Tag: Remembrance

Anatomy Lesson

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Thumb stuck out as I go
I’m just travelin’ up the road
Maps don’t do much for me, friend
I follow the weather and the wind

I’m hitch hikin’ all day long
Got what I can carry and my song
I’m a rolling stone just rolling on
Catch me now ’cause tomorrow I’ll be gone
~Bruce Springsteen from “Hitch Hikin'”

His reputation was well known and all the medical students had heard the stories about Dr. Rosse. As the Anatomy Professor, his class would become the primary focus of student energy in the first year of medical school, with other classes seeming like so much background noise.

Dr. Rosse believed in active student participation in class, in the cadaver lab, on oral tests. He told us from the first day on: ” You will learn to THINK in this class like you’ve never thought before! Your patient’s lives depend on this. You will be prepared for my class each and every day, just as you must be prepared for whatever your patients will need from you.”

He was correct.

There were 110 of us in the lecture hall that first day, looking nervously at each other and at the empty podium down in front. We had been assigned three chapters in the anatomy textbook before Dr. Rosse’s first lecture and were expected to know the names of the bones and major blood vessels.

Dr. Rosse’s assignment for himself was to memorize our names and faces from a photo directory provided to him two days previously.

He began his lecture in the barely darkened room, running quickly through a carousel of slides of graphic photos and drawings of body parts. Within five minutes, he stopped and in his thick European accent, pointed at a student in the second row said: “Mr. Davis, can you tell me the name of this blood vessel on this slide?”

The student sat up startled, and sat silent, gathering his wits. Dr. Rosse looked pointedly at his wrist watch and started saying, “Drip. Drip. Drip.”  The student started to sweat.

“Drip, drip, drip, your patient is losing blood, Mr. Davis.”

The student, in a moment of enlightenment asked,” the inferior vena cava?” and Dr. Rosse said, “Very good, Mr. Davis!” and made a notation on the tablet on the podium in front of him.

The rest of our hearts immediately were in our throats, something that Dr. Rosse would later tell us was an anatomic impossibility, no matter how much it felt like it. There would be no dozing off, daydreaming or not preparing for this class.

My turn came the following week as he called out my name, his steely eyes fixed on only me. I got off fairly easy with a question from Dr. Rosse about the attachments for the extensor pollicis longus. I had memorized all the arm muscles the night before so was prepared.

“Yes, very good, Miss Polis.  Now tell me, if I were to fall off this podium right now, land on my outstretched arm and rupture my extensor pollicis longus, what would I not be able to do with my arm?”

I had no idea. I looked at him somewhat aghast. I thought I had done the necessary preparation to be ready for his questioning. My memorizing names and locations of muscles and tendons had only taken me so far. I had not really thought about the functionality of what I was learning and how it might be relevant to my future patients.

“Think now Miss Polis! This is not so very hard that you can’t THINK it out!”  Dr. Rosse demanded from the podium.

So I guessed. “Uh, you can’t grip?”

“Exactly wrong! Take a hike back to your study carrel, Miss Polis. You have not prepared yourself well enough. Go back to your book, and with each muscle you memorize, you must feel it on yourself or your study partner and think about how it works. Your patient will thank you for that someday.”

I was mortified that day, but survived that anatomy class, survived six oral exams over the cadaver with Dr. Rosse, and although I didn’t get an A in his class, I was very relieved to get a B+. As a student, I had never been asked before to actually apply what I was learning to make it relevant to my future work. Dr. Rosse was right. I had learned to not just memorize, but to think.

And when I saw my first extensor pollicis longus rupture seven years later in my practice, I was absolutely confident of the diagnosis because my patient could not lift up his thumb when asked to act like he was hitchhiking.  And my patient did thank me.  Dr. Rosse was right again.

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The Fire and Rose Are One

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The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
~T.S. Eliot – from “Little Gidding” from the Four Quartets

To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose,
Scentless, colourless, this!
Will it ever be thus (who knows?)
Thus with our bliss,
If we wait till the close?

Though we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end
Sooner, later, at last,
Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:

An end locked fast,
Bent we cannot re-bend.
~Christina Rossetti “Summer is Ended”

As a 3rd grader in November 1963, I learned the import of the U.S. flag being lowered to half mast in response to the shocking and violent death of our President. The lowering of the flag was so rare when I was growing up, it had dramatic effect on all who passed by — 

our soul’s sap quivers

— something very sad had happened to our country, something or someone had tragically ended, warranting our silence, our stillness, and our grief.

For the twenty-two years since 9/11/01, our flag has spent significant time at half mast, most often due to our own home-grown mass shooting terrorism. When I see it flying low, I’m befuddled instead of contemplative, puzzling over what the latest loss might be as there are so many, sometimes all happening in the same time frame. We no longer are silenced by this gesture of honor and respect; we certainly are not stilled when personally and corporately instigating and suffering the same mistakes against humanity over and over again.

