I gave my daughter a ride to work today. The snow had blanked the highest tops of the
foothills near Golden and a couple of hundred feet down there was no snow, only
the shadows in the deepest cracks on the foothills and of the playful but
heavily water laden clouds as they played hide and seek with the sun in their
race across the sky. Magical you might
say. There were lots of colors, the
sweetest greens of the fresh spring grass, the dark blue greens of the wet evergreens
on the north facing slopes, the whitest white of the new fallen snow on the
highest hill tops and the remains of a dusting of snow between the peaks and
where the lower altitude no longer had any snow. Days like this make me so
happy to live here. Where is the camera when I need it?
Anyway, we started discussing a project for one of her
English classes that she has been working on this semester. She complained that James Wright had nothing
she would borrow, which I guess was one of the questions on the project. She
read an example of one of Mr. Wright’s poems.
It was a very touching poem about the poet’s father, working hard,
coming home silently and described how the poet imagined his father’s life and
the ghost of his now dead father continuing to do the same things his father
had done almost all of his life.
It zapped me right back to a day when my family was sitting
around the table eating supper, it was a quiet moment, which looking back, in
itself was probably rare as there were four children at the time plus my
parents. My father had a look in his
eyes of someone who had known love, sorrow, pain, loss, struggles, joy and
triumph. He truly looked so appreciative to be with his family enjoying a nice
dinner as he ate that it brought tears to my eyes then and even now as I write
about it.
My dauaghter continued that she did not have a clue what she
would “borrow” from the first poem. I
said “You could probably borrow the attitude if nothing else. You just don’t get the poem. Maybe
you could say that at this time you would not borrow anything, but it might be
something you could revisit when you are older.”
My daughter continued to describe some of the poet’s works
she was comparing. She read a poem by
Mary Oliver about sleeping in the forest. True, it was an eloquently written
poem, but it did not touch me nearly as much as the first poem. First, I can not imaging sleeping in the
forest without a minimum of $500.00 worth of REI gear, including a light
weight, fully sealed tent complete with foot print tarp and weather cover tarp,
backpack, lantern and a massive dose of “Off” or some other mosquito
repellent. Furthermore even if I might
live in a forest, I certainly would not sleep outside alone. I almost got the
shivers listening to the poem imaging the insects, crickets, frogs, snakes,
raccoons, foxes, coyotes and mountain lions or bears that might also be there.
“Now, that is a
poem.” she said when she finished reading it.
I said, “Well, I guess it just depends on where you are in your life”. The first poem took me back to a time and I
described the family dinner incident above, nearly crying as I tried to explain
the emotion I felt. She simply remarked,
“Well, I never had that. In fact, none of my generation has had that.”
I am pretty sure some of her generation did have more family
dinner experiences than she did, but it made me even more emotional at how much
my dad looked like he knew and understood just how good we had it, and how much
I appreciated what he did for us. It made me sad for all of the working moms
and family’s whose fathers had left their mothers to be the nurturer and
provider alone. It made me very sad for
the society where it is ok for this to be accepted as normal.
