Mom's Brooch

One time God helped me by troubling me with an odd gift. 

I came home from school—as I recall it, I would have been in either fifth or sixth grade—and my mother was distraught because she had lost a favorite brooch, which had been given to her by her father just before he died.  It was absolutely vital that the brooch should be found, but neither she, nor Dad, nor my sister could find it.  Mom was in tears. 

Of course, I knew the brooch well and could see it in my head.  I could see it in my head as though I were looking at it through a camera lens. 

Since I was looking at it through a camera lens, I noticed that I was looking at it in the spot where it was just then.  It was on the dirt floor of our garage, about halfway forward along the left hand side of the garage, six inches from the wall, with some leaves bunched up against it and partially covering its top.  So, saying no word, I went back outside, entered the garage, bent down and picked up the brooch—it was precisely where I had seen it—and want back into the house and handed it to my mother. 

I have no explanation for my vision of the brooch’s location, other than that the vision must have been a gift.  As a gift, my vision can only have come as a gift from God, for who else could have provided such a gift? 

My parents took my brooch vision as some sort of weird coincidence.  That is as far as they went.  They defused our family’s amazement at the gift by joyfully lauding—the Inexplicable.  After all, the Inexplicable was inherently delightful in itself, even poetic.  Though all went well for me that afternoon—I was given more hugs by my mother than usual and an extra portion of dessert—I was left with a question in my mind, ‘Why?’ 

If my vision was a gift from God, what was the meaning of the gift?  Was it that the Lord of the universe wanted my mother’s important brooch to be found?  Or was it that the Lord of the universe wanted me to notice that something odd and powerful—which had just happened to me—could happen at all, in the first place.    

That brooch vision had the power to skew my worldview in another direction.  I stood at a worldview fork in the road.  Which of the roads should I take?  Was I to take the road that my parents trod, which was the road of delight at the Inexplicable, which road led to poetic joy?  Or was I to take the other road, along which I might strive and might arrive at an explanation of the brooch vision based on God’s intentionality? 

I took the road I took.  I took my parents’ road, though I felt disoriented as I took it.  I felt disoriented because I knew I was not taking the road that was most truly mine.  But I was young and uncertain of myself and didn’t really know what road was most truly mine and loved my parents and was happy that my mother was happy.  That was enough—to have made my mother happy was enough. 

It took me another fifty years from that moment—and perhaps another fifty more forks in the road—before I learned that just to make my mother happy—or to make any other woman happy—is not enough.  What is enough, instead, is to know the road that is most truly mine and to take it with authenticity.    

But back when I was about eleven or twelve, I wonder what might have happened if, at that brooch moment, some experienced evangelical Christian had questioned me about my vision and had explained to me the power of God to make miracles, big and small—for His own purposes.  Suppose this Christian had invited me—right then—to join with Jesus in faith. 

Suppose I had answered, “Yes.” 

What should have happened? 

As I wrote my new memoir (coming from Tyndale in June), aged two-thirds of a century, I was relatively new to Christ’s salvation.  Suppose, instead of being a baby in Christ, now I were a man well matured in Christian understanding.  Suppose I were expert, now, at what poet John Milton refers to in Paradise Lost as “God’s ways to man”? 

            Just suppose. 

            Just suppose. 

 

Life is Stranger than Any of Us Expected

The title of this post is a line from Flux, a poem of my father’s.  Flux has stuck by me during my adult years, not because of any verbal magnificence it possesses—deliberately it possesses none—but because of its insinuation and acknowledgement of enigma.  The next two following lines are—

 

There is a somber, imponderable fate.

Enigma rules and the heart has no certainty. 

 

Dad continues in this poem, using brief snippets of a few lines, to cite one imponderable event after another.  As an example—

 

The boy, in his first hour on his motorbike,

Met death in a head on collision,

His dog stood silent beside the young corpse. 

 

 So, Dad offers no release for the reader.  His poem informs us that the imponderable dominates in life, and, therefore, that life is stranger than any of us expected.    

 

My life has been, and is, stranger than I expected.  Yet I do now lay claim to a ponderable, not to an imponderable—as a creature of my Lord, my life is exactly as I should have expected.

 

            I ponder this matter because I have written a memoir that will appear in June from Tyndale House Publishers.  The memoir is jauntily titled, using imponderables—The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told.  As is the nature of memoir, my book is an attempt to understand myself and my experience during close to seventy years. It is an attempt to make order from what Dad terms the imponderable—indeed to provide certainty for the heart, which Dad’s poem denies is available. 

