“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date”

         

            Chilled by a cool morning breeze this lovely mid-August day, I realize that the season is fading fast and, indeed, “summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Then, as the sun warms the air, I’m reminded once again that every day’s a blessing, and I am astonished at the beauty all about me. It’s found, mostly, in the little things, the small unheralded moments of joy, like the medley of birdsong that greets the promise of the day. The warble of a thrush, the subdued cooing of the mourning doves, the dit, dit, dit of the cardinal as if tapping out some Morse code to announce the glory of this day.

            Sometimes the beauty is found in the scarlet splendor of a cyclamen blooming anew amid its lush green foliage in a window pot. Or in the trembling glimmer of sunlight that plays upon the leaves of the chokecherry tree in the yard. Then, later, in the stubborn sway and tussle of the branches as clouds obscure the sun and a late summer wind sweeps by.

            At times, the shrill cries of children at play outside or the jingle of the ice cream truck triggers warm memories of earlier times on those same roads. As the day wanes in the lazy, languorous way of summer, the late afternoon sun casts a soft sepia tint upon the houses and lawns, the privets and trees, and soon the shouts of the children fade with the evening. Then—earlier now, around 8:30 or so—a soft glow appears in the neighborhood windows as dusk gives way to dark and the katydids begin their raucous overture to the night.

            The days grow perceptibly shorter now, and we ease our way toward the end of summer, the Labor Day weekend and the return to school. Pre-season football is back, while the Yankees faithful cling to the hope of a wild card berth. Soon it will be time to gather wood. Already some leaves, as if weary of clinging to their branches any longer, drift to the earth, a harbinger of the Autumn that awaits us just around the bend. And some nights in the suburbs even dip into the forties.

             While summer, in fact, will last until the Autumn equinox on September 22nd, still more than five weeks away now, we know that is just a calendar fact, that psychic summer ends much sooner. Yet there is so much beauty still to behold. It is to be found every day, in the little things.

O Beautiful for Spacious Skies

               In Egypt, one of the world’s most ancient of nations, the military has just deposed the democratically elected president, its fragile young democracy having lasted but one year. As I write this, here in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the town where Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” was born, I think of tomorrow’s celebration  of the 4^th of July, the 237th anniversary of our nation’s birth. Though we’ve had our problems—indeed, we still do—our country, so young in the annals of nationhood, has managed to endure for more than two and a third centuries.

                It has not been easy, yet our republic has survived the Revolution itself, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, our own devastating Civil War, the Spanish-American War, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and various constitutional crises—including the contested presidential election of 2000, a low point in American politics. At times, to paraphrase George Orwell, it seems that all Americans are equal, but some Americans are more equal than others. Yet through countless debates, divisions, and disasters down through the decades, our nation has endured; through populist political extremes, our nation has endured; through racial, religious, and ethnic bigotries, our nation has endured. And through the horrific atrocities of September 11, 2001, and a wave of subsequent terrorism, we have endured.

                Though our government at times may be less than we want it to be, though our representatives in Congress may seem chronically dysfunctional and we may wring our hands in despair at the direction in which the country seems to be heading, America is more than any of these. America is an idea that through our worst crises, through our bleakest days, through our darkest hours, our nation will prevail. Though we are not yet that which we one day may be, we strive still to become that “shining city upon a hill” toward which all nations, all peoples, will aspire.

                                                            America! America!
                                                            God shed His grace on thee,
                                                            And crown thy good with brotherhood
                                                            From sea to shining sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's So Great About Gatsby?

           Suddenly, like the glow of fireflies on a summer night, The Great Gatsby is everywhere. The Leonardo DiCaprio remake of the film has generated a renewal of interest in the story. Tiffany’s is advertising The Great Gatsby Collection, and Gatsby parties are suddenly the rage. While we might expect  a revival of the fashions of the period as well, the style and excesses of the Roaring Twenties do not account for the greatness of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work. Many astute readers make a case for The Great Gatsby as the “Great American Novel” for its tight story line, complex characterization, and luminous language. But in the end, the “greatness” of Gatsby lies not in the plot, or the glitz, or the age, but in the character himself.

            What makes Jay Gatsby “great”? It’s not his mystique, though from the start there is an elusive aura of mystery about him.  Someone says he killed a man once, another that he’d been a German spy, still another that he’d served in the American army during the war, and some that he was a bootlegger. “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him . . . ,” Fitzgerald tells us. And Gatsby himself seems intent on feeding the wild rumors. He’s the mythical masked man with a mysterious past who throws lavish parties “where men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings.” He wanders incognito among his uninvited guests, there one minute, gone the next, which adds, of course, to the mystique of the man. Gatsby’s enormous wealth does not define his greatness either, for the extravagant preparations for his parties—like the uncut pages of the books in his library—are a superficial display meant only to impress Daisy Buchanan, the girl of his dreams.

