Rain, Rain Go Away (Stara Evropa #8)

Sylvia had only one wart, but it grew hairs rapidly and sat on the side of her neck, where she felt men most liked to kiss. When she was nine she tried to cut it off with a scissors, and when the bleeding wouldn’t stop her mother called an ambulance which carried her from the northeast side of Szarvas to the centrum. Though she couldn’t see outside, Sylvia knew the road they were taking would require a ferry transit across a small width of river, and thus the extent of the emergency was gauged in her mind. The highway bridge some four kilometers south would not make for a faster trip, even as the ferry floated with its familiar languor.

The doctors stitched up the wound but didn’t (or couldn’t) remove the cause. The wart grew back with a vengeful lack of shape, bigger for its adjoining scar. The climate in southern Hungary didn’t compel scarves for more than a couple weeks of winter, and the adults in Sylvia’s life mostly discouraged any neck wrap indoors. Strangely, she thought, the best rival for this barnacle was the folding flesh that came with a fatty diet and the habit of shrugging her shoulders, or pulling her head into herself as a turtle would. She knew this was no fix and imagined there were less tangible reasons she’d want to shrink so, but at least she could feel herself smiling, and it was easier to interact with people.

Szarvas was an undeniably serene place to grow up, especially on the winding river that seemed a part of everyone’s backyard. The banks were flat and unweedy, as if the catfish scoured the sandy bed to match the neatly mown grass of most properties. Lazily, folks of all ages would walk into the olive water and give it some flow; they’d swim across in twelve strokes, or wade in the prevailing shallows, or sit as grizzlies, minus the bulk and hunger. Boats would putter by, unnecessarily but welcome at any rate. There was simultaneously plenty of movement and nothing really to do.

And so Sylvia did not suffocate there, and thought hard about her eventual migration to Debrecen, the largest city in the east and the chance to become a paramedic. Plan A would have been Szeged and something to do with its therapeutic waters; Plan B—Budapest for a broader university life; Debrecen wasn’t even a plan, and thus just happened upon Sylvia without much forethought. It was funny, she thought, that no one ever asked if she had been in an ambulance before, and as the training channeled her towards hands-on situations, she felt nimble—a fish in these waters. She hated the ‘hamburger movies’ of disaster scenes, simulated or not. She wanted to be inside the truck or out, taking vital signs and talking through various stages of trauma. She loved the thinking that everything was going to be all right, even when statistical scenarios augured the opposite. She enjoyed dueling desperation and contemplating what Walker Percy meant by ‘carapace’. Besides rushing to catastrophes, she would read half afternoons through, massaging or scratching her neck, if not exactly buying into the optimism of Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, who exhorted her gathered people to "love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up."

That was the novel she was reading—Beloved—when her crew got the call of a head-on collision on the main highway west of town. And, like Beloved, there was reportedly a toddler involved in the fray. Sylvia instinctively readied the infant gear for restarting hearts and respiration, then cleared her mind with the Serenity Prayer, also by instinct. Some of her compatriots pattered and even joked in the same stretch of anticipation; the rescuers’ code was carte blanche to pump blood into the ones who would have to face it.

At the site the car was duly smashed in on the driver’s side, but the driver was out and holding his little boy. Both were crying for evidently different reasons: the blood on his father’s face scared and confused the kid, while the animation of his squirmy son heartened the dad: they had survived and could now, oddly, celebrate. Sylvia came over to check eye dilation and span the spine of the little boy first, then the father. Her colleague swabbed a nasty cut on the man’s forehead and wrapped a bandage four times around, frightening the boy more with this mummifying action. Sylvia held his hand and started to sing, gradually transitioning the kid from his father’s arms to hers. As they walked to the ambulance she asked the man, first in German and then in English—she could tell they were Czech and had no local savvy beyond the ‘kusinem’ that the man now expressed for the tenth time—‘do you want anything from the car right now, something from the back seat?’ The police were on the scene and would impound the vehicle and protect the valuables—that the man knew—but when asked by his dad the same question, the kid said, between sobs, “Liska”. ‘His stuffed fox,’ he translated, and she spoke over her shoulder for someone to fetch it. They settled in to the truck and the man started a lullaby, and Liska arrived and the doors closed. ‘You’re Christian,’ said Sylvia. ‘I can tell by your song.’ ‘And you’re an angel for us,’ responded the man. ‘Kusinem.’

Halfway through the ride, the radio relay gave indication of a lawn-mower accident, and though another ambulance would be dispatched, the driver knew that the location was only two kilometers north of them on this rather remote stretch of road. A quick discussion of options determined that the present patients would not be endangered with a detour in that direction, but Sylvia was forlorn that she would have to be the one to step out of this soiree to attend to the next. Before the ambulance skidded to a stop she patted Liska on the head and shook hands with the father and son, the latter saying ‘ba ba’ contentedly. She jumped out for what she knew would be a messier situation, and resigned herself to the fact she would not see Liska’s family again.

They did write, however, a few months later, to 'Paramedic Sylvia c/o the Debrecen hospital'. It almost didn’t get to her, as by this time she had transferred back to Szarvas, her Debrecen days now done. ‘Dear Sylvia’, it began, and she scanned through the we-are-alright and grateful sentiments to a kid’s drawing on an adjoining page—a hedgehog leaning against a tee-pee with two smiling people inside. The narrative on the other page explained: the night before the accident had them camping in northwest Romania, in a torrential rain—forty hours of storm that flooded much of the continent, and in the case of Prague, killed off several creatures in its flood-plain zoo. ‘The elephant refused to move to higher ground; the rhino charged at the handlers, who had no recourse but to shoot him; the sea lion swam out of its pool and floated with the Vltava all the way to the North Sea, where it died of exhaustion. My son called it “The Very Scary Flood” and remembered one survivor of it, albeit not a zoo creature. A hedgehog crept into the soggy entryway of our tent and nuzzled close to our warmth. We talked about letting it in but of course didn’t. Probably it just needed temporary relief, but we watched it from the mesh screen until it fell asleep, and then we did the same. In the morning it was gone. When I asked what to give Sylvia for a thank you present, Josef drew this. He also said you can borrow Liska if you ever need to.’

There was a return address and many days when she contemplated taking them up on that loan. The little clinic in Szarvas had a lounge that served the paramedics’ office, with bookshelves only she added to. Now she pinned up the hedgehog with the tented people and immersed herself in a book by Zsuzsa Bánk, The Swimmer. The man of the title could hardly be considered a protagonist, as he confounded his daughter and son and others they leeched off of for season upon season at the cabins and dilapidated villas around Lake Balaton. Kálmán, the father, would stare vacantly at the ceiling beams, smoke a lot and drink a little. He was swimming in such states, in the trenches of his hermetic mind. “I didn’t know whether his life was slipping by him or whether it was he who was slipping through life without making an effort,” the daughter narrated. “He broke off relationships so easily, leaving no trail for anybody to follow, wiping out any trace of us, and today I don’t know whether it should bother me when I recall this, or whether it ever bothered me at all.” Sylvia folded the corner of this page. “I think we’d grown used to this coming and going, this stopping and starting, just as you grow accustomed to something that you know will stay the same, will never change whether you like it or not.”

