I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
But Dad was not there. So, dutiful son, raised well in the language of English verse, I felt it my responsibility to poem-make for him.
Yet I had no words.
All around me was empty prairie, with a scatter of weathered farm buildings in the distance. Nothing beside remained.
I had no words of my own, but I did have the words of Shelley, another Romantic and a member in good standing of Dad’s emoting and visionary tribe—
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
My father was not there, but, in Shelley’s lines about that ancient, mighty King Ozymandias, of whom nothing beside remains, Dad’s muse-wet spirit was there, drenching his son’s mind with wetness of my own.
So Dad and I stood there, in my imagination, on the rim of the swimming pool. I put my arms around Dad. Dad put his arms around me. His face was scratchy as it had been when I was young, and now my face was scratchy too.
There, at The Visionary Farms, I loved my father for being human and for being flawed. I loved him for being a poet and for being grand, and for loving the muse just as much as he loved his own son, who was also a lover of the muse—the muse who is one more manifestation of the ultimate Father of us all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Where are they?” asked Channa, frantic. “The sun sets at 7:13. What time is it?”
“It’s 6:51.”
“Oh! We’ll never make it.”
“We have twenty-two minutes. Maybe—if they come right now . . .”
“But think what’s left to do!”
“We’ve done everything we know to do. We can’t be responsible for what we don’t know to do.”
And we had done everything we knew to do.
We had done everything to kasher (make kosher) our kitchen and to set the rest of our house to rights for what was to be our third Shabbaton, which was to begin in twenty-two minutes. Our Orthodox rabbi was on his way to our house, with his wife and his five children, and we were to have a special Shabbat, away from the synagogue—a time of prayer and ceremony and learning and song.
We had needed to prepare. We had lit dim lights in the bedrooms where lights were forbidden to be turned on or off during the next twenty-four hours; we had left strategic lights on in hallways so the rabbi and his family could find their way to the bathroom if they needed to do so after dark; we had laid out disposable plastic utensils and paper plates on the dining table, so we would not need to worry if a dairy knife should touch a meat plate; we had boiled lots of eggs and peeled them already so no peeling work would be required during the next twenty-four hours; we had laid out fruit and kosher peanut butter and crackers; we had cleaned and scrubbed as we usually do for a party, but with special care to place the meat cutlery, dishes, cutting board, cooking utensils, and sink scrubber on one side, while we placed the dairy cutlery, dishes, cutting board, cooking utensils, and sink scrubber on the other side. Some kosher kitchens have two refrigerators, so meat and dairy can be separated completely, but we had at least separated them inside our single refrigerator onto their separate shelves.
Channa asked, “Did you put the Bible on the table?”
“Yes, you already asked me. No carrying.”
“No, Dikkon, you can carry something inside your house, just not outside. I just want the Bible to be available.”
“Here,” I said, “sit down. You’re going to wear yourself out.”
“I can’t sit, Dikkon. I can’t.”
“Maybe they’ll come in the next two minutes.”
“You’re sure you’ve thought of everything?”
“Yes. I think I have—oh, no! No, I haven’t. I haven’t taped the refrigerator light. If someone opens the door, the light will go on automatically.”
I leaped up and dashed for the barn to get some duct tape to tape the trigger down inside the refrigerator door frame so it could not move and turn on the light when the door opened. And just at that moment the rabbi arrived in his big Suburban, having rushed all the way from Montreal, arriving with sixteen minutes to spare.
Frenzy.
All the suitcases needed to be inside and in the bedrooms within sixteen minutes—no carrying while outside on Shabbat.
“Dikkon, help me,” the rabbi called urgently. He stopped herding the rebbetzin (the title for a rabbi’s wife) and his children with the carrying. “I’ve got forty kosher chickens cut up in the back, on ice, but the ice will melt. Do you have anything—a second refrigerator maybe, or a freezer?”
What? Now? Forty chickens?
Twelve minutes!
“There’s a freezer in the barn, but it’s partly full.”
“I’ll back the car up to the barn. Hurry.”
The rabbi’s daughters and the rebbetzin were moving through the house efficiently, and when they saw some non-kosher arrangement, they worked with Channa to make it right.
Meanwhile, eight minutes to go.
The chicken boxes were large, flat, waxed cardboard with ice and chicken parts inside, no plastic bags or other storage. The boxes were already dripping melted water and chicken fat. Into the freezer the boxes went until the freezer was stuffed full. There were still more chickens.
I grabbed a large plastic trash can, splashed it a few times inside with the hose, slapped a trash bag into it, and the rabbi and I began packing it with handfuls of ice and dropping the remaining chicken parts onto the ice.
Four minutes.
“You finish; I must clean myself.”
While I was annoyed at the rabbi for this sudden chicken calamity, it was funny, too, and I finished packing the ice and the meat. I wrapped two beach blankets around the trash bag and consigned it and its chickens to fate.
Suddenly, it was 7:13.