 

My life has not been imponderable though I do concede it has been improbable.      

 

            Anyway, I wrote my memoir to acknowledge that the circumstances of my life are stranger than I expected, and yet I seek to order the strangeness.  There is a point, I believe, in the strangeness.  Not only is there a point, I believe, but I go farther than that.  I believe the strangeness is deliberate.  I believe my life has been infused with strangeness for a purpose.  I was sixty years old when I learned what that purpose is.  Then I wrote my memoir.

 

My publisher has the professional responsibility to determine the demographics and the psychographics of the primary reader of a memoir such as mine.  All very well.  However, beyond mere statistics, I believe the person who reads my memoir may read it with that same sense of the imponderable about life as my dad expressed in his poem.  Like me, that person may find that life is stranger than any of us expected.  But what I hope that person may ask next is the more important question.  “Yes, but what is the purpose of that strangeness?”  

 

At my age of fifteen, on any afternoon on the coast of Maine when nothing else pressed Dad and me—and when the sun was strong and the tide was low—we might offer to take Grandmother and her house guests, the German readers, out onto Penobscot Bay.  Grandmother and her German readers enjoyed it when we made our way aboard Dad’s cruiser to the outer ledges of the bay to view the seals.  Grandmother’s half dozen or so German readers came to Maine during two weeks every summer for relief from Boston’s heat and to keep up in their former language, generally using 19^th century family sagas and romances, which they read to one another as they sat and knitted in the evenings.  Aboard the boat, however, they would exclaim and be cheerful at the playfulness of the seals, and as I passed around little cups of sherry and a tray of Ritz crackers which had experienced more humidity than was good for them. 

 

            At my age of fifteen, I was impressed by the German readers.  It was not easy to bring them aboard.  Dad and I would power the cruiser over to Grandmother’s—her house was nestled just back from a wide rock with her beach down below.  She had no dock.  Dad would lie-to in the boat about fifty yards off as I ran the launch back and forth to the beach and brought these ancient ladies off shore two or three at a time.  They would need to wade into the surf before clambering into the launch, and then, when I pulled up alongside and each boat rocked on the sea, they would need to climb aboard over the gunwale.  The boarding ladder had three steps. A lot of leg swinging was needed, up and over the side, and balancing on the after deck, before each lady was safe to totter to a bench and to sit down.  Usually, all this was accomplished while wearing a loose skirt.

 

I had known these ladies my entire life.  They were all in their seventies by then—widows, gemutlich.  Most of them represented families that had been American for more than a generation or two.  But two, as I recall it, had immigrated to our country with husband and children in the 1930s.  Deeply cultured Germany—improbably—in the 1930s was becoming a place where it was not a good place to be. 

 

At my age of fifteen, I ran barefoot over any boat in any sea.  For me, there was no place near, in, on, or under the sea that was not a good place to be.  But I remember an imponderable regarding these ladies which emerged for me at my age of fifteen.  As I became stronger and more flexible, these companions of my Grandmother became weaker and stiffer…and yet they waded, and they climbed, and they tottered bravely just the same.    

 

I didn’t know anything about this business of being in one’s seventies.  I couldn’t conceive of it.  Now and then, though, I felt their eyes bearing upon me thoughtfully, I who was my Grandmother’s first grandchild.  I, who was so much the spit and image of my father.  I, who ran barefoot over any boat in any sea. 

 

The ladies seemed to me to be weighty with how strange their lives had been, stranger than any of them expected.  I could not articulate this weightiness which showed in their eyes.  I sensed it but could not fathom it.  Among their ponderables—I should like to know this now—among them, what point had they found? 

 

The German readers did not caution me about my life to come—how could they?  My life was imponderable, its strangeness yet to be revealed.  But I do not think that any one of them—were she alive today to discover that I have written my life down in order to make literary and theological order out of my own personal flux—I do not think that any one of them would find that fact improbable.          

 

Son of the Poet: Resume

Big men and big woman with big ideas—that was the American 19^th century. 

 

It was a “can-do” world.  It was an engineer’s world.  It was a world in which good fortune came from harvesting nature’s resources and God’s gift of imagination and transforming those resources and that imagination into food, building material, transportation, health, adventure, faith, and wealth.  Most of that world’s men and women did their level best to understand the times in which they lived, to make their best contribution, to support their families and their most compelling interests, to rise out of bad times, to harm little, and to live much. Freedom was the birthright of every American child.  Equality of opportunity provided every child with a chance. 