The dog-ears served a practical purpose, sometimes. Tossing a book aside mid-sentence was typically the case when an emergency called, and at least returning to a poignant part allowed her to get back into the swing. More often than not, however, she abandoned one book to start another. Like the hedgehog, she felt itinerant and not in need of any full resolution.

But Sylvia finished The Swimmer in one sitting and in fact re-read it when, some years later, a man floated out on a raft to the middle of Lake Balaton to kill himself. It was his second attempt that autumn, and the first to be streamed live on Mad’ar media. His raft had on it a blowtorch and a yet unopened tank of benzene, and from his cupped hands he shouted absurdities to the circling patrols: ‘stay back or I douse myself!’ ‘What do you want?’ the negotiators tried to establish. ‘Her. She knows. Bring her out here and everything will be finished.’ ‘What do you mean 'finished'?’ ‘We can all go home, that’s what I mean.’

The standoff lasted into the night and quite obviously the eventuality of sleep entered everybody’s mind. ‘Where is she?’ the man bellowed, lifting to tank to his head. ‘Who is she?’ rejoined a megaphoned voice, measuring the time. ‘She knows, and she’s gotta be watching your freak show.’ Indeed, a stenographer typed within the hull of a stationed boat, and this script sped across the bottom of many voyeurs’ screens. Sylvia was one such watcher, and she noted that a fire crew was close at hand, but no paramedics in sight. The coast guard had cordoned off boats within a two hundred meter radius, so perhaps someone at that distance could rush in to salve the first-degree burns that were bound to happen. As it turned out, when the first rush of gas flowed out of the tank and the torch spewed its dragon-tongue flame, the man fell violently backwards and into the waiting water. Ready frogmen dove to his rescue and, for the second spectacular time, the fighting man failed. Some reporters followed up his muddled story, but the mental health facility kept him forthrightly out of the public view.

‘She knows’ haunted Sylvia, whether or not a 'she' existed. Every paramedic had some training in suicide prevention, and some had experience in talking someone down (or up as the case might be). More common was the pumping of stomachs or tourniquets on gashed arms. Sylvia had the uncommon instance of getting information out of a mother passing out from carbon monoxide poisoning: her twin babies were not in their cribs and not in the exhaust-filled garage, not anywhere near the property. ‘Please,’ Sylvia begged, ‘let us take care of them.’ She had no more magic in her words than the other paramedics, who had been met with stubborn silence. Sylvia hugged the mother and thought to whisper ‘river?’ in her ear, which made the woman nod. An hour later, their mother dead, the infants were found floating Moses-style in the bed of their perambulator, strapped in and crying, well downstream from the town’s outer residence.

A country of ten million can almost know its whole self, or at least references therein. Sylvia was listed less as a hero than as a paramedic of certain qualities, even if no one was tallying her ‘Liska’ moments. When the madman reentered Lake Balaton with a 3-year-old on his raft—no gas or blowtorches this time, but a large anchor tied to his ankle—and paddled out to his twice-foiled circus ring, Sylvia was called on for duty. She sat in the back of a speeding police car from Szarvas to Siófok, then in a boat waiting dockside for her services. She thought of nothing that could reasonably prepare her for the situation: no quotes from any book, no training parallel or whispered trick. And though her mind did resort to the images of his last occasion, now all was real instead of surreal (or maybe she was mixing that up). Then it was reasonable what the negotiators did to bide time: they had only a madman to save. Now there was an innocent—a hostage—and no one had a clue what to do. She saw that the child was strapped to the man’s back, 'as if a fardel,' she strangely mused, 'in Hamlet’s rhetoric.' She saw such a short rope between anchor and ankle, and estimated they were above fifty meters of water in this ironically shallow sea. Divers were ready, Sylvia was told, but the man kept all boats at considerable distance. ‘I’m not messing this up,’ he snarled, standing like a drunk on his upgraded raft. ‘She’s irrelevant now,’ he made known. ‘There’s nothing left to do.’

‘But give us the kid,’ the main negotiator prompted Sylvia to say. She stood mute. ‘Please—he’s heard from the rest of us—you need to speak to him.’

Sylvia started to cry, and quavered in a voice just loud enough, ‘Kálmán,.. I’m here.’ ‘Not Kálmán, stupid—you don’t know me.’ ‘I know you’re not Kálmán, but you haven’t introduced yourself to me.’ ‘Don’t play games—if you’re here, you know my god-damned name.’ ‘And who is your son? I honestly haven’t heard his name yet.’ ‘Does it matter? Call him dead.’ ‘Call me Sylvia.’

No one spoke for over a minute. Sylvia tried to remember the Serenity Prayer but forgot the first, familiar phrase. The name of the son was passed into her hand on a scrap of paper, and when she looked down she knew she couldn’t use it. She thought of telling the man about the hedgehog or the twins in the buggy—that made for something to think about, at least. What else was she here for?

She opened her mouth to start and, leaning forward on the rail of the boat, realized she was falling into the water. She kicked up and pulled at the water to go deeper, putting distance to the boat and unfathomably toward the shaky little raft. When she surfaced she heard shouts from all sides, and swam with the burden of her heavy uniform toward the screaming man and son. Divers now entered and flipped toward her —and the raft's—direction. She beat on seeing in a blur what was going to happen: that he’d leap from the other side and she’d have no real chance to catch him. But in a final dive below the raft she managed to grab his plunging body, feeling for the straps that tied the little boy, realizing all was lost in this incomprehensible moment. She clung desperately and hoped her body fat would temper the effect of the anchor. Then she felt like she was the greater burden, tangled senselessly into the depths. A diver ripped her arms from her sinking object. Water filled her gasp and life was lost.

‘God, grant me the courage,’ she finally remembered.

Cheer, cheer, cheer!

Go for it, Tilo!

Dan mentioned one my Dad poems from a few years ago, but he was unaware that I had cut that poem from the current Thirty Birds collection. I was trying to keep the poems at a thirty count, and A Call to Cheer didn't quite make the cut. I am still happy with the poem, but it was more personal and less related to actual birds. A bird named team didn't really count, I decided, although I did at least reference the Northern Cardinal's spring call (cheer! cheer! cheer!). Anyway, I am happy to share it, but I'll add it as a sidenote to the Thirty Birds collection. You can find this at http://www.thirtybirdspoetry.com, posted as a comment to the opening epigram (Come, you lost Atoms...)

Dick, where is your water poem?

Task for Tilo

and anyone else in this particular symposium. This Sunday, a week after one of the greatest professional sports days in Wisconsin history (thanks, Grandpa Dick), the NL Central champion Milwaukee Brewers will host their division rival St Louis Cardinals for the NL pennant and a trip to the World Series. All good thoughts to the Phillies, whom we saw this summer at Wrigley Field 'schooling' the Cubs, and perhaps the same to the Diamondbacks (just don't know these lesser-tradition teams), but this series is what the world wants to see. I'll borrow from Hamlet when he says,

"Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memories hold a seat
In this distracted globe" (I, v, 103-4).

The 'globe' is, of course, the south London theatre, the world (precursor to 'World Series') and--get ready!--the globe upon his, and everybody's, shoulders. His head! Sort of like Emily Dickinson's poem "The Brain is Wider than the Sky"...

