Margotlog: Brightness Falls from the Air

"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."

A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them.

It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.

When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.

Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.

*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:

 

Brightness falls from the air?

"Brightness falls from the air" is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: 

 

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life's lustful joys;

Death proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave;

Swords may not fight with fate,

Earth still holds open her gate.

"Come, come!" the bells do cry.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death's bitterness;

Hell's executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player's stage;

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

When you've taken a dear friend to the airport with only a three-quarter moon and a few stars in the sky, when you drive home alone through night-enveloped streets, it helps to sing: "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, Charming Billy?"

Darkness is the mood of inspiration. Suddenly, you're singing with the voice of your mother or father, ages ago in Charleston, South Carolina, with clacking palmettos in those long, languid summers. "I will be true, for there are those who trust me..."

And you're back at Girl Scout camp in the "foothills" northwest of Charleston, and Meta, the Scout of all Scouts, who stands at least six-foot tall in her sneakers, and sports long rippling golden hair, Meta is singing: "In a cottage in the woods, by the window a little man stood. Saw a rabbit running by..." 

You, suddenly, have become the rabbit--ears erect, nose twitching. And you're remembering a recent holiday including the kid-clan of your husband's grand children. Decent, the hard-working parents,  more than decent, inspired perhaps, but failing in one respect: the oldest kid, a boy about 13 wanted a pet. His parents who both work hard at jobs and at the even more demanding business of parenting, have allowed a small lizard, a gecko.

Darkness returns, and I am home again in South Carolina, with our first puppy, who lived with us for maybe three months before the little black and white charmer died in the night. My sister and I were heart-broken. Kudos to my parents, especially to my finicky Italian-American father, Leonardo, who refused a cat. "It will jump up on the table and that will be the end of it!" he thundered. Yes, thunder. His voice had a range from sweet morning dew to thunder and lightning.

We sang opera, my sister and I, dressed in our mother's fancy nightgowns, which she never wore in our presence. But then, my parents had been married eight years before I, their first child, was born. It was the Depression, after all, and both of them worked.

Singing in the dark of that 6 a.m. drive from the airport home, I find myself giving voice to all the joy that substituted for "things" in our Old Citadel lives. Wearing our mother's fancy nightgowns, listening to recordings of Lily Pons singing excerpts from the finest Italian operas, we girls discovered how fortifying it can be to gave voice to our own, immediate presence in a world that would open from fantasy to reality. My sister becoming an opera singer, and I? Well, poets are writers of songs too.

Frozen Pipes and the Death of a White Squirrel

Frozen Pipes and a White Squirrel

It's been polar here in Minnesota, land of ten thousand frozen lakes. Wind-chill well below zero and temperature an eager competitor. For the first time in 20 years, the pipes to our kitchen sink froze. Yes, they are close to an outer wall, but so are the pipes directly under them in the basement. To reach those lower depths, I had to wear a down robe AND my down coat, plus thin plastic gloves with heavy gloves over them, just to reach the cat litter box at the bottom of the basement stairs. Why the cat, who is mistress of two other cat boxes on the warm second floor, insisted on doing her business in such depths of cold is a miracle of feline sagacity.

For the past two days, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen, first rinsing dishes in a little bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, then filling the tea pot and heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the frozen sink. I could have lugged the dishes upstairs to the bathtub, where warm water still gushed, but somehow the kitchen process seemed important. I told myself the warm water exiting the kitchen drain JUST MIGHT help thaw the frozen pipes.

Eventually, I asked husband Fran to drive me to the pharmacy where I purchased a heating pad. Walking home, I felt very proud of my hardiness, giving most of the credit to my North Dakota mother. Of course, I looked like a walking blimp. In her North Dakota hometown, children walked to school, their legs bound in multiple leggings, bodies stuffed into coats, cloaks, and mufflers, and their hands in double mittens. Their heads were wrapped in so many scarves, the children themselves were virtually unidentifiable. Luckily, there were only 10 children in her class, all perfectly familiar with each other, wrapped or unwrapped.

These days, we Minnesotans with well-heated homes and cars have it relatively easy, except for the people somehow bereft of decent housing who try to survive 20-below by running a car motor from time and time and hoping the numbness they start to feel isn't frostbite. This morning, as the temp rises toward 19 ABOVE, there's a sad StarTribune story of a homeless man who did just that with his pal of a dog. He himself was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter and from there to a hospital. The dog, finally found, appeared to be fine.  

