Harold Edgerton: Ouch! [Archery] (1934)

" … and I don’t think they can!"

I take a respite from my CHope series today to remember my remarkable daughter, born on this day forty-four years ago. She was not supposed to die before me, though she left me with occasionally overwhelming memories of her presence. I miss toodling into the Willamette Valley to spot newborn lambs with her. We were formidable lamb-lookers. I miss our long-searching conversations that always lead to revelations. My magic almost always worked with her. I won't forget our final conversation where she cried, revealing that the latest surgery had not relieved her symptoms or her often overwhelming pain. She fixed that herself in a meticulously planned and executed execution.

The searing superficiality of all our present incumbent engages with pales compared to a single genuinely significant life, like my darling daughter's. The purpose of presidents and governments was never intended to inflict more pain on our most vulnerable individuals, as if inflictors would live forever and nobody else counted. We once aspired to be much better than that, and sometimes even were. Regardless of political successes and failures, we remain vulnerable. Nobody was ever all-powerful, and those who presumed they were more convincingly demonstrated they weren't. These clowns will be no different. No April Fool's intended, though this day might be the day we remember their foolishness after they've fallen. May that day come sooner than later, please.

———

It might have been a curse for you to be born on the day everyone calls Fool's Day. You became a sure and certain sign of Spring instead, a darling daughter, a confidant who grew to know better than most ever suspected. You understood how there is no particular advantage to always being the smartest, most insightful person in the room. It was roughly equivalent to having everyone believe you were the greatest fool present. Like everybody, you managed to make a fool of yourself in reasonably short order. Like most, you worked through that humiliation and the second. The divorce was the most difficult. Betrayed by a feckless husband who had cynically used you and your position to prey on his fellow immigrés. He stole your car and drove it to Florida, where he crashed it in an insurance scam before fleeing back to his Cuban homeland and another wife he might have already had, leaving you with car payments but no car to haunt you through graduate school and a spitefully unplugged freezer filled with rotting meat. I cleaned up the meat mess before leaving on exile.

None of us knew, though we all suspected, that he was poison from the outset. He was swivel-hipped and Cuban handsome, but his cues had never seemed to sum to substance, and his stories often strained credulity. When he took to treating you poorly, you defied him. I suspect those acts of defiance convinced him that he'd never be capable of dominating you, however much you might have wished he would, hoped that he could. He left you bereft, partly due to the humiliation that only true love can ever inflict. None of us knew then what our futures would bring. You worked hard to earn that graduate degree and the jobs you took to gain professional credibility. You intended to become a citizen of the world and became a significant contributor to connecting it.

In time, you would find the true and faithful love of your life. You would become his wife without once submitting to his presumed superiority as that other guy had continually insisted you should. He was, frankly, a much better class of Cuban, a Catalan with a perfect Roman Prefect's profile. He was a mathematician from a patrician family who fled Franco's Spain for inadvertent endless struggle under Castro. His parents fed him their rations during the Special Period. He overflowed with character and caring.

Before that time, before you found your Dream Come True and before you died, you were bereft for your twenty-eighth birthday. You were between husbands and struggling to succeed at anything, experiencing an understandable ebb in your self-esteem. I sent you this poem from exile hoping to bouy your resolve. I didn't know but suspected that better days lurked over the horizon. I tried to be your cheerleader, your champion, even then, with me gone (again) in exile and you feeling abandoned. I hope this birthday poem eased your passage. You were remarkable, daughter, and ultimately nobody's fool!


Owie
It’s not the stubbed toe that hurts,
not the innocently sliced finger or wretched knee,
for these are merely accidentals.
Their surprise hurts more than their damage does.
It’s the slow pitch, the aching itch,
the son of a bitch who plans.
It’s in those hands that people truly suffer.

It’s not the ouch but the owie that nails us;
once and for all, against the eternal wall.
Indictable, even convictable then,
even by a friendly judge.
You or I wearing somber black robes,
sitting as if we were supposed to know,
charged with deciding while hiding behind our sole
responsibility.

Me, too! Even you, without formal legal training
single-mindedly maintaining the useful fiction,
More concerned with diction than the truth.
Silently indicting while we live.
It’s no way to live. A life without forgiveness
must be a life without deliverance from the one escapable toil.

It makes me boil to consider my complicity.
I fear I taught you too well,
like I was taught, like they were taught before me.
You are much better than you suspect,
for reasons undetectable. That’s why I’m speaking up now.

Bury every hatchet. Smother every grudge.
Breathe deeply just imagining all that does not matter.
‘Cause this matters: You matter more than any memory,
much more than any lie.
It should hurt to be this free,
Owie. Ouch. Damn! It does
because it just does.

Be grateful for the heartaches, appreciative of the scams,
They have not managed to kill you yet,
and I don’t think they can!

Happy 28th Birthday, daughter.
dad

04/01/2010


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Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz