Hopeful

It is 9:30 in the morning. The usual breakfast of tea and toast has been consumed, and the day is before me. It is Monday, a free day without chanoyu lessons (Tuesday) or shakuhachi lessons (Friday). Both, of course, are still on Zoom and Skype. 

 

So, today I have to come up with a plan. There is enough bread so I cannot fall back on that. There is enough wine and groceries stored to take us into May. It is too early and too cold to start picking weeds out of the garden. What’s a guy to do?

 

I wander to the front of the house where Charlotte is busy managing her father’s finances and look out the window. The same cars parked there for the last year are still there. The usual litter of fast food wrappings and smashed plastic bottles is absent, so no need to venture out front. Then I notice a slight rustle in the bare bushes below me. 

 

On closer inspection, I see a meticulous female cardinal. She is olive brown with a feathery crown and a striking orange beak. Then there is a flutter to the right, and it is another female, this one slightly smaller. Is this the child come back with its mother or a competing female, it is hard to know. 

 

Now the front windows have my attention. I sit and wait and hope to catch a glimpse of the striking red cardinal male. Instead, a plump robin scurries from under the bushes, and runs straight into a squirrel as it descends our doomed ash tree.

 

Thirty years ago, we moved into a neighborhood inundated with squirrels but over the decades, the forestry around the house has changed.  Many of the large maples rotted and were taken down. The next door neighbor deforested her backyard, and we removed a large stringy conifer that was mistakenly planted too close to the porch. And with the loss of the trees was the concurrent loss of squirrels. 

 

Last summer we spent quality time with the above critters. We got to know some of them individually. There was the put upon mother robin with a mass of unruly feathers that got skinnier as her child became plumper. There was the acrobatic squirrel with the chopped ears. And the pair of downy woodpeckers that had to fight the sparrows for their turn at the suet hung from the pergola. 

 

It is late March as I write this, and I think back to the warm days in February. I stepped outside into the sun and heard trumpeting geese as they flew low in two perfect V-shaped formations heading north. This was before the climate gremlins decided to dump five feet of snow in the backyard. The snow blower and me had quite a workout. Knock-on-wood, neither of us had a malfunction.

 

When we practice tea in Chicago there is conflict synchronizing our seasons with the seasons in Kyoto. Chanoyu and Japan take particular pride in the changing seasons. I have experienced this during three visits to Japan. The trips have alternated spring, fall, and spring; or in Japanese parlance, sakura, koyo, and sakura.   

 

It is Shubun now, the vernal equinox, and the middle of spring in Kyoto. Of course, here it is cold and spring has barely begun. Only a few hardy ground hugging flowers have immerged. So, when we discuss the factitious flower arrangement in the tokonoma during tea practice, which flowers are appropriate?

 

In Kyoto, there are myriad flowers and flowering trees to choose from. Not so in Chicago: possible candidates are scillia, crocus, or maybe if I am alert, a few forced bright yellow forsythia.

 

2020 was overwhelming and despite my initial hopes, the beginning of 2021 was equally so. I remind myself to be hopeful each morning, and watching the buds and green shoots break through the soil is part of this regime. Soon Chicago’s flowers and trees will catch up with Kyoto’s flora, and the tea conversation will move onto other topics . . . And I find this hopeful. 

 

April 2021

Morte

I have never been religious. As a child, I flirted with religiosity, captivated with what the priest was doing at the altar with his back to the congregation. Curious about the incantations in a dead language; curious about the wine and the water, the gold and the crystal; curious about the unleavened bread that was turned into the body of Christ and the meticulous care with which it was handled. 

As it turned out my first experience with wine (the priests had a wine cellar in the basement), and my first experience with lying (sneaking to the bakery on Lincoln Ave. before going to class) are probably the lasting memories. 

 

I was not cut out to be an altar boy. The Latin prayers were impossible for me to memorize and I never got in the rhythm of ringing the bells during the mass correct. I stuck with it until the mass lost its magisterial mystery by reverting to English and guitars. It was as if they had shown their hand in a game of cards and it was lacking.

 

I am not sure why I bring this distant memory up. What I am really thinking about is morte/death, the impossible notion of the pandemic’s dead. I watched death during my career and it was never easy. If anything I was astounded at how hard it was to die. The spark of life would in most cases linger on much longer then I imagined it could.

 

Of course, this was not the case with traumatic injuries. Despite the incredible energy of the hospital’s staff, it was impossible to reverse the inevitable. I would stand next to the corpse and try to recreate the events to understand what had occurred. A certain amount of introspection is healthy just not too much. 

 

Most of the time, the circumstances did not allow for navel-gazing. There were other pressing problems to address for the living. Time cannot be reversed but of course, you know this. 

 

At the time of writing this, there are approximately 400,000 dead from Covid-19. It is probably not a mistake to add another third to this figure. And this number only takes into count the mortality not the morbidity. Millions have suffered weeks to months of pain and suffering due to the infection, to say nothing of the despair of their families and friends.

 

Early in the pandemic, my household on Talman Ave. decided on caution. Several years back I contracted the flu, and spent 10 to 14 lost day on the living room’s only comfortable chair either shivering wrapped in blankets or sweating pared down to my underwear. It is times like that when I realize how finely tuned our biology is to keep us at equilibrium with the world until a minuscule demon enters our body.

 

When it came to death, my Italian family had well honed rituals. We always had a calendar with the bleeding sacred heart of Jesus in the pantry. The families designated morticians provided it. Many distant relatives died while I was a kid. We would get packed up and spend three or four nights running around the funeral parlor with our cousins. All the while, the departed would quietly supervise our shenanigans.

 

Emotions would ramp up the morning of the burial. Old women clad in black would begin to wail. Occasionally someone would try to hug their love one as the caskets lid lowered. Us kids were like the Greek choir in the back of the room giggling and receiving the designated enforcers evil eye.

 

As the years went by, people lived longer, and our extended family grew farther apart, these events took on less significance and finally ended. It seemed that grief became more personal than collective. 

 

My father funeral was an unplanned (by us at least) affair in a packed church complete with an opera company singing his beloved Italian arias. I am not sure about my mother, but my sister and I were overwhelmed by turnout. Riggio’s Italian restaurant was also overwhelmed with the hundreds of post funereal friends and family that showed up to pay their respect and have pizza.

 

My mother outlived the vast majority of her friends and over three years slowly faded away with dementia. Her send off was a quiet affair in the beautiful chapel at Villa Scalabrini where she spent the last year of her life under the care of a compassionate order of Italian nuns.

 

I beg your forgiveness for burdening you in this time of plague with yet another diatribe. It is February now and the days are lengthening. Each day that we are not buried in snow or wallowing in below zero temperatures is a blessing that brings us closer to spring, glorious spring! Spring is when the glass is have full, and if we have been lucky we can leave morte behind and watch the tiny shoots burst forth with life.

 

March 2021