On A Day Like This

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rilke had it right. That was exactly the feeling of this day. The macadamia blossoms were dangling lavishly from the trees, infusing the air with their sweet, distinctive fragrance, and a choir of bees was humming, reverberating through the orchard in sound-surround, like the music of the spheres. The citrus trees were heavy with fruit and adorned with aromatic flowers, and there were bursts of lavender, sunflowers, and lacy white ceanothus, somehow surprisingly sudden.

What is to be done, on a day such as this?

“It feels like we’re in a war,” my sister says. “I thought the government was for the people, not to terrorize the people.” She and I are texting back and forth, but I can tell she is in tears. She is among the millions of vulnerable people who are already feeling the pain of cuts in programs that are vital to their lives. It’s her third day of trying to get through to the social security office just to make an appointment; she has been on hold for four hours. She is sole caregiver for her disabled son, has worked hard and played by the rules all her life, and is suddenly immersed in a constant state of fear.

“We are in a kind of war,” I reply, unhelpfully. And then I begin to contemplate how this war must forge character, how resilient, compassionate, and defiant we must become.

I recall the letters my father wrote during World War II to his younger brother Joe, who fought on the Pacific front. He seems to have written almost daily letters of moral support to Joe, and I know he wished he could do more, but his letters were a labor of love and diligence, a way to enact his sense of duty and concern. Somehow the letters have found their way to me. They are filled with newsy updates about family affairs, work, and political developments, a poignant glimpse into the texture of life on the New York home front during those wartime years. I started to re-read these in the process of writing this post, and I can’t resist sharing a few random snippets:

It’s one of those blank, barren November days in the land of the free. The cycle of rationing is now on cigarettes and matches, sugar and beef. The cigarette ration or matches is not official but a reality nevertheless. Once it was the earmark of importance to sport a pack of Camels. The invariable question would be, “Who do you know?” Now any brand elicits admiration. One store dealer put it this way to me. “Better you should ask me for my wife, but not cigarettes.”

I am still waiting for the crackup of Germany. Me and a few hundred million more like me. I don’t believe it will be very far off. The pressure must be something awful on all fronts and when one big breakthrough occurs I look for the whole thing to crumble apart. Meanwhile, let us watch and take care of ourselves as much as possible.

Pop’s family in Italy has been heard from. Almost expected to hear they were all wiped out but so far the only complaints are food and clothing so with our over-abundance of clothing we will send some right away.

It’s Sunday, One of those Sundays I love. John is out on a tour of the movies. Mom is at Aunt Nettie’s. I am alone listening to opera. This aloneness and the music gives me a chance for complete mental relaxation. It also fills me with an ennobling sense, destroys the stigma of ruthless fight for commercial profit, the endless lies, half believed even by the giver, the scheming, for all that is sordid but yet so necessary in modern life. Twenty years of this produces the modern man, sharp, alert, immune to kindness and pity, calculating, unbending in his quest for more and more at the price of less and less in his soul. Gone therefore becomes the appreciation of things beautiful and enduring, the end and all becomes the profit sheet – all else becomes a waste of time and money. I sometimes wonder if it is worth the cost to achieve material wealth. I see clearly the chances for making real money lie to the side of the ruthless and devastating.

The universalities of my father’s letters and parallels with the present are striking to me now. Concern for loved ones, concern for democracy, daily worries about money, the hiatus that struggle foisted upon his shining dreams —and sweet, precious moments of stepping away from it all.

And please forgive this long digression, but I still want to share two more passages in which I feel my father is offering counsel on how to get through the historical moment we are in right now:

I ask, what can we do about it? Curse and bitch about everything, left and right? Sink into despairing moods? No. We must do none of these things, for if we do we defeat ourselves, impose more burdens on our already burdened selves. Your object is survival, but not merely within the strict limitations of the word, but more – survival in the best manner possible. Not to emerge a sad sack, forlorn and beaten into submission by adverse circumstances. Not to come back an unreasoning savage, wild and hostile to each and all, eager and ready for revenge of the innocent and guilty alike. But to come back with balance, with a reasoning mind, to hate your enemies and to be on the alert for them, to respect your friends and appreciate them, to love those who love you and to love them in return.

That’s my father. He was eloquent and verbose, maybe over the top sometimes, but I trace my love of words to him, among many other traits. It occurs to me that his birthday is next week. It amazes me to realize that he would have been 114 years old. And he has been gone for 47 years, but I can still hear his voice, especially when I read the words he wrote.

For the world is composed of all things, many emotions, many extremes and many in the middle balances. And we can never rush to one side or the other and say – “it’s all love”, for we would be dribbling fools. Or to say, “it’s all hate”, we would be nothing but frustrated cynics, hating all because we can find no place for ourselves. Yes, the thinking organism must ever function even though the struggle is bitter even though it’s easier to shout curses and hate with blind rage, even though it’s simpler to yell with anger. But if you must become angry even that can be harnessed constructively. Accept it all as a challenge to break your spirit, the big reversals and the small ones. Defy them to break you! Dare them to prevent you from coming back as you want to, alert, intelligent, healthy, with ambition, with goals to seek and win! Get angry! But not the anger of the jungle beast who in his hurt howls with frenzy and fearful rage.

So here we are, more than eighty years later, in a different kind of war, but many of the same principles are at stake, and much of my father’s advice to his brother applies. We must constructively harness our anger, and stand up tall and defiant against the forces of evil and destruction, with goals to seek and win.

It’s a tricky and exhausting business.

The threat to all we care about is real, but the fighting more convoluted. Some of us are cushioned for the moment, but many are already in the direct line of fire, and the usual schizophrenia must click into play. By this I mean the ability to contain dissonant realities, partaking of the wonder without denying the pain, being conscious, constructive, and compassionate, but somehow also able to enjoy a spring day, present in the moment. It’s not denial, it’s sustenance.

And so, I said yes to a walk with my friends. A text from Robin that evening sums it up nicely:

A special day. Flowering macadamia trees, orange blossoms tantalizing our noses, visiting with Monte, turtles in the pond leaves, wind whipping, Diane’s hat blasting off in a gust, a good uphill climb, stories, politics, dog wading in the rust-colored oval pond at the sandstone rock formation, oranges, salami, hot tea, a vulture soaring over us, so close, the fat lizard sunning itself on a rick near the wild grasses above the pond, the land quenched with new growth and old growth rejuvenating, neighborhood scoop, feeling the canyon, the warm sandstone walls, and coming home to the delights of the orchards, sitting on the steps, hanging out, shooting the breeze, again with Monte...

Diane replied:

We seem like sedate old gals wandering about but look at all that happened!

Another poem comes to mind, a short one by Tess Taylor:

Housman was right:

your life is short.
To miss even this springtime
would be an error.

It’s a balancing act, I guess. But I’m glad we didn’t miss a day like this one. 

(Have we come back fortified, ready to get back to business? I like to think so.)