yesterday and today

[winterbadger]

My thankfulness for yesterday: storms. Specifically thunderstorms. I love them--the wind, the sound, the energy, the outpouring of rain. We had a big one last night; there was only a little thunder, but there were buckets of rain. Everything outside is washed down as if a giant hose had been turned on it. Those leaves that were still wavering about coming down have fallen, adding to the carpet of yellow and orange and brown and startling red and pink. There are high, soft clouds in the blue, blue sky, and plenty of winds to push them along.


And today's thankfulness? Memory. Mine is not the best, but sometimes I feel as if that makes more precious the things that I can dredge up (or, more often, that cast themselves like flotsam that's washed ashore on the beach of my waking mind). I was walking home this morning and my street was too bright to look at, the remains of the rain turning it into a burning silver mirror. But here and there were clumps of washed-together leaves, dark spots on the flaming street like dots of far-off cloud in the negative of a photographed sky. And I suddenly thought of all the painfully casual, self consciously striving artistic photographs of nothing in particular that were sprinkled through the pages of the readers my father used to bring home in the 70s. Other peoples' fathers may have gotten free food (I remember redactrice telling me with remembered joy of the "factory seconds" cheesecakes and pies her dad used to bring home from work at Sara Lee). My father got anthologies for young students that educational publishers were pimping around high school classrooms. They interspersed prose with poems by fabulously foreign writers; Yevgeny Yevtushenko was one, perhaps his poem "Autumn"

Something has happened to me, for I trust
and I rely exclusively on silence
where leaves pile on the ground, tired of violence,
and turn, inaudibly, to earth and dust.

And the stories...literature to make us think and see the world through other people's eyes--I think one of them was Richard Wright's story of a boy making a sandwich out of white glue in his schoolroom because he couldn't afford anything but bread. Or stories we were supposed to relate to, to teach us valuable social lessons; I recall one about a group of girls who decided to have a club where each invited all the others over for a meal. Of course, there was one who was beautiful and perfectly dressed whose parents were very wealthy and produced a wonderful meal, but somehow it didn't seem that fulfilling; and another girl,naturally, who was plump and enthusiastic and well meaning, but got everything wrong, messed up all the recipes and was miserable because she knew everyone would hate her meal, but in the end, people liked it best of all. Only one step removed, really, from "everything you wanted to know about the wasp, except why".

And that makes me turn my mind away from those piles of schoolbooks that never were (at least for me, though they made interesting reading) and try to imagine why *he* must have been, that young-old man (in his fifties then, not that far from where I am now), his calling rejected; his second career a trail of shouting matches with authority figures and hurried departures; his odd collection of children--all as smart as he ever could have wanted them, but all cross-grained and self-willed, each in their own way; his difficult, unhappy marriage; his alienated birth-family. How unimaginably difficult was it to be him? And how from all of that did he summon the strength to be a loving husband and father and a mentor to countless generations of students, who decades later took delight in meeting him and telling anyone and everyone how much he had taught them and what a huge difference he had made in their life?

I imagine a large part of it was our ancestral Fries sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. Centuries gone from our ancestral wind-blown sandhills and mudflats, the weird eyes and the stubbornness are almost all that remain.

Comments

[la-renardine.livejournal.com]

Very nice.

[la-renardine.livejournal.com]

I took a photo of the amber and ruby leaves on the emerald grass carpet outside my house this morning that I plan to post later.

[winterbadger]

This has got to be one of the best times of year for colour. The new green of leaves int eh spring is so welcome after a dreary winter, but for sheer kaleidoscopicness, autumn is probably topp.

[schizokitty.livejournal.com]

No thunderstorms to speak of -- one of the VERY FEW drawbacks of the Portland area. >;-)