 

The 20^th century used that confidence and can-do spirit—at mid-century—to defeat tyranny.  At about that time, I was born. 

 

During the next decade or more, leisured ones in the West became self-reflective.  They found badness in themselves, badness not unlike the badness they had just defeated.  Shamed, they concluded that God must be dead.  I grew.  I was educated.  My father was a poet. He sang a joyful—or a mournful—song.  I was educated by listening, and I assumed God was alive, after all, because otherwise the nay-sayers would be dead.   

 

            The realities of the world made my father a son, a brother, a student, a seaman, a husband, a teacher, a naval officer, a father, a salesman, and a teacher again.  More to the point, from his age of sixteen, he allowed the Muse to have her way with him.  He opened his heart, first, and then his mind, second, to her blandishment. 

 

I grew up.  I married.  Dad enjoyed an eighty-five-year-long love affair with the Blakean fire.  He was, first and last, a Romantic.  Dad never needed a divorce; I had one. 

 

            I am Dad’s son.  I am a different man, yet I am the same.  For example, I am a son, a brother, a student, a husband, a teacher, a novelist, a husband again, a teacher again, a father, a publisher, a salesman, a retiree, and a memoirist.  Hmmm….

 

            Other similarities abound among the eight first cousins of my generation.  Two of us are professional salesmen, three of us have a professional connection with religion and with its institutions, four of us have been, or are, teachers, several of us write for publication and two have consciously published in the literary world,.  Hmmm, again….

 

            Where does my father stop, and where do I start? 

 

            As a five-year-old (so the story goes) I was asked by casual passers-by, “What do you want to be when you grow up, sonny?”  My mother recalls that I startled these questioners.  They expected a conventional answer—a fireman, a policeman.  “I want to be a poet,” I’d say.  At which Charlotte Wilbur—poet Richard Wilbur’s dear wife—broke into laughter and cautioned my mother, “Don’t you ever break that wonderful spirit!” 

 

In fact, I’ve written only two poems in my life.  However, I’ve written and published novels, which Dad never did.  “I’m too impatient,” he told me once, “for fiction.”  A collateral suggestion from a close friend of our family, a priest and a cathedral dean: “Your father is in love with the moment.  In the end, he doesn’t really care what happens next.  But what happens next is the meat of fiction.”

 

            When Dad was thirty, he published the poem which first made him famous, “The Groundhog.”  When I was thirty-two, I published my first novel, On the Verge. That same year, Dad was seventy-four, and he published his twentieth book, Of Poetry and Poets, which went on to become one of his bestsellers.  I showed On the Verge to my father, and he liked it.  He wrote me a letter that I realized, when I read it, I’d been waiting to receive from him all my life.  It was written as one writer to another.  “If you can tell this much of the truth,” Dad wrote, “you can go on to tell more.  If you can tell the whole truth of your generation, you will have done what every fine writer does.” 

 

A little while before Dad read On the Verge, he received an inquiry from Barbara Holdridge.  Barbara was the publisher of Stemmer House Publishers, which she had founded on the success she had enjoyed over years as the creator of Caedmon Records.  At Caedmon, Barbara had done a record album of Dad reading and discussing his poems, so theirs was already a fruitful relationship.  (The coup which gave Barbara her start with Caedmon was to capture the American rights to Dylan Thomas’ voice. For years afterwards, many Americans loved to hear the Caedmon record of Dylan reading his story A Child’s Christmas in Wales—which he used to recite or read to me at bedtime.  Barbara’s acquisition of those rights occurred when he ceded them to her on a cocktail napkin—so our family story goes—while he was staying with us in Cambridge, MA, in the early 1950s.  As with a lot of poetry stories, it might have happened that way.  True, Barbara was in the circle around my parents in those days, but I think the assigning of Dylan’s voice in America to Barbara more probably occurred at a bar in New York rather than at our house.) 

 

Anyway, Barbara wrote Dad to ask if, by chance, he had anything that she could publish.  Dad didn’t have anything just then, but he replied, “However, my son’s just done a good novel.”  So Dad sent my novel off to Barbara. 

 

Two weeks later, I got a call from Barbara late one night saying she wanted to publish my novel, and then going on to say….  

 

I’ve never been sure what else she said.  My heart was beating too loudly for me to hear anything. 