My point is: this is big, bigger than labels like 'Battle of the Beers' or 'Suds Series'--in fact, I think in this post-industrial world we've come to understand cities as more than what they make. In 1982 Joe Vold was in- and out-of-character, pumping his fist in the Bejou co-op for the team he had only known in the radio abstract, imagining Musial and Brock before coming to Chicago to see Brock (at least) play at the friendly confines. Perhaps one influence to my career in literature was the aesthetic that Jose Cardinal--erstwhile St Louis outfielder--was traded to the Cubs and played hard against his launch-mates.... A cardinal becomes a cub.... And now Ryan Theriot will have a post-season life as a former cub cardinal.

Back to--where were we?--Joe Vold. If 1982 passed in pride and grace, the '87 series was tougher: somebody insidiously gave him a cap with a lopsided stuffed cardinal on its visor and dared him to wear it in north Twinkieland (no longer Bejou, now Boy River). He did, and perhaps felt accursed; the Cardinals won every game in the abstract Busch stadium, but nary a one in the fabled Metrodome. There was nothing artificial in the wins, if artificial turf had too much influence in both sides of 'home field': the Twins were the better team, as the speedsters of St Louis were going 'gently into that good night'...

So, Tilo (and Joey, who has an email invite to this site, and anyone else who wants to weigh in), be our scribe this series. We loved the legacy of Yount and Molitor, Stormin' Gorman and Cecil Cooper, Ben Oglive and Jim Ganter. We watched them hit into the Golden Gloves of Keith Hernandez and Ozzie Smith, and field the prowess of Porter, McGee and Lonnie Smith. We saw aces in Augustine, Vukovich, Andujar and Forsch. Games were saved by Sutter and Haas. Wisdom exuded from Fingers and Kaat. Kuenn and Herzog were firm at the helm.

Now what shall we do with our Morgans and Hart, our Braun and Prince Fielder, our Gallardo and Axford? How shall we write about Pujols and Molina, Berkman and Furcal, Carpenter and Salas? Is LaRussa the skipper that Roenicke is? Are wallbangers, base-stealers running this game?

I set you, dear Tilo, on top of this task. Burrow through Uncle Jon's Thirty Birds and you'll find more of the mythos...

And--Dad will forgive me--I'm pulling for the Brew Crew. Their time has come, and it won't be at the expense of the Redbirds, but rather to complement this most wonderful of American (National) traditions.

Uncle Dan

Expectations

    Funny place for an earth-shaking discussion it was, but there the forlorn seventeen-year-old sat on the cold bathroom tiles. Her mother leaned against the toilet bowl, her head tipped forward and her mind already dreading what she suspected. She had come running up the stairs in answer to a weak but anguished-sounding “Mo-o-o m.” Nora glanced at her watch; it was getting pretty close to when Ellie should leave for school. But with the exception of it being morning, the hour faded in significance. Morning – and Ellie clearly had thrown up. The evidence, that thin greenish appearance, gave it all away.
    With a despondency in her voice, Nora asked, “Ellie, are you pregnant? That looks a lot like morning sickness.” She paused, a lump in her throat making the words difficult. “But – but -- you can’t be!”
    “No. . . no, ma, I’m not.”
    “Ellie? What’s the truth?” It was starting to hit Nora with a thud, the agony, the awful realization that things would never be the same again.
    “umm, no, I said.”
    “El? Please tell me. I – I won’t get mad at you.”
    “ahh…..yeah, I guess I am” she whispered. Tears spilled over her eyelids and down her cheeks. “I’m sorry . . I’m so sorry.”
    “Oh Ellie, you can’t be!” she cried. A feeling of unbelief and utter sadness filled her being. “Whose baby is it? You’re not going steady with anyone.” She didn’t add, “and we’re Christians. This just doesn’t happen…”
    “But mom, you should know whose baby it is.” Long pause. “It’s Brad’s.” Her voice dropped in a tone of despair. Nora looked at her sorrowfully for a long moment, but Ellie was still not able to raise her eyes to her mother’s face. Finally the widowed mother reached out and embraced her youngest, her own baby. With tears in her eyes and a croak in her throat, she cried “Oh, no-o-o. There go all the expectations I had for you.”
    The words hung heavy in the air. Neither of them had gotten up from the bathroom floor, and the one-inch square white ceramic tiles were making indents on their legs. “Mom! What do you mean by that?”
    Nora’s tongue stumbled as she admitted, “Oh, you know,” her voice breaking, “senior year things like homecoming, and prom, and graduation. And then college, and all the doors that would open. .and now, . .now what? You’re a smart girl. .so many things you could have done in your future. Oh Ellie, what are we going to do?”
    Bleakness cloaked the girl’s face as the tears kept flowing. Her mother just shook her head sadly. Then she brightened just a little. “Let’s go to Walgreens and get a test kit. Then we can go for coffee downtown. You don’t need to go to school today. Okay?”
    Ellie nodded numbly, but she did rise off the floor and her shoulders imperceptibly squared as she headed for her bedroom and grabbed a sweater. By the time the two of them were sitting at a window table in the local café, they were able to relax a little and laugh, and they talked about what comes next. Back at home the test was positive – of course. There would be a baby born before June graduation.
    Expectations. The mother mulled on the mindless comment she had made on that bathroom floor, wondering what in the world made her blurt that out. It wasn’t even something she had ever consciously considered. Her only daughter after three sons, but the main heart-to-heart communication between them usually occurred driving to shopping excursions. No solid dream castles were ever constructed between them. Besides, good mothers didn’t lay that on their daughters anyway. Expectations? Hopes, maybe. But it was in the “landed gentry” that children’s futures were formed by their parents’ expectations. And that never did seem right. Should any person create expectations forming the future for any other person? What kind of “expectations” were legitimate expressions of hope for an offspring? Yet there it was between them. Nora couldn’t forget her impulsive comment.
    Nora Johnson watched the week unfold. Hurried, stuttering phone calls took place between Ellie and Brad. Ellie would turn away from her mother busying herself in the kitchen, and tuck the phone under her chin. “Mom is wondering if we are going to get married,” she heard Ellie say nervously.
    Ellie made an appointment with her high school counselor and explained her predicament. Both mother and daughter breathed sighs of relief for his understanding. He managed to work it out so that Ellie could finish her classes in January. She would still be able to graduate in June!
    A few weeks later Ellie came home from school more pensive than usual. “Mom,” she said. “We were talking about abortion in our sociology class today.” She hesitated. “I was the only one to speak against it. But I still spoke up.”
    “How did that make you feel, Ellie?”
    “Like I was standing alone against the world, I guess. But I knew I spoke from first-hand experience. I might even have said something like that. . I can’t remember exactly how it went.”
    “Good for you! Ah. . . have you thought about abortion, or – adoption?”
    “No, I couldn’t do that, Mom. It’s Brad’s baby too. What if we got together some day down the future?”
    Some day down the future came not so long after. It was a Saturday night, and Brad’s parents called from their far-south suburb, asking for a “family” confab. As Nora and Ellie and one of her brothers entered their living room, tension hung thick and silent in the air. The world was turning upside down for another seventeen-year-old too. Brad’s goals had been applauded by his parents. College, naturally, sports, probably more than one degree, a fast rise for a high-honors student. And now, what? Brad’s mother looked at her only son and blurted out, “Brad, what were you thinking?”
    There is not an adequate answer for that one, and he gave none. The teenagers went off to another room in the house to discuss their options. When they returned Brad looked down at the floor, and in more of a mumble than plain English announced “We’re going to get married.”
    And they did, but not right away. Ellie wanted to finish high school first. There went that “expectation”! The picture of a slender young lady floating down the aisle of their church in filmy white evaporated. But there is no real way to camouflage a six and a half month gestation. They planned their wedding with Brad’s gentle, understanding pastor. Lots of music, sixty guests at the ceremony and dinner following. Ellie moved in with Brad’s family, as Brad scrambled to finish high school. Just two kids, they were, facing a huge adult world all too soon.
    Right on time the baby was born. Brad and Ellie were a team as they went through labor and natural childbirth. With Katie’s arrival, the young parents never seemed to look back. College? They managed their class schedules so that one was always home to care for their daughter. Five years after her high school graduation, Ellie walked across the stage and received her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature. Again she walked down the aisle heavy with child, this one planned and anticipated with delight. The same day, Brad received his first master’s degree. Faith remained important to them, and they were not hesitant to give thanks to God for all that happened.
    As she looked back Nora would not have imagined Ellie’s life unfolding the way it did. Still regretting that crazy line about expectations that she pronounced on the bathroom floor that day sixteen years ago, she realized that Ellie had, in her own way, grown into a godly, beautiful woman.
    Best of all, her life was beyond any expectations her mother Nora could possibly have pictured.

