Once Upon a Time...

There was a tall, strong youth with a lively wit and a promising new career who fell in love with a beautiful and wealthy girl. They married and made a life together, and soon they were expecting a child. The child, a girl, was stillborn, and was never given a name. Her mother, body taxed by the pregnancy and its complications, passed away three days later. Her wealthy family, distraught over her loss, made all of the funeral arrangements, burying her in finery in a glass coffin.

The young man was heartbroken, but he carried on with his life.

In two years' time, he was engaged to be married, this time, to the best friend of the one he had loved and lost: a woman without flashy good looks, but with a strong constitution and a good sensible head on her shoulders. The two settled down to life together, had several children, and, eventually, dozens of grandchildren. They were never affluent, but they did their best in life, and they left a legacy of honest, virtuous living for their posterity.

The man never spoke to anyone about the one he had lost. Not, that is, until one day, decades later, when he opened the door to his history as he tinkered on an old tractor engine. His grandson had just shared that he had taken a real liking to a Swedish girl of his acquaintance. He replied, "I really liked a girl too, once. I married her..." And thus, for the first time, was this true tale told aloud in the light of day.

The man lived an honorable life and to a ripe old age. When he died, he left instructions for his widow. He was to be buried without fanfare, and without any trappings of life.... including clothing, in the simplest coffin money could buy, a man-sized cardboard box.

I couldn't help but think of the obvious contrasts when hearing this true story recounted to me by the grandson who had been there on the day when the family secret became something that could be told without hush and speculation. She was wealthy and taken early from life, buried in the most extravagant of ways. Her life became a secret that was only whispered behind closed doors. He was of modest means -- a hard worker, but not privileged -- of advanced age. He left this life in the simplest way our culture will bear. He's remembered freely and openly, and the wife of his second chance was loved and honored as family matriarch until a still more advanced age, and is similarly remembered with honesty and candor.

Of course, this all begs the question of what really matters in life. I suppose the answer is obvious... as obvious as the fate that befell the young woman plucked from life so young and so tragically, and with such a fairy tale flair in all of its detail.

We leave the stuff of our lives behind, ripe for the recounting, whether we exit in finery or simplicity, in glass caskets or cardboard. And when we arrive at heaven's gates, we all arrive in the same condition: in need of boundless mercy.

The Inheritance - the beginning

When a baby is born, one of the first things everyone does is identify who he looks like. "He has Jacob's eyes... Melissa's ears... that smile and the clef in his chin are his grandfather's. Look at those long fingers -- those are piano-playing fingers like his Aunt Allison's." We look for the links, the clues that hint at belonging. We look for the hand-me-downs our genetic code gives us that make us simultaneously uniquely ourselves and completely un-originally part of something bigger than ourselves.

Some of us allow that fascination with belonging to drive us to identify our roots -- the who we are and where we come from. I am one of the people afflicted by this fascination, as others have been before me. I marvel to think that if one immigrant had chosen not to leave Germany or Norway or England or France for a new land, if one had died on the journey, if one Civil War cannonball had flown more true, if one couple had not fallen in love or married by decree, if a miscarriage had not ended a pregnancy early so that another could develop, if illness had not spared the life of a child -- I would not be here to wonder about any of it.

Perhaps this fascination (like my tendency to turn my plate and eat each thing on it one at a time as it occupies the space directly in front of me) is just part of my inheritance. I don't know. I do know that I spring from a long line of people who are permanently linked to one another because, by virtue of bearing a child, they are each strands in the thread that makes world history my history.

I can't really describe how or why it is so satisfying to make a small discovery that brings me to a stranger father, a distant mother, I didn't know -- that allows me to fill one more box with a name and date and a place. I can't explain it except to say that there is a profound comfort in the growing sense I have that all of the circumstances of their lives conspired to make mine possible. I'm not quite narcissistic enough to imagine that I am the end their lives were moving towards. However, I imagine that every generation made choices in hopes that the future would be brighter for their children and their children's children. Somewhere along the line, that child was me.

It is difficult from this distance in time and space to imagine what some of the lives I am discovering must have been like. Who was Ingeborg, and why did she, at 18, choose to leave her Norse river valley for the wild newness of America? I can make a pretty solid guess as to why. Her reasons must have been much the same as those of her fellow expatriates, as approximately one-third of the Norwegian population sailed as she did over the course of several decades; but I still wonder if she was afraid when she bundled up what little she had and endured, in all likelihood, two sea voyages in cramped, crowded conditions. What was the American dream as it played out in her life? Did she miss the majestic peaks and ice-chilled tilled earth of Norway when she traded it for blustery Wisconsin winters where language and custom and everything was alien?

Her story, like those of so many others whose names and lives preceded mine, has been lost to lost to us. Still, here, at my computer desk in North Carolina, in November of 2007, I can reach out to the frigid Norway of the 1860s with my questions and find, at least, where she was born. Somehow that little gesture is full of meaning for me. It is my small way of thanking her for living, for taking the risks and making the choices that, in the great fire of life, allowed for the forging of my family.

I fancy that I learn something about myself when I learn about Ingeborg and James Madison and Nancy Mary Bennett and all of my near and distant forebears. I imagine, sometimes, that learning what I can about them fills some of the gaps in my own experience. Really, it helps me find meaning in a sink full of dirty dishes, another depressing news story, the passing of a season and the dawning of a new morning when I would rather wallow in the murky darkness of sleep. Somehow, hundreds of ordinary everyday lives conspire to make new lives possible, and my own life may become part of someone else's inheritance.

I suppose one of the reasons I write is a desire to be remembered, to leave something lasting in the world when I am no longer her to imprint myself on the minds of others. As it is, I think I leave a few blackened pixels in cyperspace -- hardly a magnum opus. However, there is a part of me that wonders... if my great-great-great-granddaughter found something I had written in her search of whatever has supplanted the Internet by her time, would she read it with as much wonder and interest as I did the letter I found from my great-great-great-grandmother a few weeks ago? I don't suppose it matters, really. I mean, the measure of our lives has almost nothing to do with what the centuries recall of them if they recall, them at all: but still, I wonder.

In the meantime, I will periodically share what I have learned of the legacy others have left for me. I imagine I won't bother trying to make it chronological (or even logical, for that matter), but as a paltry gift for those living people who share my bloodline and my curiosity about where we came from, I will leave this record. Perhaps it will become, in its own poor way, a small part of our shared inheritance.

Recycled Words

I'm not much of a poet. I play with words, but I am afraid of the simultaneous rigidity and freedom of the form.

I like poetry, but it frightens me. So, rather than visiting my own paltry attempts on anyone else, at least for the moment, I share a few poems I have encountered recently that have stirred something in me.

The Law That Marries All Things

1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.

The rain is free
only in falling.

The water is free only
in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.

-- Wendell Berry

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The Hunkering

In October the red leaves going brown heap and
scatter
over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular
driveway,

and rise in a curl of wind disheveled as
schoolchildren
at recess, school just starting and summer done,
winter’s

white quiet beginning in ice on the windshield, in
hard frost
that only blue asters survive, and in the long houses
that once

more tighten themselves for darkness and
hunker down.

-- Donald Hall

---------------------------------------------------------

Habitation

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:


the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

--Margaret Atwood

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On Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great Gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse.
Spend our resentment, cannon,-yea, disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet, for men's sakes whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

--Wilfred Owen
(Killed in battle one week before WWI ended)

May God Bless and Keep You

There are many people who are blessings in my life. One of them is my brother-in-law, David. I have the opportunity to talk to him on the phone from time to time even though he is an ocean away, and I nearly always leave the conversation feeling encouraged. Today he called to share a song poem with me, and I would like to pass it on, because the sentiment is truly lovely.

Forever Young
by Bob Dylan

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

Thanks, David.

My book

"You know, it seems to me that someone that writes as well as you do should look in to doing it in a more formal way. I just want to come to the first book signing so that I can tell everyone that I told you to 'go girl.'" -- a dear friend in a recent email.

"You should write a book." I have heard that often enough, and sometimes it comes from people whose sanity I have observed and whose judgment I trust and admire. It's flattering, and I hope that if I ever *do* write a book, it turns out they were right and what I produce was worth putting in print.

I've occasionally taken the suggestion seriously enough to spend some of those decidedly self-indulgent, randomly reflective moments before sleep wondering if there is "a book in me."

There may be. I'm simply not sure. I have yet to find it there folded behind a memory or misfiled with a favorite self-doubt... at least not labeled in a way I can recognize. I suppose I shall have to keep looking.

By now I have done quite a lot of writing. My blogs are really only one example, since I write for work and sometimes write for pleasure in other less public places. I've also read several books on "the craft" and have taken some of the wisdom I have gleaned quite seriously. Among the bits of advice I chose to take seriously: write. write often. Hence the writing on and on and on, even when I have nothing to say that is worth reading. For a writer, there's merit to writing -- just writing. At least that is what they say.

Still, even writing that I am a "writer" feels presumptuous. Yes, I have been published. Yes, I get paid to write. Yes, I edit the writing of "real" writers. Yes, I have people come to me for advice who want to become writers. No, I can't wrap my head around the declarative sentence, "I am a writer."

No matter. I write anyway. And I continue riffling halfheartedly through my brain in search of the book that some believe is in there somewhere. And I write some more.

Here is where, for the present, I'll store some of the other things I encounter in the search for my book. Here is where I will place the gibberish that comes to mind and hand. I make no rules. I place no limitations.

I invite you to read if you like, but please know that I am really writing for me, and if you happen to find my scribblings worth reading, it's a marvelous accident. Who knows, perhaps, someday, one of those marvelous accidents will transform into a page in my book.