had been set up by friends after her sudden death in 2005. She must have been 42 or 43. I scanned the Web site, and it turned out that she had given up a career as a painter, had gone on to get a doctorate in art history, had moved to Cambodia to study the art there. She died in Cambodia, from what wasn’t clear, although she was seven months pregnant.

This was not someone I had ever known well; one or two of her paintings happened to stick in my memory, that’s all. I like to think that who a person is will be more important than what a person has made or accomplished; but mostly I suspect that a person is more likely to be remembered for what his or her hands have made, or for what she or he has done or accomplished. I remembered one student painting by this woman better than I remembered her as a person. That could be considered nothing more than a trivial memory.

Autumn watch

On the page with all the weather reports and forecasts, the New York Times also prints a little map at this time of year that purports to show where to go look at fall foliage. According to this map today, northern Maine and the White Mountains in New Hampshire are past peak color, while New Bedford is still green.

Except that it’s not green around here. Carol and I drove my sister Jean to the airport today, and in the low areas along I-195, we saw plenty of color in the trees. A few trees were at peak color: one entirely crimson red maple caught my attention, even at 65 miles per hour, even though I was driving in traffic that required most of my attention. And most of the maples in the swamps were at least half red, or orange, or yellow.

You can only think of “peak color” covering broad swaths of land if you look at autumnal colors from a car. At any speed over 25 miles per hour, the variegated colors of individual trees blur together into a homogenous “fall foliage color.” Viewed that way, New Bedford is still pretty much green. But if you walk into a red maple swamp, or even drive by one, peak color is happening right now; and the red maples will be bare by the time the New York Times declares this region is a peak color.

Carol and I watch the maple tree across the street from us; the windows of our second floor apartment look straight into its branches. Our fall foliage season started a week and a half ago, when we looked out one cool morning and realized with shock that some of the tree’s leaves were touched with red. “Look at that,” I said, “the tree across the street has some red…” “Don’t say it!” said Carol. “I’m not ready for fall.” Neither of us is looking forward to the moment when that tree is entirely red. At the moment, we’re used to seeing a few little touches of red, and we haven’t really noticed those few little touches are slowly spreading.

Just sitting

It has been an exhausting week. At church, a long-term member died suddenly. In my family, we had a memorial service for my cousin on Friday; and then on Saturday two graveside committal services, one right after the other, one for my Uncle Dick and one for my cousin Becky (daughter of one of Dick’s sisters), both in the family plot in Nantucket, Massachusetts. I have to say I feel pretty drained. Maybe if I could just catch up on some sleep I’d feel like doing something more than just sitting….