We are so bent. Will we ever be mended again?

Eliot wrote these prescient words of the Four Quartets in the midst of the WWII German bombing raids that destroyed so many people and neighborhoods. Perhaps he sensed the destruction he witnessed would not be the last time in history that evil visits the innocent, leaving them in ashes. There would be so many more losses to come, not least being the horror of 9/11/01.

There remains so much more sadness to be borne, such abundance of grief. Our world has become overwhelmed and stricken. Yet Eliot was right: we have yet to live in a Zero summer of endless hope and fruitfulness, of spiritual awakening and understanding. Where is it indeed? When will the summer Rose of beauty and fragrance rise again?

We must return, as people of faith to Eliot’s still point to which we are called on a remembrance day such as today. We must be stilled; we must be silenced. We must grieve the losses of this turning world and pray for release from the suffering we cause and we endure. Only in the asking, only in the kneeling down and pleading, are we surrounded by God’s unbounded grace.

Only then will His Rose bloom, once again recognizable.  

“Zero Summer” imagines the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet points to epiphanic awakening that transcend human imagination at the same time. T.S. Eliot, who coined this term in his “Four Quartets,” longed for that eternal summer, birthed out of the “still point,” where imagination is met with grace and truth.
~Makoto Fujimura

“There Are No Words” written on 9/11/2001
by Kitty Donohoe

there are no words there is no song
is there a balm that can heal these wounds
that will last a lifetime long
and when the stars have burned to dust
hand in hand we still will stand because we must

in one single hour in one single day
we were changed forever something taken away
and there is no fire that can melt this heavy stone
that can bring back the voices and the spirits of our own

all the brothers, sisters and lovers all the friends that are gone
all the chairs that will be empty in the lives that will go on
can we ever forgive though we never will forget
can we believe in the milk of human goodness yet

we were forged in freedom we were born in liberty
we came here to stop the twisted arrows cast by tyranny
and we won’t bow down we are strong of heart
we are a chain together that won’t be pulled apart

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The Secrets of September

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The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook.

From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.

‘Tis a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.
~Helen Hunt Jackson “September“

I can choose to fight the inevitable march of time with sighs and sorrows, thus arm myself with sour bitterness for what is no more,

or I can flow unmoved for as long as I can stay afloat,
only passively aware of the passage of all around me,

or I can smile in secret at awakening each morning,
whether to sun or wind or rain,
grateful I’ve been given one more day to get it right,

or at least to care enough to try.

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Sometimes One Gallops Past

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As if the past were riding up to meet you
as if the past could ride a horse

as if the past were a horse wandering riderless
along a dusty road

as if the horse had never been ridden

/

They say a horse is broken when the rider
can stay on

they say the past is broken when you can
let go of it

I have broken with the past, she says

I have erased it from my phone
I have blindered my eyes from her eyes

/

I didn’t know the past was made of horses
I didn’t even call it a horse until now

I didn’t even call it strange
until I looked back on it

the past was a horse crossing a desert
a body draped over it

this is how we get the beloved home

/

Strange now to never hear a horse upon waking
or when out in the field

I didn’t know the past would come for me
I didn’t even call it the past until now

sometimes one gallops past
but no one else ever sees it
~Nick Flynn ” Unbroken” from “Low.”

photo by Brandon Dieleman

The past has a way of galloping away with me if I let it. I try to slow it down to a slow amble, enjoying the scenery along the way. But memories have a way of wanting to go their own way, not listening to pressure from the leg or a pull on the bit.

The past can’t be controlled or redirected any more than a horse can be ridden through my thoughts alone.

It must be a partnership, an agreement to keep moving forward, no matter what is being left behind. A horse prefers not to back up into the unseen unknown when there is so much ahead yet to be explored. I need to stop looking back and start looking between golden ears at where I’m going next.

It just might be the adventure of a lifetime.

photo by Emily Vander Haak
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Remember This

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Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this
~W.S. Merwin “Black Cherries”

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment
~W.S. Merwin “To Paula in Late Spring”

Yes, let us be astonished that any spring happens.
That the dull gray of winter yields to petals and fruitful blossoms,
then to fruit that is both sweet and sour on our tongues.
That the air resonates with birdsong and flower perfume
and the sun warms enough to dissipate the mist and tears.

Let us remember this, oh let us remember
so it is never forgotten:
all is made right and good
as eternity itself will taste like this.