Yes, at 20 below, stray dogs can survive for a time, as can most critters in my back yard. I work to help them, with a heated birdbath, which I fill every morning. On my multi-armed bird feeder pole, I hang suet and a sunflower cakes, and feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Finally I spread sunflower seeds and a mix of smaller seeds on two long pathways in the yard.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I looked out the broad picture windows in our second floor bathroom to find an enormous red-tailed hawk bending over something white. These figures were was stationed in a leafless elm tree just behond our yard. Even now, as I write this, my heart starts beating erratically. The spill of white might have been the feathers of a dying pigeon, but as I stared, a white leg and tail appeared, splayed over the limb--it was "our" white squirrel, the only white one we had among all the other grays. Perhaps an albino, perhaps with hearing or eyesight loss, yet it staked out its spot every morning for munching seeds. A familiar member of the yard, and as welcome as the red-chested nuthatches, the red-bellied woodpecker (who seems twice as large as the little nuthatch), and the hairy and downy woodpeckers, the blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, finches, juncos and even a few crazy robins who left, I assume, the minute the temperature began to drop.

I couldn't tear myself away from the window, tears in my eyes, as the huge hawk, with its rear end lifting and falling, pulled at the squirrel body. This "winter kill" was happening as I watched, and the hawk was taking one of the denizens of my yard whom I'd come, in a mild way, to love. From time to time, the hawk would pause and turn its profile. The beak and nasal area were smeared with blood. It was making a meal of the white squirrel. It was devouring a creature I had come to love.

I know it's somewhat insane, to become protective and possessive of a wild creature. But I did love the white squirrel, and I did not love the hawk, though it was impossible not to admire its huge body, puffed out in the cold and the rigor of its yanks. But the hawk was an interloper and the white squirrel had gamely visited the yard for food and water, winter, spring, summer, autumn. It was the only white one. Would I have been as sad had the hawk begun to eat one of the grays? I might have been mesmerized by watching one creature devour another. But I doubt that I would have continued to feel the loss.

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter!)

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter and Summer)

Ok, I've tried everything aside from moving back to South Carolina where I grew up, and where, LET ME REMIND YOU WARM-HEARTED RESIDENTS, there was SNOW during one of my holiday visits to my parents, years ago. YES SNOW! With all the city's bridges, glazed to ice, getting to the airport was strictly for seasoned S.C. drivers. I bit my tongue and clenched my fists as the taxi-driver, with nonchalance, kept looking over his shoulder to deliver yet another bon mot.

Now over the last few frigid Saint Paul weeks, the heated coil that has worked to keep bird bath water liquid for two years now has given up. No frilly waves as a strong wind soars over the back yard. No beaks dipping for a drink.

I do love to watch the birds--winter, summer, spring, fall. They are my soul mates, whether they know it or not. Every day I praise them silently, these brief and joyful reminders that some can fly, and not only in giant jets. I don't want to be Icarus and have my human-made wings melt as they approach the sun, but I love to watch birds congregate--over seed, grass, flowers, and yes, all year long over liquid water.

But in our frigid winters, this inevitably becomes a challenge, and not a cheap one either. The heaters I use cost nearly $70 each. This is more than I spent for any Christmas present except my husband's neon green "Warm Things" robe. Am I throwing around brand names? Can't help myself: this is the best robe either of us has ever worn. His neon green, mine forest green. His a woman's Extra Large because the guy robes weren's nearly as warm, and neon green because when I got my money ready to order a woman's extra large, all the somber colors were used up.

Lately also, due to construction noise in the neighborhood, my bird visitors have declined. Only in the twilight do the deep red male cardinals come to the feeders, and the tan-red females forage on the ground. Occasionally a sassy blue jay barges in, no fear except for a fast exit. And the rosy finches that bear up under the cold also come to the feeders only the twilight, when from my kitchen window they look like sparrows.

Off and on, I've considered in my frustration stomping around the neighborhood, yelling at front and back doors, "Your noise is bothering the birds." But this is Saint Paul. We don't dare get too "fresh" with our neighbors, though this past summer, I chastized my near neighbors for "adopting" a mostly outdoor cat who loved leaping into my yard and startling the far greater number and variety I so loved to feed. My neighbors are dandy people, cat people, like me, but not bird people.

