Memorial Day

Right now, we Americans have a great pleasure. 

 

Our nation has set a day aside, during which it is our duty to honor the men and women of our military forces.  These men and women recognized a truth larger than their personal goals.  They sacrificed their time—sometimes their health or even their lives—for the maintenance of that truth.  That truth is our possession today because of their sacrifices. 

 

That truth is embodied in the brief documents by which our nation was founded, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The men who forged these documents were all of them acquainted with the notion that something larger than themselves was active in their personal lives: most of them were committed Christian believers in the God of the Holy Bible.  As compared with an increasing number of secularists today, they believed that it was their duty—as well as their fulfillment—to work for the good of the Lord…which in turn would be for the good of all humans. 

 

I never met a Civil War veteran, although my father did, and General Washington, to me, seems so far away as to be marble.  But the General was not marble, nor were the underfed, under-clothed, and under-supported troops gathered together with him at Valley Forge.  Nor are our soldiers today.

 

Our founding documents created a unique nation.  We were founded out of the passions of eighteenth century enlightenment, tempered by wisdom gained from review of seventeenth century political struggles. Our founding population, principally, was made up of second (and later) sons and of others who needed to make it on their own.  Thanks to our geographical isolation from the European and other wider worlds, we gained some time to learn to make it on our own.  We built.  We invented.  We explored.  Then we fought to keep what we had built, invented, and explored.  We fought to keep it because we believed that our possession of it secured not only ourselves but anyone else from any spot on earth who might want to come here, to become one of us, and to be secured by what we had built, invented, and explored, too.    

 

Although we were continually torn between isolationism and interventionism, we always believed we have something to offer to the rest of the world: an idea, a hope. 

 

Today, we are a nation to which millions flock when they have no hope where they are.  Do millions risk their lives every year to cross into North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, China, and Libya?  No.  America is the melting pot, and so long as we remain so—and so long as we avoid the tendency to become hyphenated Americans—we will continue to benefit, and the world will continue to benefit, from our creativity. 

 

We are a religious nation which cares about Good and Evil.  We see ourselves as part of a long story, which, like any complex novel, has its subplots, its distractions, its heroes and villains, its ambiguities.  Yet the story we are part of is a grand one—even a holy one—and it is our privilege to be proud of it, and, right now, particularly it is our privilege to be proud of  our sons and daughters who wore—and who wear—its service uniforms.     

 

We thank them for their willingness to put their lives on the line, whether we agree or disagree with policy that put them in particular places at particular times. 

 

Would I have been at Valley Forge, virtually starving in the snow?  Would I have stood and given silent honor to my Confederate brothers, and former enemies, at Appomattox, as they lay down their arms?  Would I have charged up San Juan Hill?  As a doughboy landing with Black Jack Pershing in France in 1918, would I have done what Alvin York did and render unto Caesar?  Would I have been a young navy flier on patrol over Iwo Jima as Old Glory is raised below?  Would I have been scared and frozen and down to my last few rounds, crouching in the night on a hill in Korea, waiting for a communist attack at dawn?  Would I have leapt from a Huey in Vietnam, into the Broken Arrow battle, when the lid finally blew off the kettle?  And would I be a marine in Afghanistan today, right now, facing deadly intent by an implacable enemy desirous of doing my nation—and the idea behind it—deadly harm? 

 

Would you?

 

Any American reading this blog post has benefited that there are millions, during our years, who did these things.  And that there were many more of them, too, often hidden behind the lines. There were clandestine warriors, cold warriors, fifth columnists, spies, atom bomb designers, Rosie the Riveters, propagandists…and more.  These soldiers, too, helped the American story continue into its next chapter. 

 

There is glory, in our story.

 

For those who are nervous at such a term—glory, how antique!—I say enjoy the fact that you have the liberty to be offended. 

 

We are neither dispirited Old Europe, nor the angry and paranoid Middle East, nor the struggling and envious Third World, nor burgeoning and nervous China, nor the confused remnants of Sovietism in Central Asia, nor battered and victimized Africa, nor even the energetic but edgy Pacific Rim. 

 

Our military forces have given us 237 years of safety to create more—

 

o   growth,

o   invention,

o   goods,

o   services,

o   value,

o   security,

o   health,

o   fineness of living,

o   satisfaction, and

o   eagerness to give back

 

than has ever occurred on earth before, ever. 

 

Thank you, from our hearts. 

 

Copyright 2013 - Dikkon Eberhart 

 

 

 

Evil is like the Air we Breathe

            “Dikkon, there is no difference between you and I and Charles Manson.”  A startling comment from the man who was to become my pastor. 

            Before becoming an evangelical Christian, I knew the word evil, and I knew that evil was quite prevalent in the world…anyway among some poor unfortunate souls.  In moments of my deepest introspection, I could even point to actions in my life when there was no one or no thing to blame for what I had just done.  I was just plain cussedly wrong to have done it.  I had desired to hurt. 

            Of course, I hadn’t murdered people.  Goodness no.  Who would even think such a thing about me? 

            Now and then, if I were angry about something, I might just say something that would wound another, or I might just ignore another and not catch an eye, or I might just pass along a little piece of news to someone, about another, who would have no way to defend.  But that’s just what anyone would do under the circumstances. 

            You see, before I became an evangelical Christian, I knew the word evil, but evil didn’t have anything to do with me.  There were evil people—I knew that already, poor things—and then there were people like me.  People to whom evil might happen, but who were on the other side a great and a comfortable divide, away from evil.

            Then, in the process of my becoming an evangelical Christian, my to-be pastor said that there is no difference between him, and me, and Charles Manson.  I stumbled over that one for quite a long time…and I became an evangelical Christian anyway!

            Why in the world….? 

            Any sensible person would have turned tail and run straight away from a nutty group of God people who would make such a preposterous claim.  Charles Manson indeed!

            But here’s the thing…and you’ll just have to take my word for this if you aren’t an evangelical Christian yourself.  Knowing that my pastor, and I, and Charles Manson are not different from one another turns out to be more comforting than believing that there is a vast difference between my pastor and me, on the one side, and Charles Manson, on the other side. 

            I have come to believe that each and every one of us humans is a sinner and is therefore susceptible to being just, plain evil. Some of us allow our evil to flow more fully and more stunningly than others; good for those others among us who moderate many of our evil impulses! 

However, each of us can do what Charles Manson did.   

            When I thought that the Mansons of the world were on the other side of a great divide from the Dikkons of the world, there was a great deal of anxiety inherent in that thought process.  You see, one day I might feel the slightest twinge of a feeling inside me, a twinge that was just a little, tiny bit like what I imagine Manson felt.  Horrors!  Does that mean I would I take a carving fork to Sharon Tate? 

No, no, no, I would say to myself.  And then I—all by myself because this was a dark secret and not to be revealed to others—I would need to shove that horror back away somewhere in order to restore my comfortable conception that I was not someone from the other side. 

But my comforting conception that I was not someone from the other side was very precarious.  At any moment, I might feel a twinge.  Or even two twinges. 

Here’s why being an evangelical Christian is more comforting than not being one. 

Now, when I feel a twinge, I know everyone else feels them, too.

Now, when I fight to moderate my behavior, when under the influence of a twinge, I believe that all my companions, who are believers, are, right then, moderating theirs, too.

Now, when I fight to moderate my behavior, I am not alone—as I was before—but I am companioned, not only by my fellow human believers, but by Jesus Himself. 

I’m speaking of that same Jesus—the famous one—who, though He is God, is also man.  Though Jesus is God, the fact that he is also man means that, during those days when He was personally present among us, He felt, suffered, struggled, was tempted, and tried to get off of the sharp stick in the same way that I do. 

And, on the other hand, the fact that Jesus is not just man, but He is God—and therefore that He knows me and loves me—means that He can instruct me how to moderate any behavior and lead me in the right direction, each time, so I do actually get off the sharp stick each time. 

And then God Himself can unremember my sinfulness and take me back into his forgiving embrace, now on earth, and later in Heaven. 

