Shabbat Dinner

            “Shabbat shalom!”

            “Shabbat shalom!”

“Hi, you two little munchkins, Shabbat shalom.”

            “Hi, Grandpa!  Hi, Gramma!  Mommy made challah.”

            “It smells so good in here. And what a lovely table.”

            Our youngest daughter beamed to see us.  This was our first visit to her home to enjoy one of her frequent Shabbat dinners.  Pregnant, and with an almost four-year-old and an almost three-year old, she moved slowly, while her husband managed the quick stuff. 

            On Fridays, when the sun sets, the Jewish Sabbath begins.  The next twenty-four hours comprise the day sacred to the Lord because that is the day when He rested. 

I myself had “rested” about thirty years before.  I had rested from the stringency of my agnosticism.  The exactitude of my agnosticism had been fueled by self-regard and by academic doubt.  My agnosticism was a burden for me to bear, but I soldiered on.  At the same time, I sensed that my agnosticism had clay feet.  I wanted to kick its feet into smithereens, but I didn’t know how. 

The Lord helped me to find the way.  Thirty years before, our other daughter—our older daughter, then five—had questioned my wife and me about our family’s religious identity.  What she observed was this: Mommy was sort of Jewish; Daddy was sort of Christian. 

What was she? 

We did not know how, honestly, to answer her question, which was dispiriting for her father who had a PhD in religion and art.  Thank goodness that our daughter’s question was pointed enough that it forced a decision upon my wife and me, and that the force of our decision precipitated action. 

My wife was Jewish.  Therefore, formally, our children were already Jewish, too.  I loved the Hebrew Scriptures (otherwise, the Old Testament), though I thought that story about Jesus, in the New Testament, was just too, too odd.     

We made our decision and could then answer our older daughter’s question. 

All four of our children—two boys and two girls—received their Hebrew names.  For a while, we attended a small havarah—a gathering of Jews for prayer and learning, generally not led by a rabbi—and then later we attended our city’s largest Reform synagogue.  My wife was energetic to find social and educational groups within the synagogue with which we could align.  I—no Jew—was a stander apart although I was a helpful husband and an informative father when questioned about their Judaism by our children.

Despite my distance, as a family we commenced what was to be our two-and-a-half decades of Shabbat dinners.  We dressed the table, we lit the candles, we blessed the wine, we tore the challah and ate it, and we performed these ceremonies while we chanted their accompanying Hebrew prayers. We were grateful, even fervent, to praise the Lord.         

Our Judaism was of the Reform tradition.  Reform Judaism arose in the 1860s in Germany as a way for Jews to honor their biblical heritage but, at the same time, to fit more neatly and less threateningly into European, Christian society. 

Then something happened to me. 

The Lord has a curious way about Him, does He not?  First, He had our five-year-old daughter ask us a question we could not answer.  Then, several years after we began practicing Shabbat, He whispered another invitation to me. 

During a High Holy Day service, while we sat in synagogue and delighted to hear Kol Nidre on Erev Yom Kippur (the exquisite chant on the evening which commences Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement), I heard His quiet voice.  He stated that His doorway was open to me, should I desire to step through. 

Of course, He knew that by then I was fervent to be with Him, and that I hated my position as a stander off, while my wife and our children stood in. 

The Lord offered me a doorway.  I assumed I knew which doorway he meant.  After all, my Jewish wife and my Jewish children were beside me that evening, and I was lonely for complete companionship with them.  So I converted—to Judaism.  The process occupied several intense years—Judaism does not proselytize—and thus I became the Jewish father of my Jewish household, and, satisfyingly, the Master of our Seder, too. 

                                                           ***

But that is not the end of our story.  The Lord knew there was to be more to come.

Here’s a puzzle.  At the moment of my conversion, the Lord may have experienced one of two things.  He may have known that, me being me, it was not yet time for Him to introduce me to His Son.  Or else He may have shaken His head in sorrow that I had not understood which doorway He had meant for me to choose to step through. 