I became truly rancorous and even bellicose because eventually they stopped feeding this feline wanderer, and the critter appeared less and less. I was grateful, very grateful, but would not want to go through that angry trauma again. So now, I try to keep my mouth shut and let Robert Frots's motto: "good fences make good neighbors" suffice.

Finally and totally out of my control, I spied a hawk way way up in the bare brances of a wide-flung elm.It kept leaning over and tearing at something it held in its claws. Even with my binoculars, I couldn't see what the victim was, but the bird itself was unmistakeably a Peregrine Falcon. Looking it up in the bird book, I read: "feeds entirely on other birds." Yes, our Audubon friends have helped restore the Peregrine Falcon. I will just have to curb my selfish desire to be in charge of every single winged beauty. Bird depredations on each other are completely out of my control

Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"

Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"

It's as if I've been waiting to use Yeats' astonishing phrase until my dear friend and honored writer Patricia Hampl was about to retire from the University of Minnesota. Little did I know, years ago, that she'd been hovering in the fields where I would eventually spy my husband-to-be, sitting across from me at her townhouse. This was long after they'd worked together on the Minnesota Daily, long before I knew either of them. But when W. B. Yeats wrote "When You Are Old," he traversed the life of a woman he loved and discovered within her a love that belonged "amid a crowd of stars."
     Trish lost her dear husband Terry Williams, one of the most self-effacing and meticulous people I've ever known. I lost my first husband via divorce, but kept the daughter. Perhaps being a pilgrim  means walking along rough paths as well as catching glimpses of perfection.
     For me, some of the finest prose written by anyone in our era has come from Patricia Hampl. My favorite of her memoirs remains A Romantic Education, published after she'd established a name as a poet. Reading about her romantic education felt a lot like reading about my own, except it was so exquisitely expressed. I had to read some paragraphs over and over, perhaps because reading it as I did, before I knew her better, felt like entering a romance so enticing that I had to be a part of it.
     This evening, Trish will be honored as a distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota. She is retiring. I and many others will be there to applaud dear Trish, who has traced her path among the stars, even as she has held hands with us, given voice to her marvelous gifts, and continues to make so many of us happy. May she be the same.

Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke

Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke


I haven't had many men "friends" in my life probably in part because during my growing up, it was so clear that the boys belonged to one tribe and the girls another. Times have changed. Now among a gaggle of women I trust and adore, there are several gay couples who are as close to my heart as the best of brothers. I especially appreciate this because I had no brothers.

My mother and her twin brother, Maxine and Max, did not remain close in part because of family abuse. This subject is very vivid in my mind right now because I'm writing a memoir that now touches on it. My parents came from quite different ethnic backgrounds: my mother's side of the family was German (her father) and Swedish (her mother); whereas both sides of my father's family were what we'd now call, without hesitation, "Italian." In the days of their immigration, however, they would have been labeled, at least in Italy, Sicilian and Neapolitan. In the generations before widespread railroad travel, crossing mountains or bodies of water, even relatively small ones, set people apart.

In the North Dakota small town of my mother's youth, being either Scandinavian or German was relatively common. It was the distance in age that, in part, prompted what became an ugly episode in my grandparents' lives. My German grandfather's first wife died in childbirth, and the family of the wife, from Milwaukee, took the child to live with them. Then my grandfather's eye fell on a tall, willowy young school teacher at a rural Dakota school. Her parents had died shortly after immigrating, and she had been raised by two older sisters. The photograph/portrait I have seen of her was taken later in life, but despite her gray hair, she was a lovely woman, her face turned slightly aside, her eyes gleaming, her mouth holding a hint of a smile.

When our mother would bring us on the train from Charleston, South Carolina, where my father spent most of his working life teaching at The Citadel, she intended for us to appreciate not only her successful businessman father, but also her "Mama" who loved beautiful things, who took naps (as did my very energetic mother), and who made delicious Swedish pastries. I never knew this grandmother, but my oldest cousin whose family remained in the small North Dakota town, has told me about going with her father to visit "Mama Max." Her father, Buddy, was my mother's twin brother, the one who stayed in the town; whereas my mother, after graduating from the University of Minnesota, went east as fast as she could to a library job in Pittsburgh. There she met smiling, curly-haired Leonard, second son of the Italians. My Italian grandfather had been converted to Protestantism and preached powerfully to a Pittsburgh Italian congregation. Not easy, that business of being Protestant among a community of mostly Catholics. My father used to recount being pelted with rotten eggs when he and his family walked up the hills to their father's church.