Neu

Scant seconds old

the Schrödinger cat is

out of the bag and little c

squared a wist of its

flash-in-pan self

CERN lurked about

the inert world, goading

neutrinos to make for the gate

bidding the naysayers:

watch us and whirl!

Einstein meanwhile

may roll in his grave, if

rolling is what his inertia has

been. His theory rings

true: time hearkens

back to the abacus

counting the points of his

theory as true: that time heark-

ens back to … well, let

that and Al rest.

The point is what’s

new, what never once

was, what forces us lazies to

look high and low &

see but a blur,

write to the world,

symposium up to the

wonderful spectra, the ‘we

are such stuff’—the

gifts of our God.

Call for Submissions

I have updated my Walking Song, can’t seem to leave it alone, but our pastor’s sermon in church today helped me see why: This is, after all, a poem about praying ceaselessly. It is not the same prayer all day, but it’s been a good starter when you have ninety minutes in the early morning with a fairly consistent tempo and a captive and private audience (who incidentally seems to appreciate the poem, too). I’m not reposting it, just editing (actually doubling the length of) what’s already there, so feel free to go back to see. As for my pastor’s sermon, it was all about taking cues to keep the prayer going, from This is the day as the alarm rings, to Create in me a clean heart, to Come Lord Jesus, and so on, ending with Love you, Dad as your head hits the pillow.

Meanwhile, I’d like to make a call for submissions. I have more specific calls for the rest of the Symposians, but Dan, this blog is your inspiration, so I’ll start generally with you. When do we see the next Stavra Europa installment?

Dick, we’re still waiting to see you post your water poem. I liked it, and you said that Anne liked it, too, but apart from that, it kind of belongs on this blog, just like your earlier photo submission. And Mom says you have more photos to post - please do!

Anne, I’m told you are now published - congrats! - and Mom has encouraged me to go to your blogsite to read your last several entries. Which I am meaning to do, hopefully even before you have a chance to post a link on this site. Wherever I see it first, I do look forward to the read.

Mom, I forgot to ask you how your reading went. And will we get to see your award winning story on this blog? With Anne’s screening and permission, of course. But I must say again, it is an excellent story, and one on my mind a little more as I become aware of my daughter’s recent friendship-relationship dilemmas. She’s still strongly preferring the former, and I’m still intending to keep the same rule Josh had for Lena anyway, but I’m almost wondering if I should be reading this story to her someday.

Josh, I did say I liked having the chance to hear your last sermon a few weeks back, and it was a good message, too - much better, in fact, that my impromptu telephone sermonette based on the Book of Mormon last week, which was probably poor advice to give you in the face of things. Please, help me get the taste of that one out of my mouth, and submit something more appropriate! (For the rest of you, that’s the Broadway, South Park styled Book of Mormon, which probably has little in common with what Mitt Romney has on his nightstand).

Finally, back to you Dan.  Should we see the music, too, to your Pushkin song?  You may be interested to hear that I've found myself (yes, with the help of a piano) assigning chords to some of my walking song.  E.g., first lines of parts 2 and 4, with melody of EDCD,ACCC, gets chords C, Gmin, F, C.  What do you think?

Humbled

Glad to hear Pushkin is okay, and with this, it occurs: are we unwittingly commencing upon the next symposium subject? In honor of T.S. Eliot, who had his cats, Dan, you get hamsters, I’ll be the dog poet. Anne, Josh, Mom, pick your species.

Actually, I might let someone else continue with dogs, because after yesterday I think I am as “humbled in the end” as I care to be. We’re keeping Yoshi, no question there, but I’ve decided to stop writing walking poems, or at least those that compare my dogwalking skills to God’s.

You’ve read my two poems. I will be first to admit I stretched that prayer-leash metaphor about as thin as it can get, and yet yesterday morning I found myself starting to come up with poem number three, compelled to explain that I am NOT the dog, and that I know full well the dog does not look at me like I’m God. All this with that same walking cadence - maybe not Johnny Cash anymore, but it was just as deep and bluesy and I think there was still a guitar in the background. (By the way, Dan, I don’t know how one can play, or hear, a piano while walking.)

It went something like this:

     I am just a man. I’m hardly God,
     And this is just a dog who doesn’t talk
     And it is for his bowels that we walk
     And for the pounds I need to lose. My bod-    (yes, break)
     y aches after an hour’s exercise
     It’s not so much the distance as the drag
     Of being stuck behind someone whose bag
     I’ve been obliged to carry. Who’s surprised
     If I don’t feel so godly in the end?

And that’s as far as I’m going with it now.

When we first brought Yoshi home from the pet store, we were advised that we should be prepared for a high-activity breed. I have heard that Shiba Inus are hikers, even marathoners. I’m personally not up for 26 miles of anything, but I do like to hike, and I didn’t think I’d mind a dog who would push me a little farther than I might go otherwise. Right away we started with a mile, and when he was 14 weeks and 14 pounds that seemed to be enough for him, and me, but gradually we built ourselves up to 3.5 or 4 miles a walk, twice a day. I’ve been walking him every morning, usually around 5:30 am Yoshi time (just try to sit down and put your shoes on slowly). When school was out, the kids would walk him midday, and we’ve been trading off in the evenings. I’m sure the kids don’t go four miles on their walks, but when its our turn together Yoshi and I have been working our way up to getting to the North Chicago naval station. As of yesterday we’ve made it about half way there.

I’m still walking more than running, but Yoshi has persuaded me to jog a stretch or two each day. And in July and August, with temperatures consistently in the nineties, I had the added bonus of letting the heat take a few more pounds off of me. Through all of this, the dog would still get excited every time the leash came out. Granted, we were only up to two miles by mid July, but this was encouraging. And then on the weekends, after sweating through the walk, I’d come home and start working on Yoshi’s fence. You all haven’t seen me in a couple of months, but I’ve lost thirty pounds! At least it feels like it ought to be thirty, anyway. Actually, it’s more like five, but I suppose that’s due in part to the other tradition Yoshi and I have had, now that the fence is up, of sitting on the back porch every night and enjoying a beer.

