10 November 2017
— every couple of minutes another leaf rides the breeze
Good Morning All,
Today is my dad’s birthday. He was born in 1909, one hundred years, ten months, and two days after Abraham Lincoln. He was born the same year that America changed from the Indian Head penny to the Lincoln Head penny, the same one that is still in circulation 108 years later (although the back of the penny was changed in 1959 from sheaves of wheat to the Lincoln Memorial.)
He was born three months after the U.S. Army signal Corps purchased its first airplane, a Wright Military Flyer, from Wilbur and Orville. He was twenty-four days older than the Montreal Canadians.
Yesterday, I nipped up to the Plante Forum, a big nursery six kilometers east of here, and bought forty daffodil bulbs and a dozen tulip bulbs, which I shall plant today in his honour.
I am not sure what follows below is a poem, but it seemed to want to come out in four-line stanzas.
Old Sundays That Now Seem Locked in Amber
Bheka Pierce
After church and our mother’s Sunday roast,
She and we boys piled into the Merc, the heap,
According to our father, and off we’d go
For what he called The Weekly Ride-Walk,
Which could take us south of Boston down past
Cohasset all the way to Plymouth Planation,
Or west to the Minute Man on the Lexington Green
And on to walk across Concord’s rude bridge.
Best for me was north up past Marblehead,
A stop in Salem at Mr. Hawthorne’s seven gabled
House and still farther all the way to Ipswich,
Crane’s Beach, the first ever to steal my heart.
He was a scientist, our dad, a lover of weather especially,
A meteorologist by profession, and was never happier
Than to be where wind and wave and weather
Joined together over sand, sea, and salty air.
The abstract expressionism of clouds fascinated him,
Their patterns and the varieties within their patterns,
Summer cumuli shaping themselves into Scotty dogs,
Locomotive engines, apples, pirouetting ballerinas;
And the high-altitude cirrus, the graceful mares’ tails
That promised rain three or four days hence,
The cumulonimbi towering up thousands of feet,
Laden with rain, the lightening sparking within them.
Homeward, a different route, he and mom identified flowers
So that we learned them without having to learn them,
And if a field had standing cows and reclining cows,
He’d say, “Chance of showers”, laughing every time.
Old Sundays That Now Seem Locked in Amber
Bheka Pierce
After church and our mother’s Sunday roast,
She and we boys piled into the Merc, the heap,
According to our father, and off we’d go
For what he called The Weekly Ride-Walk,
Which could take us south of Boston down past
Cohasset all the way to Plymouth Planation,
Or west to the Minute Man on the Lexington Green
And on to walk across Concord’s rude bridge.
Best for me was north up past Marblehead,
A stop in Salem at Mr. Hawthorne’s seven gabled
House and still farther all the way to Ipswich,
Crane’s Beach, the first ever to steal my heart.
He was a scientist, our dad, a lover of weather especially,
A meteorologist by profession, and was never happier
Than to be where wind and wave and weather
Joined together over sand, sea, and salty air.
The abstract expressionism of clouds fascinated him,
Their patterns and the varieties within their patterns,
Summer cumuli shaping themselves into Scotty dogs,
Locomotive engines, apples, pirouetting ballerinas;
And the high-altitude cirrus, the graceful mares’ tails
That promised rain three or four days hence,
The cumulonimbi towering up thousands of feet,
Laden with rain, the lightening sparking within them.
Homeward, a different route, he and mom identified flowers
So that we learned them without having to learn them,
And if a field had standing cows and reclining cows,
He’d say, “Chance of showers”, laughing every time.
Go Well and Stay Well,
Bhekaron
P.S. One Bheka snap and one Holly snap:
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