One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  I have racked my brains and considered

  All the possibilities of love and I still

  Return to that boy and those socks.

  No matter what happens to me,

  That happened to me.

  A Prayer for You and Yours

  Well, my first prayers as a parent were before I was a parent, because my slight extraordinary mysterious wife and I had been told by a doctor, bluntly and directly and inarguably, that we would not be graced by children, and I remember us walking out of the doctor’s office, silently, hand in hand, and then opening the passenger door to our car for my wife, as my mother had taught all her sons to do or else she, my mom, would reach up and slap you gently on the back of the head for being a boor, and I helped my wife into the car, and bent down to escort the hem of her blue raincoat into the car before closing the door gently, and then I started to walk around to the driver’s side, and I burst into tears, and bent over the trunk of the car, and sobbed for a moment.

  My first prayers as a parent, those tears.

  Then we prayed for a long time in all sorts of ways. I prayed in churches and chapels and groves and copses and hilltops and on the rocky beaches of the island where we lived at that time. I would have prayed to all the gods who ever were or ever would be except I know somehow deep in my heart that there is one Breath, one Imagination, one Coherent Mercy, as a friend of mine says, and that everything that is came from and returns to That which we cannot explain or understand, but can only try to perceive the spoor, clues, evidence, effect, the music in and through and under all things.

  I have never thought that prayers of request can be answered; I do not think that is the way of the Mercy; yet we do whisper prayers of supplication; I think we always have, since long before our species arrived in this form. Sometimes I think that beings have been praying since there were such things as beings; I suspect all beings of every sort do pause and revere occasionally, and even if we think, with our poor piddly perceptive apparatus, that they are merely reaching for the sun, or drying their wings, or meditating in the subway station between trains, or chalking the lines of a baseball field ever so slowly and meticulously, perhaps they are praying in their own peculiar particular ways; who is to say? Who can define that which is a private message to an Inexplicable Recipient? So that he who says a scrawny plane tree straining for light in a city alley is not a prayer does not know what he is saying, and his words are wind and dust.

  Three children were granted to us, a girl and then, together, one minute apart, two boys; and my prayers doubled, for now I knew fear for them, that they would sicken and die, that they would be torn by dogs and smashed by cars; and I felt even then the shiver of faint trepidation that someday, if they grew up safely, and did not suffer terrible diseases, and they achieved adulthood, that they would be heart-hammered by all sorts of things against which I could not protect or preserve them; and so I did, I admit it, sometimes beg the Coherent Mercy, late at night, for small pains as their lot, for relatively minor disappointments, for love affairs that would break apart but not savagely, for work that they would like and even maybe love. In the end, I remember vividly, I boiled all my prayers as a parent down to this one: Take me instead of them. Load me up instead of them. Let me eat the pains they were served for their tables. I don’t think I ever fully understood the deep almost inexplicable love of the Christ for us, why he would accept his own early tortured death as a sacrifice, until I had been a father for a while.

  Somehow being a father also slowly but surely changed the target of my prayers over the years; before we were granted children, I chatted easily and often with my man Yesuah ben Joseph, a skinny gnomic guy like me, a guy with a motley crew of funny brave hardworking bone-headed friends, a guy who liked to wander around outdoors, a guy who delighted in making remarks that were puzzling and memorable and riddlish, a guy—I felt like I knew him pretty well, what with us both being guys and all, and I had confided stuff to him not only as a child, but again after the years during which every Catholic boy in my experience ran screaming and shouting away from the Church, away from authority and power and corporate corruption and smug arrogant pompous nominal bosses issuing proclamations and denouncing dissent.

  You tiptoe back toward religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and poetry and power and wild miracle in it, that it is a language you can use to speak about that for which we have no words; and in my case, as in many others I know, this was so, and I saw for the first time in my life that there were two Catholic Churches, one a noun and the other a verb, one a corporation and the other a wild idea held in the hearts of millions of people who are utterly uninterested in authority and power and rules and regulations, and very interested indeed in finding ways to walk through the bruises of life with grace and humility.

  So when I tiptoed back into Catholicism, and began taking it seriously, and began exploring and poking under the corporate hood, curious and fascinated by the revolutionary genius under the Official Parts, it was because I was a father, and knew that I needed a language with which to speak to my children of holiness and prayer and miracle and witness and hope and faith; and I found, month by month as my children grew from squirming lumps to toddlers and willowy young people and now almost men and woman, that it was to Mary that I turned, both in desperation and in cheerful silent moments when I chanted the Hail Mary to myself while waiting for the coffee to boil.

  Why? Because, I think, she was a mother—is a mother. He came out of her. That was a miracle. It is a miracle when a child emerges from his or her mother. I had seen this miracle not once but twice, with my own eyes, from very close to the field of action, and I think something awoke in me after that, something that knew she was there, available, approachable, patient, piercing. Not once in the days since my children were born have I ever felt her absence. I do not say this in a metaphorical way, or as a cool literary device, or as a symbolic hint. I mean what I said. I feel her near us. I have no opinion about visitations, other than to grin at the ones where people see her face in tortillas and on stop signs, and to wonder quietly about ones like that which occurred to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, long ago, that poor man who had to return to the hill for proof to offer the ecclesiastic authority, who gaped when a shower of roses fell to the shivering floor. Perhaps most reports are hallucinations; perhaps all of them. But perhaps hallucinations are illuminations, and there are countless more things possible than we could ever dream. One thing I know at this age: if you think you know the boundaries and limits and extents of reality, you are a fool. Thus we pray.

  I still pray for my children every day. So does my wife, in the morning, by the bed, on her knees, in her pajamas, with her face pressed down upon the blanket of the bed, abashed before the light of the Lord. I have seen this, though I try to be out of the bedroom so that she can pray in private; and every time I see it I get the happy willies, that she believes with such force and humility. But I pray on my feet, by the coffee pot, while walking, while waiting for eyeglasses, while stirring the risotto, while washing the dishes, while brushing my teeth, while scratching the dog. I pray that they would be happy. I pray that they will find work that is play. I pray that their hearts will not be stomped on overmuch—enough to form resilience, but not enough to crush their spirits. I pray that they will live long and be blessed by married love and be graced by children and maybe even grandchildren. I pray that their minds hum and sing and do not stutter and fail. I pray that they will not be savaged by illnesses, but be allowed to live healthy and happy for years beyond my ken and my own life. I still pray to die before they do. I still say thank you, every day, every single day, for being granted children at all; for I am a man who was told, bluntly and directly and inarguably, that my extraordinary bride and I would not be graced by children, and we walked out of the doctor’s office, silently, hand in hand, a
nd we wept.

  Our first tears as parents.

  We have cried many tears since, for many reasons, and our children have been tumultuous, and troubled, and in great danger, and our marriage has been wonderfully confusing, and troubled, and in great danger; but even now, all these years later, every few weeks, I will find myself in tears for what seems like no reason at all; and I know it is because we were blessed with children, three of them, three long wild prayers; and they are the greatest gifts a profligate Mercy ever granted shuffling muddled me. When I am in my last hour, when I am very near death, when I am so soon to change form and travel in unaccountable ways and places, I hope I will be of sound enough mind to murmur this, to our three children, and perhaps, if the Mercy has been especially ridiculously generous, our grandchildren: it was for you that I was here, and for you I prayed every day of your life, and for you I will pray in whatever form I am next to take. Lift the rock and I am there; cleave the wood and I am there; call for me and I will listen, for I hope to be a prayer for you and yours long after I am dust and ash. Amen.

  His Listening*

  Among the many things that my father was very good at was this: when you said something to him, anything at all, anything in the range from surpassingly subtle to stunningly stupid, he would listen carefully and attentively and silently, without interrupting, without waiting with increasing impatience for you to finish so he could correct or top or razz you, and he would even wait a few beats after you finished your remarks, on the off chance that you had something else you wanted to add, and then he would ponder what you had said, and then, without fail, he would say something encouraging first, before he got around to commenting on what it was you said with such breathtaking subtlety or stupidity.

  And he did this not once but many thousands of times, not just with me but also with my sister and brothers, and his lovely bride, our mother, and daughters-in-law and grandchildren and colleagues and friends, so that the number of times he listened patiently and attentively and scrupulously, and then politely waited a few beats to give a speaker a chance to dig deeper into or clamber hurriedly out of the hole he had just dug himself, and then said something gentle and encouraging before tacking finally toward the subject at hand, surely was a million or more, especially given the fact that he and our mother had many children together, and we are American Irish Catholics, which is to say people soaked in three garrulous cultures, each one entranced by story and legend and myth and the tallest of tales.

  I well remember some of my own remarkably ill-considered remarks to him, as a surly teenager, as a headlong young man, and as a formerly cocky middle-aged man, and in every one of those cases he was wonderfully consistent in his patience, his calm, his gentleness, his genuine absorption in what I was saying, even though what I was saying was sometimes the most arrant glib foolish nonsense and frippery. I would conclude my burble and babble, and watch him lean back to consider what I had said, and then after a moment he would say something quietly encouraging, and then often he would say several more encouraging things, and then he would finally gently comment on what it was I had said, but never with the slightest sneer or slice, though much of what I said surely deserved to be dismissed out of hand. There was a pace and a rhythm to his listening, it seems to me, such that the listening was far more important than anything else; in so many people the answering, the opinionating, the jockeying, the topping, the shouting of self, the obviation of the other, is the prime work in conversation, but this was not so for my dad, the best listener I have ever known.

