On the day before Christ traveled to the Earth
His Father asked of him the hardest thing
He’d done. “You see,” He said, “the mirth
We hear from time to time, the joyous ring
of laughter, children’s voices, songs of praise—
these celebrations we desire for them
are what we long for. Every time they raise
their voices to exalt, to touch our hem
in solemn prayer to plead a desperate case
it pleases us to comfort or restore
good health to someone’s reverent up-turned face
or guide him where he hasn’t been before.”

Then Jesus said, “I like those very much.
I only wish we saw much more concern
among them for those souls so few will touch.
Too many have a great deal more to learn.”

And they talked on, recounting all the ills
and oversights and gluttony and greed,
as well as how hate maims or simply kills
the hope of underprivileged in need.

“You see, my Son, the world has drifted far
from what I planned. Free will has been abused
so much that humankind has crossed the bar
and drifted out of reach, a gift misused.
So now I need to send you down to save
My work and give mankind a way back home.
It won’t be fun, you know. I cannot pave
the way for You. You’ll sometimes feel alone.
And worse than that, the people you’d expect
to lend an ear, to hear the message clear—
they’ll be the ones most likely to defect
for silver, status--things they hold most dear.”

“I understand,” our Savior said, “the way
will be quite hard. But if it reconciles
humanity to what You had in mind I’ll pay
the price and walk those many blistered miles.
I see quite clearly there’s enormous need
and only I can close the lonely space
by offering a painful loving deed;
the means for all to see Your Holy Face.
I know we’ll share our thoughts throughout those years.”

His Father said at length, “And when you’re done
I’ll welcome you back home and dry your tears—
and then we’ll count the many souls you’ve won.”

Thanksgiving Turkey's Prayer

Thanksgiving Dinner


When last year I drooled on my plate
I had not even started to date,
but since now I am older
(though not that much bolder)
for this meal I hope to be late.

Dad's Memorial Plaque at VFW 446

Bought them a big flat screen TV too so that when vets and families watched it they also saw Dad.

Jan's Birthday Angel

Ben, Seabiscuit and their cute trainer

Dad's Birthday at 86

Fourscore and seven years ago, Martin and Ethyl Inderbitzin brought forth a new son named Milton, conceived in love and dedicated to the proposition that he would be the jolliest baby on the Kalamazoo River.

Now we are all engaged in retirement, testing whether this family branch or that can remain as active and productive as he continues to be. We are met this New Year’s Eve to celebrate the start of his eighty-eighth year. We have come to dedicate ourselves to following his example as husband, father, fisherman, gardener, hunter, breadwinner, rabbit keeper, World War II sailor and lover of jazz.

The world will little note what any of us can say here, but his children, his grandchildren his great grand children and much of Muskegon will always be touched by Dad’s presence in their lives.

Love, Gib (December 31, 2003)

Private Memorial

I took a stool and sat there quite a while, gazing at the flowers Jan had sent along with me.The stone had not changed except for a new date, but a flood of images flashed on my screen.

Dad still walked the downtown mall at the change of the millennium, too fast for me to stay abreast. He cut no corners and marched along as if still in boot camp. We’d lived not far from there in 1936, on Terrace Street, but with everything changed beyond recognition the Oxford Hotel was gone. It was Grandma Rogers’s place of business, where I learned to tie my shoes, say the ABCs, write my name and answer the phone. Dad at twenty was not yet quite my dad and tended bar just across the street. He got Mom a job there too, waiting tables. I visited often and sat in a booth. A penny always brought me more pistachios in salty white shells than I could get open in an hour. In the evenings they frequently went window-shopping and came home with a grapefruit to share over yesterday’s Chronicle. A nickel date.

Dad’s first hip transplant did not slow him down for long and when the mall was torn out for still another revitalization experiment he walked his neighborhood, a mile of dogs and curbs and gutter surprises. Sometimes he came home with pocket change, but once it was with a discarded (or lost) filleting knife that he gave to me. I made a leather sheath for it. I can slice raw salmon thin enough to see through. For one of my birthdays in the 60s he gave me a rabbit-skinning knife in a factory-made sheath. I keep it sharp for tomatoes. Dad and knives. Dad and knives and me.

I tried to do that power walk with him once, but only once. I couldn’t match his furious pace.

Before his second new hip he joined me in my ‘90 Lebaron convert for a top-down trip up to Newago County. We slowed enough to note the changes in Uncle Ben’s and Uncle Edd’s old places, ate a meal in White Cloud and came home. It was an easy afternoon and the long ride didn’t bother him too much. Images flooded both our heads that day.

