I can put the period wherever I want to.
This doesn’t have to be the end.
But right now, I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a run-on sentence that just keeps running and running and running and it won’t ever really be the right time to put a period because it seems that as soon as you draw that one little dot everything goes up in smoke, or if not smoke then at least something unexpected happens and that one little dot suddenly seems so insignificant and I think how silly it was to think that it was enough to hold everything in that perfect moment even long enough to take a breath—
I guess that’s why it’s so important to find the rhythm of your breath (’) when you’re running.
Then you get your oxygen without breaking the pace.
***
It seems impossible to write about this. I have started it in my head almost every day since the Wednesday after Spring Break.
Spring. It’s always spring. First year, it was just starting to get warm enough to take our trays and eat outside when he started rinsing his washcloths in the sink at my station on Sundays at lunchtime. It was warm enough to run outside without a T-shirt when he started subbing in the home line on Wednesday nights and telling me stories about third-graders calling him “Hercules” when he ran past the elementary school in the afternoons. It was warm enough to ride a motorcycle when he started asking me to hang out after work.
It was the Sunday of finals week before I accepted his offer. “Nothing implied?” I asked, because he had run high school track with the guy I was dating at the time. Whatever the case, we both really wanted me to ride that motorcycle.
We rode for awhile on all the back farm roads of Highway 19. He showed off to see when I would lose my cool. I never did, though I asked him calmly at a stop sign to slow down a bit. He laughed about it when we got back to the lush green football field. “You never freaked out,” he said while I peeled apart blades of grass and he did round-offs in the shadow of the goalposts.
We talked about our dreams and our passions. He told me how much he’d wanted to go to St. Olaf before he was rejected, and how he’d had to reformulate his goals after that. He was going into the Army Rangers after hopping a few (little?!) hurdles. “No fear,” he said. “Even if I’m afraid of something I still try to do it.” I said goodbye and he promised to write.
The next time I heard from him was the next spring. “Hey there long time no talk... my bad. Truth, it was because my life got turned upside down on me,” he wrote. “I developed cancer in my spleen, liver, and bone marrow. I have been fighting it ever since. These days my spirits are generally pretty high I will make it. One day at a time. So I sent you this message with hopes of answering that small little question in the very back of ur head possibly wondering if that Cafe kid is doing ok.” OK?! His outlook on life was as persistent as always, but the body that I’d watched flip through the air in the sunshine was giving him a run for his money. Or a run for his ambition.
Four months later he wrote me about his “bran new immune system,” said he was doing great and had a lot of life left to live. “You only live once and before you know it it’s too late,” he wrote. “I want to climb mountains, run marathons, travel the world and never look back.”
I told him I was proud of him and asked him to keep me posted on how and what he was doing. He didn’t write back.
I should have known it wouldn’t be until next spring that he came back into my life. I’d just returned from Spring Break in the Ozarks and I was catching up with a friend over dinner when she said, “Hey, I’m sure you heard, but I just wanted to make sure… Chris Lund?”
I felt my stomach float up into my abdominal cavity when it should have dropped. “He passed away. On March 16th.” I hardly ever cry right after something happens, but this time I did. I couldn’t believe that one of the most alive people I’d known had joined the ranks of the least alive.
But what does that mean, really? It was obvious to me in the following weeks that he had very obviously not joined the ranks of the least alive. He wasn’t breathing anymore, but I felt as if every breath that left my chest was leaving his. Every word I spoke, I spoke for him.
One sunny Sunday I rode my bike out to the cemetery where he was buried. His grave wasn’t marked, but I did my only successful cartwheel ever next to the freshest mound of dirt. I wove him chains of flowers and peeled apart individual blades of grass, imagining him telling me to make the most of the day. I promised the wind that I’d never forget him, and rode back to campus in time for work, where I smiled and greeted everyone who passed by.
***
The meter of a poem has a lot to do with
Where you break the lines
And where you breathe.
It has less to do with punctuation,
Less to do with capital letters and grammar,
And more to do with
This-is-how-this-should-be-read
Today.
***
Less than a year ago, Grandma Helen was trying to convince me to spend a Sunday at the orphanage with her and a group from church. When I hesitated, she laughed and instead taught me how to play Bananagrams with a bag of Scrabble letters on the kitchen table. She played her old Frank Sinatra cassette tapes in the old tape player on the fireplace while Grampi did the dishes and she Skyped her friends in Poland. In the afternoon, she planned Aunt Lori’s 50th birthday party, complete with a homemade cake and affirmational party games.
The next Sunday she went to the “Old Folks’ Home” to help lead a church service before I was even awake. We met her later that morning at the English Fellowship service, where someone she’d met at the women’s prison gave a testimonial about how Jesus helped her find her way out of drugs and the mafia. She ran up to Helen after church and gave her a big hug and kiss, and cried, “Helen, I’m going to miss you so much!”
We went home and ate the lunch that Helen made by herself in the kitchen instead of letting me help with anything. I set the table, but mostly I just ate the gumdrops and chocolates she’d left out in a tray on the end table by the photo albums. We were invited for dinner at the neighbor’s with a big group of mission workers at the orphanage. “You’re really sharp,” they told her, awed. “You’re the quickest person of your age I’ve met, maybe ever!” Embarrassed, she giggled and tried to change the subject.
Grampi opened the car door for her and she laughed at his silly jokes and he pulled out her chair so she could sit down at the dinner table. “Let’s shed a little light on the subject,” he would say, switching on the light while she made a beeline for the answering machine or a printed email from an old missionary friend or a Skype date with a far-flung relative. It did not surprise me that she always remembered my birthday, and the card usually arrived in my P.O. box a few days early.
At a group meeting on Wednesday, I checked my email and saw the subject heading: “Helen passed away today.” I was not surprised, since she’d been in the hospital for weeks and I did not expect any treatment to do damage to the tumors nestled in her brain. I didn’t cry until almost two days later, when I was folding laundry and listening to Delilah while my friend Liz wrote a poem in the chair in the corner. I didn’t cry until I realized that I could hardly picture Helen still for a moment, to say nothing about her capacity to be permanently still. I didn’t cry until I realized that a year ago, the picture of her in my head would have been in black and white. Now it was in color and it wouldn’t slow down. My dad told me on the phone on Sunday that they could hardly hear her when she spoke, but my moving mental picture of Helen didn’t use a microphone and her laugh rang through the house as her fingers pounded out old hymns on the keys of the piano in the hall, across from the wall where the picture of Grammi as a four-year-old Shirley Temple-lookalike used to hang when Asha was four years old.
That was ten years ago.
***
“I’m afraid of not existing,” he said quietly in a rare moment of self-exposure. I felt his words echoing into my pillow as I lay in the dark, measuring my breaths so I wouldn’t cry. Maybe.
It might be easier if they just suddenly didn’t exist anymore. But I can still feel them in that aphysical cavity somewhere behind my sternum. It’s as if they exist both inside of me and somewhere in the physical world, and when they stop moving in the physical world the string connecting their two beings is suddenly cut. I reel backward, try to regain my balance since I am no longer tied and balanced by the stage presence of these real-life actors. The end of that string whips around in the wind and I know that those strings will never be tied to anything again. Except on the inside.
***
In music, we play in phrases.
Made up of bars, we break our phrases with an apostrophe ’
That marks the collective drawing of breath.
It’s called the breath mark.
Or the luftpause – stop the wind.
Almost imperceptibly.
Otherwise it breaks the ’ flow of the music.
Through the course of a composition, the wind stops only ’
For a series of moments…
Until the last chord.
Until the end.
This doesn’t have to be the end.
But right now, I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a run-on sentence that just keeps running and running and running and it won’t ever really be the right time to put a period because it seems that as soon as you draw that one little dot everything goes up in smoke, or if not smoke then at least something unexpected happens and that one little dot suddenly seems so insignificant and I think how silly it was to think that it was enough to hold everything in that perfect moment even long enough to take a breath—
I guess that’s why it’s so important to find the rhythm of your breath (’) when you’re running.
Then you get your oxygen without breaking the pace.
***
It seems impossible to write about this. I have started it in my head almost every day since the Wednesday after Spring Break.
Spring. It’s always spring. First year, it was just starting to get warm enough to take our trays and eat outside when he started rinsing his washcloths in the sink at my station on Sundays at lunchtime. It was warm enough to run outside without a T-shirt when he started subbing in the home line on Wednesday nights and telling me stories about third-graders calling him “Hercules” when he ran past the elementary school in the afternoons. It was warm enough to ride a motorcycle when he started asking me to hang out after work.
It was the Sunday of finals week before I accepted his offer. “Nothing implied?” I asked, because he had run high school track with the guy I was dating at the time. Whatever the case, we both really wanted me to ride that motorcycle.
We rode for awhile on all the back farm roads of Highway 19. He showed off to see when I would lose my cool. I never did, though I asked him calmly at a stop sign to slow down a bit. He laughed about it when we got back to the lush green football field. “You never freaked out,” he said while I peeled apart blades of grass and he did round-offs in the shadow of the goalposts.
We talked about our dreams and our passions. He told me how much he’d wanted to go to St. Olaf before he was rejected, and how he’d had to reformulate his goals after that. He was going into the Army Rangers after hopping a few (little?!) hurdles. “No fear,” he said. “Even if I’m afraid of something I still try to do it.” I said goodbye and he promised to write.
The next time I heard from him was the next spring. “Hey there long time no talk... my bad. Truth, it was because my life got turned upside down on me,” he wrote. “I developed cancer in my spleen, liver, and bone marrow. I have been fighting it ever since. These days my spirits are generally pretty high I will make it. One day at a time. So I sent you this message with hopes of answering that small little question in the very back of ur head possibly wondering if that Cafe kid is doing ok.” OK?! His outlook on life was as persistent as always, but the body that I’d watched flip through the air in the sunshine was giving him a run for his money. Or a run for his ambition.
Four months later he wrote me about his “bran new immune system,” said he was doing great and had a lot of life left to live. “You only live once and before you know it it’s too late,” he wrote. “I want to climb mountains, run marathons, travel the world and never look back.”
I told him I was proud of him and asked him to keep me posted on how and what he was doing. He didn’t write back.
I should have known it wouldn’t be until next spring that he came back into my life. I’d just returned from Spring Break in the Ozarks and I was catching up with a friend over dinner when she said, “Hey, I’m sure you heard, but I just wanted to make sure… Chris Lund?”
I felt my stomach float up into my abdominal cavity when it should have dropped. “He passed away. On March 16th.” I hardly ever cry right after something happens, but this time I did. I couldn’t believe that one of the most alive people I’d known had joined the ranks of the least alive.
But what does that mean, really? It was obvious to me in the following weeks that he had very obviously not joined the ranks of the least alive. He wasn’t breathing anymore, but I felt as if every breath that left my chest was leaving his. Every word I spoke, I spoke for him.
One sunny Sunday I rode my bike out to the cemetery where he was buried. His grave wasn’t marked, but I did my only successful cartwheel ever next to the freshest mound of dirt. I wove him chains of flowers and peeled apart individual blades of grass, imagining him telling me to make the most of the day. I promised the wind that I’d never forget him, and rode back to campus in time for work, where I smiled and greeted everyone who passed by.
***
The meter of a poem has a lot to do with
Where you break the lines
And where you breathe.
It has less to do with punctuation,
Less to do with capital letters and grammar,
And more to do with
This-is-how-this-should-be-read
Today.
