When my mom moved to an assisted living facility, responsibility for her condo fell to me. I told the realty agent I'd have the place ready to go on the market in 60 days. After all, it was only a two-bed two-bath apartment. What I didn't realize when I made that promise was that cleaning out the place would take a year. One year. And seven or eight different groups, including friends, an auction house, two sets of movers, a couple of people from Craigslist, a junk hauler, and a dozen trips in the station wagon.
My dad had, over the years, amassed quite a library, which my mom had preserved. Crating the books for auction and sale allowed me to linger a bit, and to select a few titles to set aside as keepsakes. What struck me--once I'd plowed through the 1960s travel guides, the collected works of Robert Graves, the Carl Jung, and the various religious texts from the Bible and the Koran to the Tibetan Book of the Dead--was dad's love for meandering pastoral tales of the English countryside. I remembered accompanying him to rare book sellers in New York in the 70s and watching as he selected titles by authors whose names I'd never heard, and have not heard since. Like T.F. Powys. Odds are, you haven't heard of Powys either. He barely registers as a blip on the radar of most booksellers, and his work are, in the words of one dealer, "very hard to move." I remembered as a teen glancing through these books late at night, when I could not sleep, just before moving on to the Anais Nin, who was far more interesting. I guess what I wanted was to gain some insight into my dad's mind and heart...to know what in these seemingly slow-paced, go-noplace, religiously flavored stories sparked my dad's interest...to learn what it was about them that filled his gas tank. My teenage self didn't get it. And so, I moved on.
Thumbing through these books again, as I boxed them up for auction, I again looked for the soul of my father, a boy who grew up during the Depression in a small industrial Pennsylvania town. A young man who paid his own freight, working night jobs to get through college. A man who was drawn to the chaos of Wall Street. It wasn't until the books were crated and sold that I began to get it, just a bit, when reading the Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon, a poet of the American Midwest. What do Kenyon and Powys have in common? Well, I guess that depends on the reader, and what each of us draws from them. But for me, the common thread is a quietness and stability. A 'centeredness' of spirit, if you will. Her poems are the perfect way to end a day, or to start one, for that matter. Perhaps I had to be over 40 to see it. Perhaps I had to be a father to envy that calm.
Either way, I think I understand my dad just a little better now.
* * *
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
excerpt from Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
