To Swift, or not to Swift. . .

I’ve decided I like Taylor Swift. It’s not her music per se, although her songs can put me in a

dancing or, conversely, a contemplative mood. In the recording studio and on the stage, her

massive talent and undeniable artistry shine. But that’s not why I find myself standing firmly

in her corner. I think it’s her moxie. Her energy. Her fearless gal-palling. Her thumb in the

face of the music industry that I admire. An old school feminist who came of age in the

second wave, I gotta cheer for Taylor’s unabashed feminist--4th wave? 5th wave? I've lost

count--brand and message. I probably wouldn’t pay to see her live, although if my daughter

or granddaughter or grandson(s) or nieces wanted to and wouldn’t mind my tagging along,

I’m in. I will most certainly join the Swifties at a showing of her The Eras Tour 2023

documentary. Hell, yes. Why not? I might even bring a bracelet to share. In the face of the

intransigent sex and gender inequity blighting American culture, her message of social

justice and female empowerment is invigorating, contagious, and downright inspiring. I’ll

take it. Yes, indeed, I will. More Taylor, please.

Summer

                           

 

The summer hum of lawnmowers

and squealing children

catch in my throat—

today is Dad’s birthday,

in three days, it’s Mom’s,

forever parents to us, always children.

 

Was it so simple then,

darting at dusk after fireflies

to collect in our hungry jars,

Dad and Mom somewhere

in the shadow of the porch

Guarding over us?

 

Or the long hot drive

to Beach Haven, transfixed by Billboards,

praying the sun

would stay strong

and steady, strong and steady

like the man at the wheel

who took us crabbing

on his one day off

and stopped for a Schlitz, or two or three,

on the way home?

 

Or, tumbling from the sleepy

car, charmed to see Dad typsy, carefree

(for once), hauling the basket

of crab-loot into the house, while Mom

‘tsked ‘tsked him for riling

us up, chasing us with

hypnotized crabs before

plopping them into the boiling pot?

 

And didn’t we escape,

from the mess we made,

to sweeter dreams (for once) in our bedroom-attic,

crab-juice dribbling happily

from the corners of our mouths,

leaving Mom to clean up shells and

wipe down the greasy stove

after coaxing our father to bed?

Yes, for a moment or two, it was.

A Haiku for Old Florida

Bulldozer idly

sits beside squared and flattened

ground where cows once grazed.

 

 

About halfway into my 17-plus mile bike ride along back-road paths that intersect with horse

trails, I find myself in something resembling old Florida. Long-leaf pine, yellow pine, myrtle

oak, and scrub oak (among many others) rise happily from the sandy soil nearby swaths of

dairy farmland. The trees are knotted and gnarled and beautiful.

These days more and more of old Florida in South Florida is disappearing as farmland is razed

to make way for pricey housing developments. If this new construction were intended for low-

and middle-income residents desperate for housing, it might make sense, be palatable even. In a

state/country where money and the moneyed rule, that is not a likely outcome.

To Hope, Or Not To Hope

Reportedly, the Finnish key to happiness is reduced expectations—being grateful and not

wanting more than one needs or has. There must be something to that since Finland has been

ranked as the happiest country in the world for the last six years. (Wait, I thought that was

Bhutan. Or was that seven years ago?) In Buddhism thought, suffering arises from desire, so

one might assume that suffering is an impediment to happiness. Expectations: “a strong belief

that something will happen or be the case in the future.”  Desire: “a strong feeling of wanting

to have something or wishing for something to happen.” Hmmm, ‘expectations’ and ‘desire’

seem awfully similar to me. Am I to conclude then that happiness arises from not wanting?

Thinking about the two brought Emily Dickinson’s tricky poem, and one of my favorites, “Hope

is the thing with feathers” to mind. If “hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul,/

And sings the tune without the words,/ And never stops at all. . .” then it seems, at first blush

anyway, that the comparison of hope to a bird is a positive human experience and to hope is a

good thing. But further in the poem, the images are not so clear-cut and positive, making the

reader question whether hoping/wanting/expecting is a good thing after all.

The speaker in the poem goes on to say “And sweetest in the gale is heard;/ And sore must be

the storm/ That could abash the little bird/ That kept so many warm./ I’ve heard it in the stillest

land,/ And on the strangest sea;/ Yet, never, in extremity,/ It asked a crumb of me.” Storm,

stillest, strangest, extremity, and crumb might be construed as less than positive. Ahh, so therein

lies the rub, or in this case, the ambiguity. Hope keeps us warm and does not ask anything of

us. It is there whether or not we ask for it. In other words, we cannot but hope even if hope may

be an illusion and therefore ultimately counterintuitive to happiness.

From the perspective of a (recently retired) English professor, this is a wonderful poem to teach

because it gives rise to varying perspectives. But it does little to answer the question: does

happiness arise from not wanting/hoping/desiring, and conversely, where in the world would we

be without hope?

 

For Now At Least

Scrambling back down Mount Abraham

giddy with Champlain Valley wonders,

my heart slows enough

to hear tree boughs breathing

in the rise

and fall of wind, the whoosh of red and

yellow leaves swaying and whispering

ghostlike in my ear: free, free, free.

 

Stilled, present

in this moment, the charging back and

forth in time my bull-like mind

slowed by nature’s Picador,

enough to let the past die—for now

at least—

the could’ve, should’ve, would’ve

hazards strewn across memory’s trail

like mossy boulders threatening to trip

my tired feet and bring me to my knees,

Or worse—

Toss me over the precipice.

The sun winks through thinning

branches and trembling cold; I lift my

face to inhale its forgiving rays. For now

At least—

no longer prisoner of the treacherous

path behind and before me—

I am blessed and reborn, and

stepchild to Wordsworth’s Nature.

 

Thoughts on "The Banshees of Inisherin"

After watching the highly touted The Banshees of Inisherin in the movie theatre, my friend and

I couldn’t stop talking about it afterwards. I was glad to have the opportunity to re-watch it on

HBO. Accomplished Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of

Inisherin is deeply moving, and quietly provocative, very much in keeping with his oeuvre. I

t is also laced with Irish humor. Bordering on the mythical, it is, ironically, an intimate private

story of friendship and (actual and metaphorical) fratricide. Like any great book, this is a film

that grows richer with each ‘re-reading’.

Besides a better understanding of the story’s

meaning(s), a second viewing helped me appreciate the film’s aesthetics and the irony of how,

for instance, the artful camera captures the chilling isolation of this remote island-village and its

inhabitants against the lush, sweeping landscape of verdant hills, roiling green sea, and magical

horizon. This contradiction captures the conflict at the heart of the story. Set in the waning

months of Ireland’s Civil War (raging on the mainland and alluded to by distant gunfire), the

film is unconcerned with political divisions. Rather, through the lens of an aborted friendship, it

explores the broken heart of a country tragically divided against itself. In the film, Colm

(Brendan Gleeson) cuts off his own fingers rather than relinquish his self-centered antipathies

toward former friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell) in order to mend a lifelong friendship for the sake

of kindness and the greater good. Hostility breeds hostility, of course, and his erstwhile friend

ultimately responds in kind, which leads to an intensification of antipathies and more violence.

 

In many ways, this tragedy of late 19th century fratricide echoes the hatred and political

divisions that rue our own country (and perhaps the world) today. Rather than staking out

common ground and looking past our differences and prejudices for the sake of the common

good, Americans seem hell-bent on destroying the ‘other’, and its own cherished traditions in

the process, in the name of – well, what, exactly? Ideology? Political affiliation? Blind loyalty? Ego? 

McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin clearly shows that such a never-ending fratricidal battle

leads nowhere and is, ultimately, self-destructive.

Ribbon of rose-gold

Forget about midnight. Twilight is the true witching hour if by witching one means bewitching.

Neither day nor night, both day and night, twilight is that magical time when refracted sunlight

filters through the forest canopy to bathe tree limbs in an ethereal ribbon of rose-gold. The sun

has dipped, not disappeared, and the moon lingers low on the horizon.

I want to capture this moment and hold it in a jar like we did as kids with our lightning bugs. I

want to live forever in this moment of stillness and wonder and magic when even the forest

seems to be holding its breath. Knowing all too well that, when trapped, lightning bugs lose

their magic. We always let them go in the end—the lightning bugs. Twilight disappears of its

own accord.

Out walking . . .

At first blush, I thought it so sad—a woman seated on a park bench playing a clarinet, and not

very well at that. She seemed so, well, alone. Tree branches glistened from an earlier rain,

insects buzzed, and the park was mostly empty. Except for the clarinet-playing woman, and me.

And then it dawned on me. I, too, was alone as I walked through the park, and I wasn’t sad a

t all. On my way back, I saw that clarinet playing woman was still there, and some of the notes

she played were still off-key. This time I smiled. I am pretty sure she didn’t see me.

The Sad Saga of Phil and Leda. . . "wouldn’t Frankenstein’s creation simply be a different kind of human rather than a failure of a man, or in this case, a woman? "

 It's hard to think about anything but gun violence right now. Gun violence, and the toxic brand

of masculinity so often associated with it. A brand of masculinity which breeds and fuels

insecurity and repression that morph into anger and is so unnatural it constantly has to be

proven and certified, often at someone else’s expense. Think bullying, for example, or domestic

violence, or sexual assault. Or mass shootings. (According to the National Institute of Justice

database, 97% of perpetrators of mass shootings are male, so gender identity clearly factors in.)

Toxic masculinity = stunted growth and is a far cry from manhood.

Women have an equivalent bugaboo in cultural perceptions associated with their ever-ticking

biological clock. If men feel compelled to live up to a mythical notion of masculinity premised

on control and domination that sometimes leads to violence, women’s identity is largely

determined by their reproducing, sexed and relatively power-less body. A body that in many

American states is governed increasingly by laws that relegate a female’s personhood and civil

rights as secondary to a seed growing inside her. (And soon to be reflected in federal law, thanks

to the upcoming ruling on Roe v. Wade). The notion that womanhood is = to motherhood has

been around a long time. It implies that if one is not a mother (in spite of the fact that some

women cannot or choose not to bear children)—and not just a mother but fulfilled in her

motherhood—she is an unfulfilled or failed woman. This stranglehold on women parallels the

demands of regressive masculinity on men.   

In two of 2021’s more controversial films, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Maggie

Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, I see an unwitting conversation about the consequences of the

culturally produced binary dynamics of toxic masculinity and emphasized femininity.

Campion’s film, based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, is set in early 20thcentury Montana

(although it was actually filmed in her New Zealand homeland). The Lost Daughter, adapted by

Gyllenhaal for the screen and set on a beach resort in the Greek Islands, is based on Elana

Ferrante’s contemporary Italian novel by the same name.

On the face of it, the films could not be more different. Power of the Dog has all the earmarks of

a classic western, including stunning widescreen images of “Montana’s” dusty, mountain-

dotted landscape inhabited by livestock, and brothers Phil and George’s isolated ranch house.

Long and medium-long shots and a third person point-of-view amplify the expansive setting, as

well as macho cowboy Phil’s alienation from his own bottled-up homosexual self.

The Lost Daughter, shot largely from protagonist Leda’s point of view, relies more on close-ups

and medium close-ups to create an interior, even claustrophobic world by contrast. It is a fitting

cinematic approach since much of the story plays out in Leda’s memory and imagination.

Middle-aged professor Leda meets her younger self when she encounters Elana, a young,

harried mother to a cloying toddler. Accompanied by a controlling and slightly menacing

husband and well-meaning but busy-body mother, Elana does not feel at all supported and is a

poster child for maternal unhappiness.

Despite starkly different cinematic mediums, both movies serve as troubling meditations on the

psychic harm caused when what is demanded of a man and what is required of a woman are not

commensurate with who they are.

Phil, the chaps-wearing rugged cowboy at the center of Power of the Dog, is domineering and

mean, especially towards his gentle brother George. After George weds the widowed Rose and

brings his new wife and her effeminate adolescent son, Peter, into their shared homestead, Phil

feels displaced. The new arrangement threatens Phil’s dominance and the carefully constructed

male-centric life he built alongside that of his timid brother.  Driving cattle, castrating bulls,

raucous drinking, the company of men, lording it over brother George. Phil, after all, is

compelled to demonstrate and prove his masculinity. Again, and again, and again. Chafed, and

even more mean and spiteful owing to this unwelcome domestic change, Phil intends to break

young Peter like a cowboy would a restive colt. In the process, fond memories of his close bond

with the deceased Bronco Henry surface, offering clues to Phil’s suppressed sexual desire for

the long-gone macho cowboy who was Phil’s mentor and likely clandestine lover. When Phil

steals away from the ranch to swim naked in a secluded spring, his sexed body comes alive. He

is bathed in cool water, warmed by sunlight, and fondled by sensual mud. Only here, shielded

from the judging eyes of his exacting masculinist culture and the stranglehold of his macho

pose, can Phil luxuriate in his true sensual, homosexual nature.

Phil’s growing but forbidden attraction to Peter becomes twisted into a compulsion to remake

the younger man into his own macho image. He puts him on a horse sans instruction. Takes

him camping. Shows him how to castrate cows and braid cowhide. What it means to be a

cowboy. Ironically, Phil’s bent aim also proves to be his own undoing. After all, Phil is not the

only one to recognize the image of the powerful dog in the shadowed hills. The bullied Peter,

who has managed to survive in a world hostile to effeminate males, also recognizes the dog’s

image. Although his twistedness is disguised in a delicate frame, Peter, too, has been warped

and hardened by the same toxic masculine ethos that molded Phil into the angry misshapen man

he is. In Peter, Phil sees malleable clay at his disposal. Instead, he finds a more powerful dog,

as well as his own shocking and terrible death by anthrax poisoning. Sadly, in poisoning Phil to

save his mother and certify his masculine self, Peter becomes the predatory male he loathes. He

loses that tender self who creates flowers out of paper and cares for his mother. Lost, too, are

any vestiges of the secure man he might have become. A man like George who wears his

manhood easy like a familiar flannel shirt. No need to boast or prove it.

In Gyllenhaal’s delicately directed The Lost Daughter, long buried images of Leda’s fraught

motherhood unspool from her memory like so many unedited filmstrips. Leda bumps into her

younger self when she observes the guilt-ridden Elana who is desperately searching for her lost

child at the beach—a child lost due her ‘bad’ mother’s distractedness. Or so society would

suggest. It brings back Leda’s painful memory of her own young child, who goes missing

during a beach outing when she did the unthinkable and looked away for a moment. Leda finds

her of course, but the damage is done, and “bad mother” tattooed on her forehead. Both Elana

and Leda are distracted mothers. Guilty because of their distractedness and desire to be left

alone from time to time—an impossible ask with young children—they are also filled with

resentment. As a young mother, Leda juggled the incessant demands of her two young children

with her budding career ambitions. She fights for time to do her work, shamelessly holding onto

an identity outside her role as wife and mother. She escapes into a short-lived affair. In the

present, Leda is a renowned literature professor with a rewarding career, but she is keenly

aware that in society’s eyes this means little when compared to her failed performance as a

mother.

 Ironically, it is Leda who finds Elana’s lost child on the beach. She also steals the child’s

precious baby doll, as if hoarding it will somehow give Leda the opportunity to be the

unstinting mother she never was. She can’t, of course. The lifeless doll can be taken out and put

away at will, unlike the two girls whose incessant demands governed her life and identity. Tanul

Thakur of The Wire says that the film, like the novel before it, “examines a common resolve

and a peculiar guilt – both related to each other – the desire to live on one’s own terms, the

struggle to live for someone else.” This is not a choice most women have. As defined in our

patriarchal culture, motherhood, unlike fatherhood, is more than a role. It is an exacting

expectation and an all-in proposition. For those who come to it by choice, mothering is fulfilling

and rewarding and full of wonder. For those like Leda marching to society’s dictates, it is a

yoke, and harmful to both mother and child. When Elana learns that Leda has had her

daughter’s lost baby doll all along, she stabs Leda with a hat pin. This symbolically suggests

that Elana, the angry, hurt stand-in for Leda’s own daughters, is lashing out against the bad

mother who failed her.

Yet, who has not failed as a mother? Who has not been failed by a mother? In a culture that

celebrates motherhood with a yearly Hallmark card there is little space for mistakes or

complexity or nuance—certainly no place for an identity that is separate from the mantle of

motherhood. There is the ideal, and there is the woman that fails to live up to the ideal.

In such a culture both the homosexual Phil and non-Mother-Woman Leda are cast as

Frankenstein-like monsters. But were it not for his maker’s perverse ambitions and stringent

expectations, wouldn’t Frankenstein’s creation simply be a different kind of human rather than a

failure of a man, or a failure of a woman?

  

Irish from her toes to the tip of her nose and the crown of her queenly head

On St. Patrick’s Day, she usually called me before I got around to calling her. A college

professor, I was too busy teaching classes or attending meetings or . . . something. “Did you

forget you’re Irish?” she’d ask good-naturedly (I never did!), a tinge of wryness coating her

words. “Of course, not, Mom! And top o’ the morning to you, too!” Another favorite line of

hers was “Do I even have a daughter?” Ouch. That meant I was remiss and hadn’t called her in

a week or two. My father’s death had hit her hard. For several years we wondered if, after fifty

years of marriage our mother would be able to go it alone. My siblings and I had many

conversations about how we needed to make sure to stay in close touch, support her, love her.

Except for faithful Maureen, the rest of us lived several states away so those phone calls were

her lifeblood. And now that I think about it, ours.

My gosh, how I miss those calls. The visits home when she stroked and clasped my hands. The

blue eyes that twinkled mischievously when she teased me about being a feminist and a diehard

supporter of Hillary. The unwavering love she displayed for her children, her grandchildren, her

great grandchildren, and her very large and extended Irish Catholic Philly family. The

distressed and lonely teens she so earnestly counseled in the high school bathroom where she

worked as a janitor. (Many tracked her down after she retired at 80 to thank and tell her how

she had saved their life.) No matter the pickles we kids got ourselves into, we could count on

Mom to back us up or bail us out. I can still hear her raucous laugh in the movie theater that

made me squirmin in my seat and shield my eyes. Her endless, meandering stories about people

and their calamities, some of whom she knew well, and others hardly at all. No matter, she had

buckets of empathy to go around, and she enlisted us children in her project. 

 Every day is a good day to remember Anne Joyce Waites who was Irish from her toes to the tip

of her nose and the crown of her queenly head, but St. Patrick’s Day is an especially good one. I

am not sure why we don’t fully appreciate and see the people we love until after they are gone.

I suppose it is part of the human condition—more hindsight then insight—or at least of my

human condition. Even now, as I write this, I realize it is two days after St. Patrick’s Day. Just a

little slow on the uptake, I guess.

I love remembering you, Mom. Your simple wisdom. Your selflessness. Your kindness. Your

boundless love for others. You were a walking lesson in how to live, and I wish I remembered

you so much and so well when you were still here with us.

 

 

 

 

The Trail is a Good Teacher

I can’t seem to keep my head up while walking on the trail. So busy dodging half-buried tree

roots and navigating the uneven surface, my eyes are pulled downward. When I remind myself

that I am out here to be in nature and lift my head, I hear birds’ chirping. I notice the swish of

brush as four-legged creatures scurry back into hiding. I am startled by the sudden splashes of

purple and red growing alongside the sawgrass palm. The honeyed, dappled sunlight of near

dusk filtering through the upper tree branches. I am transfixed. In tune with reality. At least for a

moment or two. Until my head drops back down. Gravity, I guess. 

Is it that I don’t trust the path, or my feet, or both? Look up, and I awaken to reality. Look

down, and I get trapped in the beehive of my busy mind. What should I make for dinner? Did I

word that email correctly? How many more miles do I have to go? Will I make it home before

dark? What should I write about in my next blog? What can I do for people a world away who

are living the nightmare of war? 

Look down and my insecurities and fears take over. Look up and I see . . . life. But if I don’t

study the ground, don’t I risk a misstep? Besides, didn’t I write most of my doctoral dissertation

during those long 6-10 mile trail runs? There lies the conundrum. How to walk my life’s path in

such a way that I know how to apply my mind to the task of figuring things out, reflecting,

planning, while living in the present. Mindfulness teaches us to practice being fully in the

moment. To Eckhart Tolle that means being in tune with the sensory world and what he refers to

as the “inner energy field” which is the “portal to consciousness,” and not getting lost in the

“egoic mind.” A lot of meditation teachers agree with this principal. Just bring yourself back to

the moment, they say, without judgment. 

I’m working on that. The trail is a good teacher.

Remembering Our Foremothers

Celebrated during women’s history month, International Women's Day, March 8, marks that

watershed moment when women around the world joined forces to organize and fight for the

most basic rights. We remember that the tremendous accomplishments of women in Art,

Industry, Science, and Politics came on the backs of foremothers who worked in the fields and

labored in the factories by day, cared for the families at night, and marched for fair and equal

treatment on the weekends. We especially salute the courage of the brave women in war zones,

from the Ukraine to Yemen to Africa—soldiers, mothers, wives, sisters, daughters—who

struggle for the right to live and work in peace with their loved ones.

Turtle: The Wisdom of Nature and Power of Empathy

I met him months ago. Turtle. I must have caught him by surprise. At my approach, the tiny

defenseless head slid back inside his body armor, and he froze in the middle of the trail. I was

tangled in thought, solving some problem or other as I am wont to do when he brought me back

to the path, and the present. My heart flip-flopped, fearful that my intrusion into his space

caused him suffering. I skirted the path and spoke softly. It’s okay, turtle, I’m not going to hurt

you. Where did that come from? I’d never spoken to a turtle before, certainly, not out loud. I

gingerly walked away, checked myself for sanity, and silently thanked the little fellow for

reminding me to wake up to my senses. Being in the moment instead of my busy head was

something I’d been practicing in yoga and meditation. So far, I am struggling at the present-in-

the-moment plate with a 200-250 batting average. Not for lack of practice, though.

Even though I travel that path often, I only encountered Turtle a few times after that. It was

always some variation of our initial meeting. His head retreats. He plays dead. I say, don’t

worry, little guy. I’m not going to hurt you. (I am growing more comfortable talking aloud when

I am alone. Should I worry?) 

Until today. 

Again, Turtle sat in the middle of the path. This time though, his head stayed put. Out and

proud. He looked straight at me. Or so it seemed.  He certainly did not exhibit fear. I paused and

said hello. (I guess I, too, have grown bolder.) Still, no retreat. Does he know me now? I

scanned the area and noted a tunnel in the grassy sand alongside the narrow path. Huh, I thought

—or said, I don’t really know anymore—this must be Turtle’s home. I couldn’t stay and visit all

day, so I continued on my hike buoyed by Turtle’s unexpected greeting. On my way back,

Turtle surprised me with another appearance. This time he was not only out and proud, he also

sat serenely alongside the path casually chomping on blades of grass as I watched. His

insouciant eyes acknowledged me. Shortly afterwards, and to my further astonishment, a fellow

turtle lumbered out of the mouth of the sand-tunnel and stopped dead in his (or her) tracks at

the sight of me. The reptilian head did not retreat, as if he (she) had been assured it was okay. It

was me, after all, the trail lady. I don’t know much about turtles. What I do know is that Turtle

—who appeared only rarely and became paralyzed at the sight of me when he did—now seemed

to view me as a non-intrusive, well-meaning guest, albeit uninvited. 

I’ve been thinking about empathy lately. (Stay with me, here.) Recently, I was asked to give a

talk at Nova Southeastern University on the topic of diversity and inclusion. I chose to speak on

empathy. What I actually spoke about was the alarming lack of empathy for women’s bodies.

The invitation gave me the opportunity to explore an issue close to my heart, namely the

widespread cheapening of women’s bodies. How is it, I asked, that the female body, which most

cultures profess to honor, is so commonly and cavalierly maligned, abused, killed, and yes,

legislated and exploited for political purposes? I won’t go into the ample evidence here, but I

entertained the idea that the common denominator was a fundamental lack of empathy for

women’s bodies and lives. Perhaps empathy—“the action of understanding, being aware of,

being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of

another” (Merriam-Webster)—is the missing ingredient in all social justice and environmental

issues, and a key factor in social media vitriol. 

So, okay, maybe this is a bit of a stretch, and I am delusional. However, I’d like to think that by

being “aware of” and “sensitive to” Turtle that day, I alleviated his anxiety, which permitted

him to live more freely. At the very least, when reflecting upon my experience with Turtle, it

encouraged me to think about the wisdom of nature, and the power of empathy to heal

ourselves, our country, our world, and our planet. 

 

What the Owls Told Me

I remember Kathy pointing out the two owls. They were high above us, perched atop a tall pole,

one’s head nestled in the breast of the other, so it appeared to me at first to be a single bird.

Until a head popped out, making it clear that yes, there were two of them. I do not recall what

kind of pole, just that it was quite high. But the sighting of those owls that day struck both of us

as meaningful, and I thought I’d write a poem about them. In fact, afterwards Kathy looked up

the symbolism of owls. I forget what she discovered—something about the mystical—and I

never did write that poem. Do owls travel in pairs? I am wondering that now. At the time, I was

thinking about me and Michael, and whether the sighting, so close on the heels of my brother’s

death, was a message. 

We were in my cousin’s pontoon boat. She was taking me out for a ride on the Delaware Bay

the morning after Michael’s funeral. To distract me from my sadness, I think. She’s kind that

way. I hadn’t had much time to process the loss, despite being intimately involved with his care

from the time, less than a year before, that he was diagnosed with cancer.

The news of his death in a long distance call came to me like a punch to the gut. I had just

returned to Florida from his sick-bed to catch up on my university classes and I couldn't make it

back in time to say goodbye.

Michael, just 72 and newly retired from the priesthood, was looking forward to a more relaxed,

enjoyable, and stress-free life that would never come. He declined rapidly, and the months

afterwards passed by as swiftly as high cirrus clouds. Hope, despair, untold suffering, more

hopefollowed by despair. Hospice was the endgame, well, next best thing.

And then there was his apartment to be dismantled, personal items to be distributed, and loose

ends to tie up. All of which Michael directed from his hospice bed. There weren’t many

personal items, or loose ends. Our Michael came out of the womb disciplined and organized.

His life was one of service to the Church, and he had little interest in material things. A small

closet of essential clothing. A few original works of art that hang in my home today. A personal

computer. Some Vestments. A breviary, a Bible or two, a volume of Shakespeare’s works, and

an impressive collection of novels that any English professor would covet. He loved traveling,

martinis with dinner, Broadway theater, and the newest best seller on The New York Times list.

He sprinkled pop culture references throughout his sermons, and his parishioners were wild

about him. He kept it real. He was accessible. He was their beloved Father Michael. One of the

good ones, as I liked to tell my friends, in an era replete with priest scandals.

In his apartment, he had a decanter with a matching set of crystal whiskey glasses from his trip

to Ireland, and pewter from a visit with good friends Frank and Marie in Switzerland. That was

pretty much it. All sorted and packed and bound for their destination by the time he died. Then

came the funeral preparations. Again, we got busy following his precise directions—who was to

say the Mass and give the homily, which one of us was to do what reading, and what hymns

were to be played during the Mass. All carefully written out. His financial matters, of course,

were also in order, and duly assigned to our lawyer brother to handle. 

Did I mention that Michael came out of the womb directing?

The two owls stayed with me long after I returned to my home in South Florida, but the poem

would not come. Whenever I walked a familiar path to nearby Tree Tops Park, I would think

about those owls and my unwritten poem. And Michael. I would pass a tree—two trees really,

that from a distance give the appearance of being one tree. The smaller one, tucked inside the

shade of the taller one—some species of palm—is an oak. The taller, more commanding tree is

a good fifteen feet higher. It spreads its branches and arches heavenward. The shorter one’s

trunk grows so closely alongside it that its difference seems erased, its leafy tentacles tangled in

the taller tree’s magnificence.  

Two owls. Two trees.

There were seven of us kids, and I feel a close bond to all my siblings in different ways and for

different reasons, but Michael came first, and I trailed behind a couple years later. Even though

we were just kids ourselves, we were saddled with caring for our younger sibs. That shared

burden made us tight. Our father worked two or three jobs, our mother was consistently

pregnant, and the household was not happy. Even though there was never enough money, the

kids kept coming because that’s what good Catholic parents were supposed to do. Have children

and send them to a private Catholic school they could not afford. And our parents were good

Catholics. Michael and I were two sides of the same sadness, or maybe of the same emptiness.

I don’t know what to name it, but it produced a shorthand between us. We didn’t talk about “it”

much, but we shared “it.” We lived miles apart and saw one another twice a year at best, but I

don’t think it is a stretch to say that he could be most himself when he was with me, and I, with

him. It was not easy growing up in the shadow of Michael’s tree but faced with his absence I’d

have to learn how to live in the light on my own, which explains why the poem took so long to

come.

Michael has been gone more than four years now. I keep on looking for that poem which, like a

phantom limb, both is and is not there, and will never grow back. And yet. . . 

two different trees

tangled roots, limbs, and leaves as

owls clearly can see

 

Fiction and Empathy

https://businessglitz.com/us/this-easy-way-to-increase-your-empathy-is-cheap-fun-and-

supported-by-science/

Reasons to read fiction: Entertainment and Empathy.

Emily Dickinson famously claimed, “there is no frigate like a book.” Indeed. In The Night

Manager, Louise Erdrich invites us to travel to a Chippewa reservation in the 1950s. Not only

to travel there but to stay awhile. With delicately selected, artfully arranged words, she creates

moving pictures. And eccentric, lovely, full-bodied characters that pop to life on the page, and

make their twisted way into your heart. To live there awhile is to feel the full weight and sorrow

of this tribe’s loss of homeland and culture and way of life. The scrappiness of the people, in

spite of the everyday humiliations and deprivations they endured. Strike that. Endure. And yet,

and yet. Somehow, this remnant of a tribe survives, and their survival is triumphant. Erdrich

belongs to that special breed of novelist whose fiction is poetic. Or maybe it is that her poetic

voice makes its way into even the grittiest of her fictional worlds, such as life on a reservation

in the 1950s, one of American racism’s heydays. 

Trailhead

I live in South Florida where concrete spills across the flat landscape and spreads and hardens

like melted butter. The hiking trails that have managed to survive at the bottom of the peninsula

are few and far between, and the trees aren’t tall or many. Palm trees cut off from the forest

don’t count, though they do bless neighborhoods overrun in concrete. I love to hike. I am

always on the hunt for a dirt path shaded by trees. Wonder of wonders, I have managed to find a

handful of inter-connecting paths adjacent to my neighborhood that, all-tolled and with some

retreading, can make for an eight+ mile hike. (Ironically, most of these paths were designed and

meant for horses. Yes, I live in a part of South Florida that is amenable to horses but not

necessarily to hikers. It doesn’t get much more oxymoronic that that.) 

I say hike because as an experienced fellow hiker reportedly claimed: “Anything over four

miles is a hike.” That was nice to hear. Up until then, in my own mind, I had been reduced to

the status of ‘walker’. Like the woman who walks her dog after dinner. Or the couple that

birdwatch together on weekends. Or the mother and father with three children in tow pulling

their kids away from their iPads and videogames to acquaint them with a world of trees and

other natural things. An un-virtual world if you will. Like that.

 I guess I’m a snob. I don’t want to be reduced to the status of walker.  

The hiker is in a different class altogether. She wears carefully selected hiking boots—low?

mid-calf? High? It depends on the terrain. Always waterproofed, just in case. Will I be able to

make it to the top? She hears the wind sing and observes how the trees sway to the wind’s tune.

Or else, how they rest in utter stillness as if in meditation. She relishes the challenge of the

climb despite her nagging doubts. Will I make it to the top? Along the way, she is attuned to her

natural surroundings, and to the twists and turns of the trail that take her to unexpected and

startling sights: a lively brook alongside the Welch-Dickey loop trail in central New Hampshire,

or a waterfall that suddenly appears like an apparition; Champlain Valley Wonders in autumn,

glimpsed through slants of light that cut across the treetops from a perch on Mount Abraham in

Vermont; a 100-foot felled tree, 14 feet across, its belly gutted, its gnarled trunk lying

majestically in its own grave, with fresh ferns sprouting at its base, in Olympic National Park. 

Where am I going with this? Dunno exactly. I find myself at a time in my life when I realize that

the days of seven-hour climbs up Mount Tongariro are over. And 11-day-treks on the

Chamonix Trail are in my rearview mirror. I find myself in a place that falls well short of the

one imagined by my younger self. Left most months to South Florida trails, I guess I’ll just see

where the trails lead me and try not to be a snob about it.