The First Day of a New Season

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

-Seneca

First day working in my new office up at what Dio and Peg are calling the Loft.

It's quiet as a tomb up here and a little stuffy. Dio's sleeping over in the guest room, and Lux the dog has already ventured out to see what was all the ruckus when we rolled in here at 6:15. Dio's a late sleeper, and likely won't stir until after nine, which in turn gives me a few minutes after this post to requisition the truck and run down to Tara to see the cats and to the grocery store to stock up on a couple things that are lacking here. Like food of any sort. I should've thought of that. Then again, there's also no dishware or silverware up here, so I'm not sure what I'd do with a box of Grape Nuts and a carton of two percent.

Maybe I'll let someone else cook for me down in town. Probably easier.

The rest of the place looks pretty good, almost finished after three months of reconfiguring bathrooms and endless painting and tiling.

Although you can't see it for the fog, the view's one of the finest in all of Corning.

I do miss my front porch, however. And the cats. I'm going to have to bring Dean and Slane up the hill, maybe tonight if we're planning to sleep here rather than Tara.

This morning on our hourlong drive from Cliffside, through valleys shrouded in patchy fog, P and I talked about what to do about some sort of memorial for Dad. He's off to the crematory as I sit here, and Johnnie's vaguely suggested that she'd be happy to leave me in charge of some sort of gathering to celebrate his life.

But Dad said he didn't want that, and the sad fact is that he pretty much ran off everyone who might otherwise be expected to show up. With no religious tradition to provide the ritual, and no community to show up with a covered dish, what is one to do with all this?

There's a reason for these sacred rites, for recognizing the significance of moments we experience together and alone. In this case, as much as anything it's about closure, marking not only his transition to some other state of being or nonbeing, but also the transition of everyone around him into a season of life where he's not and never will be. But instead of the wonder and beauty of the funeral rite in the Episcopal tradition, probably the most awesome and touching thing we do, we have the rites of the secular world--the EMTs declaring the death, the wheeling out to an ambulance that won't move with any urgency down the street to the funeral home, the call from the crematory for a credit card number and then to come pick up The Box. And then everyone turns back to their lives, our lives, with this gnawing feeling that there ought to be more than that.

Our ancestors got it, like they got a lot of things we've forgotten but still feel in our bones.

These bookcases are going to make me batty. Faulkner's two volumes are on different shelves. The Harvard Classics are out of order. Tillich's Systematic Theology is both strewn among the shelves and cheek-to-jowl with Picketty on Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It's utter chaos, crying out for order I'll impose over the next couple weeks before I venture back to Florida.

And so it goes.