April Revelations

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

The month of April held a revelation that caught me off guard. 

I know, I know. Isn't that what revelations are supposed to do? Open up your mind to a new idea? Shed light on a topic you thought you had fully explored? 

And maybe that is where this revelation came from, not once but three times: shedding some additional light on a topic I thought I had already fully explored. 

The first Thursday of the month is Justice Bus in Delaware. The Justice Bus is a program funded by the Ohio Equal Access to Justice Foundation; the Bus staff drives to different locations in Ohio to provide a variety of legal services to lower income clients who could otherwise not begin to afford to hire counsel. Attorneys are encouraged to volunteer to meet with clients as part of this program. Our local Legal Clinic entered into a collaboration with them in 2022 to expand community outreach; we have a monthly Justice Bus visit and serve clients with family law/domestic relations matters. 

I stepped away from most of my involvement with the Legal Clinic at the end of last year, but gladly continue to volunteer with the Bus. I recruit our attorney volunteers beforehand and, on Bus Day, I help with paperwork and client questions, and act as a gofer for the attorneys ("Would you print out Form 3 for me?"). 

At the April Justice Bus, we had a rare occurrence: one of our volunteers was stuck in Court. There was no one to take his spot with the client, so I stepped in.

The client was young and anxious. She was there to discuss a dissolution (an agreed-upon termination of marriage under Ohio law). About 15 minutes into our conference, an issue arose that had not yet been discussed, let alone resolved, between her and her spouse. We talked about possible solutions, with me explaining that the issue had to be spelled out in the paperwork before they could file the documents.

When I said she could make an appointment for the May Bus, you could see the strain lift off her face. "Will you be here again?," she asked eagerly. Yes, but not necessarily in this capacity. Her face fell. "I really like you. You helped a lot."

Revelation moment #1.

Later that same day, I prepared paperwork for another Bus client, one I took on back in the fall when it became clear to all of us at the Bus that she would need to be taken through a divorce from soup to nuts. (Note: NOT a complex one. But paperwork is paperwork and she needed someone to explain and assist in preparing it.) The very next day, I met her in the courthouse, and sat in the gallery while the magistrate handled the examination in the final hearing. I had a small gift for her, and a homemade apple pie for her and her partner. Afterwards, I hugged her goodbye, and then walked home.

Revelation moment #2.

Towards the end of the month, a close friend called me about a pending school disciplinary issue. She knew I had worked for Juvenile Court and had experience with the schools; what she did not know is that when I was in private practice, representing students and families in school hearings was one of my niche specialties. I listened, answered some questions, talked about possible outcomes. The parent was clearly (and understandably) anxious. After a long silence, thinking through the situation, I asked, "Would you like me to attend too? Not as an attorney, but as a support person?" Yes. So I did. The hearing went smoothly; we all hugged at the street curb afterwards and I walked away.

Revelation moment #3.

So what was my big revelation? 

I was more than glad to be able to help in all of these situations. (And indeed will be meeting with the young woman at our May Justice Bus, as a few of our regulars cannot attend.) But I do not miss the practice of law. I am not sure I would still be practicing even if I had not had to step away because of the cancer. 

It is not unusual for our local attorneys to practice into their 70s. Having just turned 67, if I followed that path, I would still be practicing for several years to come. 

Until this month, I had not really considered the question of whether I would have gone back if I could. There was no need to consider it, given my health. And thanks to this month's revelatory moments, I know a little more about myself and now know that even if I had gone back, I would have stopped practicing before now. Without regret and without longing. 

And that, my friends, was the revelation. 

The Bridge

 

This is an image of the very copy I owned way back when!

After over half a century of setting out to read it, I finally read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

I bought a copy of the book way back in either junior high (September 1967-June 1970) or my earliest years in high school, when I spent my babysitting funds on Scholastic Books. I found the above image on Google; that is the Scholastic Books edition and it cost a whopping 45¢ (those were the days).

My copy set on my bookshelf in my bedroom at home until I graduated from high school. I carried it to Chicago, back to Delaware, back to Chicago, out to Portland, back to Delaware, out to California, and back to Delaware. Once I landed back here for good in 1990, I had it at my various addresses until I finally disposed of it, most likely in one of great sell-offs to Half Price books. 

[Note: I just did a quick scan of my now modest collection just to make sure I no longer had my copy. I did not see it, but I did see, to my great delight, my copy of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, the 1970 play by J. Lawrence and R. Lee, and yanked it from the shelf to add to my reading pile.]

Don't get me wrong. I tried numerous times, starting from the day I brought The Bridge of San Luis Rey home, to read it. How many times did I read the opening line—"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers in the gulf below"—over the years? Numerous. And how many times did I read more than a sentence or two beyond that? 