            Ain’t that more better than having only myself to engineer myself out of yet another evil deed? 

…with no end of twinges—and of deeds—in sight? 

 

Copyright 2013 – Dikkon Eberhart

           

An Angel at a Funeral

             We Baptists are not so much involved with angels; that’s more of a Catholic thing.  But on the Saturday before Mother’s Day—as I say it, anyway—we had an angel at our church. There was a funeral, and there was a song. 

            A woman who was much admired in our congregation for her unconditional love of all of us—and of everyone else she ever met—died, suddenly.  Her death shook not only our congregation, but it shook our whole town also.  Diane was a vigorous seventy-one-year-old.  On the day she died, I am sure that she had not expected to walk out of her front door, stumble, and regain her balance only by a stepping into Heaven.   

Commonly, at our church services, there are sixty to eighty people in attendance.  On the Saturday before Mother’s Day, for Diane’s funeral, there may have been three hundred. 

Diane’s mother had been the Official Hugger of our church.  Upon her death—two years to the day before Diane’s—informally her post was passed to Diane.  Customarily, my family sits in the pew next to the pew in which Diane’s family sits.  During each Sunday service, there is a moment when our choir director instructs us to greet one another.  I have had hundreds of hugs from the daughter of our Official Hugger, and I have been moved by the genuineness of each one. 

                                                            *****

I know that this story of mothers is complicated, but there is yet one other mother involved.  Another mother of our congregation moved away from us about eighteen months ago.  Gail and her husband, in their seventies and eighties, became infirm.  They moved to Massachusetts to live with his son.  Their absence, too, was a wrench for our congregation.  Deeply loved by us, and deeply loving of us in return, Gail was a most gracious hostess when she lived among us.  Their home, built by the husband, had been the location of our Wednesday night prayer meetings.

When they moved away, our pastor and his wife bought their house.  During prayer meetings now, when we meet at our pastor’s house, we are repeating as guests in Gail’s home, too.    

Gail had been especially solicitous toward Channa and me as we were coming to Christ.  Her hugs were as genuine—though more delicate—than those of the other church mothers who hugged us.  

The final thing you should know about Gail is this: she has a profoundly beautiful singing voice.  Many in our choir have good voices, some have excellent ones.  But Gail’s voice is of another quality entirely.  It is a glory of God that humans are able to make such sounds, for the humans who make such sounds help us to anticipate what we shall hear in Heaven. 

The funeral.  I am a deacon, so I had chores and bustle as the hour approached.  Cars piled into our parking area and overflowed along the road.  One of our town’s policemen is a brother deacon.  He was outside directing traffic and wondering where to put it all.  A flood of mourners poured through our doors.  Channa—our pastor’s secretary—was busily printing more and more copies of the bulletin as the attendees doubled and tripled. 

A side door opened.  Gail and her husband made their slow way inside. 

That they had come! 

The service.  The order of service included three hymns.  Before the third hymn, our pastor announced a slight change in the detail from the bulletin.  Gail had agreed to sing the third hymn herself. 

Gail!

Hobbling on her walker, it took several minutes for Gail to reach the front of the church.  Utter silence.  Our choir director held the microphone.  Our pastor’s wife rippled quietly on the piano through the opening bars of the hymn.  Then Gail opened her mouth, and music ascended, as on the wings of an angel. 

                                                            *****

Here’s what I said to Gail afterwards.  “My dear, you made me cry.”

Here’s what she replied, twinkling, “Yes.  You cried because I can’t carry a tune anymore.  You poor old thing, you cried.” 

“No, Gail,” I said.  “You took us to Heaven, with Diane.”

 

 

Copyright, 2013 -- Dikkon Eberhart

 

The SODDI Defense

We have enjoyed bright days in early spring here on the coast of Maine.  The sun has punch for the first time in six months.  But the wind has its power, too.  A few days ago, a cold wind blew fiercely from the northeast.  My daffodils bent sideways and whipped back and forth, staggered by a very Euroclydon, the levanter which shipwrecked St. Paul. 