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An Unthinkable Price

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No, I will never know
what you saw or what you felt,
thrust into the maw of Eternity,

watching the mortars nightly
greedily making their rounds,
hearing the soft damp hiss

of men’s souls like helium escaping
their collapsing torn bodies,
or lying alone, feeling the great roar

of your own heart.
But I know:
there is a bitter knowledge

of death I have not achieved.
Thus in thankful ignorance,
and especially for my son

and for all who benefit so easily
at so unthinkable a price,
I thank you.
~Michael Burch “Privilege”


(for my father on Memorial Day)

It was only a part of what we knew about you-
serving three long years in the South Pacific,
spoken of obliquely
only if asked about,
but never really answered.

We knew you were a Marine battalion leader,
knew you spent too many nights without sleep,
unsure if you’d see the dawn
only to dread
what the next day would bring.

We knew you lost friends
and your innocence;
found unaccustomed strength
inside a mama’s boy
who once cried too easily and later almost never.

Somehow life had prepared you for this:
pulling your daddy out of bars when you were ten
watching him beat your mama
until finally getting big enough
to stand in the way.

Then Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian beaches
bitterly bloodsoaked
battles won,
to be restored and renewed
as vacation resorts.

We let you go without knowing
your full story–
even Mom didn’t ask.
You could not share the depth
of horror and fear you felt.

It was not shame that kept you silent;
simply no need to revisit
the pain of remembrance.
It was done, finished, you had done your duty.

So as we again set flowers and flag
on your grave,
reunited with Mom after years apart,
I regret so many questions unasked
of a sacrifice beyond imagining,
you having paid an unthinkable price.

Sleep well, Dad,
with Mom now by your side.
I rejoice you finally wakened
to a renewed dawn.

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Time, An Upside Down Mystery

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Am I as old as I am?
Maybe not. Time is a mystery
that can tip us upside down.
Yesterday I was seven in the woods,
a bandage covering my blind eye,
in a bedroll Mother made me
so I could sleep out in the woods
far from people. A garter snake glided by
without noticing me. A chickadee
landed on my bare toe, so light
she wasn’t believable. The night
had been long and the treetops
thick with a trillion stars. Who
was I, half-blind on the forest floor
who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight
years later I can still inhabit that boy’s
body without thinking of the time between.
It is the burden of life to be many ages
without seeing the end of time.
~Jim Harrison, “Seven in the Woods” from The Essential Poems.

… just within the gate I saw a child,— 
       A stranger-child, yet to my heart most dear,—
Who held his hands to me, and softly smiled   
       With eyes that knew no shade of sin or fear:    
“Come in,” he said, “and play awhile with me; 
I am the little child you used to be.”
~Henry van Dyke, from The Poems of Henry van Dyke

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

When we drive the country roads where I grew up,
though the trees are taller,
it looks just as I remembered.
The scattered houses on farms still stand, a bit more worn,
the fields open and flowing as always,
the turns and bends, the ups and downs of the asphalt lanes unchanged
where once I sped with bicycle tires and sneakered feet.

My own childhood home is now a different color
but so familiar as we drive slowly by,
filling me with memories of laughter and games,
long winter days and longer summer evenings
with its share of angry words and weeping
and eventual forgiveness.

Back then my child’s heart tried to imagine itself decades hence,
what fears and joys would pass through like pumping blood,
what wounds would I bear and bleed,
what love and tears might trace my face?

I have not forgotten that girl I was.
No, I have never forgotten –
I am still that girl
and will be until the end.

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Timeless Sense of Time

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I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall—
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
~May Sarton “The Work of Happiness”

Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea, 1947
Andrew Wyeth -Her Room

Some are eager to travel and roam, experiencing new places and unfamiliar scenery.

I leave home reluctantly now. Having settled in during the COVID years, I find happiness forming concentric rings around the core of this farm with my roots growing deeper in this fertile soil. It is where I belong.

Certainly, I have belonged to other places during my life. Each built a new ring in my history, growing me taller and stronger over the years. As I have moved, I have carried along furniture from my grandparents’ homes – a rocking chair, a round top antique trunk. My great aunt’s baby grand piano followed me through three moves. My parents’ things are scattered throughout this house, storing their memories in the wood and polish and fabric.

There is peace to be found in this inwardness. When I open our windows, I sense in every way how the air is charged with blessing. There is kindness here. There is happiness woven out of time and memory and love.

No matter where I shall roam, I will always find the road home.

Tell me where is the road I can call my own,
That I left, that I lost, so long ago.
All these years I have wondered,
oh when will I know,
There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.

After wind, After rain, when the dark is done,
As I wake from a dream, in the gold of day,
Through the air there’s a calling from far away,
There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.

