The Hardest Kind of Learning

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The hardest kind of learning happens in the night

when you wake from the weight

of a single thought

that settles

in your mind

like a

stone

that finally hits the ocean floor

long after it leaves your grasp,

and you sit upright—eyes wide in the dark…

still holding in the gasp.

© Copyright 2000/2004, TK, Patterns of Ink

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It takes a long time for some things to hit me. I can talk about a fact or event, mark it on a calendar, believe it's real, anticipate it, etc., but sometimes things just don't hit me until they happen. Sometimes, in fact, they hit me long afterwards.

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Take last week's Florida trip with our seniors. We had a great time, came home, and stepped right back into reality. Yesterday I stared at some pictures of Destin that made it all seem like a blur. Tomorrow night those seniors graduate. One year ago on this same Friday night, my second daughter graduated. Where did that year go?

Four years ago on that night, my oldest daughter graduated. In exactly one month, she's getting married to her high school sweetheart who marched with her on that night. We've been talking about their wedding since July; it's marked on the calendar; I know it's real and I'm very happy about it; we're anticipating a great event... but it hasn't hit me yet—not fully. I wonder when it will.

I wrote the poem above several years ago after snapping out of a dream that sat me up in bed.

In the years following my father's death, I would randomly dream that he was with us again in very familiar settings. It was as if he was "on leave" from heaven. We were all aware that he would not be there long, but it felt natural and we'd not say or do anything that would cut short the visit. It's been years since I've had one of these pleasant dreams, but the night I wrote the lines I had awakened from one in which I was trying to say something to Dad alone.

The Christmas Break before Dad died we were visiting home. Dad and I had discussed something the night before I drove back to Iowa from Michigan. [I was putting my nose in my parents business and telling him to hire a contractor to build the breezeway since Mom had been waiting for years. He was disappointed that I had intruded and simply assured me that her breezeway would be done soon enough. I regretted having said anything.]  When we hugged goodbye on the driveway, I sensed we still needed better closure. I regretted that I had spoken my mind the night before, but I didn't say anything. I later wrote him a card about it and told him how much he meant to me. Mom assured me he got the letter and appreciated it and that everything was fine. Dad and never talked about it again, and our phone calls made me more eager to visit face to face over Spring Break, but before that time together came, we were called for his funeral.

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The evening after the service, Mom called her five kids back to their bedroom to give all us an article of Dad's clothing. As we were sorting through things, I found my long handwritten card in the top of his sock drawer. I was happy to see it there. I left the letter and took an old polo shirt of Dad's. Some may think it strange, but twelve years later I still have that shirt in a Ziploc bag. I love the smell of it.

Anyway, the night I woke from this dream, I wanted to say something "in person" to Dad, but reality started seeping into the cracks of the dream and he was suddenly no longer sitting on the couch when I turned to talk to him. I sat up in bed, holding in an empty sob then blurting into the darkness, "You were right, Dad!"

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The gravity of thought is measured not by weight but impact.

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A week ago this morning, as our return jet was taking off from Florida, I looked out the window and saw the turquoise water by the white sand become deeper and deeper blue. It reminded me of this title poem.
Our first full day in Destin, we were all swimming in that lightest band of blue. Some of the seniors had never been in the ocean. One was seriously afraid as she put it, "because of all the fish and sharks and stuff out there," but she eventually joined us.
Some of her classmates reassured her there were no sharks in the "gulf" part of the ocean. I didn't say anything, of course, but that isn't true. The strange thing about the ocean is that sharks, whales, and all sorts of sea creatures really are "out there" in the deep. It's just so vast we tend not to trip over them as we swim in the waves.
To illustrate the metaphor of this poem: if you were on an ocean liner over the average depth of the ocean (about 2.5 miles deep), it would take hours for a rock dropped from your hand to hit the ocean floor. If the ship were traveling at standard cruising speed (roughly 30 MPH), you could be 70 miles or more from the splash point when the rock poofs in the silt on the ocean floor. That's hard to fathom, isn't it?
Wreckage of the RMS Titanic (postcard above) was found at about 12,500 feet below the surface. That's ten Empire State Buildings down.
"The oceans are WAY deeper below sea level than the cruising altitude of our jet from Destin to Detroit was above it. The Marianas Trench is over 33,000 feet deep, nearly three times as deep as the ocean floor. Even whales never go below 3,500 feet. They only go deeper when they die. Yes, like all creatures, whales eventually die and most of them sink to the ocean floor as "whale falls." They are preserved in the near freezing temperatures for several decades and each huge carcass creates a macabre "feeding" ecosystem all its own.
The ocean depths still hold many mysteries—that's why it's called the final frontier of earth. If my timid student had seen this video or these creatures of the deep, we would never have convinced her to take her first dip in salt water.

