Suicide in Slater Park

OCTOBER LIGHT--I said to my husband recalling a novel by that title written years ago by John Gardner. Shocked and saddened today when I read in the Times that a man despaired;killed himself on Monday in Slater Park.

I go to the Park almost daily and it is my husband's favorite outing.It is a place of family picnics and fishing on the pond and gaggles of geese and children running excitedly through them.It's not a sad place but an oasis of beauty and peace. So it is sad to think that someone despaired there.

 Monday was such a gorgeous day.I remarked that the light had changed. The bright sky was blue;intensely blue and the fluffy clouds; white clouds sailed in blue;high relief. All was bathed in a glow; kind of golden light. And even though it is a sign of the change of seasons from summer to fall; it is also a glowing light that seems to shed glory on even the humblest scene. And in that light pouring down like liquid gold on us all, a man decided to end his life.

 I am thinking of the Pope's urgent message to think of life and its sanctity at every stage--the newborn, the criminal condemned to death and the lonely old. He stressed the loneliness of the aging. I think that is something to contemplate--the loneliness of the old.

 As I age I feel a kind of deep loneliness because in a way my path of disability and care giving has caused me to diverge from the path of some friends. And also so many times when we hear from old friends and acquaintances, we hear of their disability, their diminishing, their despondency, their diseases and sometimes of their deaths. 

 We all know that we are as the poet Emily Dickinson expressed it-- on a trajectory towards eternity.
 Because I could not stop for Death – (479) BY EMILY DICKINSON
 Because I could not stop for Death –
 He kindly stopped for me –
 The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
 And Immortality. We slowly drove –
 He knew no haste And I had put away
 My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –
 We passed the School, where Children strove
 At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
 We passed the Setting Sun –
 Or rather – He passed Us – 
The Dews drew quivering and Chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 
 We paused before a House that seemed 
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground –
 Since then – 'tis Centuries – 
and yet Feels shorter than the Day
 I first surmised the Horses' Heads
 Were toward Eternity –

Knowing that we are all going towards the same destination and hearing that someone chose to quicken and end the journey early makes me pause. So often in the Bible life is compared to a race--one that we must finish, that we must run well.

 Sometimes I think of our souls that are within us as a great thoroughbred longing to reach the finish line, and we are told by Saint Augustine that we are meant for God and "our hearts are restless until we rest in thee."
 I hope that the man who died at Slater Park found himself racing towards the waiting and welcoming arms of God as he sprinted into eternity.

Vanished neighborhood storefronts of Pawtucket

Every day walking and driving around  in Pawtucket, I am swept  by a feeling of both strangeness and  familiarity that takes me by surprise.  Something is missing in a  long-known place.  More often than  not I am looking at a  building that once housed a store  and now it is  all  gone or  it is obliterated and seems to have disappeared into an entrance to an apartment.  In my old childhood  locale I look for  places  that are no longer there.  Just to name a few--at the corner of Pond Street and Prospect St. there is a vacant lot where once there  was a drug store,  Another favorite drugstore  has also been razed  at the corner of Summit Street and Division Street. This was a  dear place because it had a  cool and welcoming soda  fountain and  a friendly   soda jerk who would flavor cokes to order with cherry or vanilla flavoring.  Also he  dispensed strawberry and root beer  floats.  The  floors were tile and the overhead fans created a cool oasis on a hot summer day. Now there is nothing there but a small fenced lot.  Right next door on Summit  Street there was a cleaners --I think it was  called Keenan's--now it seems to be a  church. Division Street still has many stores but no where can I  find the cobblers. The tavern at the corner of Brewster and Division  is there  but it  looks different and it is no longer called  FORD's.  Most missed is the  small grocery store that sat  on the corner of Meadow Street and  Brewster Street. Because  we did all of our grocery shopping there we  went  most days to that store   which was  owned and managed by Modesto "Mike" and his wife Helen.  I miss it and think of them both every time I drive  by the building that  still stands there but is not  a storefront.   Also I was a daily visitor to a store that was close to my school then called Saint Joseph's now  it is part of Saint Raphael's Academy  and   takes up the corner of  North Bend and Walcott.  There were two stores across the   road--one was a grocery  store and I think it was called McCormicks.  The other right on the corner was  more like a drugstore.  Now there are no stores, but I can see where they once were in the  buildings.  When I see the students from Saint Rays  changing classes I wonder where  do they go when they  want and need a quick coke or a candy bar or a  wonderful salty pickle from the barrel in Mc Cormicks.  That is what we used our milk money for --what  do  the students today do with their milk money.Do they actually buy milk with it?
 No treats, no adventures no forays into small cool, dark places on their ways   back and  forth.

