Last lion…

And, so, Ted Kennedy has at last caught up to his loved brothers.

For those of us for whom the saga of the Kennedy family has signposted our lives, the passing of this, the youngest of the four brothers, is a kind of dead end. For even if another Kennedy picks up the torch, it will be the torch of a new generation and not the same as that torch passed so long ago to a new generation.

For me, my life, my young life, is backlit by the memory of my parents sinking a Kennedy sign into our front yard in Bayside, New York, in the fall of 1960, announcing to our neighbors my family’s allegiance to a Kennedy, another Irish Catholic like ourselves, even as my mother’s parents, as Irish as us, continued to toe the Republican party line.

By 1972, by the time I could first vote, there was no Kennedy on the ballot, two brothers by then dead by bullet, the next and youngest, the now-dead Teddy, not yet ready for prime time. Nixon, despite his peace-candidate pretensions, was never an option, and I cast my first presidential ballot for George McGovern, the McGovern button on my shirt prompting a Nixon exit poller to remark as I walked by, “How does it feel to vote for a loser?”

Come 1980, and Teddy runs, and falters and falls. And those of us who knew, who remembered, picked up the torch, only, let’s face it, to falter ourselves.

We get Reagan for our troubles, then Bush the elder, the younger still wet with inexperience in the wings, his own eyes, alas, even then bug-eyed on the stage.

The Clinton interregnum would do little to advance the Kennedy agenda.

After all, there was too much to buy in the ‘90s, let alone on into the Bush redux years of the early 2000’s. And to buy was to help the economy. Forget what was needed, whether for yourself or for society, when you could all too easily get what you wanted. Gas back then was cheap, so tank the family in a high-above-ground SUV. Why care about mileage or any pre-9/11 notion of dependence on foreign oil? Hey, we’re Americans, aren’t we, and who’s going to tell us how to live? Certainly not some Arabian sheik, let alone a granola-cruncher back home. Want a house beyond your means? No problem; some bank somewhere will give you a loan. Can’t afford whatever it was you wanted that particular moment? Hey, so what was plastic for, anyway?

As for health care, the self-proclaimed cause of Ted Kennedy’s life, either you had it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, too bad; it’s the American way, isn’t it? I’ve got mine, and if you don’t have yours, well, that’s not my problem.

Then Bush-the-encore rolls into town.

And suddenly it’s a snap to find and fund a multi-billion-dollar-a-year war, necessary or not, for year after year, thanks to a little Cheney sleight-of-hand, even as the Bush minions preach a decidedly unEmersonian self-reliance to the home front.

Health care for all? Hell, it’ll break the budget. Shore up social security? Oh, we’re good for another decade or so, if not more. The banks, the stock market, the insurance industry? And, man, all at once we’re talking a big Texas whoa. As in whoa, whoa! As in hands off, back away, who needs government regulation? The banks, the market, the insurance companies will take care of themselves.

And they did.

And here we are.

And there, there, the torch lies…

Putting on the Ritz, I mean, the Marriott…

At the risk of sounding Andy-Rooney-ish, it is, I think, perplexing that Marriott, where I stayed a week and more back, while on business in Kansas City, should have found some reason to have outfitted my room with a catalog pitching its “collection.”

Certainly, that catalog begs questions on many levels: Is it, for example, worth the proverbial paper it was printed on and the consequent damage to the environment, both on the front end and the back? Who at Marriott ever dreamed that those visiting its hotels would have a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rush home to redecorate their homes á la Marriott? And if any Marriott visitor ever did succumb to such urge or desire, why?

Nonetheless, if, by some quirk, or, more correctly, some outright and utter suspension of all reason, I ever wanted to sleep at home on the same bed I had once slept on in Kansas City, that very bed — I’m not kidding — is only a catalog-click away. I could even order the “complete bed package,” replete with one of four “signature bed dressings,” one of them dubbed, after Marriott’s leader, the JW (we are, after all, talking “signature” bed dressings). But why stop there, when I could easily add a duvet, pillow and bed linens, each reproducing, down to the very last stitch, the furnishings that made my Marriott room my so-very-home away from home.

But there’s more, as they say in the ad trade…

My telephone or online order could also include a shower curtain to match the one in my Kansas City Marriott bathroom, not to mention towels, oh, excuse me, “towel therapy,” the better to enhance the aromatherapy products and the shampoo and conditioner, which, in the catalog’s words (who could make this up?), have “developed a cult following.” (Me? I’m holding out for the chocolates-on-pillows cult, or maybe the cult of free cable-TV previews, or even the cult of ice-down-the-corridor.)

But if, like me, you’re still not convinced, still thinking that maybe this Marriott thing is not the thing for you, then go ahead…go ahead and imagine yourself lounging in your Marriott robe, sipping tea from your Marriott tea cup, the room’s ambience enhanced by a home diffuser wafting notes of lemon verbena, thyme and lavender. And whatever you’re now thinking, if it’s not enough to make you want to plunge right now into your Marriott-inspired bed décor for what the good folks at Marriott promise will be “a transcendent sleep experience,” well, then, maybe, just maybe, you’re not Marriott material.

As a former advertising copywriter, I know what it is like to have to write such drivel and to feign accountability, if not outright pride, when submitting copy to the client. And, yet, here I am a career later, confronting in that catalog a vision of my former self and realizing, again, the Newtonian/Pavlovian knee-jerk action and reaction that animates our economy: some of us sell; most of us buy. And that is, still is, all these years after I abandoned that career for another, what makes this world of ours go ‘round, maybe even more so, given Marriott’s assumption that I, or anyone, for that matter, could ever want what Marriott passes for wares.

“To be Irish…”

Once upon a distant midnight, Karen and I and our eldest, then-toddler son, Declan, then one-and-a-half, shared a bed — no apologies, we were then (not surprisingly — five home births, 50 kid-years of homeschooling) of the family-bed persuasion, a persuasion, which, given that we eventually had those five children, most of whom are now in their 20s, we eventually and successfully got over.

But at the time, back in 1983, that family bed occupied one corner of an upper bedroom in the hillside farmhouse in which we lived, some eight miles west of then-undiscovered Dingle, far out on the tattered western edge of Ireland, within sight, on any rare clear day, of the ever-roiling Atlantic. In fact, we lived close enough to the ocean, that any gale commanded notice, that night as on any night in coastal Ireland.

But the gales that night really did mean business. So much so that on this particular night — the night after the day our landlady’s son-in-law had replaced several of the window panes in our bedroom, the putty still not yet set — we three cocooned in the bed in the room, Karen and I listening to the wind test the newly repaired windows, Declan, a good baby, snug and snoozing between us.

But I’m talking gales, as in winds shrieking and unstopped by any speed bump of an island anywhere between Nova Scotia and Ireland. Gales that could, and did, strip leaves overnight from otherwise verdant trees, that soaked to the fibers rooftops long wetted by storms long spewed by that very same ocean. Gales that pummeled windows, like those that aired that Irish bedroom of ours. Gales which, that same night, would memorably blow out those newly replaced window panes.

Now, almost 26 years later, all this still makes for a good story.

But to Karen and me, to recall this story is to again hear wind screaming through that old farmhouse’s unsealed cracks and uninsulated walls, to hear rain lashing against the windows and against the wet putty of those window panes, to hear those panes shattering on the bedroom floor and then to hear rain stitching the very floor, the wind all at once funneling through the emptied mullions and firing rain like bullets. And all the while, all three of us — mother, father, son — huddled against the wind, against the cold, against all that anyone ever born Irish always knew an ocean could do.

And, the next morning, calm, a beautiful, beautiful calm.

And I would again have lit the cooker, that morning, as on many morning in Ireland, a cooker stoked with coal, the better to warm the kitchen, not to mention heat any needed water. And Karen might again have done a wash, that day, as she did on so many days, with that same heated water, in that kitchen’s sink, the laundry scrubbed against an old-fashioned washboard, then rinsed and dried afterwards on a line outside, in a wind by then soothed to a breeze and hardly a wind at all.

And all of us, Karen, me, Declan, youngest brother Patrick, would have then made our way through another day in Ireland, me scribbling for clients back in the States; Karen doing the more important work of mom-ing baby Declan; Patrick, then a ninth-grader, off at the local Christian Brothers school in Dingle, his own day made more difficult by the fact that his classes were all taught in Irish Gaelic, with no accommodation whatsoever for the English-speaking Yank, and his own Irish limited to that taught him, of romantic necessity, by his Irish girlfriend.

Had any one of us needed to go somewhere near, we would have walked, since we’d no car, and we’d have used the stroller to haul whatever needed lugging (you’d be surprised how many bags you can sling on one of the umbrella models of those days). And if we’d had to go farther? We’d have joined the regulars, of course, on the twice-a-week bus to Dingle, among those regulars the nonagenarian, his thumb thumbing the near end of his walking-stick, who, that summer, lamented that wet summer, and who later made his way into a poem I wrote (see below).