***
Less than a year ago, Grandma Helen was trying to convince me to spend a Sunday at the orphanage with her and a group from church. When I hesitated, she laughed and instead taught me how to play Bananagrams with a bag of Scrabble letters on the kitchen table. She played her old Frank Sinatra cassette tapes in the old tape player on the fireplace while Grampi did the dishes and she Skyped her friends in Poland. In the afternoon, she planned Aunt Lori’s 50th birthday party, complete with a homemade cake and affirmational party games.
The next Sunday she went to the “Old Folks’ Home” to help lead a church service before I was even awake. We met her later that morning at the English Fellowship service, where someone she’d met at the women’s prison gave a testimonial about how Jesus helped her find her way out of drugs and the mafia. She ran up to Helen after church and gave her a big hug and kiss, and cried, “Helen, I’m going to miss you so much!”
We went home and ate the lunch that Helen made by herself in the kitchen instead of letting me help with anything. I set the table, but mostly I just ate the gumdrops and chocolates she’d left out in a tray on the end table by the photo albums. We were invited for dinner at the neighbor’s with a big group of mission workers at the orphanage. “You’re really sharp,” they told her, awed. “You’re the quickest person of your age I’ve met, maybe ever!” Embarrassed, she giggled and tried to change the subject.
Grampi opened the car door for her and she laughed at his silly jokes and he pulled out her chair so she could sit down at the dinner table. “Let’s shed a little light on the subject,” he would say, switching on the light while she made a beeline for the answering machine or a printed email from an old missionary friend or a Skype date with a far-flung relative. It did not surprise me that she always remembered my birthday, and the card usually arrived in my P.O. box a few days early.
At a group meeting on Wednesday, I checked my email and saw the subject heading: “Helen passed away today.” I was not surprised, since she’d been in the hospital for weeks and I did not expect any treatment to do damage to the tumors nestled in her brain. I didn’t cry until almost two days later, when I was folding laundry and listening to Delilah while my friend Liz wrote a poem in the chair in the corner. I didn’t cry until I realized that I could hardly picture Helen still for a moment, to say nothing about her capacity to be permanently still. I didn’t cry until I realized that a year ago, the picture of her in my head would have been in black and white. Now it was in color and it wouldn’t slow down. My dad told me on the phone on Sunday that they could hardly hear her when she spoke, but my moving mental picture of Helen didn’t use a microphone and her laugh rang through the house as her fingers pounded out old hymns on the keys of the piano in the hall, across from the wall where the picture of Grammi as a four-year-old Shirley Temple-lookalike used to hang when Asha was four years old.
That was ten years ago.
***
“I’m afraid of not existing,” he said quietly in a rare moment of self-exposure. I felt his words echoing into my pillow as I lay in the dark, measuring my breaths so I wouldn’t cry. Maybe.
It might be easier if they just suddenly didn’t exist anymore. But I can still feel them in that aphysical cavity somewhere behind my sternum. It’s as if they exist both inside of me and somewhere in the physical world, and when they stop moving in the physical world the string connecting their two beings is suddenly cut. I reel backward, try to regain my balance since I am no longer tied and balanced by the stage presence of these real-life actors. The end of that string whips around in the wind and I know that those strings will never be tied to anything again. Except on the inside.
***
In music, we play in phrases.
Made up of bars, we break our phrases with an apostrophe ’
That marks the collective drawing of breath.
It’s called the breath mark.
Or the luftpause – stop the wind.
Almost imperceptibly.
Otherwise it breaks the ’ flow of the music.
Through the course of a composition, the wind stops only ’
For a series of moments…
Until the last chord.
Until the end.
1 comment:
Striking and poignant.
A reminder that the act of remembering honors those who have left the physical planes.
Your memory is sharp, and the people you share in writing are tangible because of that memory. I can sense the energies of the people you describe. Your words are so sharp--they hew experiences of a previously unknown person in my perception. You give a bit of them to me and anyone else who reads this. You share their spirit.
The transient happenings of the everyday come alive and have new birth in your text.
Love you 1968.
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