Maybe once or twice. Okay, maybe three times.

So what brought me back to The Bridge of San Luis Rey at this late date? Ramona, who is wrapping up her elementary years and even at her young age feels the call of the footlights, brought me back. She will be beginning a 7-year program this fall at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (part of the public school district there), and I know at some point she will hear of, read, see, or act in (or all of those things) Our Town, Thornton Wilder's great gift to the world. In anticipation of that day, I purchased a copy for her, and sent a note ahead to her explaining the gift.

While doing so, I poked around on YouTube and found a superb documentary on Wilder from 2022: Thornton Wilder It's Time. (Go watch it.) It is an overview of the author, the man, his works, and his lasting impact. What was said in that video about The Bridge of San Luis Rey made such an impression on me that I ordered it from our library that same day.

I picked it up Friday. I read it through yesterday, got to the end, and started crying. 

How powerful is this book, nearing its 100th birthday? This morning I told Warren I know now what I want on my grave marker. I want the last sentence of The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

The bridge is love.  

Thoreau and...Poetry?

 

The redbud is just starting to bloom

April is National Poetry Month in this country. I love poetry. I have always loved poetry. Some of my earliest memories are my beloved Grandma Skatzes telling me nursery rhymes, and what are nursery rhymes if not poetry? And by hook or by crook, or sheer luck perhaps, I never had my love of poetry extinguished by a misguided teacher determined to make me flay and gut every poem they could get theirs hands on.

So even with decades of poetry in me, was I ever more than vaguely aware of Henry David Thoreau as a poet? Let alone consider him a poet rather than a naturalist and essayist?

In a word, no. In fact, I would think of Thoreau as a surveyor or pencil maker before I thought of him as much more than an amateur poet at best.

The Academy of American Poets, as part of National Poetry Month, highlighted Thoreau as a poet in one of their Poem-a-Day emails. Seriously? If you dig deeper into the Academy's website and look at his bio, the Academy itself notes that although Henry "thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining." 

The reality is buried in the phrase "discouraged in this pursuit." His poetry was criticized, usually in correspondence and not in print, by, among others, Margaret Fuller during her editorship of The Dial. Henry's mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also discouraged him from pursuing poetry, realizing early on that Henry's intellectual strength did not come out in his poems. 

So imagine my laughter earlier this month when my longtime friend Ken presented me with a birthday poem he asked ChatGPT  to write in Henry's style. 

It produced this: 

Oh joyous day, it's your birth,
A time to celebrate your worth,
Amidst the bustle and the noise,
I pause and feel a deep rejoice.

The world spins round and round each day,
But today it's your time to play,
To take a breath and bask in light,
To revel in this moment bright.

For you, my friend, I wish the best,
May life be filled with love and zest,
May all your dreams come true and more,
And blessings rain down, rich and pure.

So here's to you, on this special day,
May happiness be yours in every way,
May you grow wiser with each year,
And find joy in all that's dear.

Happy birthday, dear one, may you shine,
Like the sun that warms this heart of mine,
May you thrive and bloom like a flower,
And find peace in every hour.

Ken noted that the poem didn't seem "especially Thoreauvian" to him, but thought that maybe the Chatbot drew from other works.

I did not hesitate to respond: "Thoreau did write poetry. He was a mediocre poet even by the standards of the mid-1800s. The ChatGPT may have topped him. Thoreau certainly would not have been that exuberant, although it did capture his love of nature. It reminds me of Twain's remark to his wife when she repeated his profanity back to him: 'You got the words right but you don't know the tune.'"

Compare that one to a poem that Henry wrote:

I was made erect and lone,

And within me is the bone;

Still my vision will be clear,

Still my life will not be drear,

To the center all is near.

Where I sit there is my throne.

If age choose to sit apart,

If age choose, give me the start,

Take the sap and leave the heart.

You be the judge. 

Revisiting Walden

I finished my reread of Walden last night. As I noted back in March when I started it, I read it in between the flood of library books with due dates (15 of them to be exact; yeah, I'm bragging). I'm not sure Henry would have approved my setting aside one book (his or any other) to take on the others, but it is what it is.

I found an observation in the closing chapter of Walden that made me smile. Henry's experiment of living at Walden Pond lasted from July 1845 to September 1847. Walden was published in 1854. So he was smack in the middle of the nineteenth century. On that topic, he wrote that he preferred "not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by."

Restless. Nervous. Bustling. Trivial. We are six years shy of the 175th anniversary of the publication and Henry's words still ring true. He saw the railroad change his community and the Industrial Revolution change the nation in his day. What would Henry make of our day? Of climate change? Or automobiles and airplanes? Or (gulp) of social media? (I admit it: writing that last question made me burst out laughing, thinking of Henry on social media.)

