Pomponio Beach / Keeping in touch with old friends / Possibilities

My third oldest friend (since 1979) is still in the hospital as an "outpatient admit," which means that she can't be transferred to an extended care facility under Medicare.  She is doing better but is still not in any shape to be discharged to live at home alone and has no funds for private pay care.  Her POA for healthcare continues to appeal to the powers that be who wish to discharge her.  Her POA's husband is a musician and came to the hospital to play guitar and sing for her yesterday.  She had a palliative care consult and it was determined that, despite having Parkinson's, she does not qualify for palliative care.  We just keep moving forward, one day at a time. 

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My oldest living friend and I met in our high school physical education class.  I looked at her name written on her gym shorts:  B. Heard.  In my mind, it was "Be Heard." I smiled at her and said, "Hmmm .... Be Heard," she laughed, and so we've been friends ever since.  Our friendship began in September 1963.  She was with me when I met R on a beach not all that far north from this beach.  She is currently staying at Pajaro Dunes, having flown from New York as she has done since the mid-1970s.  She and her husband visited Pajaro Dunes when they first met and returned every year until he died.  He asked that his ashes be scattered on the beach at Pajaro Dunes.  My friend will continue to visit Pajaro Dunes as many years as she can.

My friend and I were Beatles fans from the moment we saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.  We went together to the last Beatles concert which took place at Candlestick Park in August 1966.  In the previous June, we had listened together to my copy of Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" for the very first time at the house where she lived with her parents and siblings.  

In 1967, a week after graduating from high school, we went to the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mt. Tamalpais and sat outside listening to The Doors and other bands. Soon after that we went to the Monterey Pop Festival together for Ravi Shankar's first American performance.  She moved to the Haight-Ashbury during the early summer of 1967 and invited me to Golden Gate Park to hear a free concert given by Janis Joplin when Janis was part of Big Brother and the Holding Company.  We went to a Donovan concert at the Cow Palace, just south of San Francisco.  She came to visit me when I was living in the dorms for my freshman year at UC Irvine.  I introduced her to the music of Leonard Cohen.  R had introduced me to the music of Leonard Cohen.  My friend and I went to two Tim Buckley concerts -- one at Winterland and the second one some years later in a small club in Palo Alto.  

We both were and still are avid readers.  All those years ago, we took long walks together just outside the city limits of Redwood City and along the San Mateo County Coast in Half Moon Bay and talked about music, our dreams for our futures, and life in general.

We haven't seen each other in person since she married and left California to live in Rochester, New York, in the 1970s.  For years we wrote letters to keep in touch.  In recent years, we talk at length on the phone every so often.  We always talk on the phone when she is staying at the ocean.  She sends me videos and photos of ocean we both love.

There were periods when we were out of close touch, especially during the years she was raising her three sons, but we never lost touch for long.  There was a time in 1970 when our friendship was strained to the limit.  In my anger and confusion during that year R was in Vietnam, I distanced myself but we worked that out by the end of 1971.  

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From the "On Being Project" today:

"The Possibilities of Language

I love "On Being."  The archives are a treasure that will likely be a resource for me for the rest of my life.

Blog friends / Writing letters / Finding a Home in the World

 

Thanks so much to Beth at Alive On All Channels for introducing me to so many writers from diverse traditions all around the world.  Pádraig Ó Tuama is one of them.

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From Pádraig Ó Tuama in my email inbox this morning:

Dear friends,

I’ve always loved writing letters. The older I’ve gotten, the less reliable I am in replying quickly. But there were enough years — perhaps from the age of ten to thirty — when letter writing was such a significant part of my life that I know it’ll always be part of me. In fact, I’m trying to do it more. Letter writing is often predicated on distance, and it takes time — not just to arrive, but to read, too; often when I get a letter, I wait for a good time to read it properly. I’ve kept all the letters I’ve received. They are a treasure. 

I wrote letters to people who’d never reply, too, notably to Saint Augustine. Reading his Confessions made me want to know him, so I decided to write. While he never replied, I did get more of a sense of him knowing that whatever I read in his writing was likely to come up in a letter. The distance between us was, of course, unbridgeable: time and death are certain barriers, but that didn’t stop me. Utterly complicated as he is, I retain an extraordinary love for Augustine. I hope he’d say the same for me.

This week’s On Being episode feels like a letter. One of the things that the pandemic has done has been to remind us of distance. No longer able to call around to a house, or arrange a visit while on a work trip, the qualities of connection are nonetheless strong between us: Zoom calls, or texts, or cards, or other ways continue to bridge the distance with love and well-wishing. 

For this hour, we get to eavesdrop on a conversation between two friends: Krista and the young leader, Rev. Jen Bailey. Jen is in the conversational driving seat this week, asking questions of Krista. Together, they engage in a discussion about belonging, healing, what the past year has planted in us, and what that might look like as we progress. Listening to the show, it’s evident that Krista and Jen’s deep friendship is nurtured by both their similarities and their differences. 

Jen paraphrases the Oscar Romero prayer where he says, “It helps, sometimes, to take a long view,” and this long view of time is something that they explore: Krista reflects on her years in divided Cold War Berlin; Jen calls to mind 9/11 and Ferguson, becoming a mother during a pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd. The combination of tenderness and brutality, possibility and anxiety in these events are held together in their conversation. What does it mean to live in this time, now? And what can we do that will be beneficial for the future? 

Sharing in common a love of theology, Krista and Jen riff on Moses, who never got to see the Promised Land he was leading his people toward. Krista says, addressing Jen from the vantage point of a different generation, “What I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I will not see the end, the final fruits of. And that is fine. And it’s the way of things. But I’m also partly able to just embrace that, because I see you.” Jen brings Toni Morrison into the conversation, paraphrasing Morrison’s line: “We live and then we die.” Having experienced a lot of grief in her own life, Jen is wise in speaking about how the recognition that life can be short is a protection against apathy and cynicism. In part, what Krista and Jen are doing by this is bringing ancient text into conversation with contemporary reality, and using literature — whether ancient or contemporary — to speak to the question of what it means to live, and how we can find out who to be with one another. “Belonging,” Jen calls this as their conversation begins. The “Beloved Community,” too. 

To return to how we began, it is friendship and care that hold this conversation together. That isn’t just because Krista and Jen know one another, but because the posture of care they model — toward self, others, and the world — is necessary for this good work to continue. Jen wishes to see a time when every movement-based organization in the U.S. would employ a chaplain to look after the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of the workers. Those organizations work for policy and legislative change to improve the lives of individuals. But policies and laws will not be enough. They need care, “that tender, tender work,” Jen calls it. 

Friends, in all your work, friendships, connections, readings, and energies, we wish you this tenderness, too, in order to shore up the strength for the good work that’s before us. 

 

Beir bua, 

Pádraig Ó Tuama
host of Poetry Unbound

"The Freedom of Real Apologies"

 

Above:  Layli Long Soldier and Pádraig Ó Tuama

"There’s an anecdote told about a person who asked a scientist how to make bread from scratch. Well, the scientist said, first you have to invent the universe. 

And there’s another anecdote, about a tourist who’s lost while driving around Ireland. How do I get on the road to Dublin? they ask a local. First thing to say is that I wouldn’t start from here, the local replies. 

They’re funny, those anecdotes, and also partially frustrating, which is where some of their humor lies. But they also contain profound wisdom: None of us are alone (you can’t make bread from scratch, you’re in a long-line of humanity that’s made bread) and there are poor places to begin something. "

From "The Freedom of Real Apologies"

"Dear friends, ..." / A letter from Pádraig Ó Tuama and a poem by Paul Tran

 

Today's letter from Pádraig Ó Tuama is the source for the poem below that can be read in full by clicking on the link in this sentence.

"The Cave, by Paul Tran:

Someone standing at the mouth had
the idea to enter. To go further

than light or language could
go. As they followed
the idea, light and language followed ...