Rise up, follow me, come away is the call
With (the) love in your heart as the only song
There is no such beauty as where you belong
Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.
~Michael Dennis Browne

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Fixing Eyes on the Unseen: A Most Important Day

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“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”          
Mrs. Gibbs to Emily in Our Town

We are ages away
from our high school class
where first we walked
the streets of Grover’s Corners
and have lived decades and
decades of important days
writing our own scenes
along the way. In this theater
we meet again the lives of people
as ordinary and extraordinary
as we are and find ourselves
smiling and weeping watching
a play we first encountered as teens.
In our 70’s Our Town brings us joy
and also breaks our hearts.
Now we know.
~Edwin Romond “Seeing “Our Town” in Our 70’s”

We don’t have time to look at one another.
I didn’t realize.
All that was going on in life and we never noticed.
Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
– every, every minute? 
~Thornton Wilder, from Emily’s monologue in Our Town

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. 14 I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.
Ecclesiastes 3: 11-14


One of our very special friends from church got married today to a high school classmate she knew over sixty-some years ago. Both had recently lost spouses and found their way to each other to join together for the rest of their days. Today became a most important day in their lives, a day they could not have imagined as teenagers so long ago.

The post-ceremony reception was joyous, full of other high school classmates who recognized how extraordinary it was for two lives to come full circle after all the ordinary “least important” days of high school. Observing this tight-knit community celebrating together reminds me of Grover’s Corners of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” where even those in the cemetery under the ground continue to engage in conversation and commentary about their family and friends, sometimes wistful, sometimes full of regrets.

There is so much we miss while we are living out our ordinary days because our capacity for seeing what is truly important is so limited – if we paid attention to it all, we would be overwhelmed and exhausted.

Yet God’s unlimited vision has a plan for each of us, even if we cannot see it in the moment – His divine gift to us, right from our very beginning, until the moment we take our last breath.

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Free to Move in Darkness

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Holding the arms of his helper, the blind
Piano tuner comes to our piano.
He hesitates at first, but once he finds
The keyboard, his hands glide over the slow
Keys, ringing changes finer than the eye
Can see. The dusty wires he touches, row
On row, quiver like bowstrings as he
Twists them one notch tighter. He runs his
Finger along a wire, touches the dry
Rust to his tongue, breaks into a pure bliss
And tells us, “One year more of damp weather
Would have done you in, but I’ve saved it this
Time. Would one of you play now, please? I hear
It better at a distance.” My wife plays
Stardust. The blind man stands and smiles in her
Direction, then disappears into the blaze
Of new October. Now the afternoon,
The long afternoon that blurs in a haze
Of music…Chopin nocturnes, Clair de lune,
All the old familiar, unfamiliar
Music-lesson pieces, Papa’s Haydn’s
Dead and gone, gently down the stream…Hours later,
After the last car has doused its beams,
Has cooled down and stopped its ticking, I hear
Our cat, with the grace of animals free
To move in darkness, strike one key only,
And a single lucid drop of water stars my dream.
~Gibbons Ruark “The Visitor”

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I’ve never understood
Why this is so

But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
~Anne Porter “Music” from Living Things

photo by Lea Gibson
photo from The Olympian

I learned today that John Grace recently died at age 92; John was the blind piano tuner who tended and tuned our family’s old Kranich & Bach baby grand through the 60’s and 70’s until it moved with me to Seattle. When I saw his photo online in The Olympian newspaper, it took me back sixty years to his annual visits to our home, accompanied by a friend who drove him to his jobs, who guided him up the sidewalk to our front door and then waited for him to finish his work.

I was the 8 year old reason my great Aunt Marian had given us her beloved piano when she downsized from her huge Bellingham house into an apartment. I was fascinated watching John make the old strings sing harmonically again. He seemed right at home working on the innards of our piano, but appeared to truly enjoy ours, always ending his tuning session by sitting down on the bench and playing a familiar old hymn, smiling a broad smile.

There was no doubt his unseeing eyes made him a great piano tuner. He was fixed on the unseen, undistracted by what was unimportant to his job. He could “feel” the right pitch, not just hear it. He could sense the wire tension without seeing it. He touched the keys and wood with reverence, not distracted by the blemishes and bleaching in the mahogany, or the chips in the ivory.

I learned something about music from John, without him saying much of anything. He built a successful business in our town during a time you could count the black citizens on one hand. He spoke very little while he worked so I never asked him questions although I wish I had. It was as if he somehow transcended our troubled world through his art and skill. Though blind, when he was with a piano, he could move freely in the darkness, hearing and feeling what I could not. Perhaps it was because he was visited by a beauty and peacefulness we all long for, seen and unseen.

It occurs to me now, sixty years after observing him work, John Grace was just a step ahead in recognizing the voice of Jesus in our midst through the music he made possible.

Though he was blind, there is no doubt in my mind – he could see.

Yea when this flesh and heart shall fail
And mortal life shall cease.
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

articles about John Grace:

https://www.thurstontalk.com/2014/08/27/olympia-piano-tuner-john-grace/

https://amp.theolympian.com/news/local/article272572635.html

photo by Josh Scholten

This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.