My theme is the ache of memory. We all ache, do we not?
We ache with wistful homesickness for unity that was ours before.
I
I coach Special Olympics basketball; one of my sons, Sam, has Down syndrome.
Recently, my best power forward slammed into me as I was defending against his lay-up and knocked me over backwards. I knew I was going down, and hard; muscle memory kicked back in.
I adjusted while in the air, with my chin tucked into my chest and both knees drawn hard up into my gut. I hit the court and carried the momentum of the roll backwards. As my hips crossed above my head, I thrust down hard against the court surface with my elbow, while snapping my legs straight in the direction that had been behind me. The enhanced momentum pushed me onto my left foot and right knee, and I still had enough motion to roll me upright onto both feet.
I took one adjusting step backwards, and—two seconds after I was hit—I was vertical, balanced, and amazed.
So was everyone else.
Yow! My elbow and knee hurt.
“Are you okay? Are you okay?” Michael, my forward, was in agony for me.
“Fine. Fine. Fine.” I shook it off, didn’t even look at the shrieking joints.
The drill went on. I defended the next three players and then called in another coach—who looked at me wide eyed—and I went to count if we had enough blue jerseys for the upcoming scrimmage. Only then, surreptitiously, did I check my elbow and knee; no blood; okay.
Panting.
What just happened?
Had I actually done a complete backwards somersault and come up onto my feet in a single fluid motion without stopping? And lived to tell about it? Elbow and knee notwithstanding?
Wow! Some man!
Wish my wife had seen it.
But it probably would have scared her to death.
When I told the other of my sons about it that afternoon, he had the best comment. “Dad, that muscle memory was from muscles you had when you were eighteen on the football field. I’m glad you still have the memory, but at sixty-five, you don’t have the muscles!”
He was right. By then, everything hurt.
II
The next day, along with a crowd of people, my wife and I jammed into a small independent bookstore which specializes in poetry, after its hours. We were there for a book publishing party. One of Sam’s song/poems and two of his illustrations were included among the fifty-four pieces in a newly published poetry anthology.
The owner of the bookstore, a poet himself, officiated at the reading, and a good time was had by all. Sam read his piece with expression, and—as he deserved—he got laughs…it’s a song about chicken pox, funny in its own right and funnier still in his reading.
I hurt, stiff from the somersault and from the explosion of muscle memory. I stood in the background, enjoying the excitement of the poets as much as I did the delight on my wife’s face.
Sam and several of the other poets are among my basketball players; all these poets have limited intellectual capacity, but, as their poetry proves, their emotional and communicative powers are strong. I love these men and women. I love them as athletes for their joy to increase their ball-handling skill and their strategic concept of the game. Just so, I love them for their urgency to set down their stories and their emotions in verse.
Leaving Down syndrome aside, Sam is like his grandfather, my father. My father died in 2005 at 101, but Sam knew my father well, and they were easy together. I’m grateful for that. They shared unwillingness to see badness or meanness as fundamental in others. They shared contentment in quiet, just sitting and leaning against one another, not needing to talk. They shared urgency in their creative arts—my father, who kept turning out the verse through sixty creative years, Sam, principally, with his paintings, but also with his verse, too. They shared joyful dreaminess: their poetic minds.
There—among a supportive crowd of newly published writers in a shop filled with thin books of poetry by the best of that art—there was Sam, reading his piece. Handsome, slender, youthfully energetic, he was the very spit of photographs from my father’s time. My father’s poetic beginning was in England, at Cambridge University, among other lyricists of his day. There—and for the rest of his life—he read to whatever audience should come before him. At his beginning, often, it was in another such small book shop filled with thin volumes; later, it was before crowds of hundreds. Sam may not make a career of poetry; realistically speaking, not. Dad went on to sixty years of poet laureateships and major literary prizes and honorary degrees, published thirty volumes of poetry and criticism, was a literary king-maker, and enjoyed accolades from both sides of the Atlantic.
Seeing Sam reading in this place, it brought tears to my eyes, my memory of family tradition. Here was this particular one of Dad’s grandsons standing, as it were, in his shoes. As much as my body hurt from muscle memory, my family feeling was hurt that Dad should not have experienced this scene, too.
My theme, as I said, is the ache of memory. We ache with wistful homesickness for unity that was ours before.
III
Today, I woke up early, to pray. It was three o’clock in the morning. I prayed until four o’clock and then fell back to sleep.
Here’s what I prayed about. We have friends in our church community who are in dire need of prayers right now. We have a nation which is in dire need of prayer right now; today we are holding the 2012 American presidential election. We have people in the wider world, whom I do not know, who are in dire need of prayers right now. I prayed as best I could for our specific local persons, and for our national circumstance, and for those others, farther flung, as well.
The ache I ached is for our missing unity.
We, we all of us, we have a piece missing from the inside of us. It’s a vital piece. Augustine and others told us about this situation, so we are validated by the wisdom of these former thinkers, and we share with them our melancholic state of being…and our longing for salvation in its stead.
At eighteen, chasing down the gridiron after a punt, I dodged and wove and somersaulted past defenders and made the open field tackle and crowed with the cheering crowd…and did not hurt afterwards. At sixty-five, a sudden backwards somersault made me hurt. The loss of my father, though he was 101 when we lost him, makes me hurt. As a youngster, I listened as he “sang” his poems—I sensed that his words hung in the air as though they had been there always, by their perfection tying us back to the beginning of time. At sixty-five, it hurt me that my father did not observe Sam as he read before the crowd.
We yearn backwards, do we not?
From us there is that missing piece. There is that hole right at the middle of our…puzzle: our puzzle which is otherwise complete.
What is the shape of that hole? That hole is shaped like God.
We yearn backwards, seeking to fill that hole and to make our souls complete.
Only one specific, single puzzle piece can fill that hole.
Have we dropped it on the floor somewhere?
Was the piece not supplied in the puzzle box to begin with?
No. It was there in the box.
It still is.
IV
Once, when we were born, we had that piece before. Once, then, it was properly in its place, before the circumstances of our lives on earth and our doubts and our fears dislodged it. Once before, you see, we were complete.
And we may be complete again.
However, unwisely, some of us shun to touch that piece and to press it back into its proper place, that piece that is shaped like God.
So those ones, they hurt, not being complete…and they always will.
Others, though, we take up that piece—despite the distracting circumstances of our lives and our doubts and our fears—and we press that piece back in.
Ah!
No comments:
Post a Comment