Saints in Pawtucket

When I was growing up in Pawtucket I felt myself surrounded by  good people--in my  family, in my neighborhood and in my daily  routine. In watching the canonization of Father Serra  yesterday I  began to think about the fact that even  saints are flawed --all of us are flawed.  So  what makes a person a saint?  I don't know but  I am suddenly thinking  of  the  people from Pawtucket who seemed saintly to me.  What  was the nature of  their sanctity?  Of course, I think that my mother was a saint--I'm not going to go there--not today.
But I want to recall some of the cloud of witnesses that  were  a fact of my daily life. At another time I  will  try to tease out the particulars of these  extraordinary ordinary people. Today I want to just name a few.
Modesto Lunadelli who ran a grocery store for years  at the corner of Meadow Street and Brewster Street.

Jack White  who owned the 2-decker  that we lived in on the second floor at 130 Englewood Avenue.

Sister Mary Michaeleen who was my 8th Grade  teacher at St. Joseph's School on Walcott Street.

Al McAloon  who ran a Catholic bookstore and lending library, Saint Augustines  in downtown Pawtucket  that my mother took me to every Saturday.

Henry Shelton who tirelessly  fought  for help for the poor.

Jenarita Fox who  started at the Grove Street School  the first Special Education classes  that my two sisters with Down Syndrome could attend and learn to read.

There I have named six and I will stop here and   hopefully find the words so describe their sanctity as it came into my  life in future postings.
In the last years of his life my Uncle Joe Coleman, who had the religious name Brother Cyril, often spoke of seeing saints everywhere--on the bus and in the streets. They were all shining-- he would tell me. These are six that even  I could see glowing  before me in our small, important place--Pawtucket.

Anna's Anniversary

Today is the  anniversary of  my Aunt Anna's death.  It was a painful death and she was frightened.  We often had spoken together about  her idea of "a happy death" and had always  imagined with her  that we would together  create a happy death bed  scene ---for her.  We would sing  her favorite  hymns and  would recite her favorite prayers -- but  that did not happen.  She was in too  much pain and  suffering and full of fear because of a terrible black bile that  she was spitting up constantly. I also felt horrified and thought that black bile was an image of death itself.  We tried to recite the rosary together but we could not keep it up.  I became too angry at the  doctor who would not or could not seem to alleviate her  suffering.  I had not  thought that instead of praying  I would be  making the air  blue calling for nurses and  the doctor and wondering out loud what could be done to help ease her pain and anxiety.  She  knew she was dying; she thanked me over and over for all the ways I had helped her, and she seemed to approve  when I yelled at the doctor.

Today
I want to do something for her and I have done the usual --having prayers said and visiting her grave. When I came to visit her every Friday, before she was unable to  walk,  I  took her to Chelos for her favorite  fish and chips. Today I did the same and got a take out order to share with  my husband.
But that seems like so little.  I  am inspired  to share some of the choices we made for her ideal death maybe   that will help  ease the grief that I feel every day for her.

Favorite hymn

MOTHER OF CHRIST

7/29/2007

MOTHER OF CHRIST, MOTHER OF CHRIST
WHAT SHALL I ASK OF THEE?
I DO NOT SIGH FOR THE WEALTH OF EARTH
FOR THE JOYS THAT FADE AND FLEE, BUT...
MOTHER OF CHRIST, MOTHER OF CHRIST
THIS DO I LONG TO SEE
THE BLISS UNTOLD WHICH YOUR ARMS ENFOLD
THE TREASURE UPON YOUR KNEE


MOTHER OF CHRIST, MOTHER OF CHRIST
I TOSS ON A STORMY SEA
OH LIFT YOUR CHILD AS A BEACON LIGHT
TO THE PORT WHERE I FAIN WOULD BE, AND...
MOTHER OF CHRIST, MOTHER OF CHRIST
THIS DO I ASK OF THEE
WHEN THE VOYAGE IS O'ER
OH STAND ON THE SHORE
AND SHOW HIM AT LAST TO ME

Here's a verse that Anna  always sang--

MOTHER OF CHRIST, MOTHER OF CHRIST
HE'LL NOT SAY NAY TO THEE
WHEN HE LIFTS HIS FACE
TO THY SWEET EMBRACE
SPEAK TO HIM,MOTHER,OF ME.