            Gatsby’s greatness is found, on the other hand, in his capacity to dream and his determination to pursue that vision, however improbable it seems. The narrator, Nick Carroway, says of Gatsby that there is “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” about him, “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness.” Gatsby’s capacity for wonder, his pursuit of a dream wrapped in enchantment, is captivating and “great” in both scale and imagination. In one of our first glimpses of Gatsby we see him stretching out his arms over the dark waters of the bay toward the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across the way, as if in homage to his ideal Beauty, the Golden Girl of his dreams. Having amassed a bountiful fortune in order to impress Daisy, he later dazzles her with the evidence of his newfound wealth, only to find that the moment is anti-climactic, as Nick tells us:

                        There must have been moments even that afternoon

                        when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through

                        her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his   
                        illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. . . .

                        No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man
                        will store up in his ghostly heart.

            How does Gatsby’s dream differ from illusion? Well, perhaps it doesn’t, in a way, in that his pursuit of Daisy is not grounded in reality. Who could possibly live up to Gatsby’s idealized image of Daisy? Certainly not Daisy herself, given the shallowness of her character. He has in fact created an illusion of her, rooted in what she once was and in what he needs her now to be, the Golden Girl of his dreams. Yet, once Gatsby is reunited with Daisy, she cannot measure up to his dream and as with the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the enchantment vanishes. “His count of enchanted objects,” Fitzgerald tells us, “had diminished by one.”

            The enchantment gone, the remnant of Gatsby’s dream has become a delusion as he squats beneath the bushes of Daisy’s window seeking to protect her from her abusive husband. Inside, she plots with him to abandon Gatsby to clean up her mess.

            And so, we learn from Gatsby in the end that while great passion is admirable, great delusions may be lethal. Nick tells us in the final paragraphs of the novel that he

                        thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the

                        green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long

                        way . . . and his dream must have seemed so close that he

                        could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was

                        already behind him . . . .

Fitzgerald closes the book with the words that grace his own epitaph in a quiet little churchyard in Rockville, Maryland:

            “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

To Every Thing There Is A Season

          On this, the second warm day in a row in the second week of April, we are assured that spring, at long last, has arrived. I’ve removed the tree tape from the red maple sapling and have treated the buck rub wounds with pruning spray in hopes that the deer will find some other place to scratch their backs. The forsythia, oaks, maples, and black cherries are in bud, though the ash and honeysuckle linger in their winter husks awhile longer. Crocuses, daffodils, and bluebells are in bloom, and a breath of spring is felt on the warm, gentle breeze.

            My thoughts turn now to treating the lawn once again. In years gone by I’d work the length of the yard—front, sides, and back—row after row of raking, cutting, seeding, and fertilizing, but now I have the luxury of hiring a landscaper to manage those chores. It is a blessing, surely. Yet I notice once again the shifting contours of the back lawn, a phenomenon that would astound me every year as the grip of winter yielded to the softening spring. Amid the yard that I had come to know so intimately—an outcrop of rock to the right of the hemlock, a bit of thatch here, some moss there, bare patches where I’d cut back the pachysandra, a deep green swath of grass over the septic fields—I’d see some subtle changes in the topography of the yard. It was as if the rocks underground were shifting in silent seismic undulations so that the landscape formed a new and different terrain. Where once had been a little rise, the lawn lay level now; where once a gentle rolling slope, a little knoll appeared; and there, where the rain would puddle in a furrow beside the silver maple, it rolled down the hill toward my neighbor’s yard.

            What are we to make of such reshaping of the earth, such shifting of the landscape every year? Perhaps it's a metaphor of all that changes in Nature from season to season, all that shifts silently, subtly, but certainly from year to year. The trees are imperceptibly taller each spring, some sturdier, some feebler, others more mottled with lichens or blight. Perennial plants nudge their way through the soil reaching toward the sun, bloom for the season, then fade and die. Annuals flourish in kaleidoscopic glory until, exhausted, they spend themselves or succumb to the cool nights of an approaching autumn. The lawns too have their cycles, from the lush greens of a wet spring to the dry and brittle browns of the midsummer heat or the hibernation of late fall and winter. Often we celebrate the joys that the season has to offer, but perhaps more often we take them for granted, hardly noticing the changes as they come to pass.

            It is like that, I think, with us too, in the subtle silent shifting of our own lives from year to year. Oh sure, we live intensely all the seasons, knowing full well “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” But we barely notice the seasons of our lives passing, hardly notice most of the changes until they have come to pass. How could it be that we are ten years out of college now? Or twenty? Or forty? When did our little boys grow to be such fine young men? How is it that my wife and I approach our 42^nd wedding anniversary this year? When, along the way, did my beard become more gray than brown, and my joints begin to ache? It all happened so quickly, it seems. "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans," John Lennon told us. Perhaps we were too busy living our lives to listen. And so, in the fullness of time, we grow a little older and a little wiser. Unlike the trees, we tend to stoop a little more as the years proceed. But like the lawn, trees, and flowers that keep growing anew each spring, we too greet the next season as it comes, changing subtly as need be, but reaching—always reaching—toward the promise of the sun.