So our family continued to rest from doubt in the comfortable ease of Reform Judaism, positioned theologically—as I interpreted it for a while—at the very beginning of monotheism, not a bad place to be. Like our distant monotheistic ancestors, our family’s minds, hearts, and souls were informed and were shaped by theophany within Torah.

And twenty-five years passed away.  The children grew and went out on their own into the world, to strive along their own pathways. 

My wife and I became disenchanted by what we perceived as the wearisome cherry-picking of Torah by our Reform mentors and friends.  Some formal statements by the four rabbis whom we followed through our three successive synagogues did not seem true.  When we studied Torah closely in regard to those statements, our study often left the rabbis’ statements as untrue and unsupported by Scripture. Over time, my wife and I even questioned whether some of our rabbis and Jewish friends, in their hearts, truly believed the worldview which is implicit in the five Books of Moses.    

Once again, our spirits wandered in a desert, parched by doubt.  Our doubt was not about the puissance of the Lord, nor was it about the righteousness of the Bible’s witness concerning the Lord and His intentionality.  Our doubt was whether the religious community within which we had devoted twenty-five years of child rearing was committed to the truth.        

The Lord knew that, for us, there was to be more. 

 

                                                            ***

“Shabbat shalom!”

“Shabbat shalom!”

“Hi, you two little munchkins, Shabbat shalom.”

            “Hi, Grandpa!  Hi, Gramma!  Mommy made challah.”

            “It smells so good in here. And what a lovely table.”

Our youngest daughter and her husband, like us and one of her brothers, are evangelical Christians.  How this change from Judaism to evangelical Christianity came about is not for me to relate in this space except to say this: it is a gift from the Lord.

Either I finally caught onto the point of the Lord’s salvation story which He provided to the Jews for their theological edification, or else I finally understood which doorway the Lord had pointed toward that year on Erev Yom Kippur but which I had not identified correctly.  Anyway, it worked as the Lord intended.  However long it takes in human terms for us to understand what the Lord directs us to do, and then to do it, a blessing that the Lord provides to us is the blessing of persistence. Indeed, while we may be persistent in seeking, our Omniscient Lord is always persistent in providing.       

                                                            ***

For our first Shabbat dinner at our youngest daughter’s house, we sat down at her Shabbat table.  Our grandchildren were eager to remember the Hebrew prayers as their mother lit the candles with the ritual shielding of her eyes, as the children’s tiny sips of wine were taken, as their father revealed the large, twisted, eggy, warm loaf—just out from the oven—which our daughter makes for Shabbat dinner, and which her husband ripped apart so we could all partake. 

Baruch atah adonai eluheinu melech alon….

We thanked the Lord for the light, for the wine, and for the bread, and thus we acknowledged Him as the Lord of the Universe who has provided us with these gifts. 

As the father to this daughter, long ago, I had passed her a tiny sip of wine and a big hunk of challah. Back then, we had blessed the Lord’s munificence just as we did at the present time.  Same Lord; same munificence.  Now, though, all of us at that table knew we had received more gifts besides. 

For us around that table, now as Christians, we recognize these more gifts besides as our redemption and salvation.

Praise the Lord—His puzzles included.

                                                                 ***

“Why are you doing this?” I asked our daughter afterwards.

“It’s my favorite thing from childhood.  I want my children to know about it.  And—for me, today—it helps to shape my week…when we do it.”

“You don’t always?”

“No.  And when we don’t, things in the week go bad.  But when we do, it’s a good week.”

“Is there theological content in it?”

She shook her head.  “Not anymore.  But there’s delight in it.”

She lay her head against my shoulder and her hand on my forearm.  We rested from the meal, and the children were dismissed to play. 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

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

 

 

Letting It Go Away

My father sat at the back of the college classroom.  He watched the professor at the front of the classroom.  The students were watching the professor, too, while he interpreted a poem called The Cancer Cells, which is a poem my father had written. Dad was prominent as a poet during the middle fifty years of the 20^th century.  On that day, Dad was a visitor at this college, brought to the college to read his verse and to participate in classes as an established poet. 

            The professor concluded his interpretation.  The Cancer Cells, the professor had opined, is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  Then he called on Dad.

            Dad stood.  “Well,” he said, “I wrote The Cancer Cells.  I have to say that it has nothing whatever to do with the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  What the poem has to do with is what it says in the poem.  I saw vivid color photographs of cancer cells, in large scale in a magazine.  The images were intensely beautiful.  However, the images are also death.  It’s the contrast between their beauty and their power to cause death that moved me to write the poem. And it’s the aloof observation of the poem’s last line that makes it a good one.”

            Dad reported to me that the professor watched Dad for a moment after Dad stopped talking, and then the professor said to the class, “Well, notwithstanding what was just said, the poem is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe, and now if you will please turn to page 182….”

            Dad was not called upon to speak during the remainder of that class. 

            “Dikkon,” Dad said to me later while he mused on this event, “the truth is that once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

            I recall this conversation as I work now to draw attention to the approaching publication of my memoir—in June—a memoir that explores my relationship with my poet father and how his and my relationship affected my allegiance to our ultimate Father. 

            I am working in the background now.  Others are working in the foreground.  My literary agent—formerly prominent in the foreground—has moved into the background, for now.  My conceptual editor at the publishing house—she who acquired the book, and who then worked diligently to shape it so that it is readable—she has merged into the background, though her role still is to oversee. My cover has been designed by a genius—who has captured the atmosphere of this memoir both by color selection and by selection of images. My line editor—she who evaluates grammatical adventures of mine, checks my facts, and questions me closely when my sentences are obscure—my line editor is in the foreground as we finish our work together.  Stepping more prominently into the foreground, now, are the publisher’s marketing director and my publicist. Copyeditors will come next and, I am sure, other professionals of whom I am not yet aware.

            “Dikkon, once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.” 

            This is true not only of those of us who write stuff and who desire other people to read it.   

            For example, my wife Channa and I have four children.  They run is age from thirty-six down to twenty-seven.  Over the years, we “published” them to the world, and now they do not belong to us anymore, as they did belong to us once when we were still “writing” them.  Even our son Sam, who has Down syndrome and lives at home, at age thirty, has been “published.”  It’s just that, as a “book,” Sam rests on our bookshelves at home between his excursions into the world to interact with his employers and colleagues at the convenience store where he works, with his fellow painters and other artists at the artists’ collective where he paints, and with his fellow athletes challenging themselves in Special Olympics swimming, skiing, basketball, and track-and-field.     

            My book today is immeasurably more mature than it was when I thought I had finished it.  Before, when the book just had me in its life, figuratively I could take it to bed with me as I took our children to bed with me.  My book was little then, and, like my children then, it didn’t question my judgment.  I could enjoy cuddling it then—I could enjoy that deep, trusting, boneless slumber of its warm little body on my chest.  Now my book is all grown up and it has other people whose judgment it has learned to trust.  It needs to make a living on its own.  It doesn’t really need to listen to me anymore.    

            Dad needed to learn to be content when he discovered that The Cancer Cells is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  He didn’t particularly like that the poem was about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  But he needed to be content with that. 

Fortunately, my father was a literary philosopher as well as he was a father philosopher. As his son, I made decisions he didn’t particularly like. But, regarding The Cancer Cells and me too, he would puff a few puffs on his pipe, smile at me, pat me on the shoulder—a taller shoulder now than it had been when I was a boy—and he’d say, “Well, I still love you anyway.”  

 

Copyright - Dikkon Eberhart - 2015           

           

Buried Treasure

In my mind, I’ve been writing a new novel, but very slowly.  I haven’t published a novel for years.  Considering the slowness with which I am writing this new novel, it won’t be published for years, either.  My working title is The Pirate Book. 

The protagonist of The Pirate Book is a present-day archivist who works at a 200-year-old seminary in Connecticut.  The novel is structured as a story-within-a-story.  Much of the action occurs among pirates in the late 17^th century.  The story is kicked into action when the archivist finds an uncatalogued document hidden inside the binding of an antique, family memoir.  The family memoir is an item in the seminary’s archives.  It recounts the history of a clan of 18^th and 19^th century missionaries, some of whom were graduates of the seminary.  The hidden document is electrifying because it casts a different light—and not a welcome light—on the clan’s history.  It fundamentally re-characterizes the clan’s founding father. 

As I said, I have not published a novel for years.  On the other hand, a new book of mine—which is a memoir—is about to be published this year, in June.  In this new book of mine, I look backward, first to recount what happened during the first sixty years of my life, and then to put what happened into a context by which to understand my life’s remaining years.  So my new book is about me and how I got that way.

It does not surprise me that I began writing the memoir at approximately the same time as I set down the first sentences of The Pirate Book.  Though it is fiction, The Pirate Book is powered by the same urgencies which underlie my memoir. 

My slowness at writing The Pirate Book is due to the fact that, as I wrote during recent years, I needed to choose between a fictional voice and my personal voice.  My memoir is written in my personal voice.  That was the voice I wanted to use. Of course, the novel requires another voice than mine, the voice of the contemporary archivist, while it also toys with the 17^th century voices of several of its principle characters. 

Some pirates buried their treasure.  One reason they sustain our interest, now, three hundred fifty years after their heyday, is that very treasure.  It’s out there, even now.  What beachcomber wandering across Caribbean sand has not imagined the finding of a doubloon, where it glints in the sun, exposed after all these years by the wearing away of the wind on the sand?   In another iteration of the same wonder, what archivist has not imagined the corner of a lost letter appearing from behind the illustrated plate in an old book, rarely taken from the shelf?  And then here is the novelist’s imagination—what would the letter say?  Why had it been saved, by hiding it away?  Who had hidden it?  It must have been precious, but was it alarming as well?  How might it affect its discoverer, the archivist—now, reading it in our latter days?  An archivist is a person who likes to read other people’s mail…but only at a comfortable distance in time. 

I said my memoir is about me and how I got that way.  One of the ways that I got to, and a way that I explore in my memoir, is the way of a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.  Looking backwards in my memoir, I am studying the family line which led to me. 

My memoir characterizes my father, who was a poet of lyric fire when it came to nature, God, mankind, death, and beauty.  Dad is one generation back.  Dad was one of three children in a Minnesota family whose father was a successful businessman in the meat packing industry at the beginning of the 20^th century.  That man, my grandfather, was two generations back.  The third generation back was my great grandfather, who was a circuit-riding Methodist minister on the Great Plains during the late years of the 19^th century.    

As a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian writing about my family line, among other themes, I desired to trace my family’s theological roots and its profession of Christian belief.    

I know my father’s theological roots—one generation back—both from his talks with me and from his poetry.  I know about my great-grandfather’s theological roots—three generations back—partly by inference based on his profession, partly by my father’s stories about him. 

But what about my grandfather—two generations back?  His name was A.L. Eberhart.   

One responsibility I have to the publisher of my memoir is to supply it with photographs, so, rather like an archivist, recently I have pulled storage canisters from my barn in which my wife and I have placed family pictures away, always with the thought that—soon enough—we should get to the task of arranging them properly.  Alas, if I really were my fictional archivist character, instead of just me, I should already have arranged the pictures properly—catalogued them, ordered them, preserved them, and made them available at a moment’s notice.

In one of the canisters, I came across a familiar item.  I was familiar with this three-fold, leather, wallet-like holder of three lovely antique photographs.  The wallet is about four inches wide and six inches tall.  When opened out flat, the three photographs are displayed, each of them mounted on heavy cream-colored stock as was done in the early 20^th century. 

