The first week of calendrical summer has been a mellow and joyous one here as we had been anticipating a lengthy visit from our son Luke, our daughter-in-law Melanie, and their two delightful offspring, John Henry (9) and Hazel (8). And now they are here. Their home is in Montreal, where Luke is a university professor. This family has been much impacted by Covid, and their travel plans have definitely been in the category of touch-and-go. In our observation the myth that things bureaucratic have been better in Canada than in our own land has the status of other masochistic American myths. An earlier trip south, planned for Easter, had to be cancelled at the last moment; and there had been serious doubt hovering over this one as well. But they did with sheer heroism make a flying trip to Sophia’s wedding, and they arrived here for a real summer visit late on Saturday. They are not actually staying under our roof. At the tolerable cost of some cat-sitting they were able to wangle a large and commodious house for themselves nearby. But on Sunday we did immerse ourselves in a full day of varied activities from attending church in the morning to hanging out at the pool in the afternoon, and eating take-out from Tiger Noodles in the evening. A good swath of summer lies before us, and quite possibly even some more miso soup.
I found myself anticipating their arrival with what Henry James might call animation. I did not try to resist or disguise my eagerness. Every stage of life has its surprises; but old age is almost nothing but surprises. The physical changes, however well anticipated in theory, are in practice something quite other. I was an English professor. How many times have I read in Hamlet of “ the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to?” The “natural shocks” of physical decay, whether or not they are exacerbated by dramatic pathology, catch you off guard; but they are in a certain sense expected. What I found much more unexpected are the new developments in sentimental and psychic life, unfamiliar and unanticipated, yet upon reflection perhaps finally not surprising. The realization that one is essentially through with many of the activities which have proved so urgent and life-sustaining in earlier years is necessarily a somber one. Yet it does come with a sense of liberation as well. It seems to permit a certain surrender to sentiment. Our joy at seeing the family of our youngest child has been unrestrained—and with regard to my own reactions maybe schmalzy.
It has had the strange effect, also, of bringing to my mind a kaleidoscope of decades-old experience. Throughout my adult life I lived at a distance, often a very great distance from my parents. Visits to them were difficult and rare. The arrivals and departures were always emotionally charged, and with one exception never accomplished on my part with dry eyes. Somehow I managed it on my last farewell to my father, which I knew was a last farewell, and executed as he stood shakily upon a stick, confused, uncomprehending, and aphasic in the cubicle bedroom of a rehabilitation hospital in New Mexico. Trips “home” always involved difficult travel arrangements: a flight to Springfield, Mo., or later El Paso, Texas, and then a fairly substantial drive, usually in a rented car, to Baxter County, Arkansas or Las Cruces, N.M. Such musical tastes as I have are mainly classical; but homecomings and departures are always associated in my mind with sentimental popular ballads or Country and Western tunes, mainly having to do with absence and loss: “You Are My Sunshine,” “Red River Valley,” Peter, Paul, and Mary—well, mainly Mary: “If you miss the train I’m on / You will know that I am gone.” It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, but, my darling, when I think of thee. If you seek evidence of the inventiveness of the English language as spoken in America you might begin with the wonderful word tear-jerker. My own singing repertory, if it could be called that, consists of almost nothing but tear-jerkers, most of them pseudo-folk songs from the Nostalgia Canning Factory.
But there is one piece that has a pretty good claim to being “classical”, and I associate it always with driving through south-central Missouri and into northern Arkansas. I have mentioned this route once before, because it takes you through the village of Mansfield, Missouri, the resting place of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My parents’ little “farm” in Baxter County, Arkansas, and the rather larger one belonging to several of my uncles and aunts, was about six or seven miles south of the county seat town down a dirt road terminating at an old-fashioned reaction ferry that crossed the White River. (The quotation marks around the word farm acknowledge the fact that the land was mainly woods with some animal pastures rather than fields plowed and cultivated for food crops.) This road, the Shipps Ferry Road, was pleasant and meandering, and a bit up and down, with one fairly serious WPA culvert bridge across a creek. About a third of the way along this southbound route the road went up the long side of a sizeable hill, opening at the top to a long classic panoramic Ozark Mountain view. You couldn’t see the river, but you clearly saw the hills on the other side of it. I always reckoned when I topped that rise that I was home. Three or four years ago my granddaughter Sophia and I made a trip “home” together. She was driving cross-country from Los Angeles to a new stage of life in New York, and we met up in the Little Rock airport. It was an experience I shall never forget, and which I cannot remember without bringing to the surface the plangent realization that it is most unlikely that there will ever be another such homecoming for me. Alone in a vehicle I would sing out loud as much as I could remember of “Goin’ home, goin’ home…,” a song written by one of Dvorak’s friends to a plangent melody from the New World Symphony. We have every reason to hope that there should still be a few more such homecomings in store for Luke, Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel. And whether or not tears well in the eye, we are all hoping to enjoy this one to the hilt.
Sixty-five years ago on hot days in a public school of no particular distinction in east Texas a fine teacher, Mrs. White, spent two class hours discussing with us a poem of Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man.” It’s a poem set in a New England agricultural world that was probably already disappearing when the poem was published in 1914, and has now vanished everywhere. It is a beautiful poem with a profound and eternal moral theme, the interplay of justice and mercy. It is a dialogue between a farmer and his wife concerning a kind of bad penny of an old farm laborer who has unexpectedly shown up at their place once again. Its most famous line, spoken by the farmer, Warren, is ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ Most of us kids thought that was really profound. The poem is a kind of flint-nosed Yankee version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Mrs. White would tell you what a word meant, but you had to tell her what the poem meant. I didn’t say it out loud, but I was worried about those coercive have to’s in both of Warren’s clauses. It was as though she had read my mind. Mrs. White said: “But Mary doesn’t necessarily entirely agree with her husband, does she? ‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’”
John Henry & Hazel
