And now, Remembering my Father

Today, June 1, would be my father's 94th birthday if he were still alive. June 10 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death just past his 64th birthday. Here's another poem I wrote several years ago (once again a poem I may have shared with my poet-friend Patty on a tea date).

Rowboat Song

My song is for the rowboat hauled out for winter,
listing in a sea of leaves. I love her lines,
the graceful beauty of her usefulness. But even more
I love the way she carries the music
of my father, his summertime humming and
the ringing of brass oarlocks dangling from his hand
as we walked the tangled path pungent with huckleberry
and sweet fern in August heat. Our syncopated footsteps
on the wooden runway, the slight lift and sway of the float
beneath us, slap-slap of running line on water
bringing the dinghy in. 

My father’s slender fingers
worked the line, hand over hand, removing strands of eelgrass
and slimy mermaid’s hair, bright green and matted. And then
his easy rowing, skilled feathering of oars, their rhythmic turning
in the locks, a two-part pulse of leather and wood against brass:
back and forward again, back and forward. Between strokes,
from the oar tips a whispered staccato drips in tiny
running steps across the water’s surface.

Did we speak? Maybe a little. Mostly in silence we’d do
what was needed—unstop the sails and hoist them,
let go the mooring line, back the jib to bring the bow
around and with sails filling slip gently out the harbor.
Funny—I remember always the setting out
but rarely the homecoming, always a new beginning,
another chance.

One additional note: We sold the rowboat that inspired this poem, but I made sure I kept the oarlocks. Every now and then I pick them up and dangle them just to hear them strike together ringingly. I think I'll be sure to do that today in honor of my dad on his birthday.

Remembering Michael Dwinell

Using the bathroom at Michael's downstairs den of an office, the first place I actually remember meeting him (the office, that is--not the bathroom), was a trip. I learned fast that I had to really need to pee badly in order to make that short but immense journey through the bowels of his house to a bathroom that probably hadn't been cleaned in years. One of the benefits of making the trip, besides the obvious, was being reassured that I was not, in fact, the worst housekeeper in the world. Along with the usual old basement-y smells and look, and the unkempt toilet, there were dozens and dozens of empty toilet paper tubes collecting everywhere. Peeling paint and a tiny just above ground window that looked through garden greenery to the quaint alley were also features.

But really, that's just a small physical token of the adventure that a visit with Michael could be. Especially for me, who was in most ways very much a "good, nice girl"--polite, ready to tell my truth to the extent that I was aware of it, yet not given to doing so with much color, guts, or chutzpah, and certainly not with four-letter words. Michael filled in for whatever I lacked in that way! 

His den was papered and smothered in cards, photos, quotes from wise people of various times and places, artwork, and a fish tank in which it's amazing any fish survived, since it was probably cleaned about as often as the toilet. But I think I remember live fish swimming lazily in there! (Friends who visited Michael back at the "old place" can corroborate or set me straight on that point.)

Michael was truly one of a kind--a large presence in all respects. You kind of had to get used to him (or at least I did) before his immense gifts could be received in their fullness. Get used to the bracelets that slid  and clattered up and down his forearm; his way of seeming to be falling asleep on me, which of course provoked all my old insecurities ("I really am the most boring person who ever lived!"); the scratching, picking, and grooming of scalp and nails (it must have helped him focus or something); the straight-shooting talk that could leave me gasping for air or, best of all, reduced to gut-splitting laughter and tears. 

One of my favorite such comments came after David and I had left St. Bart's in Yarmouth, a daring/crazy, momentous, and wrenching decision after fourteen years of loving and being part of that community. Michael knew that our choice to leave a lively, healthy congregation without a plan in mind or a new place to go, and especially without any indication of the usual clergy journey onward and upward through parishes of increasing size, would not exactly win us fans among our ecclesiastical and clerical colleagues. When we visited Michael about a month after we had left St. Bart's, he said, "And what kind of support and reaching out have you been getting from your brother and sister clergy? I bet your phone has just been ringing off the hook!" And after we caught our breath and mopped our eyes from hysteria, the sad truth that no one had called us was a little easier to acknowledge and to bear.

Michael both served the church and skewered it regularly with his insights and humor. He was my compatriot in that we both eventually left the Episcopal priesthood, renounced our ordination vows, and as he had done so a few years before I chose to, he could assure me that surprisingly wide vistas would open up after doing so. And in that he was right.

I haven't got a clue what, if anything, awaits us after death. But I wish Michael more wide open vistas, radiant with love and joy and some really good jokes, and a wide, wide open embrace to take him in. Those already on the other side had better be ready for some rollicking surprises of their own as he joins their ranks.

Blessings, Michael.