 

I took that day off from writing my book about my poet father and how his lyricism contributed to Channa’s and my conversions, and I drove the three miles to Popham Beach.  Popham is a swath of sand, miles long in both directions, rare for rocky-beach Maine.  Far out rock ledges cause the seas to blast up white furies.  Two-and-a-half miles out from the beach is Sequin Island, topped by Maine’s tallest and second commissioned lighthouse, commissioned by George Washington back in 1795.  For beach-goers, at least when it is low tide, there is a rocky islet, called Fox Island, which one can reach by foot, but you had better watch the tide carefully for it comes in fast, and people have been trapped on Fox.  Otherwise, the beach is bold to the open sea.

 

All through this past winter, surfacing only occasionally for deacon and trustee responsibilities at my church and to serve in my retirement, part-time sales job, I have been plunged into my father’s world, swimming strongly, re-living my living with him.  But on that day, I needed to be blown free from words.  I needed a break from my father. 

 

            As I drove, I put into the CD player the original cast disk of The Fantastiks, which my college had done the year before I arrived as a freshman, and which Dad and I had seen there together several nights in a row.  I opened my moon roof for the first time since winter, and I cranked up the music very loud.  I sang along with Try to Remember—I’m not a skillful singer—and when we got to It Depends on What You Pay, sung by Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, I sang that, too. 

 

            At the last note of that clever song, there is a rousing cheer by the two fathers and by El Gallo, who has sold the fathers on the idea of the abduction, which he calls a rape…”It’s short and businesslike.”  Stirred, I punched the air and cheered, too.  In that instant, suddenly, I was my father.  That song had tickled my father’s fancy, and he had punched the air and cheered, too, with exactly the gesture and the intonation I used.    

 

My cheer was so much his, I was him. 

 

            When I arrived at the beach, I shut down the music and sat quivering in my car.  Far from getting a break from Dad, I was still at least half him.  A thought blasted through me.  I had just been my father, because of a gesture…and he, long dead.  

 

Then another thought hit me.  Perhaps Dad had used that gesture and intonation because he had seen his father use it, too, back in his father’s day.  And I wondered: had Dad’s father used that same gesture and intonation because he had seen his father use it, too, in the even farther-back day? 

 

            Then there came a leap of a thought-blast. 

 

If a gesture can be so evocative as to take one, in an instant, back a generation, or even back several generations, then might a gesture take one back much farther than that?  Might a gesture take one back to one’s deepest known ancestor?  Could I trace that same gesture all the way back to Eberhart the Noble in 1281?  Might Eberhart the Noble have gestured that same way when he rose from his knees before the Holy Roman Emperor, and stepped backwards out of the throne room door?  Might he then have looked at the new ducal seal in his hand, which had just made him the first Duke of Württemberg at the age of fifteen?  He might have pumped his fist in the air in the same way as I had generations later, and used that same intonation…Yes!  

 

And we Eberharts have been doing so ever since.

 

            As I sat in the car before walking to the beach, my inhabitation of my father diminished, and so my mind came more into play than my heart.  Here’s what I pondered:  if a mere gesture can do this, then what about sin?  Can sin, too, do a snap-back? 

 

            I sin today.  I sin in a way that copies my father’s sin.  Did he sin in a way that copied his father’s sin…and so on backwards in time?  Adam lied to God, and he accused Eve, thereby disrespecting his wife.  I disrespect my wife at times, accusing her of faults which—truly—are my own, not hers.  When I disrespect my requirement to honor my wife’s need for true, straight-forward, and timely communication, along with direction of our spiritual passage, does this sin snap me back, in an instant, all the way to Adam, and to his hiding in the Garden, and to his lie? 

 

Could I be responsible for the Fall?   

 

No, no. 

 

Some Other Dude Did It. 

 

Not me. 

 

No.  Not me. 

 

 

Copyright 2013 -- Dikkon Eberhart

 

Fence Evil Out, part two

In the 1960s, some of Channa’s and my generation disdained the setting up of fences.  All things should be free and easy, that group opined, and they practiced what they preached. 