On a personal note, Henry placed an "a" with a hyphen in front of several words: "a-fishing," "a-berrying." Blogger friend Kim quipped that she would be a-weeding this summer. I liked that and have adopted that phrase for my upcoming gardening season: "Time is but a garden I go a-weeding in." Henry had a star-pebbled sky, my garden will hold a weed-pebbled bed. I will be grateful if I can immerse myself and let go of time when I am a-weeding.

I wrote this post out longhand last evening, sitting on our front porch. The porch faces west; the sun was almost below our across-the-street neighbor's garage roof, so there was a bit of a glare yet as I wrote. We have had an erratic (at times) early spring—most of the daffodils are bloomed out, the buds on the dogwood tree are just opening. Birds were calling as the day wound down. I have seen the first bees of the season: both honey and bumble. And earlier, while eating lunch before open windows, I heard the spring peepers for the first time. I keep a very sporadic journal in which I make notes about the seasons, the sky, and such. After noting hearing the peepers, I looked back to last year to see if I had made any comment. Yes, I had; last year I first heard the peepers on April 12 as well. 

And for that, Henry might have given me an approving nod.

Commonplace Quote: The Heart and the Tongue

 

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

"The truth is that what the heart hungers for, the tongue talks of."                             Charles J. Finger

That quote is from the 1925 Newbery Award book, Tales From Silver Lands.  It captured my attention enough when I read it in 2011, the year I read all the Newbery Award books to date, that I copied it into my commonplace book.

A decade plus later, I am not as drawn to it and not as certain I agree with it anymore.

In 2023, I would say that what the heart hungers for, the fingers talk of. I firmly believe, now that I have been writing steadily and almost daily for three months, that my heart comes out through my fingers penning their way across a page. I know full well there are things in our hearts that our tongues cannot talk of, past disappointments and missteps key among them.

A close friend recently had a restless night during which thoughts came to mind unbidden. One was "my life is becoming a collection of regrets I'm finding hard to overlook." I understood that immediately. I, too, have my own list of regrets—none of them, I hope, so heavy and burdensome that I will drag them around with me forever—but I know they are there.

And sometimes, in the quiet of the night, or even while taking a walk, random ones will rise up. And my mind starts churning: I shoulda, woulda, coulda...you finish the sentence.

Regrets are not unlike bad debts from when I practiced law. At some point, I had to accept the bill would never be paid and close the account. (This was also the excellent analogy for forgiving someone, a technique my brilliant therapist Doug Kramer taught me many years ago.)

So let me hold thoughts in my heart. My tongue does not need to tell them.

But my pen might. And does. And will.

One Down, Three to Go

 

As I have been doing for the last several years, I am again tracking our groceries: food and common household items (dish soap, toilet paper, for example). The First Quarter results are in.

For the first three months of 2023, we spent $532.57 on food and household items, for a monthly average of $177.35. $30.25 was spent on household items: less than 1% of the overall expenses. The rest was spent on food. (Note: "food" means items we buy at a store and eat at home; it does not count "eating out," which in our case we rarely did before the pandemic and now limit to only takeout on very rare occasions.) 

We finished 2022 averaging $240.62 a month on that front. As I noted when I totaled up that year, there was the, ahem, surprising discovery about how much food I had squirreled away in the freezer, especially the refrigerator's freezer. I had vowed to concentrate more on eating down what I had put away, and our January grocery bill reflected that: of the $73.88 spent, $66.98 was spent on food. (And I had a $30.00 credit with Kroger, so our out-of-pocket cost for the month was only $43.88.) February held a major stock up at Aldi: that month finished at almost $272.00, of which about $257.00 was food. 

And March? March came in at almost $187.00, all but $8.30 of which was food. I will note that there were two opportunities we truly had to take advantage of: butter at $2.49 at Aldi (we bought 12 pounds in two separate trips, $29.88 total) and spiral-sliced hams at 99¢/pound at Meijer (two hams: $24.95). If those sales had not taken place and we had not purchased those items, March would have been closer to $157.00.

Last year's hams

Unlike last year, we did NOT purchase and stuff our freezer with six hams, tempting though that was.  Well, let me call myself out: it was more than tempting. With both the butter (still on sale through next Tuesday night) and the hams (sale ends tonight unless Meijer or another store picks it up with Easter coming up), I found myself struggling internally with whether we should buy more "just because." Just because what? Because it's a good sale? (Yes.) Because I think about food insecurity a lot? (A. Lot.) Because...whatever. In the end, we talked it over and I managed to quell my internal qualms and stressors. I can truly look at what we purchased and say "that is enough." And mean it. 

When I examined our 2022 expenditures, I hoped that we could average $200.00 a month in 2023. We hit that mark for the first quarter. 

Onward to the next!