Sunday morning the end of July 2022. Sitting outside warming, cool breeze. Sipping coffee, Sun is out, listening to Art Pepper. In a thoughtful lovely reflective mindset. Loving Vic. Planning the last years of our lives now with slow deliberateness. One always hopes for longer but sooner than we want it is our time to die. It is just there. That is all. What a day. Slow meditative clarity. Sorely needed. I must remember.
I am a lucky man.
I would rather spend a day
I would rather spend a day with you.
Then wait a day till eternities end.
A day in the garden of our own delights and choosing
Then to be lost on the eve of Armageddon.
Shall we count down the time till our own demise?
Or revel in the now and here you are,
The delight of the hollow of your neck,
The slim softness of muscles nape
Pulls my lips in.
I would rather spend a day with you
then lose an hour to salubrious thought
And engage in salacious delicious delights.
I long for you.
Oh. How I long for you.
Whether here or there,
My desire is infinite.
I would rather
Spend a day and night, a day and night
All our days and nights
With you.
So still here with all my longing and want
Desire raging and coursing
For your strength, your intellectual, your politics,
Your smoldering sensuality that you so blithely
Know nothing of or cannot acknowledge.
Still here orbiting the planet of love and desire.
I would, really, rather spend,
A day with you.
Do you remember?
The games we used to play. Dirt clod wars, Attack the forts,
Hide and seek.
Now we play that same game, but it is memories that hide
And we seek.
We seek them out with haste and pressure,
Afraid to be gentle with ourselves lest we slide unabated,
Into the mist of that abyss.
I remember watermelon pickles our Grandmother made,
Coming home from Fiddler on the Roof . . .
Our father home from Vietnam
Already wrenching on our beloved Volvo.
Just as he had been wrenched from us
We had wrenched him out of Vietnam
Before the goodbye bullet could take him
To an earlier grave then when he died at 66.
I remember my brother vanishing in an instant in a scree of gravel and stone
Whirling around to hear that lonely sound of nothing
Nothing to be seen or heard
Rushing, rushing, rushing to the edge of the railroad trestle
And there, down, down, down . . . he was in such deep soft lovely mud.
It was then I knew that I loved him so fiercely but could not name it
Would not name it because we had not been taught the deeper words.
I know and love the memory of my grandparents’ house
So quiet and creak, creak, creak went the sound of old steps and older bones
And there hidden in the dim and dusky dusty mist of time and memory,
Lay hanging a dead grandfather’s fishing hat I never knew
No smell of the dead and the hair crème he must have worn.
Its rusted steel and brass hooks still waiting for the bait and bite.
The rack upon the wall below the grimy glass held the gas mask and even at the age of 10,
I knew that it reeked of death and misery in its inherent purpose of war.
Could I hear the tortured breath and lungs wracked with mustard gas?
Sundays the breakfast day we loved. We loved our mother, our father
The unabashed love of children who love unreservedly until they know.
The memory of waiting for our fathers love put into the pancakes he made . . .
The ‘test’ pancakes, so small and tiny in their perfection.
Better then the real ones we devoured later.
Do you remember all this and more?
In the end we have this and nothing more.
Except the love we had, the hands that hold us
The love given, shared and nurtured.
I remember.
David McCullough
July 22, 2022
In Our Garden
I want to come home to our garden
Our garden of earthly delights.
After days over bodies probing their pain
The depth of their hurt and sorrow.
I’d rather come home to our garden.
Our garden of earthly delights
Feeding and nurturing both in the planting, the growing,
The harvest.
I had not thought of it till now
With my hands deep in earth.
This garden, this life.
So much the same the other begets the other
A universal dance of earth, water and blood.
Oh yes I say to the fecund madness
That we nurture and grow.
Soon unable to live apart
Without the Other
There is no me or I or you or them or they
Nothing betwixt and between.
So plant my body here and now,
Make it bloom and grow
Lay me to rest amongst the roots and thorns
My lettuce, peppers, tomatoes and melons.
While I dream of you
And what we have created
Each having the other.
Let the compost and our love
Drench my bones in power and glory
I, one with you
You, one with me
I have come home to our garden.
And let the endless circling Earth
With time and tide
Renew us again, again and yet again
in the timelessness of love and space
Unremembered yet known.
Oh my love, my garden.
Oh my love, my love, my love.
David McCullough
July 13, 2022
A few weeks ago we had our two weeks off. Welcomed my 'father in-law' who is now 90 years of age.
It was a difficult visit, a trip to the ER, father daughter conflict the stuff the life and families are made of.
Reminds me of a story recently told to me. A man lay dying with his wife holding him in her arms. It is expected, a long life lived. He said to her suddenly, 'Dying is very hard work, I love you' and died.
So while visits with relatives may be so very very hard for different reasons, sometimes they are the last visit you will ever have with them. Be it your death or theirs.
We were also able to get away after his departure. A few days and nights at Ashland, Oregon to see some plays and slow down. We met up with my distant cousin, David Bones who at 80 is full of life and vigor despite whatever health challenges confront him. I mark this visit as it had been so many years and I loved spending time with him and learning more about my mum's side of the family. Those links with the past? The links with what once was . . . are disappearing. There soon will be no one to remember or care and such is life. Still, we have these moments and they are dear to the memories of the living.
After Ashland we decamped to the Family Ridge Ranch on the East side of Salt Point State Park. We return there this coming weekend.
Globally, warming climates are accelerating. Humanity will not reach target goals of lessening warming. We are a failure to the world, to ourselves.
Fascism is on the march. Many are predicting a Civil War in the United States with widespread looting, killing and god knows what the hell else. I fear this will be the case. Trump may or may not return to power but DeSantis may be a more clear and present danger in the long run. With the Supreme court packed with conservative 'Originalist' we are facing a tyranny of the minority. The sweep of history is upon us and interesting times prevail.
As for Vic and I we consider our own future, how long to continue working, what country to live in, how to maximize our health and safety. In an uncertain and increasingly dangerous world it pays to have a plan and backup plans.