Our times alone grew sparser, but one morning we had a nice breakfast on Lakeshore Drive, Muskegon Lake just beyond the window. Only three years ago we went out to the Lake Michigan Ovals and sat for most of the afternoon at Captain Jack’s. Beer and sandwiches and sunshine. And laughing. I went back out there yesterday afternoon, but there was only the beer.

Dad still took good care of his garden in the middle of the decade, but Larry and I helped him more and more with it. Eventually, I put in his tomato plants.

We shared his birthday, Christmas and New Year’s of 2009, but it was at DeBoer’s Nursing Home. He needed me then to position his eating utensils and tip his plate toward him. I rescued some things from home (it was on the verge of becoming someone else’s) including a tie adorned with jazz trumpets that I’d gotten for him in Philadelphia. He chose it from a huge assortment. Last June Lynne rescued it again, this time for me.

I took him one of his best mountings of deer antlers and the maintenance man hung it for us. I also brought in some salmon I’d smoked at home. He liked it though I knew it was nowhere as good as his.

Yesterday evening I hitched up my jeans and went to VFW 446. People there miss him too.

Mom's birthday is the 18th.

Marines' Toys for Tots

Startled the gal at the drop-0ff site with a fleet of trucks for Christmas of 2010

Fourth of July

Dear Jesus, bring my daddy home.
Bad people fire guns at him
and booby-trap the roads.

Bring home my pretty sister too.
She writes to mom about the boys
who lose a leg or finish their
patrol then shake as if they'll fall apart.

I see her tears on every page.
She has a nurse's heart.

Ben and hobby horse

Looks like it might be a while before he'll be able to bust this bronc, but it was fun to see him astride his pony.

Father's Day

With Father’s Day around the bend
I racked my brain for quite a while
on gift ideas. My lifelong friend
is generous with a playful smile—
my mental scrapbook sports them all—
as he unwraps some little treasure,
entirely unaware how tall
I feel to offer simple pleasure.
At ninety-three it’s getting tough
to find a present he can use.
Some basement tools? He has enough
and they’re retired with no excuse.
Neckties are out. His crippled hands
do not cooperate as well
as they once did. The hour glass sands
have stolen more than I can tell.
Some sweet smoked salmon? Buckwheat honey?
Each year is its own precious gift,
and not too tied to food nor money.
Perhaps a chat will be that lift
as he recalls much younger days.
Or just a poorly crafted poem
drafted in a teary haze--
for last night Jesus called him home.

Mother's Day

The Little Red Table: Mother’s Day Tribute

As a young mother during the depths of the depression, Mom never wasted a thing. She scrubbed floors to buy onions for sandwiches, which of course produced breast milk I couldn’t digest (she later told me). She got us through those lean times with grit, determination and creative rejuvenation of ostensibly worthless rejects. Those harsh years and their lessons stuck, and over the length of my childhood I recognized her—though I didn’t know the term—as a congenital recycler. Americans of today, to be as patriotic as consumers are taught to be, use things for a while, even so-called “durable goods,” and then throw them away. It doesn’t matter if it is bought for cash or on credit; when we tire of something it goes out the door, either into a huge trash truck or a yard sale for ten cents or less on the dollar.

At our house, from kindergarten through high school, I saw old sofas and chairs recovered, woodwork, walls and cabinets repainted, rooms repapered and leftovers turned into stew.

In 1972 the old farm I bought in rural Maine came with a leaky barn full of discarded items which had never found their way into the normal stream of castoffs. Every few weeks for the first several years, I loaded the pickup and a converted boat trailer (overloaded would be more accurate) with a huge mound of stuff I couldn’t always identify and hauled it to the cone burner out on the Mapleton Road.

The most recent collection was ready to cart away when my retired parents Buicked into the farmyard one year for the opening of strawberry summer. Mom spotted a scarred brindle table with a leg chewed half off by a transient porcupine and disrespectfully covered with bird stains and grime. The unfortunate thing rested forlornly atop that ugly heap of barn junk--rusty iron, broken jars, oil cans and torn gum rubbers. It had lain there for a very long time before Nature and I finally consigned it to oblivion. With its uneven legs pointing skyward, it looked like a prehistoric beetle which had just lost a serious skirmish with the Orkin Man.

Mom lost no time in speaking up for the homely relic so I was forced to wrestle it from the pile and add an extension to the damaged leg. She hosed down the restored incarnation and gave it two coats of Farmall red.