 

It was their idea that their example of openness was sufficient, in itself, to make calm the heart of evil…not that they believed very stringently in the existence of evil in the first place.  Evil was, to them, misguided love, and it longed for an apotheosis by which it should come, shining, out of its ugly humor. 

 

Our co-generationists were to bring that happy moment into being, by dint of their goodwill.  All of us were, at the time—this is a theme—still young and unhurt. 

 

            Theirs was an intellectual and idealist snobbery, and they set fences around themselves without recognizing their existence.  They believed no one over thirty.  They dressed in flowered uniform to make a fence between themselves and the straights. 

 

             But they disliked other fences. 

 

At the time, of course, there was a war on.  Some of us laughed mightily at the silliness of the idea that Communism ought to be contained.  Why, Communism was nothing more than the idealist yearning of downtrodden men for a fairer sharing-out of the productivity of society and for a more social-justice orientation of the governing system.  What could be wrong with that?  That its principal exemplar, the Soviet Union, was a hideous affront to human dignity—to say nothing of its being an acute danger to human life—was a fact which didn’t penetrate the cotton batting some of us pulled around ourselves.  Beyond that, though many of us read The Baghavad Gita and Siddhartha and Black Elk Speaks, and considered ourselves quite spiritual indeed, the fact that Communism was antithetical to God troubled us little.  Indeed, in Vietnam, it was plain to many that our Christian nation was the aggressor and that the Viet Cong, whatever their Chinese Communist backing, were innocent and pacifist Buddhist victims of our megalomania.  

 

It would have astonished some of them at that time—even horrified them—had they been able to see a mere thirty years into the future.  It was to be the great monolith of Communism itself that died, buried in a rubble of concrete between the Germanys, and the evangelical Christian churches of America would be ascendant. 

 

            Picture if you will the young Dikkon, as yet unhurt. Surrounded by a few friends, cavorting freely on the beach at the southern tip of California’s Point Reyes, some fifty miles north of San Francisco, it was—as always—a stunning day in paradise.  That beach is backed by a tall cliff, perhaps sixty feet high.  It is pleasant to loll in the shade of that cliff and to drink wine and to talk earnestly of love and of God and of other beneficences. 

 

            On that day, our idyll was interrupted by a sudden…fence.  In the middle of a sentence, we were stunned by a sound from above of such hugeness as to blank all other sensation.  Our eyes jerked upwards.  No more than fifty feet above the top of the cliff, there appeared for an instant a flight of three Navy fighter jets streaking out to sea.  We had heard nothing until they appeared.  The noise when they passed was colossal.  They were so close above us that my eye photographed—and I still have in my mind—an image of their underbellies, one with a streak of oil near its wheel well.  In seconds, they had dwindled to specks above the far horizon.  

 

            Outrage! 

 

            I was for an instant a Vietnamese peasant and they the arrogant invaders.  What possible power could I muster against such might?  My friends stayed with that outrage through the next hour, and they whipped it into a froth of victimization.  But I grew quiet. 

 

            Suppose I were ever hurt.  Suppose I needed assistance.  Suppose someone dear to me were hurt.  Suppose…even suppose my country were hurt.  Suppose I needed to throw up a fence. 

 

            Those Navy jets were a strong, and a very high fence. 

 

                                                                        *****

                                                          

            I’m older now.  I’ve been hurt. 

 

Too, I’ve steeped myself in history and theology through many volumes and many years.  I’ve learned that others can be hurt as well as I.  I’ve recognized that bad neighbors do exist on earth.   I’ve understood that darkness does encroach across the green fields of our so green and pleasant land.  I’ve dreamed of a tower of my own.  I’ve grown angry and wanted to bang up a fence between myself and the Other, the Bad One.  I’ve watched the Blue Angels scream past me at air shows and marveled at their precision.  Mostly, though, I’ve breathed a prayer of gratitude that these magnificent men in their flying machines are on our side. 

 

I’ve challenged God on theodicy.  How can you allow evil, you who are all-powerful?  How dare you? And then I’ve cowered at my blasphemy. 

