April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Different: Today feels different than many near it. I recently turned 43, my son 14. 14 shocks me more than 43. I blinked and there is a giant standing before me...
Standing on the shoulders of giants: I am coming to terms with the aging nature of my parents and their friends. They are starting to look like normal people, not the giants they have always been, although giants they remain in influence.
Loss again: My wife is burying her longest friend this weekend. Death seems to have become more of a feature of this April than should have been scripted. [See how I used the passive voice there?] Each thing in turn has its place, I'm certain. It does not make the passage of difficult moments any less difficult. But comfort is always there as well. Peace and gratitude. Even in the darkest moments there are pricks of light. And most days are brilliant and warm. Sometimes we can look to the past and gain some perspective, or just a moment to attach to for some comfort...
Discovery: I was a nosey kid and I found the machine in the closet where my father had stored it away. I brought it out and began using it. Some of my earliest attempts at expressing myself poetically were through the clack, clack, clack of that old machine. Some secrets were banged away on its keys and sent off to private places. Other ideas were recorded and shared. It helped often to share.
I, like my father, moved on to something more modern when it became available to me; an Apple IIGS, Woz edition, with a Dot Matrix printer...
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
The Lost Generation: In 1922 a beautiful piece of steel machinery was manufactured in Germany. My Opa used this tool to share his thoughts with the world; he wrote about how fascists were bad. (The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.) [Those are Yeats' The Second Coming words, not my Opa's.] My Opa moved to Spain—where he was again confronted by fascism, forcing him further west to America. He arrived in the US with his wife and two children, and the third of five on his way. I am from the third...
Heritage: My father inherited the machine which he used for years until he needed something faster, more modern. He's told me stories of law students running extension cords along the floor of exam rooms to type essay answers on their Electric Smith Corona machines of the 1960s. Progress! He kept the old German machine, crafted in 1922, and stored it in a closet somewhere...
Snoop: I was a nosey kid. Some might have called me a snoop, picking locks to find out Christmas secrets; [I hated surprises.] I have learned not to snoop, I have learned to leave the closets of others closed until their owners open them for me; I have learned that mysteries are sometimes best left mysterious, and magic left magical; [I don't mind choosing to be tricked, but I still hate surprises.]
I, like my father, moved on to something more modern when it became available to me; an Apple IIGS, Woz edition, with a Dot Matrix printer...
Time: The German machine made it's way back to the closet; my Opa died; my son was born (taking the name of his great-grandfather who moved our family to the United States just as World War II was getting under way; my father began to look more normal to me; and I turned 43...
Gifting: On my son's birthday he received the machine from his father's request to his grandfather to part with his great-grandfather's machine (perhaps gifted by his father when Opa was 15). My father was more than pleased to pass on an old object from some attic closet; I was pleased to broker the deal; my son is enthralled! "I should invite my friends all over to see this!"
In the background I can hear the clacking of the keys flying away. Sounds like morse code getting banged away; such secrets might lie in the those keys.
I think I'll sip my coffee and wait for any doors to be opened to me...
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
(Poetic elements from T.S. Eliots' Wastland)
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