Galway Kinnell and other poets in Pawtucket

Reading Rick Benjamin's essay in today's PROJO about the Pawtucket poet, Galway Kinnell,  made me think about the poet and also the times that my mother, Margaret Coleman, who also wrote and published poetry met his mother in local stores or  at the  library.  She would come home and tell me of the meeting  and of the growing fame of Galway.  She loved his Irish name  --that his mother  had dared to name him for  a city in Ireland.  And reminded me that   she had thought if she had  a son to name him after her native county, Tyrone,  like the actor Tyrone Powell.
I took umbrage and  wondered out loud what county or town she might have named  me for-- she answered without a pause   "MAYO--that  would suit you."

  Tonight I am thinking of Galway and of the  wonderful  directness and romance of his works--how much he wrote from daily life. How he dared to describe the details of pain and suffering that are part of all love. How poetry is a  way of  understanding and  responding to daily trials and joys.

Here is a poem he wrote on   the care of an old father with Parkinson's

Parkinson’s Disease

BY GALWAY KINNELL

While spoon-feeding him with one hand   

she holds his hand with her other hand,   

or rather lets it rest on top of his,

which is permanently clenched shut.   

When he turns his head away, she reaches   

around and puts in the spoonful blind.   

He will not accept the next morsel

until he has completely chewed this one.   

His bright squint tells her he finds

the shrimp she has just put in delicious.

Next to the voice and touch of those we love,   

food may be our last pleasure on earth—

a man on death row takes his T-bone   

in small bites and swishes each sip

of the jug wine around in his mouth,   

tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt   

this supper out of him. She strokes

his head very slowly, as if to cheer up

each separate discomfited hair sticking up   

from its root in his stricken brain.

Standing behind him, she presses

her cheek to his, kisses his jowl,

and his eyes seem to stop seeing

and do nothing but emit light.

Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,   

of remembering the knowledge

flesh had from flesh? The flesh

of his face is hard, perhaps

from years spent facing down others

until they fell back, and harder

from years of being himself faced down

and falling back in his turn, and harder still   

from all the while frowning

and beaming and worrying and shouting   

and probably letting go in rages.   

His face softens into a kind

of quizzical wince, as if one

of the other animals were working at   

getting the knack of the human smile.   

When picking up a cookie he uses   

both thumbtips to grip it

and push it against an index finger   

to secure it so that he can lift it.

She takes him then to the bathroom,   

where she lowers his pants and removes

the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle

to his old penis until he pisses all he can,

then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants.   

When they come out, she is facing him,   

walking backwards in front of him   

and holding his hands, pulling him   

when he stops, reminding him to step   

when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.   

She is leading her old father into the future   

as far as they can go, and she is walking   

him back into her childhood, where she stood   

in bare feet on the toes of his shoes   

and they foxtrotted on this same rug.

I watch them closely: she could be teaching him   

the last steps that one day she may teach me.

At this moment, he glints and shines,

as if it will be only a small dislocation

for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

Galway Kinnell, “Parkinson’s Disease” from Imperfect Thirst. Copyright © 1994 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

I look forward to next Sunday and the  presentation as part of the Pawtucket Arts Festival of the winners of the Galway Kinnell  Poetry contest.  Hope to see some of  my blog readers there and to meet Rick Benjamin.

Statues at Saint Joseph's Church and Flavius Boucher

FLAVIUS BOUCHER and his GIft to Saint Joseph Church

MY FRIEND'S FATHER WAS A  SELF TAUGHT SEMI-LITERATE ARTIST IN PAWTUCKET

NOTE:  a version of this blog entry was published  on this blog on August 1, 2015,  I am reprinting it because  A reader asked if my friend Lucille spoke French at home. She certainly did. In those years many schools in Central Falls had half days in French. I learned my first French  by picking up their phrases --so I only knew the familiar forms.  But I learned so much more  from this family.

 Reading recently of  the theft of a small statue of Saint Joseph that was  adorning a small garden in the  yard of Saint Joseph's Church on the corner of Walcott Street and South Bend in Pawtucket  made me instantly  think of  a person who had once also created a statue for that same Church yard.
I pity the thief who took the  small, mass made object and only hope he did it out of  an overflow of devotion.
I want to recall the fact that once that Church yard held  original  artwork of a pious parishioner.
 I am thinking of  Flavius Boucher, he was  a semi-literate French Canadian  who was the father  of my best friend Lucille Boucher. He was also a self-taught genius of a sculptor in  granite.  Flavius was  an  extraordinary  human being with a  natural talent  for  cutting stone. Professionally he was a mason and stone-cutter. but he  went further.

