2009: The Poem in the Dentist's Chair

Tuesday, I was at the dentist for a temporary crown. I should have been there 90 minutes tops; the hard work had been down the previous week. But because my teeth have a will of their own, and for a few other, unexpected reasons, I was in the dentist’s chair for four hours, four hours of alternating intense work on my mouth and waiting.

So, I wrote a poem, the one I posted yesterday, “Once a Place.” Six handwritten drafts, redrafts and edits, all done while my mouth and sinuses felt like numbed cotton. The idea had been in my head, prompted by a photograph of me at 5 years old on my new Christmas bike. (It was red, with plastic streamers coming out of the handle bars.) I found the picture, one of many, in an envelope from a cousin in Shreveport; the photos all belonged to my grandmother and had been sitting for years in the accumulations of the long life she lived. (My family is Southern; we get around to doing things like cleaning out relatives’ estates when we get around to it.) (My grandmother died in 1984.)

I’ll likely write about some of the photos another time; quite a few of them are pictures of my father as a little boy in the early 1920s. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine my father as a child, but there’s the photographic evidence. And he looks a little like me but a lot like my younger brother; the resemblance is almost uncanny.

I found that picture of me on the new bike, and began to consider that only two years before that picture was taken, that front yard was part of a shallow swamp. Somehow, bike and swamp connected in the dentist chair, and thus the poem.

A poem in the dentist’s chair: for me, a kind of mixed metaphor summarizing 2009.

I rediscovered poetry this year, in terms of reading it; I discovered it, or perhaps it discovered me, in terms of writing it. And now I help edit an online poetry journal called TweetSpeak Poetry.

I had never had a broken bone in my life; this year, I had four – ribs, to be precise, courtesy of a bike crash (and no one blame except myself). The upside of spending my first night in the hospital since 1974: I read L.L. Barkat’s Stone Crossings straight through in the dark hours of a summer morning.

I started this blog in March, and I’m awed by the people I’ve met because of it, the talented, gifted people who share their gifts for stories, for humor, for art, for encouragement, for a good rant, for unorthodox and off-the-wall thinking, for faith, for life. I’ve learned about farm life in ways I never could by simply reading news stories. I’ve followed the progress of a pregnant mother through to the birth of her son, and how she managed a toddler in the meantime. I’ve seen one friend publish a book of poems and another get a contract for a novel for publication next year, and got to share in the joy and excitement of both of those achievements.

I’ve found new friends, so many that I’m still surprised. I’ve found and been edited by good editors, who are so good that I don’t mind being edited by them for guest blogs posts and online articles because they’re improve what I write. (I do mind being edited by people who don’t make improvements but are doing other things, like promoting agendas.) I’ve read stories that made me laugh out loud and stories that brought tears to my eyes.

I led a team at work that accomplished extraordinary things, achieving things no one thought possible. It was amazing to be a small part of that.

My wife and I learned that, come March, we’re going to be grandparents. A whole new chapter of life is starting.

I read a few outstanding books, a lot of good books and a few not-so-good books. I was introduced to a a genre of writing called something like Stephen-King-like-Christians-horror-suspense-scare-your-socks-off. And the debate that’s continuing to grow about what is, isn’t and perhaps should be “Christian fiction.” I learned that if you write a review of a book, and you’re honest about your reaction to it, you better be prepared for the imperial storm troopers to attack.

I learned the kindness of strangers in comments on blog posts, both my own posts and those of others.

So yes, 2009 was, for me, a lot like a poem written in the dentist’s chair. And I’m grateful for all of it.

Once A Place

Once a place of water
moccasins sleeping lightly
and gators and lizards
watching quietly
beneath ramrod straight
cypress trees
and lazy
swamp ferns, swaying in the
slightest wind.

A boy of five sits on
his Christmas bike, blinking,
smiling as the camera
shutters a permanence
of time, of moment;
the boy of
five, silently plotting to
turn four wheels
into two.

The man remembers the boy,
the place, the day four wheels
became two and the boy flew
down the sidewalk
into sunlight,
past where the gators
and lizards had watched
quietly and the snakes had slept
lightly with open eyes.

The Disciple

“The disciple whom Jesus loved.”

The first time we read the reference, we smile. The way that the Apostle John describes himself is actually rather charming. He doesn’t use his own name or refer to himself as “I” or “me;’ instead, he uses that phrase: “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” a recognition of whom Jesus was and what he did, and what he did for John. We read it, we nod, we agree with the sentiment, and then we go on.

Maybe we should stop and reconsider.

I love reading John’s gospel, possibly because it was the first thing I read after becoming a Christian. I return to it again and again, because of its personality and because it seems so personal, and because John always seems so astounded by what he’s writing about. He brings a sense of wonder and the miraculous to the gospel story. It’s no coincidence that John’s gospel is often the first thing recommended for new believers to read.

And there’s that phrase he uses to describe himself – “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It’s attention-grabbing, especially for a new believer, likely because you don’t know immediately who the disciple is. And John doesn’t actually say until the very final verses of the gospel.

He uses the phrase five times (13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7 and 21:20). What I find striking now, some decades after becoming a new believer, are the contexts in which the phrase is used – always in association with someone else – four times with Peter and one with Mary, and all five with Jesus (including the one at the empty tomb). John asks a question of Jesus on behalf of Peter; he’s given responsibility for Mary by Jesus; he’s running to the tomb of Jesus with Peter after being told by Mary Magdalene that the tomb was empty; he recognizes the resurrected Jesus while fishing with Peter and the other disciples; and he dispels a rumor that starts when Jesus “reverses” Peter’s three denials into an affirmation of ministry.

In other words, John doesn’t use the phrase only to describe his relationship with Jesus. He does that, of course, but he also uses it to describe himself, his relationship with Jesus, in the company of others.

To be a disciple, to experience the love of Christ, is not just a “me” thing.

Wanted more than pull of net, more
than straining of moving
weight, more than the
iron smell of fish.

Wanted more than pierced
blues of mirrors reflecting,
glistening from the sea. Wanted
not reflections but sun.

Then voice, eyes, call touching
inside my soul, icing my
heart like mountain snow.
Chose us, twelve.

Did not know the
disciples he loved until
the day of death
nailed.

(To see other posts on the word “love,” visit the blog carnival at http://www.bridgetchumbley.com/.)

Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping”

Some years back (pre-Netflix so it must have been Blockbuster, most likely about 1995 or so), we rented a movie called “Housekeeping.” It had been originally released in 1987, but we didn’t see it at the time, most likely because the release was limited. It’s an odd, quirky kind of movie; I liked it when we watched it but I have a tendency to like odd, quirky kind of movies. It starred Christine Lahti in the lead role, and she’s an actress and director known for independent films. She also played Dr. Kathryn Austin in the TV series Chicago Hope from 1994 to 1995, and she won an Academy Award for the short film she directed, Lieberman in Love (1995).

So I watched it, liked it, and forgot about it, except for one scene in the movie – a train crossing a lake on a bridge, and the train goes off the tracks. For whatever reason, that scene stuck in my head, and would arise occasionally, especially when I’d read in the newspaper about train wrecks.

Fast forward to 2009.

I read an interview with Marilynne Robinson about her new novel, Home (2008), and I’m intrigued enough to order it. But before I do, I decide I want to read her two earlier novels first – Housekeeping (1980), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize. So I start with Housekeeping. I don’t make the connection with the movie; there’s nothing on the paperback cover to even suggest it had been made a movie (you know, the old “Now a major motion picture” or some variation on that theme, as if Hollywood made anything else other than “major” motion pictures).

Ten pages into the novel, I discover my train wreck scene from the movie. And I realize I’m reading the work on which the movie was based. I remember enough of the movie to connect it to Christine Lahti and I remember how it ends. But the writing is so good I don’t care that I know what the ending is going to be. In fact, knowing the ending allowed me to enjoy each and every line of the writing, and the writing is extraordinary.

The novel is set in a small town called Fingerbone, Idaho (Robinson was born and raised in a small town in Idaho). A woman raises three daughters alone after her husband dies in a train wreck (yes, the train wreck of my memory). One daughter goes off to China to be a missionary and is never heard from again; a second marries and moves to Seattle but doesn’t stay in touch with the family; and the third drifts away, becoming something of a hobo. Life goes on until the second daughter, abandoned by her husband, returns to Fingerbone, sits her two little girls on her mother’s front porch, and drives her car over a cliff.

The story centers on the two little girls, Ruthie and Lucille, and is in fact narrated by Ruthie. They’re raised for a few years by their grandmother, than two elderly aunt-in-laws, and finally Sylvie, their youngest aunt and the one who returns from a life on the rails to take care of the girls. Sylvie is all things odd. She serves dinner in the dark; she wanders a lot; she walks out on to the train bridge over the lake; she comes home from her walks with fish in her pockets.

This is a story about many things – family, small towns – but it is also about the impermanence of life: the death of the girls’ grandfather in the train wreck; the disappearance of aunts; the abandonment of a father and the suicide of a mother; the periodic flooding of the town; and Sylvie herself, the quintessential model of impermanence. The two girls, drawn closely together by their circumstances, eventually take what seems to be two very different paths in reaction to that impermanence. One will reject it and one will embrace it but both are shaped and defined by it.

Robinson is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. She’s also a Christian. That is another way to read this novel, which has no direct references to church, religion or God anywhere in it, but seems suffused by the gospel message.

Begins

Begins

Begins in the seed of silence,
the quiet of the darkness before
dawn, as night
whimpers, finally, into day; when for
a moment of fragile stillness
night and day become one, when
a death and a birth exist
as a life;
a life.

Within the seed, the intended
destruction of the quiet, the
silence to be wiped away. The
seed erupts, the warm birth
shedding death’s cold grip, its
absence, its emptiness. The
seed bursts from its husk,
becoming a faith;
a faith.

The Christmas Curmudgeon

Author John Mortimer (1923-2009)died earlier this year. He produced a considerable number of plays, screen plays, radio plays and novels, and managed a full-time legal career as well. But his legacy, what he will be remembered for, is the Horace Rumpole stories.

Rumpole of the Bailey. Quoter of Worsdworth and Shakespeare. Smoker of smelly cigars. Husband of She Who Must Be Obeyed. Sipper of the occasional glass of Chateau Thames Embankment. Defender of presumed innocence until proven guilty. Hero of the Penge Bungalow Murders. Curmudgeon Extraordinaire.

I love the Rumpole stories. I first met him on PBS Mystery, played by Leo McKern, the Australian actor who came to be identified with Rumpole. McKern died in 2002. And now Rumpole’s creator is gone as well.

But Rumpole lives on, in A Rumpole Christmas, a delightful collection of five stories published in magazines and newspapers over the past 12 years.

In “Rumpole and Father Christmas,” our barrister meets an old friend (of sorts) playing Father Christmas at the office holiday party. Meets him, that is, as he’s returning things he stole during the party. In “Rumpole’s Slimmed-Down Christmas,” Rumpole’s wife Hilda has booked them at a health farm during the holidays – and Rumpole finds himself defending the owner of the health farm against a charge of murder. In “Rumpole and the Boy,” he finds himself the object of admiration of a boy who wants to be a barrister just like him. “Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces” shows how the old British holiday tradition of a pantomime can unravel the best-laid plans to frame someone for a crime they didn’t commit. And in “Rumpole and the Christmas Break,” Horace is defending a Muslim student accused of murdering a professor – and wondering what his wife is up to with Justice Graves (the Gravestone, as Rumpole calls him).

These are all vintage Rumpole stories – well done, charming, funny, and just the right amount of Mortimer’s pointed and insightful wit.

For to Us a Child: Isaiah 9:2-7

“The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned.

“You have enlarged the nation
and increased their joy;
they rejoice before you
as people rejoice in the harvest,
as men rejoice
when dividing the plunder.

“For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,
you have shattered
the yoke that burdens them.
the bar across their shoulders,
the rod of their oppressor.

“Every warrior’s boot used in battle
and every garment rolled in blood
will be destined for burning,
will be fuel for the fire.

“For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

“Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom;
establishing it and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
Will accomplish this.”

(Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.)

(Painting of Bethlehem, copyright Cinnamon/Dreamstime.com. Used with permission.)