In the house, the rabbi began to chant. I closed the barn door from the outside and stood next to the Suburban for a moment. From inside the house, I could hear the chanting. My hands were chilled by the ice, and my sleeves and my shirt and my arms were smeared with chicken guts. Deliberately, I breathed slowly. This was Shabbat, after all, and I needed to be calm.
This was not how Channa and I were accustomed to throwing a party, and my desire to appear calm struggled against my annoyance at the rabbi. I realized the rabbi would chide me for this thought. He would say that we were not throwing a party. He would say that we were serving the Lord by observing His commandments for the hallowing of Shabbat. There was no party involved.
He would be correct. Clearly, Channa and I still had much to learn about Orthodox living. But it still felt that seven people arriving for the weekend was a party.
After our initial prayers, I voiced what was for me a major question. “But what if it was sunset, and you were still two miles away?”
“I would park on the road. I’ve done it before. We would walk the rest of the way.”
“But you couldn’t carry stuff.”
“Maybe you have a friend who isn’t Orthodox who would drive to our car and bring back the suitcases.”
“And carry them inside?”
“And carry them inside.” Then he grinned. “And upstairs, too.”
I was astonished at the image in my head. I was astonished to imagine our rabbi striding forward along the main road in Phippsburg, as the light faded from the sky and the pickups rumbled by, as though he were some transplanted Abram following whither God wilt. I was astonished by the image of a ragged collection of the rebbetzin and of their smaller and smaller children, each child hurrying to keep up.
Twenty-four hours later, what had turned out to be a semi-pleasing time of prayer and learning came to its end. It wa
s sundown on Saturday. We enjoyed the ceremony for the ending of Shabbat, a ceremony both of regret and of anticipation, during which we snuffed out the sacred candles and thereby ushered back in the profane.
We took the tape off the light trigger in the refrigerator. We lit up the stove to make hot water for tea. The rabbi fired up his Suburban so he could drive it back from the barn to the parking area. Our Sabbath day was over.
The next morning, Christians went to church on their Sabbath, and the rabbi desired to pray beside the sea. As we ate our breakfast, we heard the call-to-worship bell rung at the Baptist church just down our road and on its other side.
The rabbi gathered his regalia, and I drove him to the mouth of the Kennebec River. I thought this would be a good spot for his prayers, since there are interesting rock formations, a long, sandy beach stretching out into the ocean, and a granite fort constructed to defend our shipbuilding center from British depredations during the War of 1812. I drove the long way around to the mouth of the river in order to show the rabbi more of our countryside. Going the long way, we passed the Baptist church.
“It’s a nice-looking church,” I remarked to the rabbi, “isn’t it? So New England-y.”
“Yes, it is,” he replied.
The rabbi and I arrived at the mouth of the river. The tide was low, so the rock formations at the base of the fort were at their most exposed where they stretched out toward the sea. In a straight line, Maine’s coast between New Hampshire and Canada is 226 miles long. However, if you were to walk our actual shoreline, you would walk 3,478 miles. Anything might have happened along those many crinkled promontories and bays, but what happened near our fort during the next ninety minutes was unusual, at least, if not unique.
Our rabbi was a short, powerful, eager man of intense awareness of the laws of his God. He radiated the same singularity of being that I had admired before in Robert Frost and in Scott Nearing—he did not seem; he was.
We two stood beside my car near the fort. It was a bright morning with a firm breeze, and it was cool. Because it was early Sunday, a number of “Burgers,” as we call ourselves, were walking the beach with their dogs or were already set up with their lines in the water for stripers. The rabbi began to dress himself for prayer. His ensemble was odd as compared with the jeans, hoodies, and ball caps the rest of us wore. He wore a kippa (skullcap) and tallis (prayer shawl), which were odd enough, but when he began to wind on his phylacteries (shiny strips of black leather that are bound numerous times around the arm and neck and head, in part to fix a black box the size of a quarter-brick tightly onto the forehead), he became even odder.
He murmured rituals as he prepared himself. I remained silent. Then the rabbi strode to the end of the rock formations beside the fort, and striking a hierarchical pose, he began to chant. I sat down on the near end of the rocks, and I occupied space to make a barrier between my rabbi and the Burgers and their dogs, each curious about this new phenomenon. Just at that moment, I loved this man who was so willing not to seem.
While I protected my rabbi, I considered an important way that I differed from my dad. Unlike my father, I did not fool around with theology. Channa and I understood theology as vital. We were intense about this. There was nothing more important to us than the truth about God’s nature and intention. There was nothing more important to us than how we might serve Him in the face of His revelation to us concerning His nature and His intention.
While I was fascinated by the Orthodox form of Judaism with which Channa and I were now engaged, even in Orthodox Judaism I had not found a way of belief which relieved the burden of my sin.
Though more than thirty-five years had passed, in my mind I still bore the image of that little girl who had died in the train wreck.
No, I had not killed the people on the train that my girlfriend and I should have ridden during our return. But I had omitted to help save them.
