Walking the Olentangy on a Rainy Afternoon

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Doc Arnett

I stand in the shadows,

still as the Great Heron on the opposite side,

watching him slide step by step,

quick movements and short pauses,

working his way along the west bank of the fork.

His gray blends into the wet clay of the bank

and I almost lose him for a moment,

then see the quick lean and stretch,

head and neck plunged fully into the water,

tell-tale silver clutched in the beak.

He holds the fish for a moment,

then snaps his head back and up.

The gulp is followed

by a twisting shake

that starts at the neck,

convulses body and wings

and ends with a shake of his stubby tail.

I stand, still watching,

as he moves on along the mud and leaves,

preying upon the fish so wary of larger fish

and learning too late

the silver strike from the sky.

There are many who die

in this notion of nature’s balance,

unaltered by willful compassion,

the greater preying upon the lesser

and not always taking note

that there is One Greater Than Us.

H. Arnett

10/12/2011

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Reflections along the River

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Doc Arnett

I know by the lay of weeds

and broken branches

that I am not the first person

to chance this way.

 

Leaving the blackened pavement of the parking lot,

I lean into the opening in the branches

that block the bank of the Olentangy.

Leaves matted from two days’ drizzle

cushion my step as I brush by low limbs

and bend beneath the larger ones.

 

Stems of poison oak jag out

as much as twelve feet

beyond the trunk of the cottonwood

holding them toward the sun.

The leaves jangle a muted crimson

hanging just above the surface of the river.

A mass of seeds holds dark against

the reflected sky sliding by slowly

in the barely rippled glass of the water.

 

A single leather leaf

nests among the green of Amur honeysuckle,

fringed by bright berries

sprouted from the shadows

that live along the river.

 

Whatever reaches light

can bear its fruit

even in the midst of mud and clay,

provided its roots have found

the substance of Life

and yield to their purpose.

 

 

H. Arnett

10/12/11

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The Morning After

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Doc Arnett

My son, Sam, sits on the big recliner in the corner of the living room, holding Levi. He is the youngest of three, not yet three months old. His lips curl open, a ready smile in response to a gentle finger nudging his throat or cheeks. Gammon is gone to pre-school and Harrison romps from one stimulus to another in the ready response of a two-year-old. Sara Jane vacuums the metal grilles in follow-up to Sam and me replacing filters a little while earlier.

There is in this a comforting ordinary, a snapshot of family in the midst of a day simply sandwiched in between the day before and the day after.

I saw the ending of the day before from 30,000 feet, saw the darkening of the world’s husk beneath me. An intense reddish orange glow rimmed the circle of the earth, a color and range never seen from ground level. At this height, light still holds, thin clouds brilliant in the sun’s high glory. Below, in the realm of nightfall, the dark closes in and lights begin to glow with their own intensity as we begin our final approach into Atlanta.

There are those moments, both spectacular and ordinary: the sun’s settling into the spinning of the world and a grandson’s fascination with a small tomato, the first bite spilling around the corners of his mouth and Sara Jane’s hand lightly touching my shoulder as she leaves the table, passes behind me.

In all of this, I am humbled, grateful. Truly, His mercies are fresh every morning.

 

H. Arnett

10/7/11

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Solo Vacation

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Doc Arnett

Lord willing, I’ll be boarding an airplane in Kansas City late this afternoon. If things connect well in Atlanta, I’ll be with my second oldest son, Sam, and his family in the Virginia Beach area tonight. I’ll get to meet one of the grandsons I haven’t seen yet and renew acquaintance with his two older brothers. It’s an added bonus that this will be on Sam’s thirty-fourth birthday. It’s been quite a few years since I was with Sam on his birthday, probably when he was still in high school and possibly even longer ago than that.

If our plans are blessed, we’ll be joined by two of Sam’s brothers on Friday night and we’ll spend the day together Saturday, fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. Never having spent any significant time on the ocean, I may discover that I’m prone to seasickness. Then again, I may have been born to it just as natural as anything. Guess we’ll find out.

I’m hoping to also find out how well I adapt to the mountains of western North Carolina as I visit my sister and her husband, my niece and her husband, and whatever canine friends might be found among them. Following that brief time, I plan to go to Columbus, Ohio, where I’ll participate in training for filing some of the federal reports that my job requires.

Having lived in Buckeye Village when I was earning my doctorate degree, I’ll hope to see a few friends from a previous century and visit with my brother and his family, who live east of Columbus. Then, I hope to be back home a bit before midnight on the third Saturday of the month.

During this time, I’ll have to abandon Randa to taking care of the three horses by herself and making sure the cat gets the occasional opportunity to sink her teeth into something other than human flesh. With the Lord’s blessing, the Arabian gelding will have a new, good home by the time I get back. With the cat’s penchant for unprovoked attacks, there’s an almost even chance that we’ll have two less animals on the place.

