December 8, 2014
Monday

Bells in winter, the birds clothes-pinned along phone wires, a river hugging its shore.
…
Are we not bound to the past in such complicated ways, even while looking forward?
— Larry Bradley, American poet
from “Separation,” originally published in New England Review, Vol. 32 #4

In past Holidailies, I have sometimes worried that all I wrote about was Christmas. It seems that this year I have barely mentioned Christmas. Instead, I have found inspiration, a jumping off point, in the poetry I have been reading in my return to Today’s Poem.

I’m reading randomly and haphazardly. I picked out a three-year-old copy of New England Review, acquired at Bread Loaf, from a row of books to be read that occupies about three linear feet on a kitchen counter beside my grandmother’s bread bowl. I don’t know Larry Bradley, although I know people he knows. We have 14 mutual friends on Facebook, all of them other writers.

I had already read this volume’s short story by a writer I knew, the reason I had bought the issue. “Separation” was the first piece I came to when I opened the volume today. The phrase “Bells in winter” caught my eye, and I just continued to read.

After C&C and breakfast, I made myself ready to attend a funeral. The deceased, Doris Herre, was 91, nearly 92, and a member of the United Church of Christ congregation I belonged to from 1980 to 1994. I left that congregation for one in the Lutheran tradition in part because I desired more frequent reception of the Eucharist. But I maintained friendship ties with my old congregation, coming back for the occasional funeral or wedding or other special observance.

In September, just nine weeks ago, I attended the retirement celebration of my former congregation’s longtime pastor. There were hundreds of people in the banquet hall, many faces I recognized but whose names I could not immediately recall.

Mrs. Herre greeted me by name and invited me to sit at the table she and some friends, also women I knew, had chosen. She remembered my daughter’s name, and asked after her. She remembered that I had joined the congregation that her son and her grandsons belonged to, and remembered that it was my devotion to the Eucharist that had compelled me to make the change. I was deeply touched and honored by this remembrance.

Penbrook UCC occupies a familiar landscape for me. Until I was seven years old, I lived two blocks from the place, which is on a quiet side street in an old neighborhood of mostly semi-detached houses just east of the city. My father taught in the building across the street, a public junior high school then. When the school district sought to divest itself of the building in the early 1980s, the church bought it, and turned it into a Community Ministry Center. Lynn attended day care and nursery school there. It houses that and a charter school now. I’m not sure if the weight lifting club and the dog obedience school still use the basement.

When I arrived this morning, there were birds clothes-pinned all along Banks Street. A strong odor of roasting peanuts wafted across the parking lot from the Zimmerman store on Elm. Sixty years ago I used to walk there with my mother. She’d buy their store-made peanut butter and some fresh-roasted coffee. Sometimes my sister and I would get a penny candy treat, but more often it was a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers, with a picture of a circus wagon and a handle made of a gauzy white thread.

At the service I saw old friends, including my former pastor attending now as a civilian, and my current pastor, there to lend support to his parishioner. Afterward, I went downstairs for the luncheon.

The basement of the church was at once familiar and strange. There’s been some remodeling and redecorating to accommodate new ministries. What was once a stage at one end of the fellowship hall has been enclosed, and what had been the “ladies’ lounge” with a flowered couch and needlepoint hangings done by a member is now a unisex handicap-accessible bathroom. I knew I was passing rooms I’d used as I walked down the hallway — Lynn’s first Sunday School classrooms, the nursery, the place my first spiritual study group met. The gray-green paint was familiar, but the path was not.

I talked to a few more people I knew, and then tried to find my way back to the main floor and the end of the building where I’d parked my car. As I climbed the central stairs, remembering the first time I’d done that after my back surgery in 1982, I heard someone come up behind me.

“I move slowly,” I said. “You might want to go around.”

“This is an old church,” she said. “I guess they don’t have an elevator.”

“Oh, there’s an elevator,” I said, “but I’m not exactly sure where it is.”

The elevator was installed maybe a year or so before I left. I guess I didn’t pay much attention to it because I didn’t need it then.

I walked across the street to the parking lot in front of the Community Ministry Center. It was colder than when I had arrived two hours before. The roasted peanut smell was gone, and so were the birds.

“Separation” concludes with these lines:

In time, we will be moving ahead toward what captured us or fixed us to begin with.
With ciphers of waters converging, bird-whistle from the wires, and, in winter, bells.

I’ve been walking around for two months with the sense of a gray cloud hanging over me. I think it’s beginning to lift.