When Once I Carried Him Who'd Carried Me

           I remember a photograph of a time when I was five and at a birthday party. I wore a conical party hat, its thin rubber string strapped beneath my chin, and I was in my father’s sturdy arms, crying. “It’s all right,” he must have said. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m here.” He would have carried me countless other times, too, in my early years, embracing, nurturing, loving.

            But as I grew and he aged, there came a time when he carried me less, and I him more. Like the time my brother Gerard and I draped his arms around our necks and carried him, stooped forward like a crucified Christ, into Dr. Howley’s office on Alexander Avenue when he’d blacked out in the waiting room, his bandaged hand too tightly wound from an accident at the bakery where he worked as a mechanic. Or the time we carried him braced on our criss-crossed arms across 188^th Street to Union Hospital, stopping traffic as we went, when he’d been held up and stabbed in a robbery at the candy store he owned in the Bronx.

            And then, years later, near the end, the time I helped to carry my father on a stretcher, tilting him nearly upright, gripping and grimacing, down the narrow stairwell on Decatur Avenue to the ambulance that would take him to the hospice. “You just want to get rid of me,” he said in his ache at leaving home to die. Little did he know, little did he know that I’d have held him in my arms the length of all the earth and back again, whispering, “It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, I’m here,” could I have carried him so.

The Architecture of Trees

                  As I look out the window this February morning, it strikes me how bare the trees are, their bones so evident in the stark clarity of these winter days. The skeletal limbs sway in the wind, silhouetted against the gray sky. Their brittle branches tremble with every gust. The upper boughs fan out their tangled twigs reaching for the muted winter light; the lower reach downward as if yearning to reclaim the leaves that wafted to the earth like feathers some months now past. Tall oaks, like giant sentinels, stand firm beside the spreading maples, while the gnarly ash is blighted by splotches of lichen. Nearby, denying the blandness of winter, the white birch swoops and bends its supple limbs to the pulse of the wind. Yet even now, in these last five weeks of the season, the buds begin to form, tiny pods of hope that bask in the sunlight of these longer days. They will soon burst forth in an exuberance of new growth, new leaves, new branches, new life, and we, along with the trees in their new attire, will welcome the spring once again. 

On the Subway with Madame Bovary

           Tucked into a corner of my bookcase is a list of books I’ve read since I started keeping a record in 1982, now thirty years ago. The list is a reminder not only of what I’ve read, but also of what I’ve not found time to read. Favorite authors like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are there, of course, as are Pat Conroy, John Banville, and Matthew Pearl. David Baldacci and James Patterson are not. Nor, curiously, are the Harry Potter books (there’s always been so much else to read), though I’ve recently read The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling’s first book aimed at an adult audience.

            Old friends Annie Dillard and Joan Didion show up, and spiritual guides John O’Donohue and Thomas Merton are there. The list includes many titles on American history (Mayflower, 1776, Washington, John Adams, Team of Rivals), and a more universal taste in authors (Paul Coelho, Italo Calvino, Orhan Pamuk, Kaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri). There are books on my abiding interest in Irish history and literature, and reams and reams of memoir. Forays into contemporaryh fiction include Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Chad Harbvach, and Denis Johnson, while the veteran Philip Roth, who recently announced his retirement from writing, appears one last time. Some books by popular authors Ken Follet and Barbara Kingsolver appear, as do riveting reads like Ian Toll’s An Instance at the Fingerpost and Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

            The list suggests to me not only the diversity of my interests, but also their sheer parochialism. My reading is uneven at best. Titles range from literary criticism to fiction, from biography to memoir, history, and poetry. From drama to theology, from mystery to politics. This year I’ve begun to read e-books on my Nook, but I still prefer to feel the heft of a book in my hands, the pulpy texture of the pages, to smell the feint dark scent of the ink.

            In the end, the list provides for me a sort of time capsule. Just as it speaks to me of what I’ve read over the years, so too my list of books often conjures the locale where I was reading a particular title. Mention of Madam Bovary carries me back at once to a crowded subway car in New York City on a sweltering summer morning. Just where Flaubert, Emma, and I were going escapes me now, but I find us on the list of books for 1982. What’s more, it seems to me now that we are there still, rumbling along the tracks toward the next station on the Lexington Avenue line, as we always will be, until perhaps we meet again someplace else in time when I take up the book once more. In the meantime, I look forward to discovering the joys of Harry Potter with my granddaughter, Chloe', sitting beside the fire on a cold winter's night in the years ahead.