Learning facts like this about the less familiar faces and places of the sea is fun and easy with the internet, but the facts of life are just splashes in the water. The Hardest Kind of Learning happens some time later when the realities of life finally settle in.
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Why Bloggers Blog: Part III-C

A 20th Century Example of
Writing Words that Last by way of a Letter

I had the honor of visiting briefly with President George Herbert Walker Bush (41st POTUS and father of 43rd) after a fundraising event in October of 1999. I’d brought with me a copy of All the Best, his memoirs in letters. His son had already signed it a month before and the father was happy to grace the fly leaf with his own brief note and autograph.

If you have ever seen the elder Bush talk of his children, you know there is a deep affection that quickly finds its way to his tearful eyes. That happened in our brief conversation. Regardless of any other feelings some may have about these two men and the times through which they met the challenges of their presidencies, I will forever feel that they are the most tenderhearted leaders I have ever looked in the eyes, and I believe time will bear this out.
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In the spirit of civility and the respect due to letters of this nature, I invite us to set aside current public opinion and think back more than fifty years to when our current President Bush was six years old, the year his little sister (nearly four) Robin died of leukemia. In the tender years to follow, he and his brothers watched their parents work through the grief of losing their daughter.

On page 81-82 of that historic collection of letters, All the Best, there is a letter the elder Bush wrote to his mother one evening in lieu of visiting his daughter's grave. I found no copy of the text on the internet, so I’ve presented it here as Part III-C, since it is a modern example of the vulnerable eloquence discussed in Part III-B. [This was written in 1958, years before he held any political office.]

Dear Mum,

I’ve jotted down some words about a subject dear to your heart and mine….I sometimes wonder whether it is fair to the boys…to “fly high” the portrait of Robin that I love so much…every time I sit at our table with just our candlelight, I can’t help put glance at this picture you gave us and enjoy a renewed physical sensation of closeness to a loved one.

This letter… is kind of a confessional… between you and me….
There is about our house a need….We need some starched crisp frocks to go with the torn-kneed blue jeans and helmets. We need some soft blond hair to off-set those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards…. We need a legitimate Christmas angel—one who doesn’t’ have cuffs beneath the dress.
We need someone who’s afraid of frogs.
We need someone to cry when I get mad—not argue.
We need a little one who can kiss without leaving...jam or gum.
We need a girl.
We had one once—she’d fight and cry and play and make her way just like the rest.
But there was about her a certain softness.
She was patient—her hugs just a little less wiggly….
She’d stand beside our bed till I felt her there. Silently and comfortable, she’d put those fragrant locks against my chest and fall asleep.
Her peace made me feel strong, and so very important.
[Her saying] “My Daddy” had a caress, a certain ownership which touched a slightly different spot than the “Hi Dad” [of the boys] I love so much.
But she is still with us. We need her and yet we have her.
We can’t touch her, and yet we can feel her.
We hope she’ll stay in our house for a long, long time.”

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Love, Pop... [a nick name he used in his letters to his parents]

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Thirty years later he was sworn in as President and attempted to cast a vision for "a kinder, gentler America." Detractors mocked it at the time, but perhaps he was referring the kindness so evident in this letter and to the civility that we've been talking about in these posts. Part IV covers some of the gathered input from comments in this series as well as some remaining thoughts on Why Bloggers Blog. [It may even be followed by a Part V prompted by a comment below.]

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[George H.W. Bush speaks at Ronald Reagan's funeral.]

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Note: Based on last week's hint about this post, some of you may have thought it would be a letter from President Ronald Reagan. He was an avid letter writer--especially prolific were his notes to his wife. She later compiled in this book. Because of his Alzheimer disease, Ronald Reagan is probably best known for this letter, which closed with "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead." I used those images and farewell letter in a poem entitled A Mourning in America .

Only the Roots Remain

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Sometimes the shadow of grief is kind
like the shade of a tree
that still stands tall
in the back of my mind—
though in reality…
it’s gone—
struck by a bolt that rent its wood
in an early spring rain.
Grass hides the spot
where the oak once stood…
only the roots remain.© Copyright April, 1996, Patterns of Ink

My mother still lives in the 14-acre woods that my family has called home for over thirty years. The first building we raised on the property was a barn, framed entirely with long stout logs we harvested from the land as we cleared it.

About twenty paces from the door of the barn stood a tremendous oak—with a trunk so large that my two older brothers and I could barely touch fingertips as we encircled it. The oaks in our dense woods grow tall in search of sunshine with no outstretched limbs but for the canopy far above. Of the hundreds of ancient trees on our land, this oak became a friend the day my father scaled eighty feet up into its branches and tied a long, thick hemp rope to a worthy limb.