Mom leaned over that table for a host of sunny seasons in the shade of the woodshed doorway while July strawberry patrons passed her crisp fives and tens. She tucked them with maternal care into the table’s lone drawer and was hardly aware of the vision she made as she bantered with customers pleased with the crop. Her smoky brown eyes and magnificent smile were more than enough to persuade me that the table was her. She had given it fresh life and pressed it into obedient service, just as she had countless things over her long life. When the picking was over for the summer, she and Dad eased their car down my long driveway and onto the Egypt Road. I was never happy to wave goodbye and often during their long absences found myself drawn out to that formerly busy spot in the yard to drink in her lingering spirit. The little red table always seemed to radiate a special northern New England warmth, even many years after the strawberries and Mom were only a wonderful memory.

The woodshed in winter was stark still and cold, but the table suggested as I began to feel old that since she longed for spring I should do so as well. And two welding gas tanks stood as close as they could--solemn, silent sentries who knew her true worth, but wouldn’t tell.

Easter

In the Garden

One Thursday Jesus spent in prayer
and sweating blood, it’s said.
He asked if He might be excused
from what lay just ahead.

We used that day more pleasantly
and made our plans to go somewhere
to celebrate—and did!
We see life rather differently
than He who gave us His.

(Painting is my version of a recognized work.)

Taking Off

Taking off is a book about awareness, anticipation, judgment and clarity. It's therefore also about growth, taking risks, sizing up challenges and moving ahead with what sometimes seems impossible. This makes the story at least a brush with love. Maybe not as close a brush as some would like, but I know my limitations.

We make mistakes in life, sometimes big ones. We also occasionally manage to dodge the worst consequences of some of them and find ourselves whispering a private prayer to our invisible copilot. Once in a while those people whose lives we touch aren't quite as fortunate and we do our best not to put them in harm's way again. We don't always succeed, but we keep trying.

Invitation

Would you like me to write you a limerick about one of your friends or relatives? Something to include in a gift card? All I need for raw material are some bits and pieces of facts about the victim which describe him/her, or some information about a circumstance/predicament, recent experience or an interesting thing which brings the person to mind. Grammar, spelling and syntax don't matter. Humorous verses are the most fun, so long as they don't villify....

These are free of course, but I make no promises about keeping up with demand (if there is any). Send your scraps of material to me at my email address: grogers@jdweb.cc and I'll respond to yours for the sake of privacy.

Is Frosty saying hello or goodbye?

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Winter

Even Mother Nature Can't Please Everyone

A scant five months ago our final rose
was plucked, another month for husking corn,
and when the first tomato comes, who knows?
The sparrows work their little hearts to death
attempting to find nourishment enough.
Homeowners shovel, watch their frozen breath,
decrying buried cars, then note how tough
it is to navigate on greasy roads--
and glare at those with show-off four wheel drive.
Shed roofs can barely stand their heavy loads.
Some snowblowers are only half alive.

But youngsters five to twelve or maybe more
love forts and secret caves and snowball fights.
They eye their winter sliding things, deplore
those scattered days when spring-like grassy sites
emerge to spoil their fun--and pray for news
of coming storms to close their school up tight,
thus forcing out those blasted homework blues
and giving them a reason for delight.

Nursing Home

Those silent wheelchairs stalk the quiet hall,
some moving slowly, others not at all.
Yet every single one contains a face,
a wrinkled, careworn soul who’s now a case
to study, care for, wash and sometimes groom
in private space unlike their former room
at home where everything familiar stood
around them looking bright and young and good,
reminding them of lives they’d mostly had
before their limbs grew weak and outlook sad.

Expressions say a lot to clue us in
about their thoughts. Some patients even grin
and say hello, while others seem to be
in still another place that we can’t see.
It’s hard to watch this scene, but caring staff
look after them with love to help them laugh
(sometimes), applying something more than skill
and coaxing them to work beyond their will
to just once more exceed their state and try
an extra day their status to belie.

One morning little kids came in to sing,
a simple-sounding, entertaining thing,
pre-schoolers all, their scrubbed and shiny faces
bent on bringing Christmas cheer to places
in our minds not used to innocence.
Their songs and gestures lacking all pretense
gave little hint that some of them one day
might find a waiting wheelchair as their pay.
The lyrics weren’t the least bit hard to follow,
but some of us then found it tough to swallow.

V-Day

What special day is almost here?
A time to honor those most dear.
We look around and note the hate,
the wars, dissension and debate
to settle squabbles large and small
as if they mattered much at all.

We lose perspective and decry
our differences, though we could try
to see humanity as if we were
but one, and doing so prefer
an end to suffering of all kinds—
each other’s blessed valentines.