Yesterday was another sweltering one, except this time it was the first of September. I thought we were getting past those dog days of summer. Nevertheless, as soon as I got home, around 5 in the afternoon, I got the leash out, and Yoshi was all for it. We started out on our usual path, and right away I could feel the humidity. Yoshi kept pulling me along, but after about a mile his tongue was wagging out of the side of his mouth. A half a mile later, he started to slow down, and I started remembering Duncan, our cocker spaniel with an enlarged heart. In his last breaths it hurt too much for him to lie down, and he just dropped. 

Dan once expressed his concern that maybe his track workouts contributed to Duncan’s demise. I have had my own residual guilt, but it has had more to do with being dogsitter while the family was on vacation, and failing at the job. There’s nothing more sorrowful than the task of burying a dog and then having to tell a family about it afterwards. On the drive back from the airport, coming home from Hawaii.

Don’t worry, I’ve already told you that Yoshi is a keeper, but these were the thoughts that crossed my mind yesterday. We were a mile and a half from home, and I knew I had to do something, so I detoured into the heart of Lake Bluff and found a water fountain. I had no bowl, but I had Yoshi’s unused poop bag, a blue newspaper sleeve, and it worked surprisingly well. I filled it with about as much water as his dog dish usually holds, and not only did it not leak but the sides folded down in a way that gave it some standing structure. (One for your column, Anne?) Yoshi lapped it up. I refilled it, but he had had enough, so I dumped the second dishful on top of his head. He shook it off immediately but seemed to appreciate the gesture.

All is well, I thought, but I decided we’d better skip the last half mile of our usual route. But when I got back on the trail and started heading homeward, Yoshi immediately sat down, then lied down. Not a chance, he said. I pulled a little, but he was hugging the pavement. Then I had my second brilliant moment: I bet he had his north and south mixed up. Sure enough, when I pulled the other way he got up and started walking. I nonchalantly looped around the first big tree we came to and headed back south again, and it actually worked. But before long he was walking slowly, and panting pretty heavily, and a quarter of a mile later he stopped again. All right, Yosh, I said, we’ll rest. I knew we would have to get home, though, and get this walk over with, so after a good five minutes I prodded him up and we started walking again. I think we made it another half mile this time.

And this time, he found a shaded patch of grass and sprawled on it. Okay, buddy, I said, I get it. And I picked him up and started walking. Part of me was grateful that the paths were deserted on this hot afternoon, so no one could see me with my 23 pound lapdog. But mostly I just wanted to get him home. We continued this way for at least another quarter mile, until finally Yoshi decided that, all kindness aside and the heat notwithstanding, he preferred to walk. I think he sensed we were getting close to home.

I suppose I could make a poem out of all of this, too, thinking of other times when Jesus figuratively picked me up along the way, or maybe considering how complex our master and friend roles can be, but I think I’d just like to keep this prosaic for now. Maybe I’ll stick with bird poems.

We’re still walking, though, and today we made it to the naval base. Okay, we did it by driving to Lake Bluff and walking north, but it was an achievement all the same. This time, just to be safe, we started about an hour later, when the evening was a little cooler, and I brought a bottle of water and an extra newspaper sleeve.  And we took it nice and slow.

Pushkin's Home

Please don’t forget your faithful

friend—he’s running away again

from home and all he’s known and

been to everything he cannot

be kind of mild to beasts like

him—his mind and his eye are dim

from all the stars he’s taken in

imagination now defiled:

he’s really running wild,

he’s nothing that he wants to be,

(but he’s free)

and what’s wild, wild, wild

and what’s free?

Pushkin tell me, tell me true before you die

Rush and show me, are you freely being wild

Non-stop I beg the star spots to

shine the straying path home

but I know God knows I’m fooling myself

and faith has nowhere to go

Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home

Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home

See everything I try to

find—this Pushkin is wasting time

a guinea pig we named for him, a

kind of playful ploy by

me, who brought the rodent home one

day—I thought that he’d want to stay

the creature comforts were in place

they never mattered anyway

[repeat all boldface]

turn trim days and toss thin

nights—hardly had a plan of flight

the next door lady with dubious

sight stopped her tracks just to stare at a burrowing

blur at the base of her clustered

trees—and suddenly we're on our knees

we catch the blame rat with relative

ease and justify the face of things

Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home

Walking Song

   1

Lately my life revolves around a dog
Who knows whose leash it is and whose routine
We follow, stretching thin the line between
Our independent wills. I see the dog
As one who needs a master, while the dog
Sees one who needs a friend, and if I’ve been
One caught up on commands the dog has seen
Me listening now and then.
    So man and dog
Since time began have tugged upon this leash
And traveled down the trails of this routine
As if it were the purpose of their walk.
    Man and dog,
Unequally assigned, but side by side
Man walks the dog, dog walks the man, and each
One seems to keep the other satisfied.

    2

I am the man. This is my dog
What would I hear if my dog could talk?
What would I want to say if I were the dog?
What would I think? What would I know?
Where would I run to? How far would I go?
And would I run away if I were the dog?

Let me stretch this leash from here to heaven,
Let me sometimes think I know the way
But let me take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.

I am the man. This is my dog.
I try to listen whenever we walk.
But what can there be to say when you’re a dog?

    3

Sometimes I find myself spinning around
And chasing after things that aren’t there,
Entangling the one whose leash I share
And losing sight of where we might be bound.
I think it’s good to have someone around
To take my side, to set the pace, to bear
The distance and to gently lead me where
I know I need to go,
    But I have found
Myself spinning around things I don’t know.
I’m leaping after birds up in the air
And tracking common scents into the ground,
    But I have found
The one whose leash I share at every turn
Keeps telling me the things I ought to know
But giving me the time I need to learn.

    4

God is the man. I am the dog.
I’m not the man I once thought I was.
He seems so far away. I am the dog.
Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Drawing me close to the man up there.
I don’t have words to say. I am the dog.

But I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.

God is the man, but I am the one
Who walks with him when the day is done
And with each breaking dawn. I am the dog.

   5

Lately my mind has turned the metaphor
Of man and dog, the leash and the routine
Upon its head. What can these verses mean
If I’m still learning what the walking’s for?
And can there even be a metaphor
Sufficient for the poetry I’ve seen
Along the way, when every step has been
Part of a song I’ve never sung before?
    All the more,
 I will walk, and in my walking sing,
And with my singing cherish the routine
And through routine embrace each metaphor
    all the more
Of God and man, of learning how to pray,
Of never understanding everything
About this life but walking anyway.

    6

And I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given.
I’m learning how to pray.

Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Keeping me close to the man up there,
And he’s not so far away. I am the dog.

