The Next Right Thing

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

~Charles Dickens

Eight Marches ago, on one of those biting Lion / Lamb days when the chill seeps to your bone, but every so often the wind relents and the sun warms your face, I put my spade, my shovel, my rake, and my hopes in the back of my Ranger and drive out to Malwyd.

It was rangy. Cabgrass and truculent hollies. Old azaleas. A grove of gnarled andromeda, noble and twisted.

But also, woodchuck holes and poison ivy, striped petunias and pachysandra, flagstone and old wrought iron. Good bones but rampant: an ancient estate. Nothing but rambling roses, possibilities, trepidation.

They let me place my shovel in that unforgiving clay, and it became a project that fed my soul.

But first we lay the garden hose along the edge of what will become the perennial garden, and adjust it relentlessly until we find a rhythm.

It is audacious: our proposed bed claims much of the lawn. Swift approval: with a nod sweet labor begins. Trenching the edge with a sturdy Amish shovel, I turn the turf to reveal writhing grubs and an impoverished clay, sickly and orange. We work it with mushroom soil and manure and peat and sand. Each thrust into the crabgrass my shovel slides over slippery, hard, angry clay. I turn it and churn it and hope for the best.

These little plugs we plant, from the wholesale nursery in Bucks County, seem so unsubstantial against the scope of the place. But work is underway and does not cease.

Some seasons are impossibly fecund and benevolent: soaking rains, nourishing sun, impossible bounty. Other seasons are pinched, dry, angry, and sparse. Skunks spray, firethorn taunts, there is the day my feet swell and burst the laces of my boots after an allergic reaction to a hornet swarm.

But, always, the labor.

Paths built. Slate cut. Trees felled.

We build a pond, a terrace, an ambling walkway through a grove of crimson maples.

At some point boundaries no longer contain our desire: the neighboring house is bought and razed, the garden doubles. We restore the orchard to where it once had been.

Days at Malwyd passed in a glorious rhythm: a neighboring carillon chimes almost forgotten hymns at just the right moment.

I lose myself in the work, I relish these golden afternoons

But, last March was the time.

This thing I created, this thing I nourished and savored, that also fed me, was left to fend for itself.

Enough of tending a garden that is not my own, last year I turned toward home, unsure what I would find.

All that glorious preparation, all that sweet and sunny labor well spent.

That place where I knew every leaf, and had seen every season, and had labored blissfully until the sun gave way to a luminous moon.

That place where I knew the toads that clamored so frantically on fecund spring days.

That place where crimson stars fell from Japanese maples onto English ivy.

My best work. I left its care to others, in humility and gratitude.

I sought new gardens to tend.

March is a raw month, elemental.

March is sun warmed soil and wind driven rain. March is biting chill, and hope that soars like a great blue heron, taking sudden flight. March is a month to take stock of paths that led to whatever vineyard you now tend, and a month to mourn just a little for that other path you did not take.

I used to, many Marches ago, think that every time you loved and lost, it left you diminished. But, as Marches go by, I have come to realize: you never lose if your labor is love. It may turn you inside out, but next time, if you are lucky, it will lead you to a fruitful vineyard. Love won't leave you diminished, but only open to the next right thing, grateful for the labors that led you to the place you now stand.

Mrs. Taylor's Spectacles

The old red brick William and Margaretta Library Association, on Second Street,  Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, predating the white brick and marble Taylor Memorial Public Library of my youth.

The normative institution of my formative years had a name that was pure torture for a small child who had trouble with his R's.

Taylor. Memorial. Public. Library.

It was bad enough that my name was Brian Gregory, but this place's name was nearly impossible to say. I didn't really know what any of those words meant, and had to practice a long time to say them in the right order.

The great thing about reading books was that I always said everything perfectly in my head. In real life L's and R's threw me for a loop, and made me a little ashamed.

But I loved that low marble counter on the children's end of the circulation desk, even though I worried because I was always bumping against whatever the generous maximum limit for the number of books you could check out was.

The best sound in the world happened after you handed your peach colored paper library card, with the metal plate, over to the library lady. She placed it in the machine, and then dropped the card from each book you had chosen from the stacks in. It made the most satisfying "chunk chunk" sound that you could ever imagine.

Years later, when they replaced it with a gun that slapped a price tag-like due date sticker on the book, I thought, wow, that seems disrespectful to the book somehow.

The library was close enough to walk to, and once I got old enough to cross Broad Boulevard on my own, I could ride my bike there of a summer day. In the era when air conditioning was still a bit of a luxury, I would then bask in a nearly perfect summer day. It was the next best thing to the forbidden swimming hole at the shale creek we called Trickling Springs, that dumped into the Cuyahoga beneath a hemlock grove, just past Mary Campbell's Cave.

In the summer, there were reading contests, involving a bingo card that made you read from every category in the stacks, and game pieces, which were toothpicks jabbed in a piece of Play Dough.  You got to move a space on the game board for every book that you read. To this day, my brother and I still argue over who read more books. At some point we may have to call in Betsy Booth to officiate.