 

Like the flooded man disdainfully waiting on his roof for the Lord to provide—while first the Lord makes a floating door passes by, and then an empty canoe, and finally a Coast Guard helicopter with a dangling rope—none of which he uses because, as he explains later to St. Peter, he was waiting for God to provide—I didn’t notice at the time that the Lord was providing just as fully as He needed to, and that it was by my own arrogance that I failed to see it..  

 

            A stone wall along a property line in southern New Hampshire is a barrier to assure the goodness of neighbors of good will, but it is a figurative one withal.   Three feet high at the most, that fence will stop a cow from crossing but not a man with evil in his heart.  That’s when we are glad for the more powerful fences, the bigger and the higher ones, from the Spite Fence in Penobscot village to the instant platoon of taxi drivers who had my back in Roxbury, from the towers and stone cottages which saved our Irish ancestors—and with them Christian faith—to the fliers of supersonic fighter jets who have our national back today. 

 

            To be hurt is inherent in being the animals we are, albeit animals with a divine spark.  But, in the end, there is one even greater Fence that we can use. 

 

When it all comes down to the end, and we truly need a fence, and we have tried everything we can think of, and absolutely nothing else will do, we have Jesus to watch our backs. 

 

Jesus did stand up for us once upon a time, and He stands up right now, too.  Greater than the greatest soldier, who dies to save his foxhole buddy, Jesus (who is God) allowed Himself to die so that He might save all of us, through all time, until the end.  

 

            Here’s what Channa and I learned: against bad neighbors God has given us a Very Big Fence.   

 

  Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2013         

 

Fence Evil Out, part one

As a Christian, you admit that evil is.  As a Christian, you throw a barrier before that ring-tailed, horn-swogglin’, sidewinder of a devil before he gets the upper hand.   

 

Fences are necessary; always have been, always will be.   

 

                                                            *****

                                               

When I was a boy, my sister and I drove with our parents each summer through coastal Maine to our summer cottage.  Penobscot was one of the small hamlets through which we drove.  Penobscot was, and is, modest enough—small houses strung along the street, a store, and, for many years, a blueberry cannery, now turned into a craft shop. 

 

The houses are set close together.  As we observed Penobscot during our yearly drives, nothing much changed, until one particular year.  That year, we were stunned to see between two houses a tall wooden slat fence, as high as the second levels of the houses, stretching from the street back to what must have been the rear property line. 

 

What had happened? 

 

That raw wooden barrier was like a scream between the two houses…what could possibly have caused this palisade to be flung up?  The remainder of our ride was enlivened by speculative answers, each answer more excitingly lurid than the last. 

 

Many readers will recall that Robert Frost wrote a poem about re-building stone walls each spring with his neighbor, in which is found that famous line—“good fences make good neighbors.”  The poem tells of the two neighbors meeting to restore the wall between their properties, the neighbor being pine, and Frost apple orchard.  Time—and an imp—knocks down the wall each year, Frost says, and each spring it must be restored.   

 

In Penobscot, though, the installation of that wooden rampart seemed not to have been the result of a neighborly afternoon work.  It seemed as though it must have been thrown up in a sudden rage, and savagely nailed into place, by one side or the other. 

 

Thud, thud, thud: the hammer!   

 

My father took the opportunity of this shrill wall to write a poem he called “Spite Fence.” It’s not one of his best, but it concludes with a pun on the Frost line, and one which his pal Robert enjoyed.  Dad’s line always got a big laugh when he included the poem in public readings.  The last line of Dad’s poem is, “Bad neighbors make good fencers.”

 

Someone in Penobscot was safer, when fenced. 

 

                                                            *****

                                               

            Whenever I was young and broke, in Boston I would drive a cab. 

 

            One summer, in answer to a rash of cab driver muggings, and a murder, the company for which I drove agreed to install thick Plexiglas barriers, like fences, between the passenger area and the driver.  Despite that new fence, among my fellow cabbies, there were those who drove armed, though it was against the policy of the company to do so.  However, there were times—late on a Saturday night, for example, with a certain sort of fare in the car—when I longed to have a gun on the seat beside me. 

