Monday, April 4, 2011

You'll know your stars, and you'll chart new ones




Recommended Listening: Stand By Me, Ben E. King

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

“See Bro, one, two, three.” 

He counted them out with me and smiled, “Onion’s belt.” 

“That’s right Bro, Orion’s belt.”

I could almost sense him there with us, just as he had always promised he would be.  I was 6 when my grandpa first showed me my first constellation, the easy to find, and always constant, Orion. 

I couldn’t always find the mythic hunter’s head and arms, but I could always find his belt.  Later I would find Cassiopeia, and move on to Ursa Minor and Polaris.  But Orion is where, he said, we could each look and know that the other was right there, not far away, looking at the same point of origin in a massive, always changing sky. 



My Grandpa McGregor liked a good pipe, a sunny day to golf in and a clear night.  When I think of him I can smell his tobacco and remember his kind hands on my shoulders.  He is the culmination of many things amounting to love.  A man able to love me, and one whom it was easy to love.

I want to say that love comes easy.  It’s hard once you have it to imagine living without it, impossible even, but it comes, at least for me, powerfully easy. 

Ten years after I lost my grandpa, I had the honor of working for a kind and generous lady.  She came at just the right point in my life, and offered me her trust, her time and her dreams. 

Mr. and Mrs. Bentley hired me that summer to work in their shop as well as to plant a number of gardens for them at their home.  Mrs. Bentley loved wild flowers and boulders.  She loved trees and sunshine.  I was to be careful of everything that lived, especially the white trillium, she reminded me with the utmost sincerity. 

She was slight, with a soft voice and kind eyes, however, I don’t think anyone had ever told her she had limitations, because she recognized none of them.  I can still see her standing in the door of her shop, her face covered in the dust of the boulders she had helped a landscaping crew set around her property.  “They don’t know this land, Heather.  They were going to smash those boulders onto a patch of pink clover!”



The roots of her strength were grounded in the love she had for her parents, her husband and her children, spreading back through the land her father had loved and into the infinite.  She never told me what to believe, she reminded me how to believe.

My grandpa once told me, “you know your trees.”  He was a code breaker in the Philippines through World War II, and longed for the youthful Maples and great old Oaks of his home.  He also told me that the more trees you have, the more roads you will be free to wander.  In short, an open heart is a free one. 

This year I loved someone very deeply for twelve hours.  I dreamed of his life and the things I would share with him, and then he slipped away from me.  I had twelve hours to love him.  My littlest possibility, my baby lost before I could even hold him.

He is as difficult for me to find some nights as Pegasus, but he is as real as though I had been given a lifetime.  I wondered, for just a moment, what might have happened if I had not known.  But I turned from that question.  I loved him, and my road is longer, my way stronger.

Last night as Bro, Justin and I stared into the night sky, I thought of my many points of origin, and realized they all lay in the hands of those I have been so lucky to have loved, be it for 12 hours, 14 years, or all my life.  My hope is that I can teach my son to love openly and freely, to embrace his life with eternal gratitude, and to find his way home, whenever he needs to, through the stars his father and I have found, been given and entrusted to him.

I told him last night “you’ll know your stars, and you’ll chart new ones.”  He doesn’t yet know what I am saying, but he will find his way there: it’s as easy as “one, two, three.”