She asked me to come see her.
We walked beside the bay,
An omnipresent sky above
A fingerpainted day --
She asked me not to leave her.
I said I had to go,
For the sun goes down on everything
We'll ever feel
Or know
Tag: Love
dependence day
the night exploded
into our long history
of all the feelings
we could have felt forever
had we the right ones to feel
To share is human:
A Precious Gift I Never Knew The Cost Of
(First published December 2013. – Owen)
In 1975, when I was thirteen years old, my parents paid for me to attend Interlochen National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. I was there to study piano with Peggy Neighbors Erwin, a famous piano teacher from Coral Gables, FL. I had the summer of my life there, enjoying drawing classes; attending theater, ballet, opera (which truthfully I did not enjoy at that age), and symphonic concerts; and, of course, studying and practicing the piano. I made friends, saw sights, got exercise, had a sick weekend at the infirmary, attended church, developed unrequited crushes on girls, and brought back a lifetime worth of memories. I also cemented a lifelong of love of classical music, live drama, and the arts in general.
I was there for ten weeks, and didn’t really get homesick until about the eighth week. I wrote very detailed letters home, describing the place and what all we did, letters my mom had until very recently when she gave some of them back to me.
When my father had retired from the Air Force four years before, we had moved into a three bedroom ranch-style house on the opposite end of Florida from where Ms. Erwin lived. The yard that came with that house was odd in that it included an empty lot next door and half of an empty lot behind the house. A year or so after we moved in, my dad went away to school for 10 months, and when he came back, he used the half-lot in the backyard to build a workshop for his new business: custom-building and repair of musical instruments. The empty lot next door he used for a great labor of love — a garden. He grew fresh strawberries, onions, tomatoes, watermelons, and I don’t remember what else in that garden.
That empty lot yard was kind of important for another reason. It contained half of our semi-circular driveway.
When I returned from camp, my parents had sold the lot next door. It was weird because a fence went up and we no longer had a semi-circular driveway: we had a quadrant. Easy to drive in, but clumsy to back out. I thought my dad would miss his garden, but he said it was so much trouble keeping the squirrels out that he was relieved to be rid of the nuisance.
I didn’t think much more about that empty lot; the people who bought it never built anything on it during the remaining years my parents lived in that house.
Around 1996, we were back at my childhood home in Florida visiting my parents. My whole family had gathered there: my older sister and her boyfriend (now husband), my older brother, my (now ex-) wife, my 10-year-old stepson, and my 1-year-old son. We were going through boxes of old pictures, and my ex, who was a very inquisitive person, was asking my mother questions about the photos.
“Now where was this taken?”
“That photo — was from the lot next door, back before we sold that. We had a garden there we loved to work in, and that was taken when were getting ready to bring in our first strawberries. They were so good, so fresh.”
“Why did you sell the land?”
“To pay for Interlochen.”
I was stunned.
It had never occurred to me as a child that my parents made financial sacrifices for me or for us. I knew that there were things we wanted we could have, other things we wanted we couldn’t; this was par for the course. But it had cost my parents quite a bit to send me to that place, and the eyes of a thirty-four-year-old man saw it very differently than a 13-year-old boy had.
“I never knew,” I told my mom. “I didn’t realize you had to sell land so I could go there.”
My mom laughed a kind of joyous laugh. “You had the best time there. Probably no week of your life went by for the next five years when something wouldn’t remind you of that place. Best money we every spent on you.”
In my teens, I cared a lot about myself and my friends; by my twenties, I carried about very little else, and I blamed my parents for both their shortcomings and mine. I am ashamed to think of the way I sometimes spoke to my father; and it saddens me greatly to realize the poor return they got from me for all of the time, love and money they invested.
Still, that summer I spent at Interlochen was one of the great formative experiences of my life. My parents gave up a lot — literally — so I could go. The only thanks they got from me for years were the excited stories I would continue to tell about the place. This made it all worth it to them, something I understand now as a parent.
Because, when you love someone, you don’t do things for them for the thanks.
