Güd wrtr

Yeah, you two!
I don’t care if he’s your brother—
you can’t shove him into the pool.
No, you can’t shove anyone
into the pool.
No, you can’t dunk him and
hold him under either.
I don’t care that he ate your
cookie.

No, you can’t blow my whistle.
Because it’s a lifeguard whistle,
and you’re not the lifeguard.
Yeah, you can wear my hat.
For a minute. I need it back.
To keep me from getting
sunburned.
Yes, I see your sunburn.
It’s a doozy.
Yes, yours is a doozy, too.

What are your names?
And you’re how old?
I’m 18. Yes, I coach one
of the swim teams.
You want to be on the swim team?
Well, let me watch you swim.
Yes, your brother, too.

Can you put your face in the water?
Blow bubbles? Turn your head
to the side and breathe?
Yeah, like that. Good.

Nice handstands.
No, we don’t do handstands
on the swim team. But it’s
great that you can do them.

Let’s see how fast you can swim.
Sure, I’ll blow my whistle.
Ready? On your mark,
get set, go!

•••

Thanks to Genaro Molina of the Los Angeles Times
for the inspiration and his excellent photo.

Dick Schmidt
(guest poet)

It’s always the right temperature
when you want to take a nap.

(In honor of Brother David Steindel-Rast’s 100th birthday)

To swim, you must trust,
said a wise man who has
now achieved 100 years
on the planet.

“You can learn as much as
you want about swimming
from books,” he said. “You
can stand in the water

and move your arms.
But unless you really let
yourself down into it,
you’ll never swim.”

You don’t trust the water,
which will hold you, if
you allow it; you must
trust yourself, he says,

a bigger challenge.
Learning to swim then,
means learning to trust
the unknowable,
the unseeable,

what some call God,
as well as the physics
of bodies in water.
If we allow ourselves

to relax and float—
a lesson we practice again
and again—we build
trust in our fragile,

undependable, often
get-it-wrong selves,
coming to see that we,
quirky and oddly made,

truly are our own best
gifts.

•••

Brother David Steindel-Rast is an author, scholar
and Benedictine monk, known throughout the world
for his philosophy that gratefulness is the true source
of lasting happiness.

Widely considered the “grandfather of gratitude,”
Br. David has been a source of inspiration and spiritual
friendship to countless leaders and luminaries as well as
one of the most important figures in the modern interfaith
dialogue movement.

You can learn more about Br. David at the Grateful Living
website, where you can also see His TED talk,
“Want To Be Happy? Be Grateful,” which has been
viewed almost 10 million times.

Two summers ago she came to help
me sort through stuff in the garage,
taking careful inventory of decades-
old plastic bottles of bubbles,

testing them, one bottle at a time,
sitting on my deck, blowing bubbles.
On hot days, I still see her there.
Now a reporter in Texas, she moseys

back to her hometown to touch base,
see her people, reconnect with those
who mean much to her. I am one
of those, she kindly tells me each

time she sees me, this stellar former
student of mine, one of my last,
dealt some rough hands—among
them being a student journalist in

the early months of the pandemic,
the world locked down, learning
to report remotely. Good training,
she says now, covering business

and agriculture in San Antonio.
Though I watched so many students
fumble through their early days
as writers, poets, photographers,

journalists, designers, editors,
now they circulate through me
in a sweet blur, their faces
popping up now and then,

the particulars long gone
of what they did or didn’t do,
how well they succeeded or
didn’t. And then one shows up

full of gratitude and generosity,
along with mint-green tea,
and we sit in the back yard
on a sultry July afternoon

as I quiz her, fascinated, saying,
“Tell me what it’s like on your
newspaper these days. Tell me
what it is to be you.”

And she does.

(Ode to a Sacramento summer)

We knew it’d show up eventually,
after weeks of saying to each other,
“Perfect weather, isn’t it?” and
“Best summer I can remember.”

Because we live in a land of too hot,
a state of hot-hot, with the always-
hottest place in our southern desert
that’s got the word “death” in it.

But here—near the top of California’s
great central valley, where sizzling
spots like Red Bluff often win the prize
for hottest in these parts—this week

we enter the landscape of century
temps. We avoid the eastern and
southern humidity, but boy, can we
cook. And boy, are we about to.

Which is why God, in the guise of
Willis Carrier, created in 1902
a system to control temps and
humidity in a Brooklyn print shop,

though it wasn’t until 1906 that
engineer Stuart Cramer dubbed it
air conditioning. Think about that,
friends, when we step outside

into 100 degrees, then turn our
sweaty selves ’round and head back
in, offering our perspiry thanks
to Messrs. Carrier and Cramer

and the kabillions of their
descendant engineers and
technicians working to ensure
that we stay cool, baby—

real cool.

The garden goddess next door,
as part of her daily practice, stands
hose in hand, kindly watering

the corner bed by my driveway—
the creeping little daisies, the last
of the poppies, new cone flowers,

the to-be Black-eyed Susans
(still all leaves for the moment)—
chatting with me as our eyes

flutter upward, drawn to a large
monarch swooping, seemingly,
around us, gaily pirouetting,

alighting momentarily on the ginkgo,
perhaps looking for a drink.
The ticker tape in my brain

flashes—Mom!—along with
the sense of someone else hopping
up and down, hand raised

like a kid in class—me, too!
I say to the garden goddess,
“I wonder if that’s my mother.

She loved butterflies.”
I grin at my mystical neighbor.
“And maybe your mother, too.”

“You think so?” she says,
hope rising in her voice.
“Do you hear her? See her?”