I loved everything about that library:

The stained glass window, Flora and Fauna of Ohio, which was real leaves and flowers, pressed between glass.

The sound the drawer on the card catalog (a heavy maple wood cabinet, presided over by a paper mache Pinochio) made, when you pulled it out, and thumbed through the cardstock files, looking for whatever new topic had piqued your interest.

The way they let me check out books from the adult section before I was officially old enough, after I had read through everything in the children's section.

The way checking out the LP of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders suddenly made me feel like a really big kid, and like I understood those impossibly tall teenagers who towered over us with their 70's afros. Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy.

The bronze statue of the fawn, at the bottom of the Story Time circle, where you could curl up with a new book when you realized you weren't quite ready to be a teenager.

I loved how my picture, Leopard in the Sun, pastel crayons on purple construction paper, made it into the All City Art Show, in the basement gallery. It felt like a big accomplishment for a kid from DeWitt, in a show normally dominated by the kids from Silver Lake and Richardson.

There was a metal sculpture by Mr. Simon, the art teacher from the high school. Read Indian flint arrowheads, pressed in glass, right at the Third Street entrance. A glass case full of ceramic figurines of Beatrix Potter characters. A Local History Room full of old maps and yearbooks. The price of admission: your peach-colored library card, and a signature on a page the reference librarian kept, stating you wuoldn't steal anything.

There was no end to the magic of this place, all the more when I realized, I could make a calligraphy masthead across the top of a piece of paper, typewrite my news stories below, Xerox it on the library machine for a nickel, and then sell it to my neighbors for a dime.

(Okay, when you factor in the labor costs, the Seventh Street Bugle-Messenger was never a cash cow, especially when you consider the time I spent, inspired by the Cleveland Press v. Plain Dealer rivalry, of coloring in my pictures with Crayola markers. The Press made a big push for being Cleveland's first color paper, and folded shortly thereafter. The Bugle-Messenger didn't last much longer.)

Somewhere near the front door, was a picture of the ivy covered old red brick original Taylor Library, and nearby, a glass case that displayed Mrs. Margaretta Taylor's spectacles.

I always liked that somehow, because it connected us to the person who founded this library, and reminded us that it didn't have to be here. This place existed because a very small woman, whose tiny wire frame glasses were in this case, wanted it to be here, and worked very hard to make it so.

Taylor Memorial Public Library. A difficult name for a small child who had difficulty with L's and R's to learn to say, but well worth the effort.

Lilacs in Tin Foil Vases: Thoughts on Home

On my Dad's shoulder's, Bicentennial Parade, 1976

The house I grew up in, built in 1970, the year before my birth, was on a piece of an old farm. No fireplace, no attic, no ghosts or secret passages: just a bland, new story-and-a-half Cape Cod, built in the side yard of the red brick farmhouse next door. A few silver maple saplings were plunked about the bare yard and the devil strip in soil that had been scraped down to unforgiving clay.

In old family photographs, snapped on my Mom's Brownie camera, the house sits on raw soil, a fresh concrete walkway leading past bare cinder block foundation, to a hollow core front door.

1971, a raw foundation on Seventh Street.

But there were remnants of a former place.

A gnarled grapevine on a rusted wire fence hedged the backyard.

In a corner dark and mossy, a contorted dogwood, by far my favorite tree, crouched under a massive pear tree that would become our space ship. Under the pear tree was a place I loved to dig. Here, the soil was soft, moist, and dark, and you did not have to dig deep before you found treasure: shards of pottery, an old bent spoon, a rusty gate latch. Like the Bennetts' old plum tree or the twin massive cherry trees with shiny peeling bark in the Mays' front yard, or the old twisted lilac next to the brick farm house's back door, all along gravel-and-tar Seventh Street, and even under the soil, were remnants of what had been before.

On a Sunday afternoon thirty-five Mays ago, the day before the big parade, my Mom and sister cut bouquets from that ancient lilac. They took those little sprigs and for each one they crafted a little tin foil vase, and filled it with water, so they would not wilt while the Brownies held them in white gloved hand, down Broad Boulevard and all the way to Oakwood Cemetery, to be placed at the oldest soldiers' graves.

Oakwood Chapel, erected by the Ladies' Cemetery Association, 1883

Years later, my Dad would lead the Cub Scout pack, in signature pith helmet, as we carried the DeWitt School Pack 3186 banner with great pride. To march in the parade, you had to have full uniform, which required a trip down to the Scout Shop, way up on an upper level of O'Neil's, across the High Level Bridge, all the way in downtown Akron.

James Gregory, in signature pith helmet, leads Pack 3186 down Broad Boulevard.

The Cuyahoga Falls Memorial Day parade: an event that, although the route may change, is otherwise changeless: politicians, the marching band, Scouts, drum corps, and always, the veterans.
 

