by Brian Doyle
I have seen nurses help bring my children out of the sea of their mother and into the sharp and bracing air of this world. I have seen nurses praying by my tiny son’s bed before and after his heart was edited so that he could live to be a lanky and testy teenager today. I have seen nurses grappling cheerfully with the wires and coils and tubes and plugs and buttons and toggles and keyboards of vast machinery beyond my ken. I have seen nurses with blood on their blouses in the nether reaches of the night in emergency rooms. I have seen nurses hold my children’s heads as my children were sick upon their shoes, and never a snarl did I hear from those nurses, but only a soothing sound deep in the throats, a sound far more ancient than any civilization. I have heard friends of mine who are nurses speak eloquently and articulately about their work as witness, as story-saving, as patience and endurance, as being those souls who stand by the door between life and death and usher other people through it in both directions. I have quietly gaped in awe at the sinewy courage and flinty strength and oceanic grace of nurses, and many times considered what our hospitals and hospices and clinics and schools and lives would be without them; which is to say starker and colder and more brittle and fearful. We would be even more alone and scared than we are now when faced with pain and confusion.
We take them for granted, yes we do. We think of them with reverence and gratitude only when we see them briskly and gently at work, leaning over us and those we love, being both tart and sweet at once; but here, this morning, let us pause a moment and pray for them in the holy cave of our mouths, and thank the Mercy for these most able and skillful agents of His dream for us. And let us pray not only for the extraordinary smiling armies of nurses among us; let us pray to be like them, sinewy and tender, gracious and honest, avatars of love.
Cool Things
As a fan’s notes for grace, a quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes,
Such as, for example, to name a few:
The way the sun crawls over the rim of the world every morning like a child’s face rising beaming from a pool all fresh from the womb of the dark, and the way jays hop and damselflies do that geometric aero-amazing thing and bees inspect and birds probe and swifts chitter, and the way the young mother at the bus stop has her infant swaddled and huddled against her chest like a blinking extra heart, and the way a very large woman wears the tiniest miniskirt with a careless airy pride that makes me so happy I can hardly squeak, and the way seals peer at me owlishly from the surf like rubbery grandfathers, and the way cormorants in the ocean never ever get caught by onrushing waves but disappear casually at the last possible second so you see their headlong black stories written on the wet walls of the sea like moist petroglyphs, and the way no pavement asphalt macadam concrete cement thing can ultimately defeat a tiny relentless green thing, and the way people sometimes lean eagerly face-first into the future, and the way infants finally discover to their absolute agogishment that those fists swooping by like tiny fleshy comets are theirs!, and the way when my mom gets caught unawares by a joke she barks with laughter so infectious that people grin two towns over, and the way one of my sons sleeps every night with his right leg hanging over the side of his bed like an oar no matter how many times I fold him back into the boat of the bed, and the way the refrigerator hums to itself in two different keys, and the way the new puppy noses through hayfields like a headlong exuberant hairy tractor, and the way my daughter always makes one immense final cookie the size of a door when she makes cookies, and the way one son hasn’t had a haircut since Napoleon was emperor, and the way crows arrange themselves sometimes on the fence like the notes of a song I don’t know yet, and the way car engines sigh for a few minutes after you turn them off, and the way your arm goes all totally nonchalant when you are driving through summer with the window down, and the way people touch each other’s forearms when they are scared, and the way every once in a while someone you hardly know says something so piercingly honest that you want to just kneel down right there in the grocery store near the pears, and the way little children fall asleep with their mouths open like fish, and the way sometimes just a sidelong glance from someone you love makes you all shaky for a second before you can get your mask back on, and the way some people when they laugh tilt their heads way back like they need more room for all the hilarity in their mouths, and the way hawks and eagles always look so annoyed, and the way people shuffle daintily on icy pavements, and the way churches smell dense with hope, and the way that men’s pants bunch up at the knees when they stand after kneeling in church, and the way knees are gnarled, and the way faces curve around the mouth and eyes according to how many times you smiled over the years, and the way people fall asleep in chairs by the fire and snap awake startled and amazed, unsure, just for a second, what planet exactly they are on, which is a question we should probably all ask far more often than we do. Look, I know very well that brooding misshapen evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most cheerful denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies. But I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things there are cannot be measured, calibrated, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often to us all. In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.
Address Unknown
In the two years since my brother Kevin died one summer afternoon at age 64, I have often wanted to write to him—partly from long habit, as I wrote to him steadily for years, and partly because there continue to be many things I wish to tell him even if he can no longer open my letters.
But I did not write, having no address for him in his current form, and being unwilling to have my own letter returned to me, sad and bedraggled after a fruitless voyage; I think I would weep at that, and I have wept enough.
But I realize this morning that I can write a letter, and perhaps he can read it, if I do not mail it in traditional form, but post it in the electrosphere; for he is himself now free ions and electrons, and probably capable of apprehending and understanding matters far beyond my ken; so I sit down and begin.