 

             Dad also sent my manuscript off to Robert Penn Warren—“Red” Warren of All the King’s Men—and to James Dickey—of Deliverance.  Warren and Jim Dickey were established poets who made it big in fiction, too.  Dad asked them for blurbs, which each supplied.  Delightfully, the jacket of my first novel bears endorsements from these giants of literature in two media—they were men to whom I’d passed the peanuts at cocktails and for whom I had needed to stand to recite my Shakespeare.  They were men who, as I said in my thank-you letter to Warren, were gracious enough to respond fully when confronted by the blandishment of the sons of one’s friends. 

 

So I was now all grown up and… on the verge. Barbara nominated On the Verge for both the Hemingway Award and the Pulitzer Prize to try and draw attention to it.  Dad was never shy about putting himself forward literarily, and he often chided me for my hesitation at doing the same on my own behalf. 

 

Dad wanted nothing but the best for me, I am sure—first novel and twentieth book, all in the same year! 

 

But Dad had found my publisher, and Dad had gotten my blurbs.  That made it difficult for me to respond helpfully to unpublished writers whom I met later during author signings.  I had no war stories to share with them about the difficulty of finding an agent or a publisher.  I had become a made man without needing to shoot anybody.

 

            So, first I was on the verge, and then I was over the verge, and now here’s the rest of my resume. 

 

I published another and a much superior novel four years later—Paradise—which a number of readers have dubbed the greatest American novel you have never heard of.  However, after that, I went off for twenty-eight years to make myself a success in a career with which Dad had nothing to do. 

 

            I wrote on the side of course, and I even did weekly newspaper features, but I had no time for the business of book production—which does consume a great deal of time, even when you think you are done with the book because you have 350 pages piled on the desk next to your laptop which were never there before. 

 

            If you want to know more about all this—and there is much more funny stuff to know—then take a read at the rest of the story, which is coming in June from Tyndale House—a memoir, The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told. 

 

…and let me know what you think. 

 

Did anything like that ever happen to you? 

 

 

 

copyright, Dikkon Eberhart 2015

 

Backwards to the Golden Time

Memoir writing is dreaming backwards. 

 

Eleven years ago, my father became one hundred years old.  When Dad turned one hundred, my wife and I had no grandchildren yet.  We hoped we might have grandchildren someday—after all, we had produced four children, so the prospect of grandchildren was bright.  However, whenever our grandchildren did come along, they would not be able to sit with this man, my father, the poet, who was one hundred years old.  Dad would be gone by then.  Our grandchildren could read his poetry, they could view him in pictures, but they would not be able to know him as I knew him. 

 

So I sat down at my desk, and I began writing stories about my dad, and about my mom, and about how it all was.  In order to write these stories, I discovered, also I needed to write stories about Dad’s and Mom’s own parents, and about how it all was for them, too.  The more stories I wrote down, the more stories I remembered, and the more stories I remembered, the more dangerous this process became.  I was dreaming backwards, with emphasis on the word dreaming.  

 

You see, I am a writing sort of a fellow.  In order to understand my life as I live it, I objectify it.  This is not a choice of mine; it’s the way I’m wired. My psyche places me outside my life, while I live my life fully.  From outside, I observe the themes of my life, upon which I mull.  And as I mull the themes, I order my memories so that they illustrate and they dramatize my themes.  It’s a circle—it’s what I mean by dreaming backwards. When we dream, we are both receiving something from our outside and creating something from our inside at the same time.  That’s why dreams fascinate, though they are not real. 

 

As I wrote my stories down about my parents and about their parents, I was dreaming backwards.  My father, the poet, was called “Dreamy Dick” when he was a boy, and the apple does not fall far from the tree.  Dreaming backwards is dangerous because it may fool the dreamer.  It may make the dreamer believe that the created story of the past is the past.  However, that is not so.  The past is ungraspable—it is past.  If you are writing a memoir, the people of the past are unable to tell you, now, if you are wrong in your memory.  The people of the past are unable to chide you when you order your memories for the purpose of dramatizing your themes…at their expense. 

 

To the casual observer, writing a memoir probably seems easy enough.  After all, you know the stories—just write them down.  But memoir writing is a razor-edged endeavor.  The writer of a memoir has a responsibility which is weighty.   If the writer fails to balance precisely between self-enhancement and self-abnegation there is a danger of falling and of being cut.  A memoir—this is what I have concluded—a memoir should be a kind of prayer by which the writer expresses, highest among all things, humility. 

 

As an example of my desire to live in a past which I did not possess myself, here’s a memory.  I loved my father partly because of the past he had lived in before me.  I could dream my way into his experiences when something of his experience touched mine; I was ten-years-old and a warrior. 

 

Dad had been a naval officer during World War II.  His principle responsibility was training young gunners on navy bombers the necessary marksmanship, with their .50-caliber double-barrel machine guns, to survive strafing attacks by Japanese Zeros, and to shoot the Zeros down instead.  After the war was won, Dad kept his target kites. 

 

Choose any summer day, when I was ten.  Maybe on that day we’d take Dad’s elegant old cruiser out onto the ocean in Maine, and we’d go to Pond Island, along with a swarm of smaller craft, some fifty of our closest friends and us. We’d have a boatload of clams, lobsters, cod fish, corn, potatoes, salads, pies.  (I’d be especially proud if I’d caught the cod while drop-lining near Saddleback Ledge.)  The hour would be early, still cool, with a light air from the south, no fog.  I’d handle the anchor, following Dad’s directions.  Several trips would be needed in the launch to ferry all our equipment to the shore. 

 

Then, on the south side of the island, we’d dig a deep clambake pit in the sand, line it with stones, fill it with drift wood, and set a bonfire ablaze to heat the rocks.  We kids would fill a dingy with fresh rockweed, torn from its roots below tide line.  When the fire burned down to glowing coals, we’d layer the pit with the seaweed—instantly bright green on the seething rocks, and popping—and we’d toss on the food, layering it with seaweed and topping the whole bake with a thicker layer.  Finally, we’d cover everything with an old sail and bank the sand up around the sail’s edges to hold in the heat.  Then, finally, there’d be nothing to do but to wait while the bake baked, to stroll, to run, to explore, to lie in the strengthening sun, to philosophize vigorously—or meanderingly, as the mood suited.  Perry and Craig would lead us all in singing The Sinking of the Titanic, and we would all take a delicious, ghoulish pleasure in the line “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives….”  Beer and wine for the grown-ups; orange Nehi for us kids. 

 

Then it would be early afternoon, and the breeze would be up.  It would be a good, strong, summer southwester—good sailing weather, for kite sailing. 

 

Dad and I would rig a kite.  It was an act of shared and minute technical specificity that I adored since it was so uncharacteristic of my father; Dad was not a tool guy.  But kites, I realized, were really poems, and therefore they deserved his intensity of attention to their every nuance.  Sometimes Dad would agree to fly the huge 10-foot-high kite, but usually it would be one of the 6s or the 8s, which are plenty big enough when you are yourself about four-and-a-half feet high. 

 

Dad and I would work for half an hour, threading the lines, re-screwing a thimble, guying the rudder straighter.  Then it would be time, and I’d carry the kite sixty or seventy feet downwind along the beach, carefully playing out the four lines it took to control these monsters, while Dad made final adjustments to his reels and his control arms and his harness.  He’d attach the controls to his chest, a “front pack” of great drums of line controlled by hurdy-gurdy handles, with arms that stuck out two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder, through which the lines ran before heading for the kite.  Distance was controlled by grinding the drums with the handles; yaw and lift and plane were controlled by the rudder, which in turn was controlled by shifting one’s shoulders backwards and forwards, thus pulling the rudder one way or the other. 

 

It was my job to hold the kite upright, buffeted by its weightiness in the wind, and to await Dad’s command to thrust it into the sky.  Before I thrust the kite into the air, knowing the fun we were about to have, I would stare at the silhouette of a Zero that was painted on the kite with the big red target circles over the gas tanks in its wings.  So that was where to hit ‘em!  And especially I would stare at the carefully stitched .50-caliber bullet holes in the kite that riddled those very wings.  How close I was then, dreaming backwards, in that numinous moment, to the howl of the bullets themselves!

 

“Go!”

 

As hard as I could, I’d launch the kite up into the wind.  In a second the kite would catch the wind and zoom high. In my mind, the stream of bullets would follow it, and the thudding of the guns would buffet me, and the hot brass would rain all around. 

 

In a steady wind, Dad could fly the kite up to three hundred feet, make it hover there for the longest time, and then make it dive straight down into the sea—straight down into the sea!—only to pull back on his controls at the very last instant so that the kite tore through the top of a wave and rose again, streaming shining droplets from its wings and from its lines, like some raptor on a string!  

 

This was jam at a clambake. 

 

The past was mythic.  My father was mythic.  I was mythic—and ten. 

 

I dreamed backwards to the Golden Time—when lived the Old Ones, who fleeted among the ancient trees, and knew. 

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015