To share is human:
A Thing That You Do
I started taking piano lessons the summer between 5th and 6th grade. My piano teacher told me that it was very important that I keep my fingernails short. So I did.
It was a thing I was supposed to do.
Now, when I say, “so I did,” I mean, “Given my general lack of attentiveness and indifference to such matters, I would, when pressed, remember that I was supposed to keep them cut short, and act more-or-less accordingly,” — which is a much weaker sentence. More accurate, but definitely not as strong as saying “So I did”.
As I gradually grew into whatever level of attentiveness came to represent my maturity, I lost the discipline of keeping my fingernails short. I started keeping them short again after I got married, for reasons I will get to in a moment.
Unlike the stock photo that accompanies this piece, I have usually cut my own nails. I will admit to having gone through a period of my life where I got manicures, but the pandemic ended that, and I’ve never started back up again.
A lot of things have “never started back up again” since the pandemic.
I am thinking of all of this because I cut my fingernails just before writing this post. And I do it now, not for piano playing reasons, but because my wife likes the way my fingers feel on her skin. She likes the feel of fingernails less.
So it is just a thing that I do, because when I touch her, I want her to enjoy it. And once she has told me what she enjoys most, it is important to me to remember and act accordingly.
Much of love in the long term consists of what are commonly called “little things”, or what I am calling “just a thing that you do”. They are not dramatic or earth-shaking; they are just decisions that you try to make and then not simply unmake.
In the same way, much of bettering love in the long term consists of noticing and acting on other such things. My wife finds these things for me often.
And it means a lot.
Love is a paycheck, not a bonus; It's not the rain, but more the sea -- Love is like breathing more than running; Best seen and showed in its Constancy
To share is human:
The One That Wasn’t
She traveled the low, and dreamed of the peaks.
Searching always her tribe, finding only their cliques,
She began to think, maybe, the problem was her:
For solutions just were not as advertised.
In the heat of the fall, in the cold of the spring,
She banked nothing and all on almost everything,
Was she neurodivergent, or just immature?
For the world seemed a little surprised
To find her as she was, or perhaps, as she wasn't:
Our do's and our will's do not fit one who doesn't --
And the moon still looks lonely to she-the-unsure,
The allure of just what wasn't
Prized
To share is human:
Only So Many
"How much time do we have left?"
The young boy asks, his parents shrug --
"Just enjoy the time while you can,"
His mom says,
While his dad looks on with a camera.
Sea touches sand like breath in lungs,
Clouds form their shapes, these whales, these ships --
Time flows and washes all away,
The mind will lurch and reach and slip.
We've traveled here, my love and I,
For she's now sick, and we don't know
How bad is it is, or how it ends:
The waters crash and ebb and flow
And I still don't know how much time
There is or can be, nor will I;
Awake I am, out on this shore,
While she is sleeping in, nearby,
Only so many days like this --
Only so many hours, smiles --
As I, like my father's camera try
To capture wind, and love,
And miles
To share is human:
… some believe …
there's some believe in recipes --
for life, for love, for making friends --
and so they want a step-by-step
to lead them, surely, to such ends
as motivates their soul and heart,
and so they wait, and never start.
there's some believe life's not that way:
each story different, like each day,
and that to live's to improvise
(for knowledge does not make us wise)
and that discovery's not knowing
but, it's more like bending, flowing,
inching, reaching, floor and ceiling,
earth and sky and simply
feeling
To share is human:
it was not so long ago —
there was that time --
and it was not so long ago --
when rain fell into barrels by our door,
when pain was bearable upon that floor,
for you and me were linked, and strong, and free,
and true was more than price, or liberty.
and when you felt your shoulder tapped, you went --
it was your time, you said, and so you served --
but afterthoughts and undertows be damned,
we had a dance to dance, a spotlight time:
but nothing bought, and nothing we had planned,
could comprehend the sentence, or the crime.
there was that day --
and I guess it's been years --
when though we were, you weren't, and that was all,
when going through meant me becoming small,
for as the rain evaporates by sun,
so we the two were destined
to be one