Back to the Bloog

Dan, I enjoyed your last poem, and wonder if we shouldn’t be submitting our extra-bloogular commentary to the symposium.  I suppose that’s up to each email’s author, though.  As for my own comments, regarding allusions, I wanted to at least add this to the mix: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a great poem in part because of its extensive use of allusions - and yet, by its rhythm and repetition and rich imagery, it is also a great example of a poem that can be appreciated on many levels, even if we don’t “get” all the references.  If anyone is interested, check out http://www.thirtybirdspoetry.com/2011/03/social-creatures.html for my own Prufrock allusions.  Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Anyway, here’s my latest one or two efforts.  I’ve alluded to these in those extra-bloogular exchanges and in recent phone calls with Mom, but these are otherwise allusion free.  Maybe that makes these less “great,” but this is where I’m at.  It is still a walking poem, the whole thing being composed and revised in my head while dogwalking.  Dan, you may be interested in knowing that I also had some acoustic guitar in my head for the second part, and if it were a song, Johnny Cash would have to sing it the way he did in covering Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. There, will that make up for the lack of allusion?

heaven's gravity

In a J. Alfred mind (Prufrock is there—

etherized, we know, sequestering the dare)

I measure out life not with coffee spoons

but by the bloogs blowing by, the three moons

of Na-Nupp, which like Jupiter’s orbs should

have names: Jonathan, Joshua and Anne, good

shepherds of inertia—the shantiest

of all great theorems, and still Newton’s best:

that bodies in motion (or not) remain

always so, spoofing the legerdemain

of less-than-familial forces. We will

remain in such celestial space and still

(like Lear’s storm, still) avail our naked souls

to weather out residual, bedlam shoals

—those we know we should not leap. Yes, we know

too well the law and the prophets, and so

we adumbrate their future relevance

in all we hope to do, in circumstance

beyond our vain control. Christ, where are we

without the course of heaven’s gravity?

[Knitting] On the Road

As we pack for our trip out west, exchanging everyday tedium for road trip periphanalia, our settings slowly recalibrate to vacation mode. Thoughts of dish detergent turn instead to, “How many books should I pack for two days through Kansas?” (Inhale.) In our pantry, practical Crock Pot ingredients are shoved aside for bright boxes brimming with gummi-somethings. Glass cleaner is forgotten and sunscreen takes its place.

(Exhale.)

I pack my clothes along with the bags of general family sundries that someone has to pack: calamine lotion and paper plates. I pack up my toddlers’ clothes (who, left to their own devices, would pack eight pounds of picture books, three swimsuits and a clutch of Legos).

And I pack my knitting projects for the road.

I am only a little embarrassed to admit that I put more energy into the planning and gathering of knitting projects than all other trip components combined. There is a science to picking the perfect knitting-on-road-trip projects. The projects must offer difficult elements to challenge my ablilities (when else do I have the luxury of undivided knitting time anyway?) and lots of straight stockinette to knit blindly as I gaze at the changing scenery. The yarn must be beautiful and the pattern must produce a finished project that will be a worthy vacation souvenir.

As I knit on the road, each tidy stitch falling into place, I feel myself realign.

On the road I can breathe, my lungs fill with renewal and hope and optimism.

Out the window the changing landscape excites my imagination and a fresh person awakens within me. Ideas of new worlds enter my brain, mutating my DNA. (As I pass a creek in Wyoming named Old Woman Creek I know beyond any doubt that this will be the name of the winery I’ll open when I am old, and ready to settle down again.)

On the road I slip out of my old soul, unfettered by past sins and present failings, a snake skin shed. I am freed from the person I am known to be. I am free to improve.

Around the bend I am sweet and charitable.


Over the next hill I am who I want to be.

Cutbank, MT

"Don't take your kids to the Terrace Motel," said
the man at the Plaza, who didn't have room,
and the Super 8 boss who didn't like kids.

Our door at the Terrace was guarded by Duke,
a sleepy old dog that had nothing to prove--
he and Nkeesa, a door further down.

These ne'r-do-well doors of the Terrace Motel
had paintings of Tweety Bird, Ernie and Bert,
Bugs Bunny and Wily and--you name the rest:

the owner one day let his daughter range free
and cheer up the joint for Nkeesa and Duke
and anyone else closing doors on the place.

He told us "Nkeesa is Blackfoot for friend."
We pet her and left our kids sleeping inside,
then ventured to Main Street and down to the 'Den'

where tiny credentials lent drinks on the house--
ours just being strangers and paused passers-by
who wanted to burrow a night in this town.

Some players at pool sidled shots and themselves
and slid, when all done, to the dark to drink more;
my wife and I racked a new table of balls

and lanced through the fun of seventy-five cents
and wondered a little how little kids slept
(obeying the oldest and wisest, we hoped).

Stealthily, somebody put three quarters down
followed soon after by another three coins--
the promise of winners to claim table rule,

indigenous right to itinerant gains.
We learned that "Oki Nikskani" launched each game:
the greeting of Blackfeet that made us new friends,

"quite like the dog attending our kids," but this
was a sign to get back to base, the Terrace
in Cutbank--a beautiful dive to be inn.

House

This is our new house, same as the old house,
Where we once lived before moving away
Into the next house, the house before this house
Ran out of room for a family to stay.
We thought the next house might be the last house
To live out our days in an ambient way
But this is the next house after the last house,
Where we once lived before moving away.

We thought the last house might be the best house,
And it was nice for a year and a day:
It was a new house, a nothing-to-do house,
All we could want for the price we could pay,
And it was a big house, a two story tall house,
A dream house for those who like dreaming that way;
At least it was newer and bigger than this house,
And it was nice for a year and a day,

But we missed our old house, our used-to-be-cold house,
And found our way back to a place we can say:
"A house that is old is a house that’s well settled
A house that is small can be comfortably warm,
And the house that is ours at the end of the day
Is the house we return to, the house we call home."
This is a good house, the house we’ll remember.
We’ve found our way back to a place we can stay.

A Very Full Month

Dear Symposians,

July was a very full month.  It would have been full enough with the wonderful weekend in New Glarus and at the farm (thanks Mom & Dick!), the two night visit from the Prague Lamkens (thanks Dan and Katrina and kids), the extra time Andrew could spend with Joey (thanks Joey!), the Pecatonica fan club at Suessical (thanks everyone).  It also would have been full enough with the introduction of Yoshi to our family (kids, you can say thanks Dad here).  But as good as all that has been, what made this month the fullest is that it was the month we returned to our old digs here at 1192 Griffith, following another full month in June of preparation.  We have painted walls, installed floors, replaced ceiling fans, had a tub painted, paid a plumber to fix our toilet (expensive, but not as much as the extra running water had costs us over the years) moved out junk and moved furniture from one house to the next, and, most recently, put up a new fence around our patio (thanks Yoshi).  But we are moved in now!

So now you know why I have not had much time to add to the Symposia.  Dan, I enjoyed reading Bud Jako Bach - I kind of wished you hadn’t told me the ending before I read it, but it was a compelling read all the same.  And Josh, I am only now realizing that that whole best album discussion was at one point tagged to be a Symposium topic.  Please, do contribute directly, and let Dan’s finally figuring out the system inspire you all.  Bud Jako Dan!

Anyway, being all moved in now, I can finally sit down and write another poem.  It will, of course, be about the house, and, after one rip-off from the Who, it is unavoidably Seussical.