 In the 1950s when  I was  visiting  his family  home on  Columbus Avenue everyday, he began  a miraculous self transformation to an artist in stone.  I could  not believe the  long hours he spent patiently finding the  forms and faces in the great blocks of granite that he  brought to his workshop  garage. He rigged a  hoist and  would  create statues  especially busts of such historical  figures as Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Pope Pius, and  even  heads of his three  children, Arlene, Lucille and Raymond. He would use a caliper to  measure their  noses and lips-- I was so  envious of  those  lovingly crafted images of his children.

 In my my eyes Flavius was  an ideal father.  He enlisted my  help  in his enterprise in an original and creative way.  Since he could not  read or write beyond the most basic  English, he asked for my help  because I  was known as  someone  who read obsessively and liked to write   poems. He instructed me  to read  aloud to him the  histories he found of the figures he was  drawn to recreate in stone.

Then after he had listened to me read and reread the encyclopedia entry he had found, he would try to create aloud a  brief  history of the  person and also a history of his own interest and of the stone itself to accompany the work he was  creating.  He would talk to me about the person, his interest in the person, and the special characteristics of the stone itself. Then I would  frame sentences  that  reflected what he was telling me.

  Remember--I was in grade school at the time.   I would read them back to him repeatedly until he was satisfied.  When  he liked the  way I had expressed his ideas, he would thank me and ask me to  write in print a copy of what we had  composed together.  Then he would  place that on a  cardboard and stand it next to the  bust he had completed.  I  never heard what  became of all the things he  carved  so  perfectly.  I know that he sold some of them,  I know that he  got orders  from some people  for specific  subjects to be carved,  I also know that many of his finished works languished in the stone dust of his work shop.

But he worked on--- and one of his works, a statue of Saint Joseph, he contributed to Saint Joseph's Church.  That statue is not where it used to be, and I am not  aware of how it was  moved or when, where or why.  I walked around the  church grounds that I had known since childhood. One day  several decades after I left Pawtucket, I drove to  my friend's old three- decker on Columbus  Avenue and walked around the large yard and tried to  see into the garages.  I could find  no trace of  the old stones or  the workshop. I don't even know when Flavius died because all of his children left Pawtucket and went their separate ways.

I do know that he influenced me  because of his originality, his productivity and his fierce  persistence in creating his art in a world that was largely indifferent to him.  He and others that I knew and cherished in Pawtucket also modeled  for me the kind of dedication  to art and to their  creative genius that impressed itself on me as real artistry and real intellectualism.

 Those relationships guaranteed that  I would never make the mistake of thinking that education and intelligence are congruent:  that  just because  a person is educated means that he is intelligent or  just because a person is not educated maybe even illiterate meant that they are not intelligent.  No, intelligence and creativity  are  like  birds that  can alight on' the  branch of any tree.

Two People reading Ghazals in Homage to Ghalib

    I am home recuperating from thyroid surgery,  and that means even more silence than usual because it is  painful to speak.  Not to complain too much, but my husband  is an introverted silent person and I have always been willing to take up the slack.  But with that option gone, the hours of quiet became oppressive.   I cast about for something to  unleash  some words from  Yash and I  was thinking of his love the poetry of Ghalib and especially his  old delight in reciting Urdu  couplets. But  his memory loss is so complete that he cannot recall  them.  I  felt stymied by the fact that  most of my books have either been boxed up and stored  in the garage or  dispersed to various  book sales and libraries and the Salvation Army.

I decided to bite the bullet and re-buy them at the trusty Amazon and Alibris, and sure enough in two days  volumes of ghazals in Urdu and English  were at  our door.  I did not urge the books  on Yash--that is deadly. I just started   reading them and nodding and  smiling. Sure enough  within minutes  Yash picked up the volumes and started reading the Urdu aloud to just hear those wonderful sounds.

Then he started reading the  English versions aloud--and  that  seemed like a happy out come.
We both tried to memorize  couplets and have spent several happy evenings  exchanging ideas about such  lines as these:

When I describe my condition, you say "What's your point?"
When you talk to me that  way what am I to say?

 Your lover may not be faithful, but she is your lover.
We could mention the  sensuous rolling way she walks.

Spring doesn't last that long but  at least it is Spring.
It would be  good to mention the scented winds that move through the garden.

Ghalib, once the boat has arrived at the other shore,
Why go on and on about the wickedness of the boatman?

This is Robert Bly's translation and according to Yash he has gotten close to the  ironic and puzzling and puzzled tone of voice in the original.  There is something so direct and  funny about that voice that I love it.

How I wish I could find that tone of insouciance, idiomatic speech,  hidden depth  and surface charm for my own  poems.  Wish me good luck  with that dream.