I still carried my guilt.
PART FOUR
“I need to tell you something, Dan.”
“Okay.”
“I need to tell you about the worst thing I ever did.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “When I was young, I had a chance to avert an accident, and I didn’t, and people died.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“And you’ve been carrying this weight now for how long? Thirty-eight years?”
“Yes,” I said and began to weep. “There was an eight-year-old little girl.”
“So she’s in heaven.”
“I don’t know.”
“What would you say if I told you that God has already forgiven you for what you did?”
I looked at him, eyes watering.
“Can God do that?”
“Of course. He already did.”
I shook my head. “But why?”
“Because He wants to.”
“Why? It makes no sense! Why should He want to?”
“Because He loves you.”
“That’s not what I was told.”
“God forgave you because He wanted to, because He is responsible for what happens, not you.”
I looked up.
“This is what evil does, Dikkon. Evil has kept you in prison for thirty-eight years. You’ve borne this weight for a long time, and it’s not really there. It’s gone.”
And suddenly, it was.
When we were children, we loved to stand in a doorway and, with straight arms, to press as hard as we could against the two jambs with the backs of our hands, until our muscles screamed. Then, when we relaxed and stood away, our arms would float delightfully and effortlessly upward as though they were propelled by something other than ourselves. We did this again and again; it was so sweet.
In Pastor Dan’s office, suddenly, my shoulders floated upward as though invited to ascend by God. No moment of weightlessness was ever sweeter for me, not even as a boy inside my father’s open door.
Maybe that’s what it feels like to be in heaven.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Dad was ninety-three, Dartmouth honored him with a day of symposia, a late-afternoon reading by numerous poets, and a banquet afterward at the Hanover Inn, hosted by the college’s president, James O. Freedman, and introduced by poet Cleopatra Mathis. Some of the poets honoring Dad were friends of many years: Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Philip Booth, Dan Hoffman, Jay Parini, and Maxine Kumin. Dick Wilbur, Syd Lea, and others who could not attend sent testimonials, which were read aloud. By that time in my life, I had known these people for many years—I was an old hand who had gone in another career direction. Others among the attendees were newer in my acquaintance, such as Stephen Cory, Galway Kinnell, Christopher Keane, and William Logan.
Dad was the last to read. He was an old war horse hearing the trumpets blare; he read resoundingly and was funny.
After the reading, we invitees trooped across campus to the Inn. On this occasion, Allen Ginsberg was wearing shoes, so he was not refused his seat at the table. Of course, time had passed since the 1960s, and time changes what before was hot into what now is not.
Good speeches; good food. After dinner, a number of us stood, one after another, and read a favorite of Dad’s poems to him while he sat beside the president and glowed. After a few of the poets had done their bit, I stood and read “Seals, Terns, Time.”
The seals at play off Western Isle
In the loose flowing of the summer tide
And burden of our strange estate—
Resting on the oar and lolling on the sea,
I saw their curious images,
Hypnotic, sympathetic eyes
As the deep elapses of the soul.
O ancient blood, O blurred kind forms
That rise and peer from elemental water:
I loll upon the oar, I think upon the day,
Drawn by strong, by the animal soft bonds
Back to a dim pre-history;
While off the point of Jagged Lig
ht
In hundreds, gracefully, the fork-tailed terns
Draw swift esprits across the sky.
Their aspirations dip in mine,
The quick order of their changing spirit,
More freedom than the eye can see.
Resting lightly on the oarlocks,
Pondering and balanced upon the sea,
A gauze and spindrift of the world,
I am in compulsion hid and thwarted,
Pulled back in the mammal water,
Enticed to the release of the sky.
When I finished and sat down, Allen—who had perhaps been a little bored with the proceedings and had spent most of the after-dinner time amusing my daughters by drawing for them his little inventive animal-creature cartoons—said this: “Dikkon, that was you?”
I nodded.
“I had my eyes closed. I thought it was Dick reading; your diction is so exactly how he reads that poem—the rhythms, the emphases.”
I smiled down the table at Allen and then at Dad. “Thank you” is what I said.
Had I still been an actor, Allen’s remark would have been a fine compliment.
But I was not an actor. My intention had been to express my love for my father by assuring him that I had listened at his knee. My reading had not been mimicry; it had been gifting.
When the party was over, and we were clustering around, I was clustering mostly with Allen and thanking him for amusing my daughters.
Allen enlarged his point. “I’ve heard you do ‘The Groundhog,’ Dikkon. Sometimes you do it better than Dick does. He has mixed feelings about it, or used to anyway. Your mother told me once that Dick would refuse to read it in public at all—this would have been in the 1940s—jealous as he was of it for his other verse.”
“Well,” I laughed, “he did it twice this afternoon.”
That was true. “The Groundhog” was the final poem Dad read. When he had finished it, and the audience was still absorbed in silence, Dad twinkled at them and said, “That was a good one. I’m going to do that one again.”
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 18