The rope dropped down and hovered a few feet above the soft sandy ground. I was thirteen and Dave was fifteen. Paul was sixteen, and on the cusp of caring less about such things, but the day Dad hung the swing we were all amazed at the height he had gone in the tree and the long pendulum swing of the rope.

“Is this going to be a tire swing?” I asked.

“Better than that,” Dad baited, “You’ll see.” And he began telling us of a similar swing he and his brothers and all of their friends once had when they were teens. His explanation was more than a story; it was the beginning of a long tutorial on the art of rope swinging.

Within a matter of days, with Dad’s help and some left-over lumber from the barn, we built a large platform ten feet above the ground around the trunk of a hickory tree that stood about thirty-five feet south of the oak. The platform was framed in like a house and suspended from above. A ladder was used to reach the trap door in the floor planks. [We eventually learned to run with the rope away and then toward the fort to "kip" up without the ladder.]

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It was impossible to throw the rope (as dead weight) to the platform, but when properly tugged as if ringing a church bell, the weight of the long, thick hemp arched like a drawn bow string and then re;eased at just the right moment. There was no "twang" sound, but the rope flew up the platform straight as an arrow, and the catcher would lean out and grab it. That’s when the fun began.

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The first jumper would take the rope in his left hand and lean back as far as he could on the platform. Then, by simply lifting his legs in a “pike” position, he would glide out into the wind like Johnny Weissmuller [whom we all considered the truest Tarzan of all time. We heard his scream all the time on Bill Kennedy's "Sunday Showtime," a Detroit classic.]

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At the other end of the rope’s reach, we would twist our body and come back feet first in perfect form. Upon reaching the platform, our feet lightly land with the flair of a trapeze artist, and we'd hand off to the next jumper.

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As our grips and arms grew stronger we gained the reckless confidence of Weissmuller's jungle, and in our minds this pastime took on the subtle nuances of an obscure Olympic event. It also became a team sport. Often Dad was right there with us and every bit as good.

As we introduced more and more of our friends to the swing, we continued to break our own record of how many jumpers could latch on each time the rope returned to the platform. Imagine seeing 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 boys dangling from this rope—that’s no exaggeration—the record may have even been higher. The last to jump on could barely find an inch of unclaimed rope to grab as he leapt outstretched like a flying squirrel. Because I was small, I was usually that last squirrel.

We’d ride the hurtling clump of sweat and laughter until we could safely drop off one at a time without being pummeled into the dust. (As skilled as we all were on that rope, “gang dismounts” were avoided at all cost—think of eight guys slamming to the earth at about twenty miles per hour. It happened only once as I recall. Someone's face was in someone's armpit, and an eruption of laughter sapped all strength, and we dropped in a grunting tangle of limbs. Fortunately, we all broke each other's falls and not our necks.)

The swing was a part of our life for many years. It was something we never “out grew.” I don’t recall my last ride on the rope, but I had no reason to think I'd never see it in its place again. All I know is one spring when I was away at college, a bolt of lightening struck the oak with a crack that rattled our house.

After the storm, Dad went out to see which tree was hit and there at the base of our oak the ground was strewn with long strips of bark, and one side of the trunk far above was exposed from the blast. Of all the giant trees on our land... why our rope-swing tree? Dad called us in our dorm 600 miles away to tell us about it. Looking back on it now, I think he knew a chapter of our life had closed. Older people have that gift-- of seeing the life in chapters. Younger people see only pages and can't wait to turn them.

Somewhere in a shoebox, I have a snapshot of my dad up on his highest ladder painting tar on the bare wood in an effort to keep the tree alive. It took only a year to see that the tree had been harmed beyond hope in that storm. By the second summer, its branches were bare.

In the same box, there are other photos of Dad cutting down the old oak. It required the largest of his arsenal of chain saws. None of us who had known the tree were home to help, but my brother-in-law understood the significance of the event and took the pictures for us. Most of the tree was stacked for firewood (oak burns clean and long), but Dad set some aside for a secret task. (This fact alone confirmed that to him the tree and its swing was more than rope and wood.)Through the years that followed, he gave each of us [and eventually each grandchild] our names carved from the rich grain of that oak. always reminding us it was from "our" tree.

My father passed away in the spring of '95. [This Sunday, April 1, marks 12 years.] His death was sudden and unexpected like the bolt that took our tree. As I came upon the first year anniversary of his death, I thought of the many gifts he had in common with that oak, and scribbled down this poem to share with my family. Beyond them, only a small group of middle-aged “boys” who remember the feel of a heavy rope in their hands… would understand its meaning.

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