I have always liked the three photographs stored inside, which are skillfully done.  On the right panel is a photograph of my father’s brother at about age two.  On the left panel is a photograph of my father, also at about age two (though he is two years younger than his older brother).  The middle panel has the largest of the photographs.  This is a profile picture of my father’s mother, my grandmother, who is revealed as a beautiful woman of about thirty.  It was in memory of her that my wife and I gave her name to our oldest daughter—Lena.    

After I had admired the photographs one more time, I was about to put the wallet aside when I felt something odd.  The panel which displayed my uncle’s photograph was slightly thicker than the other two panels.  Something was stuck behind the picture of my uncle.  I prodded a bit, and out slid an envelope with a folded piece of paper inside. 

Eerily amazed to be in precisely the same circumstance as my fictional archivist, I examined the address on the envelope.  I recognized the handwriting.  It is the handwriting of my father’s father, of my grandfather, whose handwriting I had often seen in other documents.  The letter was sent from Austin, Minnesota, to my grandfather’s mother, who was at that time staying at Rosslyn Hotel in Los Angeles, on April 7, 1906…postmarked at 4:30 pm.  On the back of the envelope, a note is written in ink, also in my grandfather’s hand.  The note says, “For Clara, September 13, 1929, A.L. Eberhart.” 

Not knowing that the financial world would be rocked sixteen days later, I surmise my grandfather was just filled with love and with commitment when he gave his 1906 letter to Clara.  Clara was the woman A.L. loved after he recovered from the sad death of his wife Lena in 1921.  I do not know how A.L. came to re-possess the letter he had sent to his mother in 1906, twenty-three years after he sent it, but he must have perceived the letter as precious, and perhaps Clara did so as well.  Years ago, important family documents were tucked for safe keeping in the family Bible. This important family document was similarly tucked away—inside the icon of A.L.’s wife and his first two children. 

A.L. must have considered it precious, else why should he have tucked it so carefully away, to be preserved until it was found, by chance, by me, his memoir-writing Christian grandson, in 2015, eighty-six years later?  

With tender fingers, I extracted the letter.  It is written in pencil on heavy, cream-colored stock, seven inches by twelve inches, folded in half and then folded in four, in order to allow it to fit into the small envelope.  Here is what my grandfather wrote, when my father was two years old, and here is what he later gave to Clara, when my father was twenty-five.   

 

Austin Minn.

April 15 – 1906

Dear Father & Mother:

This is Easter Sunday and this letter will relieve my conscience of one of its heaviest loads and I trust be the means of bringing much joy and happiness to you both.  Ever since I backslid after my conversion in Chicago, I have feared that the death of one or both of you would deprive you of the joy of knowing before death that I again decided to serve Almighty God.

At a men’s meeting this afternoon Mr. Hormel and I went forward and publicly declared thereby to live a Christian life to the best of our ability in a meeting of [illegible] Sunday.  There were 3000 men there and a number followed our example.  I have attended almost every meeting for the past four weeks and have heard more sermons in that time than for the last fifteen years.  It was either 1889 or 1890 that I was converted and since the termination of my short religious life of about a year I have never opened a bible or offered a prayer but on account of the early training you gave me, eternally branding on my conscience the difference between right and wrong and because of the simple, fearless presentation of God’s messages to man by Billy Sunday the Evangelist I will read from the bible tonight and pray to God to take me as I am.  You have waited long and patiently for me but now our family is a unit.  I am going to begin at the bottom just as I did in business.  I have been successful in business so I want you to give me some verses of scripture to read that will help me.

Lena has asked me to go forward with her and she is going tomorrow.  Don’t expect too much of me at once for I have a big battle on for a while I am sure, but I have health and an iron will and will try and hold fast this time.  Where is that verse “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ?”  You have always prayed for me to keep on don’t quit I need them now.  With love from your son

Alpha

The children are well—

 

Praise the Lord for this most excellent of buried treasures!

 

 

Copyright Dikkon Eberhart, 2015