The Birthday Tree

It's Saturday morning, the first day of November, All Saints' Day.

The maple tree in front of my house is bright red. Not a rusty fall sort of red, but scarlet--a red that fills the bay window and turns the air in the living room pink. Parents of trick or treaters stopped to admire the color yesterday. The tree and the blue sky curving above it smiled benignly on the witches, superheroes, and firemen climbing my front stairs for Tootsie Rolls and Mary Janes.

In our family that tree is called The Birthday Tree, specifically, Kris's Birthday Tree. Kris, the first baby in our family, was born on a grey and rainy All Saints' Saturday twenty-two years ago. He was born at home, with a midwife, in a house that we had purchased and moved into just a month earlier. On the day of his birth, the house sheltered us, a cocoon around this new mother, new father, vulnerable infant. The next day dawned brilliant, clear and cold, and we saw for the first time the splendor of this maple tree, displayed, it seemed, just for us, a celebration of our little Kristoffer.

The tree's boughs are close enough to the ground to inspire climbing. During the summer, a couple of neighbor kids dragged a box found in an alley somewhere to the parkway in front of our house and used it to get themselves up to those first branches, so they could sit there, superior, surveying the stop sign, the intersection, the sidewalks. When our kids were small, Lon would lift them onto that low bough and stand beneath, ready to catch them if they fell, ready to help them down when they got bored.

Ten years ago, when construction trucks tore up our street, laid new sewers, and then repaved it, the tree took a bad hit. Carelessly, when no one seemed to be looking, some random piece of equipment chunked away an eighteen-inch circle on the street side of the tree trunk. I called the town forestry department. I don't know if they came out with emergency medicine for the wound. The leaves seemed thinner the next couple of summers, but the tree came back. The scar is ugly. The bark that thickened around the exposed vascular tissue of the tree is crude and gnarly. But the tree's canopy is full, deep green in the summer and celebration red on the last days of October and the first days of November.

The birthday boy called earlier this morning--earlier than I expected to hear from him today. Halloween on a Friday night means great parties for twenty-somethings. But he had awakened to an emergency: his computer wouldn't turn on. With two weeks to go on the one-year warranty, this is a good time to have this problem. I went to the internet to find customer support and turned Kris over to his sister for a happy birthday conversation. By the time I had information, Kris had figured otu what was wrong. The laptop's battery needed charging. Connected to a power source, it was fine--ready to play music so that its owner could go back to sleep.

A boy still needs his mother, I guess. We all need each other. The maple's leaves nourish the tree, and even after the leaves are shed, the tree will live on through the winter and bud again in the spring. Our lives nourish each other's and make each other's lives possible. Riches and complexity of thought and feeling come from those who have gone before and from lives all around us.

I read two nourishing stories in this morning's New York Times. After weeks and weeks of reading mostly election news--some blatantly partisan, some flatly balanced and blind to objective truth, the vivid human emotion in these stories was a relief. One was about medics and an Army doctor fighting to keep a bleeding man alive after a shrapnel attack on their post in the wilds of Afghanistan. The other told about opera-going Supreme Court justices, liberal and conservative, awed at meeting Leontyne Price at a National Endowment for the Arts luncheon in her honor. Very different settings. Life, death and violence in the first, the recollection of artistry subtly portraying these things in the other.

Dare I quote Studs Terkel who died yesterday? Or my sainted husband who loved to satirize the checkered-shirt Chicago icon: "Oh, the humanity . . . the humanity!"

Saints, a procession through the ages, of people sanctified and made holy, growing up and growing old, bleeding and dying for each other, giving life to new generations on God's good and fragrant earth.

Birthday tree 2017

I've been watching the birthday tree.

That would be the maple tree in front of our house which Lon noticed, and then I saw, too, had turned brilliant red when the sun rose on Sunday, November 2, the day after our son Kris was born. Sometime in the next few years, as the tree put on its annual show for our All Saints' Day baby, Lon dubbed it "the birthday tree."

Lon liked to make legends. Some he made by living them, "Front Page" style in the newsroom. He also liked to name his cars and compare life to his favorite movies. He liked our kids' birth stories, myth-size family stories, and created them as well as kept them.

I came to believe in his story of the birthday tree. The pink glow that its scarlet leaves cast on the living room in late October and early November is like a filter on an aging actress. It lifts my spirits, gentles my soul, and probably hides wrinkles, or at least bathes them in flattering rose-pink.