Bud' jako Bach

Pavel’s grandmother didn’t like to talk about his origins, and only did so when a ridiculous assignment at school forced the issue. ‘Bring in a memento of your folks’ usually launched the instructions, and never did any other kindergartener come with a final postcard of his mother, or a fragment from her favorite poet, Wislawa Syzemborksa—written well before anybody’s recognition of her as a Nobel Prize laureate. Pavel was born in 1972, the year the Polish poet published (to whatever extent the government allowed) a collection entitled Could Have, and Pavel’s Polish mother convinced his Moravian father to drive up to Krakow to hear a spring reading.

They were engaged but not yet married: Martyna had been studying literature and Jaromir music theory at Masaryk University in Brno, an hour south of Olomouc, where they dropped off the baby to spend two nights with the less-than-approving grandmother. ‘Why not bring him with you, this Pah-whel of yours? You obviously have your heart set there, even more than on my son.’ ‘Oh, Babi,’ Martyna said with a giggle, ‘bud’ spokojni!’ Jaro blushed at his girlfriend’s familiar use of Russian—easy enough for any Slav to decipher but a fretful precursor as to how they might raise their son. ‘Be at ease, Mama,’ he whispered in Czech as he kissed her and the sleeping baby good-bye.

The recital was among several events they attended in the festive atmosphere of Krakow; college students were everywhere, burning candles on all ends, cramming fun before their looming exams. Perhaps, Martyna posed to Jaro on their return drive, it would be good to keep Pawel in Olomouc until the term is over. Yes, maybe, Jaro groggily replied, tapping the steering wheel to stay awake…. Among the gleanable objects in the ensuing crash were the scribbled lines of “Theatre Impressions”:

For me the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth:
the raising of the dead from the stage’s battlegrounds,
the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,
removing knives from stricken breasts,
taking nooses from lifeless necks,
lining up among the living
to face the audience.

So this was what the grandmother harbored and pulled out for a kindergarten display. The postcard, for the record, was salt to the wound: ‘Dearest Paw-Paw (the baby was barely a year old, so Babicka would have to read it to him so), Do you see the trumpet-player high in the tower? That’s going to be you someday. Your daddy and I will see you soon.’

Independent of such elementary needs for catharsis, his grandma raised Pavel well, if shrouding him from the culture staked in Krakow. Every afternoon the phonograph played Janecek, Smetana, Mahler, Mozart and, occasionally, some sub-Alpian masters. The grandmother hummed to these as she cooked dumpling dinners, while the boy played with toy trucks and his own, quiet sense of regimented traffic.

When Pavel was an impressionable and precocious boy of sixteen, and when pimples didn’t get the most of him, he loved performing the sole bassoon part in his gymnasium orchestra. There wasn’t much pressure in the preparations, even as his conductor forthrightly assumed a demeanor of austerity, preoccupied always on his greater responsibilities for the junior national philharmonic, which drew from conservatories all over the country. Despite such leadership, Pavel’s gymnasium was simply adequate, not altogether dedicated to the art. Probably eight or nine bassoonists nationwide would qualify ahead of Pavel, especially since the conductor already knew his flaws: technical lapses and the tendency to daydream about the non-instrumental lives of the flautists or the harpist or, more directly, Magdalena, whose part he liked to think was most Shakespearean—the ‘hautboy’, he mused, of high, mournful oblivion. Magda also wouldn’t make it beyond their present level, but when she played the small fugal descant in the chorale ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’—“Sleepers, Awake” (he imagined his conductor tossing his baton at his drifting reverie)—no one, nothing, not even the composition itself was more beautiful. But how was that? Magda only plugged into the major fifth and sixth as any faithful button-pusher would. And Pavel’s steady contrapunt to the light melody was written to rebuff her syncopated entrances and keep a Clydesdale’s beat to the requirements of the entire, unsung hymn. Her part and his were the sum function of about eighteen pipes in the preferred varhala, the one-man instrument that Bach understood as the closest channel to spiritual ecstasy.

But for modern sensitivities, that notion was too cathedral. For Pavel, all religion was in the form of Magda, the back of her sweater swaying serenely just centimeters from his knee rising to keep beat—all ligaments and connections beyond the banalities of even the practice sessions for this very moment affirmed that there was nothing he’d rather do than play bassoon for…, well—even his own funeral, as thoughts would so tumble. After all, he had never been at one, even if he could fully imagine…

In which case, it would be the Air from Suite #3 in D major, which precluded any wind instruments: he’d have to learn cello and picture Magda playing viola. Yes, that composition, and then—mutely mincing the matter—a line or two from Syzmborska.

All death and adolescence aside, a quarter-century later, Pavel was now a computer programmer, not particularly versed in musical software like Ovation or Magix, the applications his ten-year old son was fond of tooling with. A bit concerned about the twenty-first century in general, Pavel took his son and little daughter to Bach’s homeland, the Thuringer province of eastern Germany, the insular shell of the sturm and dram environs of Weimar. He had been there several times before, wiggling through the cobwebs of failed communism in burgher cities like his own Olomouc and the ludicrous Karl-Marx-Stadt, that now had the equally abominable name of ‘Chemnitz’: it might have designated some stony stream of ancient importance, or the historic hand-off of one Lutheran Martin to another, but Pavel envisioned a culture of chemical potions, mass-produced to try to sterilize the foibles of any outmoded, well-intended design for sociological rectification.

Instead of the more logical route through Silesia (where Bach’s family purportedly served a small exile) and onward to Dresden-based Saxony, Pavel honored his daughter’s wish to see the white tigers at the Liberec zoo—indeed a curiosity that would help make the trip palatable for all concerned. His son Lukas was a burgeoning hockey fan who appreciated the context of this esoteric mascot of the Liberec team, so he too began to imagine the outing as relevant to him. At any rate, beyond his predilections, he silently honored what his father needed to do.

For there was something driving this journey beyond the ennui of glass-encaged tigers or the rendition of baroque music: Lukas remotely recalled his dad’s account of first slogging to Leipzig alone, getting caught in a snow squall that almost ran him off the road at the mountain pass between borders. He stumbled into a Lenten service at St Nikolas church, where bas relief palm fronds topped each towering column and a varhala chorale bid sleepers to awake, as if naïve to the private circumstances of the listeners—beguiling and almost insidiously exquisite; the late winter storm still beat against the building, but Pavel melted in the nostalgic warmth within, a puddle to pool in the surrender of his senses.

That was the mid-nineties, and Lukas must have been four, barely conscious that his native Czechoslokavia had devolved into Czech Republic. Pavel and his wife conceived a second baby at the behest of the new nation: only a handful of countries in the world were under the unusual threat of losing population by the year 2025, and while Bulgarians and Ukrainians and Czechs could see such an exclusive reality as auspicious, there were among them some restless politicians who knew that replacement labor or (less vocalized) immigration quotas would not favor their long view. The Czechs had an emerging business sense and decided to attack the problem with a billboard campaign, to create a vision of the ‘big picture’; then, adding ingenuity to a figure of genius, they exploited a somewhat archaic idiom that passers-by had to puzzle out:

NEDAVEJTE SI BACHA, BUD’TE JAKO BACH.

