cadence and fervor

This morning over blueberry walnut pancakes, I met a woman from our neighborhood who has her share of stories to tell (although, what person over the age of seventy doesn't have stories?). She is one of those marvelous people who connects to younger generations effortlessly, without sacrificing her own history and wisdom and perspective. This way of reaching out isn't common, at least in my experience. And I wonder if the lack of it from both younger people and older people leads to the apparent disregard we have for the lives of our senior citizens sometimes. But that's a tangent.

Mrs. T recently lost her husband and described the process of writing his life story to us. Many of her grandchildren are too young to have known him, so she wants to bridge that gap with her memories. He was a talented carpenter and built their home from the ground up, and she wants them to know he had "gold in his hands." Her softspoken love for him is simple and alive, and I don't doubt that her descendants will see that in her writing.

Her descriptions of her husband made me think of a chunk of a book I have been browsing through: Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor. In the introduction, he writes:

"My dad and I were as different as could be (I made sure of that), but his life had a clarity that I find in poetry. He was a carpenter, and if I close my eyes, I can see him, thirtyish, handsome, sawdust in his dark hair, running a 2x4 through a circular saw, trimming it, holding it up to the studs, pulling a nail out from between his front teeth, taking the hammer from the loop on his pants where it hung, and pounding the nail, three whacks, and a tap for good luck. This simple act, repeated a thousand times as he built the house up over our heads, had the cadence and fervor of poetry. He didn’t earn his daily bread sitting in a conference room, manipulating people, moving big wads of cash around, spinning a web of hogwash: compared to that, his life was poetry. When he bowed his head and gave thanks before a meal, it was always the same words, the same cadence. When he took a chicken by the legs and head, there was a plain cadence to that. I hear that whack in poetry."

I love that poetry does not always have to portray an epic adventure or a tragic love affair. It can just as easily give voice to our everyday moments and commemorate the simple but extraordinary people we have lost. Our stories come in so many different and surprising forms, and for me it never gets old.