But it's not a typical year for this red maple in the parkway. Midway through October its branches were dotted with red leaves, but they blew off on a windy day. The leaves still on the tree are green or dull green-grey. They were nothing to today's Halloween Batmen and Spidermen, the miscellaneous hooded middle-schoolers with gruesome greasepaint, or the tiny preschool princesses (one of whom  carried her blue princess pumps and plopped them on the porch at my feet when she said "trick or treat"--they hurt to wear, said her mom, but they were still part of her costume).

The birthday tree has not gone glorious, at least not yet. Might be the lateness of the fall, yet another sign of pervasive climate change. Might be damp weather, or dry weather, or grief.

I miss Kris intensely. (He died three months ago, at the age of 30.) His cheerful, alert, oh-fuck-it spirit is very much alive to me in photos and memories. I resist saying much about this, whether it be in simple words or in metaphor, lest the explaining take the edge off, dull the memory or diminish how much I hate that this happened.

The weather app says it will rain tomorrow, on Kris's birthday. From the look of the tree today there won't be a scarlet surprise in my front window in the morning--no matter what the pigments do as winter approaches. Maybe next year.

I've got a snapshot of Kris, maybe seven years old, climbing in the tree in spring, red t-shirt, red buds on the branches against a blue sky. Can't post it, because the computer and scanner are resisting the commands coming at them from the mouse.

Maybe next year.

All Saints 2017

Random on All Saints Sunday, November 5, 2017

1. It's been a long and very full weekend. I have no hope of putting together a coherent post, especially after a couple of Lagunitas IPAs and a Chicago Classic pizza at Lou Malnati's.

2. But stuff has been splatting on the windshield of my spirit, like insects on a long night drive. Can't ignore the mess.

3. I've sung Morten Lauridsen's Lux aeterna three times in the last 24 hours. It's gorgeous. It's ethereal. It's not even all that hard to sing. I've purposely stayed away from taking in the translation of the Latin, even from thinking about it. I can't produce the space and the sound and the support for the musical line if I'm thinking about that eternal light and my dear ones who rest there. (Or in Kris's case, are playing Frisbee with Jesus--my mind went there briefly during one performance and had to be rapidly called back to the Latin.)  

4. Space and sound and breath embody Spirit in music, which lifts earth to heavenly spheres of joy and laughter and light. Is that, maybe, incarnation in reverse?

5. More than once today, I found myself wondering if we have taken the hard edge off sainthood, or have sentimentalized the inevitable grief of living with our teary remembrances of dear ones, our candles lit for "saints" now in heaven with God. For "all of us," says the canticle, "all of us go down to the dust." And then—dear God!—24 people (is that the most recent total?) are murdered at 11:30 on a Sunday morning in a Baptist church in Texas. The incense of shock and sorrow barrels across Twitter and Facebook and internet news sites, as a few prophetic voices cry, this should not be! But sadly, we feel more and more helpless each time this happens. And what other response is there then, than sentimentality over the stories of the dead. 

6. "I am not resigned," said Edna St. Vincent Millay in "Dirge Without Music." 

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

7. I'm with Edna--not resigned, though I have seen the ashes on the hard ground, even as the spirit of loved ones lost flows all around me and within me, in memory, in thought, in joys, in places, in people. 

8. Spent some time with Kris's friends, who were "krawlin' for Kris" along Madison Street in Forest Park last night, visiting the bars they'd hung out in together, before his ALS diagnosis, before the wheelchair, before he died. I'm not good at late nights in bars with funny stories, teasing, pool tables and punching bags--never was. But it was good to be with them for a short time, to hug them, to enjoy their company, even as a totally sober old person. 

9. A friend pointed out to me today that to call a maple tree losing its leaves in fall a birthday tree is to put death into a larger context, to suggest that something else is coming into being. A poet, perhaps, could say this elegantly in sixteen lines, or twenty--and would discard or hide these random notes. Me--I'm going to hit publish and pick up my knitting. 

Firing on all cylinders

I'm rehearsing a show these days. I'm the director.

I love directing. It's challenging. You get to work closely with a bunch of interesting, creative people. You get to help them be successful. Sometimes you have to negotiate, but you, the director, get the final say--at least until the show opens and things start to go their own way.

