Pasture

Sometimes I imagine, and not in a morbid way, that I’m lying on my deathbed, remembering my life. Like everybody else, I’ve had moments of high joy: wedding day, childbirth, work-related stuff. But there are also more subtly-flavored memories. Pregnancy, once the initial excitement abated, was one. I would lie on the sofa in the afternoon, not reading the book on my lap, not crossing items on my to-do list, not writing letters to my mother, but content to simply gestate.

Nursing my babies was another. Those enforced breaks from the brouhaha of early motherhood allowed me to put aside laundry and work. Rocking slowly, listening to the little slurps and gulps, I might have been a mother cat, blinking in the sun and purring as she nursed her litter.

But that was long ago. The last time I felt this kind of contentment was in the field in front of my house, in southern Vermont. It is a cliché spring morning. The grass is bright green, and the dandelions are glinting in the sun. Up high on the house roof, against the clear sky, the bluebird sings his wistful little song. And, for the first time in months, I am letting Lizzie and Emma, my goats, out of their yard.

They are twin Nubians, one black, one fawn, with droopy silver ears and Roman profiles. The moment I open the gate they dash out to the field, their long ears flapping, and set to gobbling great handfuls of grass.

The field is not fenced in, so I need to stay with them. In the past I’ve tried bringing a book to read, but the moment I open it Lizzie and Emma rush to look over my shoulder, reaching their long necks to nibble the pages: “What’s this you’re reading?” Another time I brought paper and pencil, intending to draw them. But again, as soon as they spotted me doing something with my hands, they cast aside all thoughts of grass and ran over to see, and taste, my drawings.

Since multitasking is out of the question, I watch my goats eat. They tear off amazing quantities of grass and shove them down their throats with a few mighty chomps. Later, when their stomachs are filled to bursting, they will lie down and regurgitate the contents, give them a proper chew, and re-swallow them. It’s what ruminants do.

I sit on the grass and do nothing. Cleaning out the hen house; getting the garden beds ready for the chard and kale and broccoli seedlings that are waiting on the kitchen windowsills; thinning the baby apples that are starting to swell now that the blooms are gone will all have to wait until the goats have eaten.

For now, I watch and I listen. A lulling rhythm soon establishes itself as the goats move across the pasture: step, yank, chomp; step, yank, chomp. The bluebird has stopped singing. Maybe his mate has arrived and they’re at the back of the house, stuffing old grass and twigs into their nest box.

The sun—surprise!—actually feels warm now, and I discreetly take off my down vest and sit on it, to keep from attracting the attention of Lizzie and Emma, who will want to investigate. I breathe the clean Vermont air, chew on a grass stem.  Is this what they mean by “pastoral peace”? It’s a very ancient human thing I’m doing, sitting in a field, watching goats pasture. I think about the shepherds watching their flocks on Christmas eve two millennia ago, and about the even older psalmist who identified with sheep being led to rest in green pastures.

I think about those other peace-inducing states—being pregnant, nursing babies. Like watching goats graze, they are only seemingly passive. Lying on the sofa, rocking in the chair, sitting on the grass, I am doing nothing, but accomplishing a great deal: growing a fetus, feeding an infant, keeping goats safe while they pluck dandelions.

These are things that nobody ever taught me. For once, I didn’t have to take notes, or memorize lists, or practice techniques. They arose in me naturally, without recourse to the frontal lobes of my brain.

I hope that death is another thing that comes naturally, without conscious effort--something that, along with our animal brothers and sisters, we humans instinctively already know how to do. And I take comfort in the thought that in some future spring the molecules of my body will turn to grass for somebody’s goats or cows or sheep, and I will be part of that pastoral peace forever.

Seven Pounds of Cassette Tapes

There was a time, back in the quasi-medieval gloom of the twentieth century, when cassette tape players were cool.  If you were used to carefully threading reel-to-reel tape only to have it snap and strike you in the face like a cobra, the click of the cassette into the player, the thunk of the "play" button followed by music seemed as miraculous as getting water from a faucet versus fetching it from a well.

A technologically-inclined college boyfriend of mine was so enamored of cassette players that when he was away at his summer job he used to send me tapes instead of letters.  After I married, I learned that my new husband's grandfather was as fond of the little machines as my old boyfriend had been.  He used them to record family phone conversations, no matter how trivial.  If we called to let him know at what time we would arrive at his house, t we would hear the click that told us were being recorded for posterity.

And that is why, cleaning out a closet the other day, I came upon a bag containing seven pounds (yes, I weighed it) of cassette tapes. Seven pounds of forty-year-old conversations.  Seven pounds of baby babble.  Seven pounds of voices that will never speak again. 

There's me, sounding like a have a cold, interrupting the conversation to tell my toddler not to pick up the clock, please!  There's a three-year-old telling her grandparents that she just got new shoes.  There's me again, calling from the maternity ward to say I need my watch so I can time how long the baby nurses on each side...