  His listening is now largely a thing of the past; he and his ears have achieved a great and venerable age, and his hearing is a shadow of what it once was. His mind is as sharp or even more so than it ever was; his generosity and grace remain oceanic; and you could search whole galaxies, to no avail, for a gentler, wittier man. But this morning I find that I very much miss that one little thing he did so well, that was not little—the way he stared at your face as you spoke, with all his soul open and alert for your story, and how he would wait a few beats when you were done, in case there was a coda coming, and then he would lean back and consider what you had just said, and then finally lean forward again and say something gentle and encouraging. That he would often then add something wise and piercing is true, but that is not what I want to leave you with; I want to celebrate his listening, for it is now nearly gone from this world, and it was a rare and extraordinary and unforgettable thing.

  * This is the very last of the 173 consecutive “Epiphanies” columns that BD published in The American Scholar, “the longest tenure of any blogger by far,” the editors noted, “and we hope his columns have enchanted, delighted, and enriched you as much as they have us.”

  His Weirdness

  A friend of mine is dying in the fast lane, he says, smiling at the image, for no man ever loved as much as he did zooming those long stretches of highway in the West, where there are no speed limits or curves or cops and nothing to kill you but sudden antelopes. But now he can see his exit up ahead, he says, and he has slowed down to enjoy the ride. He’s been pondering the sparrows, who do not sow and neither do they reap, he says, shuffling into his yard armed with fistfuls of seed.

  The woman who loves him watches him go, smiling. There are so very many tiny things that are exactly him and no other man on earth, she says: When he shaves his neck every other day he bangs his razor against the right side of the sink, and there’s a little tiny scatter of hairs, which drives me stark raving insane, because never once in forty years has he remembered to rinse that off, despite one million promises to do exactly that. One time I wrote the words Clean the sink! actually in the sink, with a big red arrow pointing to the place where he bangs his razor, which made him laugh so hard I thought he was going to lose a kidney, which he didn’t, nor did he clean the sink. Also he has a pair of boxers that are so incredibly ancient and threadbare you can, I kid you not, see through them. It’s like eight threads with a waistband holding them together, but God forbid he throws them out. I have pointed out to him that this article of clothing is no longer serving the purpose for which it was designed, but he won’t let them go, which tells you something about his commitment, or his craziness. Also he has a weird habit of slicing off the crust of a loaf of bread an inch at a time, which drives me stark raving insane, each piece the size of a quarter, which leaves a naked, crustless loaf of bread on the table, and who wants a loaf that looks like a skinned snake? Also even before he got sick, he shuffled, you know? He never lifts his feet. The kids and I always thought it was because he’s distracted all the time. There are ten things going on in his head at once, and walking properly is just not on his priority list, walking is something he can do on autopilot. But it sounds like there’s a rhinoceros in the hallway, and after you hear that ten thousand times, you want to shriek, My god, will you walk like a normal person! But he’s not normal, you know. That’s the point. Also he hums all the time, and he doesn’t hear it. Every day a new set of songs. Lately it’s all Beach Boys, all the time. He says he used to get in trouble in school when he was a kid because he would be humming during tests and exams and driving the other kids and the teacher stark raving insane. Same thing happened at work, he says: he would be in meetings with his soundtrack going full blast, and after a while he’d wonder why everybody was staring at him. I have been listening to his humming for forty years, and, me personally, I think Van Morrison is the all-time playlist champion, although there was a long stretch there, two or three years, where it was mostly West Coast jazz, Chet Baker and Art Pepper and stuff like that. See, that’ll all be gone when he goes, and that’s what makes me cry at night. Mostly we just try to enjoy the time we have left, but sometimes I think ahead to when the sink will be totally clean in the morning, and that will be awful, or the bread won’t have white holes where he’s cut off pieces of crust the size of a quarter. What kind of raving lunatic would do such a thing? Only him. People think what we’ll miss most is his humor and kindnes
s and all that, which we will, but lately I think what we’ll miss the most is his weirdness. His weirdness is what he was. Everybody else saw him as a good guy, but we saw him as the humming rhinoceros in the hallway, you know what I mean? And sometimes I get really scared of waking up in the morning and not hearing that stupid shuffle. I hate that shuffle. I love that shuffle. That’s as close as I can get to what I am trying to say.

  Let’s go feed the sparrows with him. You will not be surprised to hear that he has a weird thing going with feeding the birds: a different seed every week, and he keeps track of which ones they like. He has a piece of paper pinned up on the garage near the bird feeder with his charts on it and also, God help me, a section for comments from the birds, with a little tiny pencil. I told you the man was a total nut. Did you think I was kidding? I was not kidding. What kind of man would go to the trouble of making a pencil exactly two centimeters long? It works too. He tested it, of course. And it tells you something about him that, deep in his heart, he wouldn’t be surprised if someday he shuffled out to feed the birds and found a tiny complaint written there. Nobody who ever lived would be happier to find a complaint from the sparrows about the seed of the week, believe me. He’ll probably write a little tiny reply from the management, you know? With a promise to do better.

  The Tender Next Minute

  One time when we were kids my two younger brothers

  And I were absorbed with ropes and climbing and what

  Heights could be scaled by intrepid adventurers like us,

  And we scaled the garage, and then we scaled a massive

  Sweet gum, and then we tried to scale a neighbor’s shed