My job as director is to make sense of things. To make sense of the script, of what's behind the script, and of the bigger picture suggested by the script. And to make sense of all the details suggested by the music, if it's a musical (as this show is). You start with words and actions on paper, written by someone  you've never met (at least in this case). You try to understand and think about and pretend all kinds of things that make those words and actions seem real and truthful and believable.

It's not at all like life.

Oh, the goal may be to create something lifelike. What's up on that stage is based on a lot of observation of life. But it's not at all like life.

I know this because this afternoon I went directly from four hours of rehearsal to life. A family backyard birthday gathering. At rehearsal I'm the person in charge, the person who is working full-speed ahead, millions of neurons firing in the brain at split-second intervals.  I try to fill up songs with action: "Food, glorious--also wonderful, fabulous, magical and beautiful--food." March here, march there, march in a semi-circle, march to the front, to the back and up on the table. The song from "Oliver!" is sung by children, workhouse orphans, wan and pale. I have delightful, cooperative children in this show, but they  jump up and down and lose focus when I stop to think. Stress hormones to the max. We moved on from there, to other scenes and a dozen new problems, many of which I had spotted and solved days ago as I prepared for this rehearsal in my backyard. Which isn't to say that the solutions worked when executed by actual people.

When I write, I work at sentences until they match some higher ideal of rightness in my head. When I direct,  I work at scenes and manipulate actors until what I see seems right and smooth and brings clarity in the story. I look at things hard, and then I change them.

Cut to the birthday party: points to me for realizing that I needed to be self-observant and careful and quiet until I wound down a bit. Because what I really want to do is bark orders at people, change the way they're sitting, tell them what to say and laugh too loudly. I am sparkling and commanding, articulate and running the conversation, with knitting needles clicking furiously. The sock on the needles may have saved me. Somehow as the fingers speed through the  twenty stitches on a needle in something under forty seconds, the mind falls under the control of that hypnotic rhythm.

I wanted to control the family story. To control the stories of everyone there. People are struggling in their lives--sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, grandmas, significant others and my own children. I want to shape their stories and their struggles and who they are into something that gets resolved and that means something. But on this summer evening they're happy playing bags, or sawing apart a downed tree branch, or showing off the innards of an old upright piano. I want clarity--why do we do these things? To what end? Is everyone okay? Where will it all end?

Not at all like the stage.

It's a summer night. Later there will be a bonfire. The lawn stretches out into gray-green as the sun goes down. The games end. The bugs come out. The young folks relax in their chairs, and the old ones go home to their beds.

And we face tomorrow with the same lonely questions we had at the beginning of this day.

The pre-birthday-dinner post

It's my birthday. Fifty, um, something. I'm sitting at the computer watching birds in the overgrown slippery elm outside the window next to my desk. The glass is covered with anti-glare film, to make it easier to see the computer screen, and the blind is mostly down. It makes it hard for the birds to see me. I've got seven of them within sight, tiny sparrows and some others I'm not sure about, other than suspecting they're young because of their spotted feathers.

How long will they live? A few years? Less than that? The bright red cardinal I've seen around our house for several years now--is he the same bird? Or somebody's grandson?

Next week this foliage will be cut down. The yard's a mess, stuff like volunteer trees got away from me years ago, and my neighbor has house painters coming next week, who need to be able to get at the side of her house. Lorenzo from the landscape company told me "you won't recognize the place." That will be nice, too, but I will miss gazing into the "tree house" from my desk, feeling like I know these birdies well.

Of course, now that I'm trying to take their picture, they've all disappeared. Did someone tweet that there are better bugs to be had elsewhere?

I watched an episode of "Through the Wormhole" last night with my son. It was about humans achieving greater longevity--living a thousand years, even forever. Morgan Freeman's narration made mind-spraining leaps from work on artificial intelligence and graveyard bacteria to aspirations for making the human body, or at least the human mind, last longer. In the final segment, a physics professor, photographed in a New Orleans cemetery, predicted an age thousands of years in the future when humans would merge with God and the universe. His language sounded almost creedal in proclaiming the  communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

J. S. Bach died on this day in 1750, probably of complications from diabetes. Birds with blow-away feathers and tiny, hollow bones flit through the depth of foliage behind my window now, on this warm summer day. Where will they go next week? My life stretches back over half a century to my mother giving birth--my aging mother who I have to pick up from physical therapy in a few minutes. My children whom we will soon meet for dinner eagerly plan their futures--college, marriage, families, homes.

I'm perched on my chair, writing it all down.