Literature and life
20/11/14 05:15
This morning as I write, a friend lies dying in Hospice House. It is possible that he died in the early hours of the morning and his family, who are kind and considerate people, are waiting to give me a call. It is also possible that his process of dying will take days or even weeks. It is within the range of possibility, though highly unlikely, that he will recover enough to walk out of Hospice House. He has done it before.
He was awake for our prayer in the morning, but couldn’t wake up for the prayer when I stopped by in the afternoon yesterday. He is operating on God’s time now, not human time and no one can say how that process translates into human time.
His wife says that he checked everything off of his “bucket list.” He had a grand time in October, when we dedicated our latest Habitat for Humanity home, with people from the church, the homeowner family and even the mayor of our city all wearing “Ward’s Crew” buttons. He recently came back from a wonderful trip to Oklahoma where he had an early Thanksgiving with children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. There were plenty of people who said he shouldn’t exert the effort for that trip - that it might shorten his life. That, of course, didn’t stop him and his family were well aware that their opinions in the matter were far less important than their support.
So the vigil has begun.
It isn’t the only vigil in our town. Hospice house has twelve beds and each is filled by a person whose span of life is short. And there are a dozen more nearby at Regional Hospital. And more in each of the area’s nursing homes. And a few at home. Multiply that by all of the cities in our country and all of the countries on the globe, and dying isn’t a unique event. Sitting with a loved one as he or she dies happens around the clock every day.
We all, of course, are mortal.
I am fortunate to have good health at this phase of my life and am able to work with enthusiasm and eat a reasonable diet and exercise in a wide variety of ways. I can enjoy my family fully and participate in multiple friendships. I am blessed in so many ways that I would never complete the list of things for which I am grateful. I don’t have a “bucket list.” There are lots of things that I’d like to do sometime in the future, but my life will have been full and complete if I accomplish none of them.
But I have come to the realization, quite recently really, that I will not read all of the books that I might read. For years, I have been hungrily reading book after book in part because it seems to me that there are so many good books that I didn’t read. I wasn’t the best student in High School and our school didn’t have any kind of special literature classes, and there were a lot of books in the English canon that I simply didn’t read. So I have tried to catch up. I maintain a list of classic books and try to check them off one by one. Along the way, I get sidetracked by special topics. This fall I’ve been reading a lot about the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company and stories of the north of Canada. Hudson’s Bay is a huge company with a long history and the books tend to be epic. I’m sure I’ve read more than a thousand pages on that topic this fall. So I decided to sneak in a few novels before I head of on another “jag” - possibly the six textbooks used in one of the nation’s most popular university storytelling courses. The book I chose is Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. I know I should have read it when I was 12. I never did. In fact this is the first Bradbury book I’ve ever read.
There is a professor in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop who reads that novel every year. Lots of literate people speak of the wonders of the book’s use of metaphor and flowery, poetic language. It is a sort of coming-of-age story of a 12-year-old. It has been described as “magical,” and “timeless” and “vintage.”
Wow! It might be classic writing - at least it is very good writing. And it might be great for a writing teacher to assign as an example of good writing. But Bradbury’s memory must not have been very good when he wrote it. That 12-year-old is like no 12-year-old I’ve ever met. He thinks like a 40-year-old. He describes the events of his life like a university professor.
Or maybe like an old may lying dying when there is plenty of time to think about what it was like being a 12-year-old.
The book is great for read-aloud. The words tumble out in a lush, rich progression. Like poetry, I catch myself reading some of the paragraphs out loud. Like I said, the book is rich and wonderful and well-written. And the characters are so totally unbelievable that one has to suspend all pretense of reality and enter into a world where adolescents think like old men.
Maybe I will think like that when I sort through the events of my life. Having blogged for so many years, I’m unlikely to be motivated to write a memoir - the blog archives are as close as I will get. But if I did, I suppose, I might be tempted to write of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. I probably can remember a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. There’s probably a magical, timeless summer in my past.
We all have our own ways of telling our stories. And some of us are fortunate enough to be asked to tell part of the stories of others.
Right now, it seems like imitating Bradbury would be exactly the wrong choice to describe the life of my friend. Instead, I’m likely to follow his own advice: “Cut the crap and get ‘er done!”
He was awake for our prayer in the morning, but couldn’t wake up for the prayer when I stopped by in the afternoon yesterday. He is operating on God’s time now, not human time and no one can say how that process translates into human time.
His wife says that he checked everything off of his “bucket list.” He had a grand time in October, when we dedicated our latest Habitat for Humanity home, with people from the church, the homeowner family and even the mayor of our city all wearing “Ward’s Crew” buttons. He recently came back from a wonderful trip to Oklahoma where he had an early Thanksgiving with children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. There were plenty of people who said he shouldn’t exert the effort for that trip - that it might shorten his life. That, of course, didn’t stop him and his family were well aware that their opinions in the matter were far less important than their support.
So the vigil has begun.
It isn’t the only vigil in our town. Hospice house has twelve beds and each is filled by a person whose span of life is short. And there are a dozen more nearby at Regional Hospital. And more in each of the area’s nursing homes. And a few at home. Multiply that by all of the cities in our country and all of the countries on the globe, and dying isn’t a unique event. Sitting with a loved one as he or she dies happens around the clock every day.
We all, of course, are mortal.
I am fortunate to have good health at this phase of my life and am able to work with enthusiasm and eat a reasonable diet and exercise in a wide variety of ways. I can enjoy my family fully and participate in multiple friendships. I am blessed in so many ways that I would never complete the list of things for which I am grateful. I don’t have a “bucket list.” There are lots of things that I’d like to do sometime in the future, but my life will have been full and complete if I accomplish none of them.
But I have come to the realization, quite recently really, that I will not read all of the books that I might read. For years, I have been hungrily reading book after book in part because it seems to me that there are so many good books that I didn’t read. I wasn’t the best student in High School and our school didn’t have any kind of special literature classes, and there were a lot of books in the English canon that I simply didn’t read. So I have tried to catch up. I maintain a list of classic books and try to check them off one by one. Along the way, I get sidetracked by special topics. This fall I’ve been reading a lot about the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company and stories of the north of Canada. Hudson’s Bay is a huge company with a long history and the books tend to be epic. I’m sure I’ve read more than a thousand pages on that topic this fall. So I decided to sneak in a few novels before I head of on another “jag” - possibly the six textbooks used in one of the nation’s most popular university storytelling courses. The book I chose is Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. I know I should have read it when I was 12. I never did. In fact this is the first Bradbury book I’ve ever read.
There is a professor in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop who reads that novel every year. Lots of literate people speak of the wonders of the book’s use of metaphor and flowery, poetic language. It is a sort of coming-of-age story of a 12-year-old. It has been described as “magical,” and “timeless” and “vintage.”
Wow! It might be classic writing - at least it is very good writing. And it might be great for a writing teacher to assign as an example of good writing. But Bradbury’s memory must not have been very good when he wrote it. That 12-year-old is like no 12-year-old I’ve ever met. He thinks like a 40-year-old. He describes the events of his life like a university professor.
Or maybe like an old may lying dying when there is plenty of time to think about what it was like being a 12-year-old.
The book is great for read-aloud. The words tumble out in a lush, rich progression. Like poetry, I catch myself reading some of the paragraphs out loud. Like I said, the book is rich and wonderful and well-written. And the characters are so totally unbelievable that one has to suspend all pretense of reality and enter into a world where adolescents think like old men.
Maybe I will think like that when I sort through the events of my life. Having blogged for so many years, I’m unlikely to be motivated to write a memoir - the blog archives are as close as I will get. But if I did, I suppose, I might be tempted to write of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. I probably can remember a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. There’s probably a magical, timeless summer in my past.
We all have our own ways of telling our stories. And some of us are fortunate enough to be asked to tell part of the stories of others.
Right now, it seems like imitating Bradbury would be exactly the wrong choice to describe the life of my friend. Instead, I’m likely to follow his own advice: “Cut the crap and get ‘er done!”