I know what's in those tapes because one night around Christmas, after my mother in law died and the tapes were shipped to us, we sat around with our grown children and played a few of them.  And then for the decade that followed they sat in the closet, untouched.

Our present house has ten closets.  The cottage we are moving to has four--and no attic, no basement, no outbuildings.  No place to hold and hide the flotsam and jetsam of our long lives until it falls to someone else to find and deal with it.  But the shift from ten closets to four is forcing me to do something about those seven pounds of tapes, tout de suite.

When paper was scarce, not so very long ago, all that might remain of a grandmother's correspondence was a packet of yellowed letters bound in ribbon.  Before photographs became ubiquitous, you were lucky if your ancestors, if they were people of means, handed down a painted portrait or two.  But now the past, or at least the material evidence of the past, is always with us, demanding to be recaptured, relived, revered--and threatening to crush us with its weight.

I must confess to chafing under this accumulation of letters, photos, dry cleaners' bills, bits of lace, broken earrings--all of which meant something to someone at some time.  Why should I bear the moral weight of deciding what to keep and what to throw out?  Why should I have to grit my teeth and do what the previous generation was too soft-hearted to do?


I believe that the parents and grandparents who saved the things I find in our closets these days--a maternity ward receipt for my spouse's circumcision ($3.00), an embroidered hankie, the seven pounds of cassette tapes--were prompted by love for us, their descendants.  And it is a different expression of love, but one just as strong--love for those who will come after me and who should be spared from disposing of the relics of my past--that keeps me sadly but methodically making these objects vanish from our lives.

From My Father's Hand

I found the manuscript of a piano sonata of my father's among some papers a while ago, and today I scanned it and sent it to his editor in Barcelona.  She is hurrying to get his few remaining unpublished compositions out in time for the celebration of the centennial of his birth later this year.

The score is signed and dated spring, 1966, two years before his death.  The paper has yellowed with age, but the familiar blue ink has kept its color, and it called up for me the memory of my father sitting at the dining room table, copying out scores by hand.

He composed at the piano, alternately holding a pencil and a cigarette between his right index and middle fingers, squinting against the smoke and trying out chords one after another.  When a piece was finished he orchestrated it.  And when that was done he copied out all the parts, by hand.

Like most professional musicians, my father cobbled a living playing the violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles, and teaching college classes and private students.  While he was alive, his compositions brought him recognition but no significant income.  So the copying out of scores had to be sandwiched in between endless rounds of classes and rehearsals and his own violin practice, not to mention driving my mother to the grocery store and all of us to church on Sundays.

In the evenings, after the last private student had packed up his violin and left, he would sit at the dining room table with his ash tray and his cigarette and his fountain pen with the blue ink and copy out the music he had written, note by note, stopping every once in a while to push his glasses up on  his nose.  And when I showed up with the plates and silverware to set the table for dinner he would blow on the ink to dry it and stub out his cigarette and put everything away without a word.  Then we would eat and when that was over he would leave for orchestra rehearsal.

I wonder what he thought about during those endless hours of copying music?  Did he hear it in his head?  Did he resent having to do this mechanical task when he would much rather be at the piano creating new work?

I never saw him rush.  He never seemed frustrated.  He sat there for however long he had, peacefully making marks that I found, and still find, beautiful in themselves--the verticals perfectly vertical, the bars on the sixteenth notes parallel with each other, and the tempo and mood indications in his  sweeping, old-fashioned hand--allegro ma non tanto, moderato cantabile, molto espressivo.

My father's handwriting was famous in the family.  He was said to have inherited this talent from his father, a silent, obsessively orderly man whose hand was even more perfect than my father's.  It was considered unfortunate that the calligraphy gene had passed me by, though at least the musical one, for better or worse, had not.

It struck me, as I scanned the score and with one click sent it flying over the Atlantic and across the width of the Iberian peninsula all the way to Barcelona, that my father had copied out that piece using the same basic technology as Bach--a pen, some ink, and his own hand. Or, in the case of Bach, someone's hand, since Bach's twenty children, I am sure, were put to copying scores as soon as they could hold a pen, or their father's could never have managed his enormous output.

I'll never know how much more music my father might have composed if he had had either twenty children or a computer and a printer.  But those blue ink lines on yellowing paper contain far more than potential melody--they hold the very presence of my father in the dining room at dusk, bent over his task, while my mother sautes garlic on the stove and I put away my geometry problem set and get out the knives and forks, the napkins, and the dinner plates.

Five Memories Of My Father

1. The feel of his mustache on my neck.

2. His gray hat and his winter coat, which made his head and shoulders look gigantic.

3. Sitting on his lap and being accidentally burned by ashes from his omnipresent cigarette (he would apologize profusely).

4. In the summer, sitting on a little seat on the back of his bicycle and going for a ride on country roads.

5. Being allowed to make one pizzicato on his violin.

Happy solstice to all!