“It’s more of a knowing,” I say
as the butterfly—who certainly
feels like a she—lingers within

our sight, even a bit later when
I walk across the street to my car.
She soars into the sycamores

of the house next door where
Becky lived, my favorite neighbor,
whose garden goddess daughter

has continued the family tradition
of daily hand watering in summer,
growing a lush forest of ferns

and greenery, which I can’t help
but think must delight both
of our mothers flittin’ in

for a quick hello from their
spot in the forever on this
sparkling summer afternoon.

Listen, an experienced gardener warned,
you want to watch the wisteria.

It gets away from you, its dime-sized seeds
burrowing into the ground, it’ll grow
and grow and grow into a constrictor,
a green strangler. I’m not kidding.

But, I said, I like the pretty clusters
that drape like lavender waterfalls
before the leaves burst out.

Yeah, he said. Just wait.

Same with the morning glories
that took over the fence with
their glorious purple blossoms,
open-throated to the sun.

And mint. Everyone warned me
about mint. Subterranean invader,
they said. It’ll pop up everywhere
like whack-a-mole. You won’t be able
to get rid of it.

You want to leave a legacy after you die?
Plant mint.

But spearmint, I said. For tea.
And the smell.

Yeah, they said. Just wait.

Today I stretch tall to clip
the constrictor’s searching arms
roaming the fence, get it away
from the neighbor’s house as it
reaches for me, snagging some
tenacious morning glory with it.

Crouching, I yank out a little mint
by the roots, plucking some of its
wrinkly leaves for tea later,
consider transplanting lemon thyme
where I have de-minted—

“my darling lemon thyme,” I hum—

growing so happily under the maple
in the front yard. Will it do well here
in so much unrelenting sun?

You never know till you try, I think,
the perennial motto of gardeners,
whose ranks I have now joined
as an apprentice, bringing my
minty-thyme hands to my nose,
closing my eyes, and—yes!—
inhaling deeply.

One short, measly hour,
not a special one, just any old
hour, look around and ask,

“What would my life be
without this thing? Without
that thing? Or that one?”

Without the tree shading
the window, without the window,
without the kitchen sink

you’re standing behind,
without the water running cool
and clear on your hands,

without the knife in your hands
that has just cut fresh corn
off the cob that you’ve put

into a bowl for a summer salad,
without the small oval tomatoes
growing on the searching vines

in the back yard, five of them,
lycopene red, on the granite counter
next to you, resting,

ready when you’re ready, in this
ordinary hour, this everyday minute,
this extraordinary moment.

You know how you wake up some mornings, the bad dream running laps in your brain, telling yourself it’s not real, but you carry the hangover of free-floating anxiety in your satchel of woes, which, most days, you can set in a corner, say, There, there, to the worries that do you no good to fret over?

For whatever reason you’ve shouldered them today, along with the persistent headache that points to something blooming outside that’s bugging you, so you go back to bed for a while, hoping that it will ease, that you might doze, awaken again feeling better, but no soap, so you lie there thinking, This is dumb.

You rise with a groan and make the bed so the cat can assume his usual place in your spot—or, more accurately, his spot that you’ve borrowed overnight—and while there is much to do—always much to do—you think, Start with easy, pulling on shorts and a lightweight T-shirt, adding your shades and, slipping into the flip-flops by the back door you keep there, tugging on the somewhat stuck door that swells in summer.

When you step into the sunshine, you feel a bit like Dorothy walking into Oz, blinking behind your shades, and because it’s a watering day, you pick up the magic wand, turn the spigot and presto! There’s the delicate shower of water that you aim at the leafy arms of the tomato overgrowing her wire cage like a too-small bra, a simile that makes you smile because the plant variety is, after all, named Juliet.

As you set aside the squirter and gently touch one of the reddest ovals, low to the ground, the first cluster to bud, it comes off easily in your hand, which lifts you somehow. And you cup another little gem, and another, and now you hold a trio of tomatoes, as if they were just waiting for you to show up, which you deposit in a small cardboard square box and take some photos, which you think is a bit silly—just tomatoes, for heaven’s sake.

But that’s the point: Holding a bit of heaven in hand that you grew from a sprout, even as you chuckle, thinking, All I did was plant her and water her, knowing that forces far greater than you shaped and continue to nurture Juliet—and you, for that matter—an everyday miracle that softens your old heart into once again loving this loveable life.

If you believe that you were not born to sing,
then you must allow the birds to tutor you,

sitting in places where they do, allowing them
to feel comfortable enough to vocalize near

you in your scary human suit. You will think,
at first, that they are all brilliant sopranos,

with their warbling trills, and, if you are
fortunate to study with an owl, you may

want to imitate its throaty hoo-hoo.
And you should, for allowing your throat

to open and sound to emerge is what you do
every day. Singing is just sustained talking,

after all. And the point is not to be good
or to necessarily harmonize with others.

The point is to sing out on a deep breath
a note of meaning—perhaps a joyful one,

but ones of sorrow and despair, too—
a long note. Do not worry if it wavers

or your voice breaks. Listen. The birds
falter, too. Join them. Let them remind

you that you are of a species that is born
in song. Sing your own tra-la to the wingéd

ones in trees, especially to those in cages.
In fact, open the cage and slowly climb in.

Do not mind the feather ruffling; settle in
on any available perch. Leave the door open.

Open your mouth. Let a note take wing.
See what happens.

•••

(For singers everywhere—

like my friend Lilly Ganly, a rock ‘n’ roll singer
who turns 17 today—

and Martha Kight, my high school friend,
still singing, still acting her heart out,

and my friend Katie O’Rourke, music teacher,
opera singer and chorus member, who, with
members of Chanteuses, a Sacramento women’s
chorus, recently performed at Carnegie Hall in
New York with dozens of singers from around
the country.)