From where I now sit

This past week I sat most days on the Drop Stone bench overlooking Roaring Beach and watched the National Youth Surf Competition run through its paces over seven days. A loud speaker would blare out the ongoing details of each heat as the “under 14’s” and “under 18’s” progressed up the ladder to the finals on Saturday. These were held under a calm and beautifully blue sky with the temperature reaching a tropical 90 degrees.

I doubt any of the two hundred young surfers could see me sitting up here. Even as I could not “see” the man who sat looking down at me half a century ago.

For five years my father would sit, usually alone, in the chlorinated humidity of the swimming pool’s bleachers and wait patiently for myself and a couple other young hopefuls to finish practice in order to chauffeur us back home. For a night’s rest. In order to repeat the routine the next day.

Me, the adolescent boy with red eyes wearing a baggy Speedo, was totally indifferent to this faithful act of parental love. It has taken years of personal journeying through life to give me the understanding that love comes in many forms.

I can’t reach back and change the silence between my father and myself, or even say “thank you” to this long dead immigrant, a peasant at birth in 1905, who, with long hours of self sacrifice allowed his young boy a chance for gold.

I can, however, as mentioned in last week’s blog, reach forward and show a kindness to others who might happen upon Windgrove.

When the guest arrives, expected or not, we just might venture down the path to the Drop Stone bench by the seaside, sit down for a minute or two and talk about the challenges and pleasures of life, of love, of fear, of hope. Of compassion for all creatures great and small.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden