FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF EIGHTY

Our house in summer.

Today is my birthday. For the eighty-first time, June 1, 1934 to June 1, 2015. Eighty-one birthdays. I want to give to you, my reader, a birthday gift. Two, in fact. But in order to know what the gifts are, you must read on to the end!

This birthday is one of the best. For one thing, 81 is far less disturbing an idea than 80. 80 was O.M.G. terrifying. 81 is just more of the same. Cool – I’m “in my eighties.” No longer a stone of stumbling – more like bedrock.

Yesterday, the last day of May, Becca, my first-born, and her husband, Will came. In a day of occasional rain-showers, Becca and I worked in the flower beds around this old house. Gardening in the rain – it was purely delicious. Of course I mostly had to stand and supervise because of my left hip’s tendency to disconnect. She had the fun of getting mud all over herself. After this year’s long, merciless winter, we were surrounded by the green of spruce and maple, the white of peony and Japanese dogwood, and the yellow of iris and baby marigolds.

This house has stood here in the center of Amherst for a hundred and fifty years – since around the end of the Civil War. It belonged to African Americans for close to a hundred years, and it came to us as a kind of gift and pure miracle – a story I have told in a book titled Wake Up Laughing.

The house where I was born.

But this is not about the book, or the house, both of which I like a lot. This is about this day. This eighty-first day of my birth. I’ve always loved my birthday – and I’ve been a little embarrassed to say so. My love of it started with my mother. She did a lot of things that weren’t so good in her mothering, and I have followed Sharon Old’s practice in her poem, “I Go Back to May, 1937” in which she says to her parents as young, unmarried images perhaps in a photograph, “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”

Maybe I have not “told about” enough of what my complicated, troubled mother did right. One of those was giving me her love of poetry. Every first day of June she recited a long portion of James Russell Lowell’s poem, “The Vision of Sir Launfal” which begins,

……………And what is so rare as a day in June?

……………Then, if ever, come perfect days;

……………Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

……………And over it softly her warm ear lays;

……………Whether we look, or whether we listen,

……………We hear life murmur, or see it glisten . . .

4039 Olive Street

— she (and therefore I, to this very day) could go on, and on. I think I tortured my only sibling, Sam, by quoting to him the first line at least twice a year, pointing out to him that his birthday, the 21st of December was almost the shortest day of the year, while mine was almost the longest day. And what is so rare . . .”

This year was one of the all time best birthdays. After getting wet and muddy, then getting dry and warm, Becca played her new ukulele with her newly calloused fingers from practicing, songs that she knows I love – folk songs, black and white gospel, country songs. “Here’s one you love,” she said, remembering my teaching it to our four children as we travelled three thousand miles from Massachusetts in a VW bus to visit Peter’s parents in California:

……………I love the mountains,

……………I love the rolling hills,

……………I love the flowers,

……………I love the daffodils,

……………I love the fireside

……………When all the lights are low

……………Boom-de-ah-dah, Boom-de-ah-da . . .

— and then there was lemon cake – -the absolute most lemony lemon cake I ever tasted, and I remembered how as a child her face would pucker in disbelief when I ate a sliver of lemon rind, raw.

It was a lovely day.

I stayed up late at night and watched the clock tick down my eightieth year. I was glad to see it go. It had been a hard, hard year. Many changes. Losses. Griefs.

In the last weeks of my eightieth year I decided to read again Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved. It had been so many years since I read it, I thought I had forgotten all but the central plot situation. But as I read, every scene was one I remembered – only I had forgotten that all of those scenes came from Beloved. It was sort of like reading the Bible or Shakespeare. Very familiar images, phrases, and the thought: OH! Is that from Shakespeare? OH! is that beloved scene from Beloved?

I read the entire book, but what I needed to read – what in my experience and belief I was led to read – came early, on page 36. There Sethe tells Denver things I needed to hear, beginning with the words at the bottom of page 35, “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it.” I was given a call to love this place that is my home in a new and deeper way. I told the ancient (as I myself am now ancient) African-American woman who told us we needed to be in this house – I told her that it would remain her house until I had lived in it for 42 years – as long as she had lived in it. It has been “only” 35 years. She died many years ago. But I need to talk to her, Sister Susan DaCosta, “Mrs. D.” I need to ask her to let me co-own it now. I need to belong to this land, to “rememory” it and to listen for the times when I “bump into” Mrs. D’s “rememories.” It is a call that gives me joy.

Now. I have a gift for you, reader, who has come this far with me. Two gifts, if you want both of them.

First, I give you the new poem that follows. It is new, unbaptized by much editing. It may be raw and unfinished. I wrote it longhand day before yesterday and typed it up today.

Second, that book I mentioned at the start of this personal essay, the one that tells how we got this house, sits in my basement in stacks of boxes. It is one of my favorites of my books, well reviewed on Amazon, etc. But we haven’t promoted it, and there are too many copies. If you would like a signed copy for yourself or as a gift signed to someone else, click HERE to order it from my website, tell me how you would like it inscribed, and you may have it for $5 to cover postage and handling.

POEM ON THE EVE

OF AN 81st BIRTHDAY

June 1, 2015

A blessed day — a beautiful

blessed day at the tip-end

of May, at the tip end of

a lifetime of May endings,

the bendings of the heart

toward June, through the

noontime of a life, toward

the mourning dove’s evening

courting call and all

the sweetness that the aftermath

of winter cannot count down . . .

Around and around the sun

we fly, and then we die.

And isn’t it miraculous

that no one knows for certain why

the rusted horseshoe holds

the body of the horse, and

the worn-out human body holds

the reins, the ride, the wind

that stirs the leaving.

In the end, what is more real,

the horseshoe, or the horse?

The body, or the ride?

Neither the horse or rider asks

where the morning went.

In the end, the body

is impediment.

……………After reading page 36 of

…………… Beloved, by Toni Morrison