A porch (or two) with a view

June 12, 2015

We’re on a front porch in Sewickley, PA, an idyllic place of mature trees and century homes, a town as similar to Dundas, Ontario as you might imagine, here on the edge of Pittsburgh, a city you’d also be forgiven for confusing with Hamilton.

Both have that rugged steel history around a fine waterfront and remarkable green and hilly topography, all what we, the Froese 5, have seen on our road trip here south of the 49th Parallel.

Of course front porches in Hamilton don’t have American flags, but our friends and hosts here in Sewickley have, for us, added a small maple leaf on their flag, right in the 50 stars, a gesture of goodwill, no, not to be confused with any notion of Canada being the 51st State.

Steve makes the point and we all laugh and exchange gifts, especially for the children who are beside themselves with joy for the mere fact that they’re literally beside themselves standing on this porch, this visit now, (after yesterday’s hotel pool visit) the first since seeing each other last about a year ago in Africa.

Steve, who heads up the American board of Save the Mothers, (we’re all here meeting for business) was the president of the Ugandan university where Jean and I our kids still live most of the year.

His daughter and son-in-law and their kids lived a literal stone’s throw from our own home up that university hill in Africa.

Part of a larger gaggle of expatriate kids at that African home, these six now on this porch had spent years together, running through the banana patches or playing this or that game or just hanging out under the African sun.

Which is all to say that it’s funny how life goes – Steve (and his wife Peggy) are Sewickley residents who never imagined they’d ever live and work in Africa, never mind for 10 years, any more than I imagined I would write from Africa or even from front porches in Pennsylvania.

But we need to be open to life’s surprises, if we’re open to anything, to hold our hands open, and our hearts too, and say, “Here I am. Send me.”

Send me to Africa. Send me south (or east or west or north) of The Border, that is any border. Send me across the road, if that’s where I can best live and move and have my being and serve others during it all.

Send me even to other places in life, that, quite honestly, wouldn’t be the first destinations I’d choose, but places that, somehow, show me what I never knew I was looking for.

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Another view is from the front porch of the old 1870s estate house in Niagara where I grew up, where my daughter and I sat with my father the other day … but this will have to wait until next time.

For now, to stay with the Americans, if you missed it in the Spectator last weekend, this, below, from the Spec’s Comment page,  is a piece that germinated while I sat on a porch in South Carolina.

It was in Charleston, a special time away for Dad and Daughter, and in early mornings I was spending time alone reading A Gift from the Sea, a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an old classic that happened to be around that particular American porch.

(I once mentioned this author and book in a column I wrote, one about an impending marriage, my impending marriage in particular, published the day before Jean and I wed … no, never imagining this either, that I’d come across it years later in some South Carolinian home.)

Below is this recent Spec piece, something on poets and war and playing in the ocean with my beautiful and growing girl.

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We’re stuck in this brokenness together

(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 6, 2015)

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have

Not universal love

But to be loved alone

— W.H. Auden

 

CHARLESTON, S.C. — We’re in the ocean, waves crashing at our knees, salt on our lips, my daughter and me and all these poets in my head.

My daughter (today she turns 12) laughs and dances and spins in circles and says, “No, Daddy, don’t take any more pictures. Just come and run with me. Enjoy the moment.”

In this, Elizabeth becomes a poet herself, like many children, showing that she knows something about the art of living as much as the art of any pen.

This is it, our long-awaited dad-daughter trip, Day 1, a visit to the beach with our American hosts and friends who we first met in Africa.

My wife is another member of our family who may not know much about, say, Rilke, but who lives life as if it were a poem. She freely shares a certain love, one that, as Rilke put it, is clear and binding, but releasing too, even as she freely shows it when I occasionally leave with one of our other children for special time alone.

It’s hard to know what anyone could do to deserve this particular love or to be in this particular family. It’s a family that’s not perfect — have you ever heard of the (lying) perfect family? — but we’re a travelling gaggle of souls, even with our baggage, who have been spared the hard pain of separation that’s so common in our time.

And so we, my daughter and I, are in the water and then we’re on the ground here in Charleston, this place that drips with history, where we run against the waves of the Atlantic and collect memories like they’re sea shells, where we visit old slave plantations and ostentatious colonial mansions, where we hear old voices and try to put it all together.

The first shot of America’s civil war was fired here in Charleston, in South Carolina, the South of the South, the first state to secede from that divided family of America. This is why I think of it all, because this is a nation’s history, yes, but it’s more.

It’s an echo of any brokenness, of any family, of anyone who knows the horrible truth that brother can kill brother, that sister can maim sister, that mother or father can do as much in their own unspeakable ways, that you or I or anyone, if nothing else, can simply be a family’s grand disappointment.

It was John Donne who said that no man (we’d add woman or child) is an island, that we’re all part of the main. For better or worse, we’re all stuck in this human brokenness together. As war and bitterness can touch one, it can touch all, even as peace and healing can also touch.

In another way, though, it seems like we’re all islands, strewn and scattered here and there, so very separate in our brokenness, cast together only in a common sea, but still each alone, each of us craving to be loved … alone.

Every trend and pressure from the outside says no, don’t think about this frightening reality. Here, go preoccupy yourself. T.S. Eliot — “we’re distracted from distraction by distraction” — would surely be speechless today, a century later, in our mechanized and digitized time when it’s more desirable, if not easier, to be loved widely by many (and that’s not love) than to be loved deeply by a few.

Maybe one day we’ll better understand this, what these dead poets are still trying to say. Maybe we’ll grow up and fight off these pressures, not because everyone is doing it, but because nobody is.

Maybe one day I’ll grow to do better than just rhyme off poetic words on a page, I’ll better live out this rhythm of grace myself, even as I hope that you will.

Maybe then we’ll save something of ourselves, if not our families, if not society, if not civilization itself. And on the journey we’ll grow young and have that much more of the kingdom of heaven inside us.

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June 12, 2015 • Posted in
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