For my father and mentor                                                                                                       Don Welch 1932-2016

SWIFTS

Is it true we enter heaven                                                                                           through chimneys

no longer resting on stub tails    our beaks                                                         in bricks’ cracks

Is this what it is to go solely                                                                                 As wing

to be loved by the sky

Tell me   wise ones   how many flits                                                                           add up to glee

in an air territorial   one                                                                                      that’s driven out jays

and if spirit’s not iridescent      with what                                                                    does light play

Don Welch

To go solely as wing, to be loved by the sky, gleefully and sweetly released into the sanctuary of spirit and light. That is precisely how my father left this earth.

Years ago, in a song whose title I no longer remember, I was taken by the words beautiful agony. A paradox, indeed. And yet, as agonizing as the last days of a loved one’s life may be for those who cannot imagine a world without him or her, they may also be incredibly beautiful. For me, my family, and countless friends and colleagues, these days were beautiful, filled with reverence and great love for my father’s life and legacy.

In the sanctuary of sweet release, there is beauty in the going–as well as in the coming to those chimneys through which all swifts enter heaven. And if spirit’s not iridescent? I can hear my father’s voice, feel the very rhythms of his speech–rhythms that have long sustained and shaped me–as he answers, with what would light play? 

How immeasurably blessed all of us have been to play in the light of my father, your friend, colleague, and teacher.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of a restless bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

So writes American author, Sherwood Anderson, in his story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio. And aren’t all of our stories ultimately the stories of hands? Hands that enfold infant hands–small, powdery snails, curled into sleeping fists–hands that tuck rogue wisps of hair back into place, hands that clasp in prayer and applause, hands that tease life back into the lifeless, hands that find their rightful places in other hands, and hands, like Wing Biddlebaum’s, that beat the air into meaningful space.

Anderson continues by writing:  

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. 

Wing’s restless hands had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. But best of all–and tragically misunderstood by most–his hands encouraged, affirmed, cared for, and loved his students.

Having been dismissed from his teaching post, Wing lives in relative seclusion, willing his hands to quiet obscurity. Anderson ultimately leaves us with a final, powerful scene:

Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal, and setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light below the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary. 

Biddlebaum is much like John Updike’s Flick Webb, an ex-basketball- player-turned-gas-station-attendant, a man whose hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench though. Such exquisite, expressive hands fighting to survive in a world of strawberry-picking and tire-changing! Hands that may have been mistaken for those of a devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary and yet they were spurned, dismissed, bound by circumstances and misunderstanding.

In the sanctuary of hands, we would urge such fine hands from their greasy overall pockets, sing to them the words of affirmation, long forgotten, long silenced. We would watch them fly into the expression of their yearning.

And those hands that are not fine and nervous on the lug wrench, hands that become natural extensions of the tools they hold? In the sanctuary of hands, we celebrate them, too: hands that patiently bait hooks for children who cast recklessly into the wind, hands that darn socks and knead dough, hands that throw perfect spiral passes, hands that hammer, cut, and plane. The stories of such hands are also worth books in themselves.

When words fail us, hands seldom do. Instinctively, they move, their muscle-memory too strong, too resilient to remain pocketed.

I have watched the hands of the hospice workers who have visited my father in the last days. Daily, these hands have sustained us. All of us. They have taken vitals, bathed, bandaged, cleaned, and held our grieving hands until they could stop shaking. It is clearly the job of poets to write about these hands. For they are the hands of the devotees moving assuredly through decade after decade of our rosaries.

My dad’s homing pigeon loft

Growing up in Kearney, Nebraska with a boatload of homing pigeons in lovingly maintained backyard lofts, home has always held such a uniquely ornithological bent. For my family and me, home has always involved pigeons.

And the fact that these pigeons have such a keen homing sense–some flying 500 miles from Texas to Kearney in a single day–makes our family home a place to which birds, children, their children, and friends return time and again. Our collective homing instinct for 611 West 27th Street is undeniably strong.

My siblings and I delighted our elementary classes with annual pigeon visits. Armed with a small canvas crate and a pigeon, we would lead our classmates to the playground, where we would release the pigeon amidst our teachers’ and friends’ cheers. The pigeon, bearing a class message in a small capsule attached to its leg, would fly several blocks to my family home. And then my dad would retrieve the message from the pigeon’s leg, so we could take it back to class the next day. Positive proof of the bird’s homing instinct. In one local newspaper photo, I was captured releasing a pigeon for my fourth grade class: Shannon Welch releases a homing pigeon (see blur) on the playground of Park Elementary School. 

Blue bars, grizzles, checks–all names for different kinds of homing pigeons, names found quickly within the pages of the national Racing Pigeon Digest, names that laced through dinner table talk, and names that became an integral part of our family vernacular.

Blue bar                     Photographer: George De La Nuez

In the sanctuary of homing, birds and people give into their heart instincts and move purposefully towards home. Through plains’ wind and rain, in spite of the compulsion to water and rest, we all drive on. My mom and I were just talking about my 13 hour drives from Wisconsin to Kearney. Stopping once for a bathroom break and with a trusty supply of peanut M & Ms on the passenger seat beside me, I drove on. Like my father’s pigeons, I had eyes for only one thing: home.

Homing pigeons take to the air to mark the start of Idaho’s annual Festival of Flight.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GREG KRELLER, IDAHO PRESS-TRIBUNE/AP

In Robert Frost’s narrative poem, “The Death of the Hired Man, ” Mary, the female protagonist, says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the sanctuary of homing, we have to go there. I beg to differ with Thomas Wolfe who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Not only can you go home again, for many (most?) of us, you must go home again. And when you do, they “have to take you in.” This is where you belong–through biology, through adoption, through spirit.

Homing is bone-bred. Miles from the places we call home, our bones quiver, pulsing like an anatomical GPS, urging us surely forward.

In G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands, a medley of fables, poetry, and original drawings, he writes:

It was his home now. But it could not be his home until he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son. 

In the sanctuary of homing, we are all prodigals. Having gone from and returned, we earn the right to announce, I’m home. And for those of us who are truly blessed–pigeons or people–the right to hear these homing words: Well done, my good and faithful servant.

For most of my life, praise seemed like such an other-worldly, churchy thing. Praise lived alongside liturgies and homilies and sacraments. To offer praise seemed more a prescriptive act than an natural one.

But as my faith matured–thanks to incredible mentors and writers–I came to see praise as the  most natural expression of gratitude, of honor and affirmation. My children kid me mercilessly about not waving when I pass them on the highway. What are you doing? Why don’t you ever see us? To which I respond, I’m singing. Sorry, but I can’t sing and wave at the same time. 

Honestly, I’ve had some of my greatest praise moments, alone in the car, singing loudly–and mostly on pitch. Likewise, I’ve had moments that are indelibly etched in my praise memory when I’ve been holding sleeping babies in the middle of the night, looking at the stars in a clear, winter sky, and walking alone.

Several years ago, I co-wrote a song, “Sanctuary of Praise,” for our church praise team. This song, in so many ways, has become a theme song for my life. Here are a few stanzas:

I see God in the smallest things                                                                     in my ordinary days                                                                                 Folding clothes and making beds                                                                     will be my act of praise

As I watch my children sleep                                                                             in the quiet of the dawn                                                                                     Jesus folds us in His arms                                                                                 where we belong

And oh, my Father has come home with me                                                   I’ve invited Him here to stay                                                                           and in this ordinary place                                                                               we’ve made a sanctuary of praise.

In my sanctuary of praise, folding clothes and making beds, making Playdoh animals with my grandchildren, and tooling up the Des Moines River with my husband at the helm of his jon boat are authentic acts of praise.

Just the other night, my father was telling me of a recurrent image he has had since adolescence: Jesus, arms stretched wide open, standing in a field surrounded by workers–gritty, earthy, lost and helpless humans. This, he explained, is a picture of the pre-church Jesus, the Savior who dares to love the unlovable, who dares to live among the dirty and the hopeless. This is the Savior whose sanctuary moves with him into leper colonies, desert places, solitary mountain tops, gutters and back alleys, taverns and soup kitchens, refugee camps and prisons. And this is the Savior whose sanctuary is omnipresent and yet transcendent, earthly and yet holy.

Evangelist Billy Graham writes:

The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service. The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.

Billy Graham, like my father, understands that the most sacred music in the sanctuary of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and the helpless. 

Those who enter the sanctuary of praise may sacrifice, serve, and seek. They might sing mightily or sit quietly awaiting that still small voice. Some may perform simple acts in simple settings, for all praise is worthy praise.

So if you see me driving down the highway, the window open, my left arm dangling in the summer air, most likely I will be singing my praise, lustily, lost in the moment.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt (bottom) in my granddaughter’s bedroom

In contrast to the sanctuary of ingenuity, we may also take refuge in the sanctuary of everyday use. This is a sanctuary of pragmatism and utility, of ordinary things and days.

When I was teaching college and high school literature courses, I relished teaching Alice Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use.” I remember sitting in my community college office, reading this story for the first time. Wholly oblivious to the fact that there were other colleagues and students around me, I literally shouted, “Amen!” as I reached the end. This story deserves a hearty “Amen”–and more.

Set in the 1960s, Walker’s protagonist is a black mother of two adult daughters, Maggie–who lives at home with her mama–and Dee–who has left for the city and a better life. Early in the story, she describes her protagonist:

In real life, I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather.

Walker’s plot centers on a visit from Dee, who returns to the family home with her boyfriend. Dee, who has renamed herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo to honor her new identity, is immediately smitten with the milk churn in her family home. She announces that she will use the top of it as a “centerpiece for her alcove table” and she will think of “something artistic to do with the dasher.” As she moves through the house, however, she finds something even more desirable than the old milk churn: two old family quilts, a Lonestar pattern and a Walk Around the Mountain pattern. Both are made from pieces of her grandma and grandpa’s clothing, as well as from her great grandfather’s Civil War uniform.

When her mother offers newer, machine-stitched quilts that will “hold up better” and reveals that she has promised these quilts to Dee’s younger sister, Dee/Wangero cries, “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

To which, her mother responds: “God knows I been saving ’em up long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!”

In the end, the mother snatches the quilts from Dee and places them in Maggie’s lap. She chooses everyday use over decoration, leaving her eldest daughter quiltless and clueless.

Last fall at a church auction, my husband and I bid on, and ultimately bought, an old metal Case tractor–a collector’s item still in the original box–for an amount I will not disclose. (It was for a good cause!) The next morning when we went to pick up our granddaughter for church, Paul presented our grandson with the tractor. Before anyone could say a thing, Paul had removed it from the box and was on the floor, tractor in hand, beckoning Griffin to play.

In the sanctuary of everyday use, pricey collectible tractors are loosed from their precious boxes and, as toy tractors will, take their places among their Dollar Store contemporaries. They are pulled and pushed through sand and dirt, they are forgotten and left in the rain, they are used, and they are loved. Best of all, they are not heralded to be anything more than they were intended to be.

Great grandmother’s china will leave the china hutch in this sanctuary. And though there be chips and cracks, though the painted roses may fade and the cup handles broken, ordinary families will eat their dinners from this china. And their everyday use, like comfort food, will be deeply satisfying.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt hangs from a small wooden ladder in my granddaughter’s room. But it has been–and undoubtedly will be–used. Its worn edges and faded pastels give testament to a century of use. And if Gracyn uses it to make a tent, to host a picnic for her dolls, or to curl under with a good book, so be it. In the sanctuary of everyday use, this is expected. And applauded.

Painted on stockings during WWII

The scene: two weeks before Christmas, 1988, lunch time

The players: Megan, age 6, Collyn, age 4, and Marinne, age 3 (and me, their mom)

Megan: Mom, you gotta see this! Look what Collyn made!    

Me (standing at the sink, washing dishes): Just a minute .  .  . (this was my stock phrase to buy time)      

Megan: You better hurry before she eats it–            

Me (turning towards the counter where the girls were eating their baloney and cheese sandwiches): I’m coming!

Collyn: (proudly displaying a blue plastic plate with a nativity scene created from white bread, baloney, and processed cheese) Look, I chewed out the whole scene with my teeth!                    

Megan: You can see the little baloney Jesus in the bread manger. And the cheese wisemen can stand up by themselves!  

Marinne: I like it!  

Me (incredulous): Wow.

Collyn: Can we keep it?        

Megan: She means can we spray it with that clear stuff that makes it last. You  know, so we can keep it and put it out at Christmas every year  

Me: We’ll see .  .  . (my other stock phrase to buy time) 

In the sanctuary of ingenuity, a nativity scene chewed lovingly from white bread, baloney and sliced cheese is less a wonder than a challenge. You have the makings of a sandwich that you don’t want to eat: what can you make with it? how can you transform it before our very eyes?

Sometimes ingenuity comes at a moment just like this. You are comfortably sitting in your home (or wherever), and the opportunity for ingenuity arises. So you take it because you want to and because you can. And from these moments, you discover new and more efficient ways to cut your watermelon, to tie a silk scarf, to braid your daughter’s hair, to substitute an ingredient in a recipe you desperately want to make–but for which you lack one crucial ingredient, to decorate a room on a dime, to jimmy-rig a riding lawn mower so it will run again, etc.

But just as often, ingenuity is born from need. Sometimes desperate need. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor,” she writes of the volunteers from the Ladies Betterment League who make their scheduled visits to Chicago’s poor. Having romanticized their mission work and the recipients of their largesse, these volunteers are ultimately appalled at the sights, sounds, and smells they find in the projects:

They have never seen such a make-do-ness as                                                             Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”                                                                   Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich                                                               Rugs of the morning (tattered, the bespattered. . .)                                                     Readies to spread clean rugs for the afternoon.                                                             Here is a scene for you. 

To be ingenious is to make do in the face of poverty and want, to roll out newspaper rugs for your guests. Depression era survivors used their ingenuity to find countless uses for those ordinary things we unthinkingly throw in the garbage: left-over pieces of aluminum foil, plastic butter tubs and Cool Whip containers, scraps of fabric and automobile parts. During WII, ingenious females drew fine lines up the back of their bare legs to simulate the hosiery that was neither available or affordable. In lean times, all clamor to enter the sanctuary of ingenuity.

  Consider the world’s foremost online sanctuary of ingenuity: Pinterest. Enter this sanctuary and be sorely amazed! You can learn how to become a real-life MacGyver who, armed with a box of paper clips, can save the world–or at least make some cool jewelry. You can make perfect pancakes with a squeeze bottle, organize a drawer of cords with toilet paper tubes, remove a stripped screw with a rubber band, rub deodorant stains out of your clothes using old pantyhose, and unclog a drain with Alka Seltzer and white vinegar. With a little help from your Pinterest friends, your make-do-ness will guarantee you a spot in the ingenuity hall of fame.

For in the sanctuary of ingenuity, a paper clip is never just a paper clip, a cereal box never just a cereal box. That is the beauty of ingenuity: something’s destiny is never bound by its original form or function.

If we can look at a paper clip or a baloney and cheese sandwich with new eyes, why not a struggling student, an aging neighbor, a despairing man, woman, or child? Why not a person–any person? Maybe I will create a Pinterest site for those who want to enter this sanctuary of ingenuity and be just as amazed at the ways in which we can transform our perceptions of those around us.