12 - my friend's poem, love, and more snow

My mom called after her day at a sauna.

"I am calling you to let you know that sauna and massage just made me so happy!"

"Oh really? You loved it that much?" I asked, brushing off some snow from my hat and gloves in my room. She rarely calls me to let me know that she is happy, I thought.

"Oh yes. I never let myself have a such a treat, and I am glad I did it today."

"Well. I am glad that you did it, too, mom."

"But you know... I felt bad for your dad," she spoke softly.

"Why is that, mom?"

"Oh, you know. Your dad has been working hard, too, and I felt bad that your dad didn't get to have such a treat. He doesn't like sauna anyways, but his legs have been hurting, you know. It was nice for me, but your dad..."

After all these years of living with my dad, bearing with him, and complaining to me about him, she still has this incredible compassion for him. She wants her husband to join her delights in life. Perhaps, that is love, I thought, being able to bear one another with such compassion and patience, missing the other's presence in your experience of joy and pleasure.


My friend Sam (I am not sure yet if I can call him a friend, but I will call him a friend) dropped his poetry book in my mailbox today, with two postcards inserted marking two poems, I assume, he would like me to read more thoroughly. So I did. And they touched me in similar ways Frost did during my high school and my inadequacy in understanding languages and theories did not seem to matter so much after reading his poems. Here is a short excerpt from his poem Accident (I will share his entire poem when the entry is shorter).

. . .

he would have to say, standing alone, his pulse snapping

against the sky, filling the veins of the night,

plasma, cartilage, bone – crying out for her,

her jacket flapping in the bush. He would have to say

that love does not mean preservation alone,

but also creation and destruction, and only then

is a thing complete, is it revealed, like the windshield

shattered sixty yards away, like Somayah dead,

sitting calmly in the grass, after the truck she crashed

flipped over fifteen times. Some things are impossible

and they come true. Maybe all things.

. . .

- G.