The dead are always looking down on us, they say,while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats
of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, and when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
-Billy Collins, "The Dead" from Sailing Alone Around the Room
We are going to church today. We don’t always go to church. In fact, as disappointing as this may be to those wonderful folks who raised me, we go to church very infrequently. Today we are going. It's Palm Sunday and I need to visit with my Dad.
On Palm Sunday we would come home with our palms and sit at the round, butcher block table in the kitchen. Dad would get out his Swiss Army knife and with the precision of a surgeon, methodically separate each of the palm fronds into several perfectly sized pieces. I remember sitting patiently as he did this and with my inquisitive student eyes, I would sit and learn from the master. One by one he would take each perfectly sculpted piece of palm and create a cross, bending the ends into an interlocking puzzle and passing the pieces back and forth, gently slide them into neatly made pockets created by his own magic artistry.
Patiently, he would repeat the process over and over until each one of had our own specially crafted gift from Dad’s hands, our own keepsake of the Easter season. We’d place the crosses in our room, hanging them from our bulletin board or laying them on our dresser where they would dry out, turning from green to yellow and get dusty as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months. In November when I would reach for a warm pair of socks, there was that cross, still sitting in my jewelry box on my dresser where I had placed it so many months ago for safe keeping.
He is on my mind so much these days. His voice fills my dreams, sneaking in to give me advice, tell me a story or sit by my side. So real it seems that I have to remind myself that he is gone, having left us suddenly last July 10th, forever changing the meaning of that particular day in history for me and the others who loved him.
At the grocery store a group of Girl Scouts set up a table to sell cookies. Their mothers stand behind the girls, chatting as they supervise their daughters in the fine art of fundraising. “Remember to say thank you,” they coach as the girls approach the faces coming out of the market. A tall, grey haired man stops and takes a box or two.
“Thank you so much,” they giggle and look over to see if Mom is listening. They will be here for hours, having spent yesterday and last weekend and next weekend too, trying to sell as many boxes of cookies as daylight will allow.
My neighbor spends the weekend in the garden filling his new raised beds with soil, beds that he built just a few weekends ago with his son. The night before he and his wife hosted a party to celebrate the son’s engagement. The next day, the son and his friends, tired from a night of engagement revelry, spend the day in the yard with dad, building beautiful boxes of redwood that in a few months time will hold his prized annual collection of peppers. The sound of their laughter fills the air as they tell stories between the noise of the skill saw and the thump of the hammers.
Life is full of simple moments. Moments that in and of themselves seem so meaningless: a cross made of palm, a box of cookies, a handful of black garden soil. Snapshots, pages, scenes. Alone they have no meaning but in context… Put the snapshots in an album, the pages in a book, the scene in a movie… and now, now it tells a story. We write each day, line by line, not knowing where the story will go. Each word is important. Each sentence has meaning.
We sit at the table in the kitchen when we come home from church. I take out my Swiss Army knife and I separate the fronds of the palm, trying to emulate the master. I wonder if I will remember how to do it, after all, it’s been a year. Without thinking, I catch myself looking up, wondering if he is watching.