A Cuyahoga Falls parade circa 1963, when the route took it down Front Street.

Thirty five years ago, we arrive early, to get a good seat on the curb of the grassy Broad Boulevard median, a block west of the library, and across the street from the house at Broad and Fourth, which has been under renovation all four decades of my life.

The World War II vets are legion, in crisp VFW and American Legion caps and fezzes. The Korean vets, less numerous, still make a good showing. There are but a few Vietnam vets, scruffy and bearded, who get at first reluctant, and then appreciative, applause. The float where the vets enact the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, as always, garners sustained applause.

A convertible approaches, courtesy of Wallace Oldsmobile on Front Street. A few men, perhaps the oldest I have ever seen, slouch in the back seat, in rumpled American Legion hats. They are the World War I veterans. My Dad, a prescient man, tells me, "Stand up, these men won't be with us much longer." We do, and I offer my best imitation of a Cub Scout salute.

The Broad Boulevard Memorial Strip, in a 1960s postcard view.

This past week, three and a half decades after that parade, in West Virginia, the last of the Dough Boys, Frank W. Buckles, passed peacefully, at 110. A Missouri farm boy who bluffed his way in to the Army at age 16, he drove a rear-echelon ambulance on the Western Front, and saw the aftermath of the war's worst carnage.

These are the things that date you: one day you have great-grandparents, and grandparents, and parents, and then you do not. One day your esteemed teachers are still teaching, and then they retire, and then, they pass. One year there are World War I veterans marching in the parade, then just a few in a car, and then there are none.

The cartoon view of the seventies, of free love and hippies and day glow psychedelia, shrouds the more formal Midwestern first decade of my life.

We greeted the Bicentennial with unabashed red, white, and blue enthusiasm. We bought stiff leather "school shoes" from an elderly man with a shop down on Front Street, and kept rubber soled canvas "gym shoes" inside our desks, to be worn only for gym class. We learned to read from tattered Dick and Jane readers, with frayed red bindings, stamped with with the name of demolished Broad Street School, which Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary replaced. Sure, there was a house on Francis Avenue above Mary Campbell's Cave at the great gorge of the Cuyahoga, rumored to be inhabited by hippies, but it was still an era in which, on special occasions, little girls wore white gloves.

The things that date us: Memories of musty downtown department stores. Brownies in white gloves. World War I veterans, lapelled with red poppies, in remembrance of Flanders fields, riding in the parade:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

The day after reading of the death of Frank Buckles, the last Dough Boy, I sat bolt upright in bed, with a sudden need to remember lyrics to a song, sung over 20 years ago in A Capella Choir at Cuyahoga Falls High School:

Fair are the meadows,
Fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
Jesus is fairer,
Jesus is purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to sing.

It is a very old hymn, of obscure German origin, which even as we sang it over twenty years ago, seemed old fashioned. It was a favorite, apparently of Miss Josephine Long, who established the choral music program at Falls High and was held in such esteem that her favorite hymn was still sung decades after her death, just as the A Capella choir still processed into the Christmas Vespers concert with candles, as she had done it, and applause was strictly forbidden, as she had deemed it to be.

The fields and the meadows of our memories. Fallow until we churn them, and then one thing connects to another. The day after I sat bolt upright and remembered those lyrics to Miss Long's favorite hymn, I was tending a garden I have nurtured some seven years. It is an old estate, surrounded by tolling bells: from several Episcopal churches, from our Lady of Lourdes, from the seminary of St. Charles Borromeo. And sometimes, from the Merion Tribute House, built to honor of those who fought The War To End All Wars. My day's labor is chimed by bells from many belfries, ancient hymns that I have known: my own perfect Eden.

A frieze on the Merion Tribute House honors Doughboys

That brisk March at noontide, the bells were from the Tribute House, friezed with pugnacious mugs of the Dough Boys it was built to honor. Two days after Frank Buckles' death, the noon after I awoke to that almost forgotten hymn, the tune that the carillon chimed was none other than Miss Long's obscure favorite anthem.

This past year I have been startled by encounters, seemingly random, that later drip with meaning.

It's not magic, it's just living long enough to see the patterns. With enough life experience, every thing that happens to you reminds you of something you've experienced before. And everywhere you look, remnants of what is no longer there. An old priest at St. Marys of the Barrens once told me, you reach a point where there is a ghost behind every tree.

1971, I lean against a newly planted sapling.

In the meadows of our memory, in our favorite mossy corners, we find tokens those who came before us left behind. The rituals and the parades, the stories of those who came before us but we may not have known, the songs and the memory of the voices that lifted them: to me that ground at Seventh Street is hallowed, my own Flanders field, connecting me to the community that formed me, and all the saints who now from their labors rest. The little sapling plunked in unforgiving clay of a small house built the year before my birth is now shaggy barked and craggy. The same wind that blew the poppies at Flanders rustles its silver branches yet. This tree. This earth. This ground. This life.

That tree and the author, 39 years later.