Mothers' Day, Remembering

LOAVES AND FISHES

He came home from the sea with boxes of fish in the trunk of
the green Plymouth, as comfortable with the smell of cod and
halibut as we were not, fish fine-chosen for gift and home.
Neighbors came like cats upwind to ask how the trip had
gone, and to carry newspaper-wrapped fish home again.

She baked top-heavy bread in old ovens, flooding home with
the gold smell of eastern Washington wheat, crust-buttered
and throbbing invitation to coffee. They all came to the
oilcloth-covered table like pilgrims; uncles, old men left
over from another generation, and friends out on a drive.

There is someone here with a few loaves and some fishes,
they all said, and they came for the picnic at Gus and
Jennie's place. Some stayed at the table for the last trip home,
and for bread and cod. We grew up on the bench side
of the multitude that was family, on loaves and fishes.

We all ate what we wanted, twelve baskets full, we five
thousand men, and women and children, at the table in
Jennie's kitchen, where Gus brought halibut and cod home in
the trunk of an old green car. How was the trip, we all said,
and Jennie brought coffee, and bread brown from the oven.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog