2.14.24
The urge to speak without a theme. The “burden” of a song – resonant verbal persuasion: what a song bears, carries, is pregnant with.
A stretch of drab weather: snow, rain, gray, cold, leaving crusty smears of white. Henry bounds across the grass-spikey snowfield like a stubby gazelle. Hilarious his exuberance; uplifting. The mere possibility of such joy repays the burden of being (the theme, too, of Chekhov’s tender story, “Rothschild’s Fiddle”).
Life is its own reward – if you let it be. So often we don’t. We superimpose on existence expectations it was never meant to bear (another burden). We ask it for what it cannot give and we cannot have: life everlasting, percipient admiration, tireless intimacy:
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Who teaches us to rejoice in what is? Born in luxury’s fabled lap, I was taught discontent. Here and now were never enough. I had to prove myself like an equation. Was I not lovable as I was? Must I be chased through time by the specter of disgrace?
How I loathe complaints, my own especially. We should banish sighs. Think you’ve been shortchanged? Wait till the clocks stop and there is no change, only dark and cold!
I mentioned Chekhov’s story. Read it – hardly a dozen pages – convenient for our rat-a-tat moment. A rustic coffin-maker named Yakov is always complaining. Nothing pleases him. He sees his sufficient life as loss after loss. Holidays steal his chance for profits. An anti-Semite for no reason, he kicks Jews as one might a cat. His child disappoints, his wife disappoints, only his fiddle gives him joy. Then his child dies, then his wife, he abuses and shames his well-meaning Jewish neighbor, then he himself is dying, and he plays his fiddle and weeps for all the beauty he has missed till tears drench his sleeves. Yes, he’s been shortchanged but by himself, not life. Life with all its charms and chances had been there for him all along.
The great gift of my seniority has been appreciation. I was lucky all along but, like Yakov, hadn’t known it. Relations, experiences, rewards, however bounteous, were always less than I’d had in mind. A son raised to shine like the sun, my luster paled against my hopes. Poor me! I did not mope, kept on bushwhacking through my time, did not grumble like Yakov (except maybe privately to my yawning journals), but neither did I rejoice in the grandeur that was ubiquitous, through which I trudged. Not until Jane.
Jane embraced me as I was, with all my oddities and shortcomings. I wasn’t perfect, for sure – but who was? She did not, as so many spouses do, hope to remake me to her ideal design. Skittish, it took me years to relax into acceptance of my adequacy. I expected always – maybe today! – the grim verdict: I’d disappointed. Jane smiled at my dread. She had not taken me on approval. I was OK as is.
Love is the fiddle which draws forth the beauty of the world. With love you have more than enough. With love every day is a holy day. Though the weather may not be sunny, it is never drab.
Yakov encountered this enormity on his deathbed. I, albeit a latecomer, discovered it in time. Granted, love is obvious, yet I celebrate it with a neophyte’s delight, for it was new to me. Such a simple lesson – life is a gift, rejoice in it! – yet how often withheld.
May your Valentine’s Day glow with the luminance only love allows.