There, in Dingle, we’d buy whatever we couldn’t buy — including Wellies at a pub along Green Street, a pub that doubled as a hardware store, and socks at a clothing store that doubled as a pub — at the one-room, one-counter grocery in Murreagh nearer our home. And, memorably, on one of those days, as we walked from home in Kilcooley to the bus-stop at Murreagh, maybe half a mile away, the gales again nail-gunning a horizontal rain, we passed a couple of soaked-to-the-skin road workers digging a ditch at the edge of the church at Ardamór, their work overseen, for lack of anything else to do, by a long-retired mailman known locally, and famously, as Paddy the Post.

Glancing up at us as we approached, Paddy pinched the brim of his cap, the better to hold it against the wind and rain, smiled into the weather and bellowed over the howl of the gale, “It’s a wild one, isn’t it?”

That night Patrick would have struggled through his homework in his own bedroom, no doubt spending much of his time trying to decipher the gibberish of the Irish he heard against the little Irish he knew. Karen and me would likely have sat in the sitting room, with no television to entertain us, only a radio, the room itself warmed only by a turf-and-coal fire, the air alit by the various voices of Radió Telefís Éireann, or RTE, the government-run radio station, some of those voices in Ireland’s assimilated English, the rest in the native Irish.

But back to where I began…

“To be Irish…”

Is something I have known since I was a child.

My name alone a kind of tribal tattoo. Dónal. The name, when said by anyone Irish, mellifluent, the first syllable drum-struck by its long “o” and spilling into the musical second, lesser note. Dó-nal, “world-mighty,” in its Anglicized translation, even if the name pre-dates anything any later tribe, whether Scots or English, ever better embellished. It is, therefore, what it is and always was, before the Scots ever tacked a “d” to the end or the English determined some Anglicized translation: Dónal, plain and simple, Dónal.

And, were there any doubt of my lineage, my father was another Dónal and his two brothers were Kevin and Seán; my great-grandparents, on both sides of my family, had called Mayo, Sligo, Tipperary, Longford and Cavan home; my own children bear the names of Declan, Brendan, Siobhán, Tiernán and Dónal, the last one Dónal Óg, or “young Dónal,” the better to distinguish him from me, Dónal Mór, or “Dónal the greater (or, more to the point, older).” And I, after those intervening generations, had been the one, the only one, albeit briefly, to again bring my name to ground, to very green ground, by moving back to Ireland.

“To be Irish…”

If you know history, is to know suppression, if not outright oppression. Is to understand the loss of language, culture, faith, history. Is to till the earth, but not own it. Is to raise crops and livestock, but to die, horribly and by the hundreds of thousands, for the lack of those very things. Is to suffer the insufferable, until finally some voices became a chorus, became a crowd, became an insurrection, became history.

“To be Irish…”

Is also to know that there is nothing in life that is to be taken for granted. That what you have today, you may not have tomorrow. That anything lived or loved can also be lost — and eventually will.

“To be Irish…”

Is, in the words of the late Irish-American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” And, the part Moynihan left out, to know that the very same world will, in the end, also make make your heart.


*Once again, the vagaries of Blogspot, at least insofar as I can fathom them, do not allow me to preserve the architecture of a poem. Suffice it to say, that there are some missing indents in the following lines, but you, proverbially, will get my drift:


Language Lessons
(Ceachtanna Teanga)


“Never, he breathed,
his smoker’s thumb burninshing
a blackthorn pinched between the knobs
of ancient knees.
“Never a summer like this. Not
in my ninety-five years.


Rain curtained the windows
as he spoke, purling
in the bus’s slipstream, as one white hand,
flushed from its perch, fluttered briefly
with regret, then settled again
on its blackthorn roost, and blue eyes,
swimming in a century of memories,
slid slowly from mine to the floor.


In air electric with Irish, his English
seemed all squawk and sputter, though
his wool coat, peaty with rain, held
its own in the lingua franca of the nose.
What little I knew of the old words
I understood. That a bus
was not simply a bus.
That the stopped burr of Donald
was not the liquid lilt of Dónal.
That no round-voweled potahto plucked
from Kentish loam would weigh so heavy
on the page as any tongue-tripped práta.
That there was, in fact,
a lunacy in Lúnasa that mere August,
in all its English augustness,
would never quite convey.

Could-a, would-a, should-a… (or, A Love Letter to Karen, on this, my 58th Birthday)

Karen and I married on what some, with questionable kindness, once thought a whim.

Since then, we have racked up almost 29 years of marriage — and 19 moves in those same 29 years.

We have lived in six states, three of those states more than once, and two countries.

We raised my youngest brother, Patrick, after my mother’s premature death of breast cancer in 1981, at which time Karen and I had only been months married, and Karen, God bless her, had made room in the blush of her own life for my brother, himself only ten years younger than she.

Karen and I later had five children of our own, all of them born at home. We home-schooled most of them most of the time. And Karen later brave-faced the years of my graduate school at Notre Dame, then was, if anything, even more stalwart during those pre-med science years back in Vermont, and, later still, during med school in Iowa and during residency, all of which, in the end, cost each and both and all of us some 13 years of what might otherwise have been some semblance of a normal life.

Under such circumstances, who could blame Karen for not at times wondering what could-a, would-a, should-a been?

Certainly, not me. Not the guy responsible for much, if not quite all, of the above.

Still, when it comes to the unexperienced and the unrequited, Karen is, and she herself would readily admit, the queen of what-might-have-beens:

“If only we’d not moved from Cornwall (Vermont) and had never left that little grey cape I loved…”

“Surely, we should have saved more than we did and much earlier, especially now that we’re older…”

“What if you’d never gone to med school…what if you’d just gotten a teaching job at the Academy (St. Johnsbury, in Vermont)…”

“We could have just stayed in Ireland…we could have bought that acre of land on the ocean west of Dingle, back when no one knew where Dingle was…could have had a life unequal to any we’ve lived since…”

“We should never have sold that house and those ten acres in Jericho (Vermont)… remember the snowstorm that greeted us on our arrival…it snowed for a week…two feet of snow all around, trees hung with snow, the very air a mystery, the lineman linking our phone line a mirage trudging from the house to the distant pole through the falling snow…”

“What if we’d never left Peacham (Vermont, again), what if we’d never left the brick house or the Gagliardi house or the brown house…what, what might have been…”

“And, yes, Karen,” I patiently tell her, not for the first time, never for the last, “We could-a, would-a, should-a…”

Yes, Karen…

We’d now be somewhere, undoubtedly under other, better or less circumstances, but still wondering what might have happened, if only we’d not done this or done that.

If only we’d not been so quick to sell this house or sold that one later or for more money; if, perhaps, the sun had not shined on August 22nd of any particular year, or if, instead of going to the grocery store in the morning of some now-dead day, I’d gone in the afternoon; or, maybe, just maybe, we should never have left Virginia twenty-something years ago. Maybe I should have stayed with Time-Life Books until, as eventually happened, there was no more Time-Life Books; maybe I would have gotten some kind of buy-out, some gilded, silvered or bronzed parachute; and maybe, maybe, as you’ve often suggested, we should have had one child instead of five, or five homes instead of 19, 19 dogs instead of one, one career instead of two, eight cars instead of five…

We’ll never know, though, Karen. Because we never lived those days.

And because here, here we are…

You, Karen.

And me.

Here.

Now.

Together for 28 years and counting, a few down, most up, with five kids to love and to still watch grow, not to mention that youngest brother of mine, who, despite the fact that we used our parental training wheels on him — and he did his spin on us (right, Patrick?) — has done more than okay.

And so, Karen, so have we.

And, yes, Karen, we could-a, we would-a, we should-a …

But we’d not be here, now, in this moment, this place, still moving forward, for better or for worse, as once we promised one another that day, that lunch hour — that whim —those 28-and-something years ago, in front of that justice of the peace, all to the alarm of my then-boss and our still-friend, Glenn, who vowed never again to leave me unattended in any lunch hour ever…

Nor, if we’d stayed put, would we ever have known the likes of Vreni and Peter, of Frank and lost Joan, of Glenn and Maria, and, back in Vermont, of Jean Clark, of John and Wendy and Bob and Sharon, of Tim and Betsy, whom time eventually made the in-laws you wish you would have; and, still in Vermont, of Kathleen Kolb, of Jean and long-missed Howard, of Dick Birdsall and Edith and Gordon; on to South Bend, and Kevin and Indie, Diana and John, dear, dear Mary and her family; and here in Iowa, Helen and Bob, Jane and Geery, Marti and John, and so many, many more, unnamed here, and all, all, all of whom have graced our lives…

Would never remember a certain swing at a certain Vermont motel at a certain vanished time in our lives, way back in 1986, as we watched our two toddler children on that same swing and committed ourselves then, that dulcet evening, that very moment, to a life in Vermont…

Could not now think of the stereotypically silent Calvin Coolidge without recalling our own not-to-be-forgotten picnic, what, maybe 20 years ago, a stone’s throw from Coolidge’s modest house in Plymouth, Vermont, and a photograph, taken by a friendly passer-by, on that passer-by’s own urging, that very same day, one that, to this day, preserves one moment of one very memorable day…

Should never still hear, on a footpath near the Notre Dame Basilica, the skip and scamper of our children’s ghosted younger feet as all of us walked, on any given Sunday, from graduate housing to Mass and back again…

Would not have found, in Iowa, a place to call here, if not quite home…

We could-a, Karen…

would-a, Karen…

should-a, Karen…

Still, life’s been good, really good.