Regardless of equine and feline concerns, I’m excited about the trip, looking forward to the visits, even though I will miss my wife. It is a particular blessing, too, to know that neither of us will dread my coming home.

H. Arnett

10-6-11

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Noise Machine

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Doc Arnett

When the flood closed I-29 north of Saint Joseph, we saw a huge increase in traffic on US-36, which runs right by our place here, about four-hundred-and-fifty feet from our bedroom windows. According to an article in the local paper, the daily traffic count jumped from 7000 to 42,000. That’s quite an increase and no small part of it is truck traffic. The drone and moan and whine and thunder of eighteen-wheelers are not always conducive to sleep.

To help us with our somniferous aspirations, we’ve been using the noise generator Randa’s sister-in-law gave us. Having our choice of Summer Rain, Ocean Surf and Stormy Night, we opted for Waterfall. It seems to be the one that best masks over much of the traffic sounds. So, part of our evening ritual now includes setting the alarm and turning on the waterfall.

It has made quite a difference. Unless the voices and other noises inside my head instigate insomnia, I’ve been sleeping pretty well of late. Occasionally, the deep snarling of Jake braking will stir me in the night, but usually, the waterfall sounds prevent the rhythms of the road from waking me.

In this case, the sounds of recorded nature help me sleep and give me rest. But I worry that sometimes the deliberate noise of our lives might be drowning out the wrong things. The distractions of our busy-ness may be keeping us from alerting to the signals of more important issues: a child needing something more than fifteen minutes help with homework, a neighbor on the brink of despair, a co-worker whose home life has become an oxymoron, a supervisor whose loneliness has become more than torment. Or, it may be something possibly even more important: our own emotional or spiritual emptiness moving us toward some life-altering Bad Choice.

It is a fine skill to cultivate the habit of blocking out the aggravations and irritations of our planet so that we can find the solitude that we need. But we should keep in mind that the purpose of rest is that we find ourselves refreshed for the work that the Lord has prepared for us to do.

H. Arnett

10/5/11

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Rite of Passage

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Doc Arnett

Some thirteen years ago today, Randa and I were making our way, post haste, from Georgetown, Kentucky, to the Olathe Hospital near Kansas City. Complications after the birth of our first grandson had put Christy in serious condition. A bit of surgery brought a quick change for the better, leaving us all able to rejoice more fully over Hunter’s birth. Reminiscence of that event brought a bit of focus last night.

As we sang “Happy Birthday” to Hunter and he blew out the candles on the cake Gramma Randa had made and decorated, I remembered him and his mother in that hospital room back in ’98. I thought briefly about the wooden swords I’d made for him and his brother, Gage, when they were in the pirate stage and how we’d played Hide-n-Seek in the basement of the house we’d lived in on Mitchell Avenue. I also remembered when I’d turned thirteen and how I thought it was such an important event.

It was. Back then, it was. Now, I’m not so sure.

In a culture that lacks the bar mitzvah or the night alone in the wild, we have largely lost the rite of passage that marks moving from child to man. In this age of indulgence and every kid with a cell phone by age nine, we have blurred the line that used to signal adulthood. Kindergarten graduation and eighth grade prom, grade school girls dressed like hookers and grade school boys playing blood and gore video games all signal a society that has lost its grip on the distinctions of adult-ness. We have postponed responsibility and advanced privilege to the degree that some notion of adolescence seems to extend from third grade to at least the first year of grad school.

Maybe it’s the sadness of that cultural shift that made Hunter’s thirteenth birthday seem so poignant. Then again, maybe it’s just waking up and thinking, “Holy cow! I have a teenage grandson!”

It’s not that unusual in life that what appears to be some great poetic insight is nothing more than another confrontation of our own mortality.

H. Arnett

10/4/11

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Symphony

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Doc Arnett

Randa and I found our way to our seats for the symphony performance about twenty minutes before start time on Saturday evening. Her brother, Kevin, and one of his grandkids joined us. While Kevin and Randa talked, I struck up a conversation with the young guy sitting to my right. He is a percussionist majoring in music at Missouri Western, which is in Saint Joseph, as is the symphony. Turns out that the conductor is also one of Nick’s music instructors at the college. Nick, and, I assume, the rest of his class, had been directed to attend the concert and write a review.

As the symphony began to play its opening number for the season, a Mozart piece, I leaned forward in anticipation. About three minutes in, I felt the slight pressure of Nick’s elbow against my side. I ignored it for a while but then the pressure increased somewhat. “That’s a bit un-neighborly,” I thought, but still avoided moving or anything else. Finally, as the push of his elbow against my side had reached the point of beginning to dislodge me from my seat, I turned to say something to the kid.