 At some point when I was still very young, my North Dakota grandmother developed stomach cancer. I have a hazy memory of tiptoeing across the large parquet floor of the hall to a small door which usually remained half-open. There in a narrow bed, lay a figure who was my grandmother. She did not speak nor raise a hand. I don't remember ever seeing her stand. Slowly over the years, it came out (largely from my cousins who grew up in the town), that "Mama Max" had been abused. When the last of her four children left home for college--the youngest would have been "the twins," my mother and her brother--Mama Max slowly fell into a depression and wept a lot. After his first semester in college, my mother's brother, Buddy, came home to protect her.

My mother spent one summer helping her father repaint the kitchen a sunny yellow, but without fail, she returned to graduate from the University of Minnesota and head east. It has taken me years to piece together this story, and to honor my uncle's dedication to protect his mother. It was only years later, when I was pregnant with my first and only child, that my mother and I took the train from St. Paul/Minneapolis back to North Dakota. There we stayed two nights in a local motel. We called from the motel to see if her brother Buddy was at home. No doubt he was astonished to hear that she was nearby. Years later, wondering why she did not call long distance ahead of time. I think there can be only one answer: she intended to make the trip without the fear, embarrassment, or awkwardness of having already contacted her brother. But he was welcoming and invited us to his family's large lake house just outside of town. My first glimpse of Buddy, sitting in a large family room, immediately told me he was my grandfather's son. They looked very much alike.

Our visit was brief and friendly enough. The big house in town, which my grandfather had expanded when  "the twins" were born, was being fashioned into a bed and breakfast. Though I have seen some of my cousins since, I probably never will visit Hankinson again. This essentially means that my sister is my only relative outside my daughter, and my husband's wide circle of family and friends. Keeping family secrets so long a time can turn confidences into whispers, so soft that they eventually disappear like smoke.

Margotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Margotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Today with wind in golden leaves, and the sky a brilliant blue, it's as if loss is being transformed into immediate memory. We memorialize the gold even as it mounds the streets.

I pack up three bags of organic compost to recycle. As I finish my work at the compost site, a young man with a fist-full of smallish plastic bags walks past. I call out: "Do you have any larger ones?" He is gone in an instant, and just as leaves fly up in a slant of sun, he hands me two long green bags. The magic of memory: I have been listening to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It is very very long. In the eight-disc set, I visit over and over the house at Combray where he waits anxiously for his mother to come upstairs and give him a good-night kiss. The beach at Balbec where he goes with his grandmother--her gentle figure leaning over him. The next day at breakfast, intense golden light is smothered by heavy curtains, which let only a sliver fall across the breakfast table.

Finally in the midst of this memory magic, I can't stand my limited knowledge any more and look up Proust in the encyclopedia. I knew that he'd waited until the last decade of his rather short life to retire to a cork-lined room and write. There where he gave memory precedence, he initially wrote only one volume.Others followed, embellishing, recovering, re-inventing. He captured the extraordinarily lush style that neither smothers or impedes the onward flow of narrated memory. In the narrator's voice there is a tinge of irony, as adult Marcel faintly sympathizes with his younger agony when the young woman Albertine, whom he's loved for a long time, now fully reveals her sexual interest in women. 

Yesterday, my husband and I went to Minneapolis to see a movie called "Colette," based on the early years of another French marvel, almost Proust's contemporary.Whatever I'd read about it had completely vanished to be replaced by my much earlier fascination with this true French stylist. Though Colette, like Proust, made marvelous decoys out of her own life, I found that Willie, the much older literateur who seduced young Colette, had initially used the material of her life to boost his own reputation.

When she took leave of him, intending to tell her own stories, not letting Willy subsume her into a charater called Claudine, I urged her on. By then, she had done away with her coil of braids; her hair became an enticingly boyish bob in fasion in the early 20th century. My mother's hair never had the swagger of Kiera Knigthly's Colette, but it fit nicely under a cloche. By this time, Colette had a girl/boy lover. Not so different, I say to myself, from Proust's Albertine who also seduced girl lovers whom she tried to keep from Marcel.

What was it about French culture at the close of Proust's era and the opening of Colette's, that gave these extraordinary stylists such rich aplomb? There is a freedom from niceties or reticence (think Emily Dickinson) which turn many American women's stories away from celebrating the flesh and toward hints of mystery--both powerfully appealing, but unable to capture the body as a free-wheeling ironic entity, worth all its rambunctious license.