It Is Enough to Love

 

You

You make me cackle with wild laughter.

It is not why I love you. 

 

You drive me mad with desire,

But again, it is not why I love you.

 

You amaze me with your intellect,

But once again it is not why I love you.

 

You delight me in the breadth of your interest.

But again and again, this is not why I love you.

 

You make me crazy with passion and weak in my knees,

Still, this is not why I love you.

 

You take my breath away with your beauty,

Yes, yes, yes, it is still not why I love you.

 

Your knowledge of this expansive world cultures and languages amazes me,

But in no way is this why I love you.

 

You hold my love in your heart

For this and all these things . . . 

are not why I love you.

Just to love . . .

That is enough.

Easy is Too Long

I’ve been having it so easy,

For a long time now . . . .

and now, 

I’m just little bit tired and sick

of being on the wrong side of easy. 

With hard times coming,

Taking it easy is not so easy any more.

Living or dying,

Caring or not,

Some choices, tough or not, have gotta be made.

We think we’ve come so far yet nothing kills like the deception we live 

In our hearts and minds we yearn for peace  

then we cry out in pain and rage sweeps our hearts and minds

And blood and butchery runs in the gutters of our hearts.

We’ve been taking easy for too long nowl

And if ever had any faith it is long since lost. 

Till I met you and yes, I’ve met you.  

In the alley's of my mind and byways of my heart. 

It’s easy loving you.

A cushion of love and then the fear of losing you. 

But hard choices remain,

And the easiest of all was loving you.  

 

David McCullough

September 16, 2022

Bounty

Our garden bounty 

Bike vs Auto

 

POEM - My Grief for You

 

 

My grief for you

the eventual loss of the Us we have become

is boundless and deep.

 

The  images of a barren home

lived in by one of the Us.

populates and haunts prememory.

 

Dwell not in the past.

But better there then some imagined future

bereft and betwixt without and within

our love.

 

I struggle to pare

to sliver and trim and whack and cut

these blocks of words and letters

free of superfluousness 

down and down to essential meanings

but not shorn of elegance and beauty.

To be here now

and not in the future.

To not live in the past 

but to be here because of it.

Jazz Morning

 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?

 

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

Garden

        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

June - July 2022 holiday.

 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.

 

June 2022

 My words seem to become less important the older I get. Despite decades of hoping for wisdom and that I will learn to write better … I fear this may never be the case. 

These are dark days indeed. Global warming, pandemic, war in Europe that has begun with Russia invading the Ukraine.  Putin is a coward hiding with his money and lies letting the kulaks die for his pride.  

Like the millions that have come before us the sweep of time and history does not give us a warning of what will happen. But many of us are filled with a great sense of foreboding and anguish.  I cannot help but think there is great suffering to come by the many billions across the world and it is all we can do to simply survive and try and prepare.  

For now I can only try to be content in my words and actions.  It is for me alone to review in the years ahead if I am lucky enough to survive. I know I want my words and life meant something and working as a nurse I used to think that I was contributing something… But now I am even in doubt of this seemingly humble goal. 

In the end, at least for me, I believe that the right and only course of action is to do the right thing. At this moment in time it is to live with the woman of my dreams and to lessen the impact that we have upon the planet, to try and do some good to help others survive. For anything I say right now is lost to history. 

There will be no one to read these words out of the multitudes of words written every day.  Who is to say that what I write has any dept or meaning now or in the future.  It is for me I write . . . hoping, hoping, hoping for lasting meaning.

Upon the occasion of the death of my friend, Jim Costa.

I do not want to say the long goodbye.

To have it short and sweet is my wish when I die.

I say no to COVID but yes to all of you

No to lymphoma, glioblastoma.

But yes to your eyes and heart and your goodbyes.

We will not get what we want,

our desires wishes thwarted inopportunely.

To meet our end with peace can be a most difficult thing

but love and morphine can ease the path.

I'll take a modicum of gracefulness and ease

surrounded I hope by love,

support, cradling arms . . . .

as we bid the other the long goodbye.

and ease, ever so gently . . .

into that long good and graceful night.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/09/eagles-hotel-california-tour-review/619973/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

 

Hotel California

This music, this song is inevitably tied to my friend Jim Walsh who died in an overloaded light plane crash in Sacramento around 1982. One of the last and best memories of being with Jim was a warm Sacramento summer night out for a drive to who knows where (and that was the very point). The drive took us into the foothills up near Sierra College. Back then, 'in the olden days' it was not as built up as it is now - of course of course.

We were in our young 20's, our very young 20's and the night, like our lives, was ours with nothing between us and a bright long future. We drove his silver shining Honda into that night with all the windows and sunroof open to the stars and moon. We talked of nothing but everything that lay between us and the universe racing by. Hotel California played on the radio and we sang with it a bit, lifting our voices in sync but little knowing of life's travails then or what was to come. Not many of us do I guess . . . but even at a young age I had seen some amazing things and Jim . . . he had some stories to tell too, some much darker, some much brighter.

It is good, this memory. I hold and cherish, nurture it close to my heart. I shared it over the years with Jim's brother, Mo Walsh. He is one of the finest men I know on this planet. We carry this mutual sorrow, he for the brother lost and I for one of my best friends. In his dying, Jim gave us the gift of our friendship. From death comes many gifts even if I could not see that in the making. This song is many things to all of us who heard it back in the day. But to me I will always remember that night speeding along in the darkness of a full moon with a best friend, in a silver Honda, on a warm summer night, long long ago.

My day thus far . . . .

I am outside COVID testing people in a line of cars.  Older patient drives up.  Says she is worried that something that happened today may affect her ability to take the test.  I can see the emotion building in her face.  I tell her that we have time, no one is behind her, is she ok?  Does she want to talk?

Then the tears begin to flow at last and she can unburden her sadness and grief for these all too brief moments  Her 5 month old granddaughter just died who had been born with a terminal medical condition.  This woman had just picked up the death certificate that is lying in the front right seat.

What can one do?  Except to hold her hand, hold it with silence and acceptance, with empathy and love.  Sometimes our greatest gift is to help in the relief of great suffering.  Thank god I had the time, that I was able to make the time.

Our own suffering comes back to us in these moments.  I was able to use that to understand her suffering.  Although the two are so different the human experience remains.  The shared suffering so to speak.

There are no heroes in this story - except perhaps for this person in front of me and the parents of a dead baby.  Just people, all these people surrounding me, holding me up making it possible for me not only to do my job . . . . but to hold the hand of a grieving woman.  I am grateful and humbled.

 I had wine and conversation with a good friend last night.  He is older, served in Vietnam as a combat photographer.  

The taliban, a world and decades away from Vietnam over ran Kabul two days ago.  So our conversation may have have been prompted by this because the parallels are all too familiar.

Our conversation did not devolve into drunken reminiscing of war stories, his war stories (for I have none to share nor wish to).  But it did touch upon the endless repetition of wars this country has seen, initiated and those brought upon it.

To this day the memories of combat are crystal clear.  Sometimes, when you are a good friend, you learn to just shut the fuck up and listen.  That is what I did.  Took me long enough I guess. 

I have memories like this.  Crystal clear.  From fire fighting days, medical calls in the field. Horrific scenes etched into times frozen memory that clutches and claws at you at the most inopportune times! How inconvenient suffering can be at times.  

Yet again and again, I also have these moments but of my lovers touch and kiss,  Haleys comet in the Fijian South Pacific skies in 1986 as I lay on the deck of a boat crossing the midnight sea.  I watched Haley's Comet all night . . . and I wondered who will be watching it when it circles back to us again in 2061?  I may be alive against the odds.  If I am alive I will gaze toward the heavens in wonderment, awe but most of all gratefulness.

Grateful for being alive every day, to have had the love of my life with Victoria Wright and the peace and deep intense satisfaction she brings to living, for the friendship of my friend and his wine and all the friends I have scattered around this lovely warming planet.

A bit North of the Lost Coast

 

We are seldom given such opportunity . . . .

Engaged.  January 2020. The Love of my Life.  Right there in front of me and I had no idea.  Someone that is love personified, smart, giving, caring,  beautiful, crazy, funny and thinks of me in her actions and I think of her in mine.  I have never been so honored to be loved and to love.  We are so seldom given these opportunities.

Coming inside after COVID-19 testing August 2020 at the Santa Rosa VA Clinic in California.  You can see my Powered Air Purifying Respirator (PAPR) that I am holding (I had just removed it).  In 100 F heat it gets very warm and humid quickly.  The air coming in is also quite hot.  We are now at the end of August and it is much cooler but also much smokier due to the many fires that we continue to endure.

To The Sea I Went

To the sea I went
To touch my face and toes and hands
In the cold upwelling pacific ocean
So far. So very far. 

Inevitably
Always. 
I look West and South again
Finding my way
Seeking my bearing. 
A compass needle ever moving

I look for Hawai'i nei,
For Levuka and Viti Levu
Always searching my minds eye
For what I cannot see yet have not, 
Cannot leave behind.  

These are the islands of my past and dreams they come to me and I to them
It is not perfections paradise
But a breathing living history
Walking forward in time
But always looking back. 

These are the islands of my dreams
Forged in fire
Not forgotten
People loved 
In the perfect village of my mind. 

I may never return to them
It is not known. 
Only a guest- taught so much and 
A life well spent 
Reckoning, searching, dwelling
For the islands in my dreams. 

David McCullough
June 20, 2020