He was so asleep that the side of his head was slumped over, touching against his shoulder. I don’t know how his baseball cap stayed on. I half-expected to see a wee dribble of drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. Fortunately, the lights were too low for me to make determination on that point. He barely stirred during the applause as the symphony concluded Mozart. Not even the guest virtuoso violinist playing Beethoven could rouse Nick’s interest. He slept as soundly as an exhausted coal miner on a feather mattress.

Apparently, someone stumbled over the lad during intermission or else spilled a cold drink down his back. When I returned to my seat, young Nick had vacated the premises, not to return. I suppose he had to rush home and start typing up his review of the performance, perhaps beginning with “The soothing strains of Mozart eased through an appreciative and receptive audience…”

I’m sure Nick must have reported to his friends how completely boring it was. A world renown musician and an accomplished symphony performing music of such quality that it remains fascinating two hundred years after its composition was not sufficient to hold any interest for him. Nick was not there for the triple-curtain-call standing ovation at the end of the performance that spoke of how dramatically different the perceptions of others were from his own.

It is often in life that our response to a certain event tells others more about us than about the event. Even if it’s an event that happened nearly two thousand years ago.

H. Arnett

10/3/11

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September Blessing

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Doc Arnett

On this day of sky so blue

the least, thin cloud seems but a thought,

may the Lord’s own hand

bless you with peace that stretches

from dawn to dusk

and lay you down gentle,

ready for your rest.

On this day of air so clear and clean

it seems to bring a refreshing

that reaches all the way

to the center of your soul,

may the Lord’s good grace

strip away every trace of guile and guilt

and leave your spirit

sensing the nearness

of all that is good and decent

and thoroughly indifferent

to every sleight.

On this day of work and harvest,

of long rows winding

along the run of the ridge

and feathering toward

the line of trees along the ditch,

may you welcome the gleaning of grain,

surrendering the fruit of harvest

and joyful

for what is being laid up

in bins that do not rust,

where thieves do not break through and steal,

where all that is good

is held against That Day.

H. Arnett

9/30/11

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Seasonal

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Doc Arnett

The change of cool that came through a couple of weeks ago has brought us the most sudden autumn that we’ve seen in quite some time. Two nights of temperatures in the upper 30’s triggered the shift.

Usually, it will take a few weeks for the changing of green to gold in the soybean fields. It will start with a bit here and there, yellow on the high spots, spreading gradually until only the low spots hold to the color of summer. In between, splotched shades of green dapple the change until finally all is gold. This year, it seemed that entire fields shifted from green to gold in only three or four days.

Across the way from the beans, entire fields of corn have already been stripped to harvest. Long rows of stubble contour their way around the terraces, the ditches, the woods. Tractor-trailer loads of shelled grain rouse long trails of dust, rising above the gravel as the trucks crackle their way along the ridge toward the highway.

Whether our change comes in long slow descent toward the river or in the twinkling of an eye, we will one day become the harvest. And will rise up to meet him who has planted us.

H. Arnett

9/28/11

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Key Words

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Doc Arnett

The last spanking my dad gave me was forty-six years ago and it was over a preposition. I remember now as distinctly as then that he told me to “bring the cows up to the lot.” I knew as well as I knew my own name that he meant for me to “bring the cows up into the lot” but I was eager to get back to fishing. So, I did what he said instead of what he meant and hurried back to the pond. Not thirty minutes later I was wishing that I had done otherwise. As he was unbuckling his belt, I very briefly considered a defense based on semantics but decided against it.

The reason that I am thinking about this all these years later is that I am now engaged in the revision phase of the massive report on which our college’s state funding for next year will be based. A big part of the formula depends upon how each course is considered for the calculation. The amount varies across six levels depending upon how “expensive” the state considers each course is to deliver. But, unless a particular course is “tied” or “linked” to a particular program, it will not get any funding.

So, I am trying, with the help of a couple of other key people, to get this all straightened out. Part of my frustration is that I frankly don’t have a gnat’s idea of an elephant what the difference is between a “tied” course and a “linked” course. Which it is determines what information I have to send to Topeka in order to get funding credit for each course. There are about twenty-five such courses at present, which translates to a few hundred thousand dollars in future funding. Hopefully, by sunset today, we’ll have it worked out.

One thing I have gained from both experiences is an appreciation for the accuracy of terms. Henceforth, when someone asks me, “Doc, don’t you want to go to heaven?” I’m going to reply, “Nope, I want to go into heaven… and I want to stay there, too.”

H. Arnett

9/27/11

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