Don’t be too careful, be like Bach. The first clause only coincidently brushed upon the composer’s name, but the second implored a sexual revolution, throwing familial caution to the wind as Bach did, even if half his twenty children died before they were school-aged. The visual comprised of a large standing figure of the prolific father and twenty pint-sized children looking just like him, regardless if they were boys or girls. Neither of their mothers made the editors’ cut, perhaps because the billboard was cluttered enough. When their little girl was born, Pavel suggested to his wife the name Johana to show the nation they had done their duty, and although he was joking and they were loathe to play out such a throwback to imposed patriotism, the name indeed fit their curly-haired baby.

Now, the three of them (Mom staying home to work) made their way chronologically through the great composer’s life, bee-lining from Liberec to Eisenach for the humble origins, Weimar for the coming-of-age context, then Leipzig for the fullness of effect. “Though fullness had its fulsome qualities as well,” Pavel explained to his less-than-half-listening back seat. The Leipzig diocese paid relatively little for his labors, then axed him without compunction after an eye surgery gone wrong, forcing an early and anxious retirement…; the understated funeral and obscurity that followed…; the irony of Mendelssohn extending a Jewish hand to resuscitate the interred music of the Reformation. Lukas asked a few questions but was just as eager to count with Johana all the modern windmills they passed.

In Leipzig both Cathedrals were rather dormant, and the museum of Bach’s house was being refurbished. ‘Great,’ thought Pavel—‘the trip sort of amounts to nothing.’ There was a free concert on Thomaskirche square, as menial as that was, and this by an undistinguished Polish quartet that called itself ‘Xerxes’. They were Krakow natives, the playbill detailed, all in their early twenties. The only one pictured making eye contact with the camera was the woman who would play cello, a sort of invitation to the wavering Pavel, who would otherwise relent to the alternative of a water park outside the city. Waiting in the hot square for two hours would test the children’s patience, but…bud’ jako Bach, he tacitly insisted. “Bud’te”, he pluralized for his kids.

They ate a soup and sandwich lunch nearby the square, then ice cream cones precariously in the press of people jockeying for a spot close to the small platform beneath the stature of Bach. A German woman among the throng pointed out to Pavel’s kids little plastic chairs front and center, with courtesy bags of crayons and flipbooks and lollipops—perfect for Johana and (a little old for this) tolerable for Lukas. Pavel thanked the woman and wiggled his way to the far side of the statue, less for his optimal view of the performers and more for the angle to mouth ‘shush’ to his chattering kids, when the time would inevitably come.

A grand entrance by the master of ceremonies anticipated such a shush, though his booming voice through his microphone compelled everyone’s attention. He was Günter somebody—Übermensch flashed into Pavel’s brain as the man stepped onto the platform and off, engendering instant delight to the majority assembled, flourishing his urbane words of welcome with efficient jokes that the heaviest patrons in the front lines of folding chairs encouraged with throaty laughter. Xerxes waited behind the statue, pressing ears to their instruments in subtle, nervous fidgets. They apparently knew German, as no one was beside them to cue in Günter’s swaggering set-up. Pavel looked at his kids sizing up to the barrel-chested man, wondering how they were making sense of the bombast, any better than himself.

The quartet, announced with due epithets and ebullient applause, took their twenty steps from behind the statue to their chairs. They adjusted music into their stands and did a final tuning, as if for show, and the violinist said something self-deprecating, in fragmented German, to further please the crowd. Pavel watched them from the side, but had a more direct view of his children, who had diverted their attention to their coloring books.

They began with Beethoven’s Pastoral from Symphony #6 in F Major, followed by an obligatory Bach—slyly challenging the halcyon occasion with ‘O Man, Bemoan thy Grievous Sins’ from St Matthew’s Passion. Then, to introduce a composer from their homeland, they played a fragment from Krzesimir Debski’s double concerto for violin and viola. Pavel remotely remembered this composer from a ‘Taniec Sudecki’ effort he played at Masaryk University: the dance of the Sudetens would perhaps be ill-received here in the loose-thread associations of ‘Sudenland’, as none of its modern, southern inhabitants referred to the range.

In between pieces Günter would wield his craft, his gift for gab. Naturally there would be some playing to the crowd, assembled here this beautiful afternoon, all the way from München—what, not yet in the mood for Oktoberfest?—to Koningsberg—yes, that little (cough) Russian (cough) enclave that still boasted Kant over Kalinin. Pavel wondered whether the little critters in the front row would receive Günter’s attention: there were a half dozen more installed next to Lukas and Johana, oblivious, like them, to the banter.

But after the penultimate piece Günter acknowledged their presence. With ‘gross magnanimity’, Pavel thought he heard, we should hear what the least of these are hearing today: “Wie heisst du?” Günter posed, and leveled the mic to Lukas’ face. Pavel half mimicked his son’s instinctive whiplash: he wanted nothing of this parlance. On cue, Günter flipped the mic upwards and into his ready quip, which set the audience laughing, then deadpanned another question to Lukas, who mumbled something in no language Pavel could decipher. Günter probably made the same observation back into the mic, along with some kind of ‘kinders say the darnedest things’, which this time, with the guffawing crowd, set himself on an amplified ‘Ha, Ha, Ha!’ Lukas looked at his dad, who offered little commiseration if self-evident consternation. “Nevadí,” Pavel mouthed—“don’t worry.” Xerxes started the strains of a modified version of Zarathustra, and Günter slipped into the shade behind the statue, to enjoy a well-earned smoke.

Now Pavel wanted to jam the cigarette down his throat. What nerve to assume a little kid from Olomouc—never willingly part of any reich—would necessarily know what to say to this grandstanding guy. How would his majesty fare with the same verbal challenge in Olomouc? And would he deign to hear Xerxes there, at a venue that might stand more to reason? Or in Krakow, preserved in principle during Nazi occupation but geographically smack between the smog of Auschwitz and Majdanek? Pavel was not the type to act on such ire—hostility wasn’t in his weltanschauung—but just as he stepped in the direction of the unsuspecting charge d’affaires, Lukas stirred from his little chair and scampered toward his father. He’d been writhing in embarrassment, red-cheeked and blurry-eyed, and Pavel had to hold him, even if that did little to satisfy.

‘Feel like clocking him?’ Pavel wanted to say. ‘Imperial pigs—it starts in little stages. The smallness of self-aggrandizement, the ignorance of what Othello calls “the cause. It is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!” Or what Syzmborska crops in “Hitler’s First Photograph”:

No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.

That, son, is from People on the Bridge—what we are, not people on any itinerary of our own drafting. We can only ‘sin boldly’, as Luther observed, and that must mean making goddamn Günter eat his cigarette. You surely see the difference: he sins like a coward, above and below reproach. And Lukas—’

“Dad,” he broke into what seemed like furious silence, “I want to go home.”

Then Pavel looked over to Johana, watching Xerxes as intently as any of the adults behind her. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed her brother’s escape. Her curly head bobbed ever so slightly to the strokes of the cellist and she could have sat there into the evening. Provided, of course, she knew she was not abandoned. “Lukas, I know it may not settle the shame—and I mean this jerk’s shame, not yours—but you’d be the best big brother in the world if you went back to sit with Johana. I’ll stay here, and afterwards we’ll leave.”

Lukas demurred, shifted his weight away from the whole scene, but then, upon hearing his dad’s cheerier whisper—‘nedavej si bacha’—pursed a knowing smile and walked toward Johana.

Nothing worth rationalizing, Pavel melted anew.