If Only It Were That Poetic

My Grandma Fuchs had a saying, “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. She also believed that “if you can’t listen you have to feel”. I know these both to be true, for me, whoever the devil the Devil might be. Lately, I’ve been in a rut. Let’s face it, four months in the same place, drinking the same coffee—and not very good coffee at that—seeing the same faces, walking the same concrete, well, it’s called a rut. With no mirror drawing my attention to the trench I’ve been digging, busily, steadily working it, I’ve realized that I am boring myself. That’s not something I like admitting. My standard response to people who complain of boredom—way too many school kids on my early road—well, if you’re bored, change what you’re doing.

Amazing, an entire compound called the Railyard District has suddenly blossomed, while I wasn’t really paying attention. I can see the mountains to the west from where I’m sitting this morning. Classical music, rather than bad rock and even worse not-so-golden oldies, brings a nice sigh to my ear. In spite of my poor choice of a different place to walk my two miles this morning, I’ve landed with a good cup of coffee. I didn’t know my head was aching until the pain went away.

Mr. Frost instructed us on choosing our way. It seems that this now very mature, at least in years, person has been drawn to the hard way, “because it was grassy and wanted wear”—if only it were that poetic—and my reflections invite the memory of my Grandma Fuchs’s caution, “if you can’t listen…” and so on, which I never applied to myself at the time I heard her comment on the choices she saw being made. That was a long time ago.

I don’t know that my maternal grandmother was much of a risk taker. She probably traveled the road carved out for her by her German heritage, the one of hard work, nose to the grindstone, rest when the day is done. That’s what she learned growing up in the early 20^th century in rural northwest Harris County Texas. The product of hard-working, hard-headed German stock, first generation Americans, I doubt that she knew much about what my generation of Fuchs derivatives calls fun. My own measuring stick is relatively innocent. I saw my Mother and Daddy work seven days a week, and that’s what I learned. Invited to table games, I’d rather be cleaning the kitchen or digging in the dirt.

In 1973, while on a visit with my partner John and friends to the land and country home newly purchased by my parents—actually a gift from Grandma Fuchs—we  worked on Sunday morning building a rose bed on the east side of the house. My friend Virginia snapped a Kodak of Daddy and Grandma, shovels in hand—at the time he was 62, younger than I now, as I approach my 65^th birthday, and Grandma was 76—and Virginia commented to me, “some day you’ll be glad to have this picture”. Oh, how I wish I knew where I put that treasure. For now, it is lost from me.

Work, that’s what we did seven days a week, and when we weren’t working as a family, we gathered as a family for food, innocent celebration, quiet entertainment, something all of us lost and consequently mourn, we have mourned, for a long, long time. Our lives weren’t exciting by most standards, and likely all of us were a little weary now and then, especially my hard-working parents, genuinely weary. Certainly the mental struggle over where to walk and then sit with a cup of coffee—Mocha Java, Mexican Zaragoza Select—was not a part of their experience. A fresh pot of Mrs. Olson’s favorite, Folger’s, or Maryland Club, roasted in Houston, Texas, “the coffee you’d drink if you owned all of the coffee in the world,” and a Lucky Strike plain tip for Daddy, that would have been their way of taking a break, from work.

Daddy didn’t get many years to perfect the art of relaxing after he and Mother retired, not that he wouldn’t have chosen that road long before he lost life’s vigor. His health was already spent. He’d been mining that decline for a long time. And though Mother was blessed with another 20 years of relatively good health before her own decline robbed her of what she knew best, and apparently loved even if not so much by choice, being productive, enjoying the fruits of labor remained foreign to her German nature. As her health failed, and our family of senior citizen children helped her struggle with decline, offerings of food—cinnamon toast and Mexican hot chocolate on a cold afternoon at that place in the country, purchased in 1973—were not so much about celebration, but more about passing the time, hopefully to soothe the heart and spirit.

After four months of time for reflection here in the high desert, I have begun to think about what waits for me on the land in Texas that our grandmother purchased for our parents in 1973. It has been an especially hot, dry summer in much of Texas, and the garden that I’ve worked for the past seven years, building it shovel by shovel, has pretty much had to fend for itself, in spite of the generous efforts of my sister Joan and my friends Jim and Bert. Soon, I won’t be concerned with where to take my morning coffee. And though I could certainly purchase the beans for Mocha Java or Mexican Zaragoza Select, I think a pot of perked Folger’s will do nicely, as I prepare early each morning to go out and do what is in my bones—before the Texas sun, which begins hot, has its way for the day. Because of my choice to while away the summer in northern New Mexico, my work in Texas is already cut out for me, at least for now. The road over there is definitely strewn in leaves no step has trodden black.

If Only It Were That Poetic—Santa Fe, New Mexico (August 13, 2008)

R. Harold Hollis