Your grandson is now a year old, and rotund and hilarious, and wobbling to his feet, mostly holding on to furniture as he cruises around the room. I report with horror that his mother makes him wear bow ties at social events. I’ll take care of that. The Los Angeles Lakers are incredibly awful this year and it’s delicious to watch and you and I would have enjoyed every egregious minute. The tree your wife and children planted in your memory is now 15 feet tall. The wood ducks are a little late this year; it’s been a hard winter. Notre Dame had a decent year in football. Your wake was hilarious, like you wanted. I still have your last message on my phone: I worry about my kids, and will you keep an eye on them? Whenever I see an owl I want to call you. I bet a hundred people think about you every few days, which is a cool epitaph. I saw Mom and Dad a while ago, and they told me the story again about how you didn’t talk at all for your first couple of years and they were getting really worried, and then you said clear as a bell, Is that a greenhouse? which still makes Dad laugh. Mom and Dad are getting more fragile and papery and transparent and illuminated by the day. Bruce Springsteen has not announced he will run for president in 2016, but I have high hopes. I have been reading a great number of books about otters and badgers and foxes. The other day when I aske
d our dog where you were, he turned immediately to the west. I found this fascinating and was going to call but this note will have to suffice. I have to go and pick up a child now. I love you, man. Send me a postcard?
Hawk Words
The last time I saw my brother Kevin in the flesh was three years ago, in his den, in the evening, just before summer began. We sat with our legs sprawled out and talked of hawks and love and pain and Mom and beaches and mathematics and Dad and college and his children and mine and our patient, mysterious wives and books and basketball and grace and pain and then hawks again.
We were both major, serious, intent raptor guys, delighted to try to discern the difference between, say, a kestrel and a jay, which are about the same size, although one can dismember a mouse in seconds and the other would faint dead away if dismemberment was on the syllabus.
Both of us would happily have studied hawks for the rest of our lives, but the problem was that his life was ending soon, and this was the last evening we would have to talk about love and hawks, and we knew this, so we talked about hawks and love.
In my experience, brothers don’t often talk bluntly about love, even if you do love each other inarticulately and thoroughly and confusedly, because it’s awkward to talk about love that’s not romantic. Everyone chatters and sings and gibbers about romantic love, and how it starts and ends and waxes and wanes, but we hardly ever talk about all the other kinds of love, which include affection and respect and reverence, and also brothering, which is rough and complicated.
Brothers start out in competition and some never stop. Brothers are like trees that start out adjacent but have to grow apart to eat enough light. Brothers worship each other and break each other’s noses, and adore each other and steal from each other, and detest each other even as they sprint to defend each other. It’s very confusing.
If you are very lucky, you eventually get to be the same age as your brother or brothers. Eventually the differences between and among you erode and dissolve and the love is left in craggy outcrops where you can sit together with your legs sprawled out.
So we talked about love, but we used hawk words. That’s what I wanted to tell you this morning. We talked about how it’s awfully hard to tell sharp-shinned hawks apart from Cooper’s hawks and who was Cooper anyway?
We talked about the immeasurably old war between crows and red-tailed hawks, and who started that war, and why, and sure it was about a girl, sure it was.
We talked about owls and ospreys and eagles and kites and falcons and other raptors, too. But mostly we talked about hawks because we knew hawks and saw hawks every day and had always both been addled and thrilled by them and always would be even after one of us was ashes in a stone box under an oak tree.
We talked about how often you can see better with your soul than you can with your eyes in some strange deep way that I cannot explain though I’ve been trying to articulate the inarticulable for a long time. We talked about how one of us promised to stay addled and thrilled by hawks as long as he lived, so that both of us would still be delighted by hawks somehow. So it is that now, when I see a sharp-shinned hawk slicing sideways through oak branches at supersonic speed in pursuit of a flitter of waxwings, my brother Kevin sees it, too, though the prevailing theory is that he is dead.
Often I find myself mumbling, “O my gawd did you see that?” and he mutters, “What could possibly be cooler than that?” and somehow we are still sprawled and lucky and it is almost summer and we are talking about love.
Bird to Bird
When I was a child my grandmother withered over the course of some months until finally she was the size of a bird. In the end she was all bones and glare. She was a hawk one day and a gull another and a heron the next depending on the light. You would go to visit her and expect to see a gull like last time but instead there would be a disgruntled osprey in the bed. I pointed this out to my mother but she did not answer. Mom went every day. She took a different child with her every day. She would just look at one of us in a certain way when it was time to go and you would get in the car, mewling. The birds in Grandmother’s bed made gentle mewling noises sometimes. Sometimes Grandmother cried without any sound. It is a loud silence when someone cries without any sound. She had lived with us for years. She was stern and forbidding and brooded in her perch like an eagle. Her spectacles flashed sometimes when she looked at you. Birds can see much farther than people can. She could see through walls and around corners. She knew what you were doing before you did it. We would enter her room in the nursing home and Mom would say something gently and a falcon would open her eyes on the pillow. I wondered if the nurses knew that Grandmother could change form as she liked. Perhaps she could no longer control the changes and all day long she went from bird to bird under the sheets. That would be a tumult of birds. The nurses must have known but they probably loved birds and didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Often Mom would say something gently and Grandmother would not open her eyes at all and Mom would just sit on the edge of the bed brooding and I would watch the bed for birds. Did she have a favorite bird to be? If you could be any bird would you be every bird or choose only one in which to live? Could you get stuck being a bird and forget that you were a person? Could the bird you wanted to be refuse you? Some questions you cannot ask anyone older. They will laugh or frown or give you advice. You have to just hold the question calmly in your hand and wait for the answers to come or not as they please. You cannot tell the birds what to do. The answer to a lot of questions is a bird. One time when Mom said something gently to Grandmother in the bed, an owl opened her eyes. Owls have piercing yellow eyes for which the words entrancing and alluring and riveting and commanding and terrifying were invented. Yellow is a dangerous color. Yellow means caution. Yellow means be careful and watch out and trouble ahead. Grandmother died very soon after that. You would not think a woman could wither into a heron but what do we know? Probably when Grandmother died the nurses picked up the heron gently and carefully and reverently in a towel and carried her outside, with prayers in their mouths, and they buried her under the sweet-gum trees. Birds love sweet-gum seeds. Probably whatever people thought Grandmother was is only a little of what she was. Surely we are made of more things than we know. We could be part goshawk, or languages no one knows anymore, or dreams a turtle had one winter under the ice. That could be. We went to Grandmother’s wake because that is what our people did, and we went to the funeral because that is what our people did, but we did not go to the burial, because that is not what our people did, and also probably no one wanted to see the lean thin coffin in which you would bury a blue heron. Years later when I was driving past the nursing home where Grandmother died I thought maybe I would stop and poke under the sweet-gum trees for heron bones, but then I drove on, because I like questions better than answers. Birds are how air answers questions. Birds are languages looking for speakers. Birds are dreams you can have only if you stay awake.
To the Beach
One time for no reason at all my kid brother and I decided to ride our bicycles from our small brick house all the way to Jones Beach. We got maps out of the family car and pored over them and concluded that it was about four miles to the shore. He was twelve and I was thirteen. We could cut through a few neighborhoods before we had to thrash along in the grass on the shoulder of the highway. Riding the shoulder would be a problem because twice the highway crossed bridges over the tidal flats and we would have to dismount and balance our bikes on the six-inch curb by the rail. We figured we would worry about this when we came to it. We supplied ourselves with two cans of soda, two sandwiches, and a beach towel apiece. We debated about the surfboard. What if it was windy out on the highway and the board caught a gust and one of us was obliterated by a truck? Mom would be mad and the surviving son would be sent to his room for life and never again see the light of day and wither away, pale and disconsolate. But we tested the wind with our fingers and it didn’t seem too bad, so we brought the board, which was f
ive feet long and fatter than it should have been. We’d worked on that board every day during the summer with wax and affection and dreams of glory. The board was obstreperous, however, and no matter what we did, it was too much for just one of us to manage on his bike. So we decided to carry it between us, and in this ungainly manner we set off for the beach.
For a while all was well except for the amazed looks of passersby and their occasional ostensibly witty remarks. Why people try to be witty when the only available audience is the very people they are trying unsuccessfully to be witty about is a mystery to me. Finally we climbed the embankment up to the highway and headed south to the beach. Just then my brother reminded me that we would have to pass through the tollbooth constructed so that city planner Robert Moses could recoup the tax dollars he had spent providing Jones Beach as a gift to the people of New York State. Our older brother worked there as a toll collector, but he wasn’t the sort of brother you might casually ask a favor of while he was on the job, and there was no way around the toll unless you could swim with your bike on your back. We decided we would worry about this when we came to it.
We soon grew weary, and the surfboard was incredibly heavy, so we stopped and ate a sandwich as the cars whizzed by, and one car threw a beer can at us for no reason we could tell. Because we were both reading the Hardy Boys books at that time and wanted to be detectives, we got the license-plate number and my kid brother, who had a ferocious memory, memorized it and also wrote it in the sand just in case. We proceeded on. Now there were flies and mosquitoes but also rabbits at the foot of the dense bushes beside the shoulder. We came to the first bridge and after a brief discussion decided that we would walk our bicycles one by one along the curb and then come back for the surfboard. A guy slowed down to help us (or rob us) as we were walking the surfboard over but we waved him on impatiently, using the glowering faces we admired on construction workers and our older brother who worked at the tollbooth up ahead. We used the same plan at the second bridge, although this time a gust of wind did come up and we were almost blown into the highway just as a truck roared past and we were nearly obliterated and we made a deep and secret pact never ever to tell our parents about this incident, a pact I am reluctant to break even now. This experience made us hungry, so we ate our other sandwiches and drank our sodas and buried the cans in the sand for archaeologists to find in the twenty-seventh century and proceeded on. The highway led inevitably to the tollbooth and, as expected, there was no way around without being seen from the state-police office; Robert Moses was no fool. As our mother said, you had to admire the devious energy of the man, even though he was an arrogant tyrant who should be in prison for destroying a thousand neighborhoods and their vibrant cultural fabric.