 

            But we unarmed drivers did have another sort of fence upon which we could depend.  There was radio communication between us and dispatch, and dispatch had access to all the Town Taxis in the city.  And Town Taxis were everywhere. 

 

One night I slapped up a quick fence. 

 

I had responded to a radio call in the Tenderloin—lower Washington Street—at 2 am on a Sunday.  Two young men got into the cab and directed me to a location in Roxbury.  They struck me as menacing.  Their manner was pumped, loud, aggressive.  As we approached what they said was their destination, they changed their minds and, without giving me an actual address, they directed me into a smaller street, and then, after that, into an even smaller and a more narrow and more badly lit street. 

 

I did not like this. They radiated nervous energy and were alternately silent and then loudly jiving. 

 

            Well, there was the radio code. 

 

I thumbed the button on my microphone, spoke a certain number, and recited my location.  That’s all I needed to do.  Instantly, all other radio traffic was cleared from the air, and I was live in realtime through the network.  Dispatch repeated the code number and my location.  That’s all it took.  Within two minutes, other Town Taxis cruised beside me.  I had five cabs inside of 120 seconds.

 

            I pulled to the curb and told my fare this was as far as I went.  All five cabs surrounded me.  A platoon of headlights bathed my fare.  Large men stepped from their cabs.  Baseball bats and tire irons were in evidence. 

 

Very quietly, my fare paid up, and, very, very quietly tiptoed away.

 

            That was some code, that was. 

 

            It was a battlement against which I could lean.  That’s what fences are for.  They let us know where we stop and where the Bad One starts.  And they keep it that way, with him on the other side.  

 

                                                                        ******

 

            As a young college man, I visited Ireland, and I made it my business to sojourn to Yeats’ Tower, to climb up into and to inspect its interior, and to observe the view from its windows.  I was at the time much enamored of William Butler Yeats, a poet who built no fences between the commonplace world and his inspirational world of spirits and the imagination.  Like him, I too longed for the lost woods of Arcady.  I was open to comers from all sides—spiritual comers—because I was still young and unhurt. 

 

Yeats built the tower for the wife he married late in life.  My father’s telling of Yeats’ Tower had given the place a prominence in my mind—Dad had been a diner with Yeats and his circle in the 1920s, and he had looked on the older Nobel laureate as a god-like being.  When I arrived at the tower, from Dad’s tales, I had expected it to be more imposing than it is.  Truly, it’s a modest construction.  But you may sit in its upper story and gaze out at the green hills and dream of your own escape from the pavements grey…to the shores of some Innisfree of your own devising. 

 

            A tower.  Yeats may have built the place just to afford his wife a high view, and himself a high one, too.  He may have been pummeled politically and wounded in love, but he was not a man who feared, I think, the stranger.  Nevertheless, the ancestors of Yeats’ Tower were designed to keep fearsome strangers away.  Towers are fences that one pulls up around oneself against the danger of those men from that mountain over there. 

 

Indeed, elsewhere along Ireland’s western coast are the ruins of towers more ancient than Yeats’, which have succumbed over the years either to Frostian imps or to war.  They nobble the sheep-grazed hills, and they fascinated me.  I explored those that I could reach in a few days’ walking. 

 

Who had stood within these walls, now cast down, and what had he feared from away?

 

            Still farther out than they are the stone huts of early medieval Christians, set on the rock islets strung along Ireland’s Atlantic shore. In those years, those hutments were home to monks who fell back as far as possible from the encroaching re-assertion of paganism, and then they set themselves a final bulwark, a fence.  Saint Patrick may have cleared the Ireland’s green of snakes in the fourth century, but, at least figuratively, the serpent was making a vigorous return by the sixth. 

 

The Irish monks were justly afraid of the spiritual danger they faced; it would be more than three centuries before the Auld Sod once again was free of the hissing of snakes.    

 

 

Copyright, 2013 – Dikkon Eberhart