And, at the same time, it has also at times been hard.

And, Karen, I do admit to having made it harder.

Freelancing was never quite free. Med school — sorry, Joseph, “follow-your-bliss,” Campbell — was never anybody’s idea of middle-age bliss. And residency was hardly an improvement on med school.

And let’s not even discuss our decisions since then.

But if we’d not done what we’ve done, you and I, Karen, would not be who we are.

And just look at you, Karen.

The librarian you, at twenty, could never have imagined you’d be, your work, your good work, your very good work, loved by kids and parents alike, from Iowa City to Vermont. Not to mention mother of five — six, if you count Patrick — and a good, no, truly gifted, mother at that. Survivor of all those moves, and, let’s face it, medical school and residency and too much more. And still, still, the girl you were, the woman you are, the woman you so deeply are.

Me?

All I got out of all of this was an MD, which, in the longer view, is not much.

Yes, Karen, we could-a, would-a, should-a..,

But, again, here we are, with all that we’ve lived behind us and whatever we’ve left to live ahead. And, mindful of that, mindful that the path ahead is at once climbing and narrowing, what’s next?

© 2009 Dónal Kevin Gordon

His pleasure…

The corn here in east-central Iowa, in this, the near-edge of summer of 2009, is knee-high and growing inches by the day. And many an adjacent field, now, as for so many seasons before, is carpeted, if only ankle-high, in soybeans, leaves pale-green, the color so reminiscent of Vermont in so many a wistful and now-remembered spring.

And even if that is news to you, I suspect that you are more interested in where I have been, all these many months, ever since my blog whispered to a seeming close in November.

Short version of a long story: Six of ten physician faculty at my residency resigned, each one of them for very good reason, leaving the four survivors with so much more to do, not the least of it saving the residency itself. And yet, in good time, and for equally good reason, I, too, resigned, and so did yet another friend and faculty member. Only, in the end, I chose to stay on. Only because I could not give up teaching. Only because, maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing, feathered or not, as hope.

Nonetheless, all that I and my many colleagues endured these many months certainly deserved my resignation. And even though I have decided to remain on the faculty, it has cost me dearly, whether in terms of friends lost or in a path ahead made less certain, with my own desire to again be the writer I was wobbling in winds beyond my control, even as I continue to be the physician I am.

And yet here I am.

Still heading to work each day as physician and teacher. Still hoping again to be the writer I was. Still wishing that life might somehow become less complicated, somewhat less convoluted.

And yet, and yet, I so miss writing…

For those of you who knew me back when, I truly loved what I did.

For years, first on the staff of Doubleday and later at Time-Life Books, I went to work eager to prove every day that I could do what no other copywriter could do, not ever for ego, but only because I was aware of a certain gift, a gift that was mine to give in return.

Later still, as a freelancer, I had little choice but to excel as a writer, the better to keep my family roofed, clothed, in good health and in food. And, at some point, back in the mid-1980s, I started writing chapters for books, and, happily, editors liked what I wrote.

And always, always, as my bride Karen knows, whether I was writing those books or writing advertising, I wrote for that burn of a moment when I knew that I had done all that I ever could do, when there was nothing I myself could not do better, that moment analogous to that of the Scots runner in Chariots of Fire, who, against a verdant and scalloped backdrop, not unlike that of my own loved and lamented Vermont, confided to his sister, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

God, how I felt His pleasure. God, how I miss that today…

But, you ask, you’re now a physician, and isn’t there pleasure to be had in that?

There is.

But not like the pleasure I felt before as a scribbler.

Sure, patients appreciate to whatever extent whatever I do, and the residents, I want to think, are grateful for the teaching I do. And on most days I leave work having accomplished something greater than the effort invested.

But to again feel God’s pleasure…to feel His pleasure as once I did…to know that I had done the best on any day with the gifts given me…ah, to again do that, and so often…such is pleasure, His pleasure…and why I run..and fast.

© 2009 Dónal Kevin Gordon