A Poet Laureate of Hospice

Extraordinary Ordinary People 2

My aim with Extraordinary Ordinary People (EOP) isn’t artificially to extend or violently to stretch the meaning of extraordinary so that it loses all sense. It is rather to explore the unexamined regions of the characterization. If the extraordinary is to be found in human lives and acts other than those that are granted fame or celebrity, for the range of reasons our current culture and others, historically, have so deemed a person to be extraordinary, then in what other or more encompassing attributes does that quality lie? How is a person who may still be understood as ordinary to be seen, nonetheless, as extraordinary? How may it be that what I, and maybe you, too, will judge to be extraordinary can still remain in some other sense ordinary?

The parameters of my choice last time were very particular: a man who previously and subsequently lived a life not much out of the norm of many millions of others had, for about five interrupting years, performed outstanding military service as a courageous bomber pilot and determined prosecutor of war crimes. Then he went home. For the rest of his long life, though he accepted, in a kind of brotherhood, recognition and honors from those who knew of his service, he didn’t seek celebrity and he didn’t live in a way to gain continuing fame in his life.

This time, I want to reorient my vision out of the spotlight of great historic events, away from the always compelling draw of courage in combat. My focus in this entry is on a person probably more obviously “ordinary” to many. He had no encounter with history, he earned no medals and performed no aeronautical feats of wonder to dazzle the imagination. The ordinariness of this week’s person is in many ways not unlike that of my own father. Neither man was well educated and both were blue collar workers.

In the case of my father, to make a point, the nature of his ordinariness, as it appeared to me at a point in my youth, briefly contributed to a period of alienation between us. It occurred for both of us as a great departure from our relationship during my childhood. I had been born a third, unplanned child at a relatively late age for my father in those days, 42 – and then he decided he wanted another girl! Once I was born, however, my mother regularly recounted, the love and attachment were immediate and reciprocal, and Mac, my father, doted on his worshipful offspring as I revered my sun-god father.

As I came into my middle teens, though, I was seeing my father differently. Through the other generational and cultural clouds of that era, I came to see a diminutive, barely educated immigrant sewing machine operator who understood little of the dramatically changing world around him. It was a modern American world of which I was very much a part, and Mac was prepared to guide me through it little more than he could teach me sports or guide my education, which was not at all. To make it worse, at an age, in a time, when defiance of unreasonable authority performed a badge of courage for a young man, Mac offered a cautious, even, as I perceived it, timid face to authority. Of course, I had no idea then the details of the life and the nature of the world that had shaped Mac and from which he fled to the United States on his own as a youth younger than I then was. I had no understanding that for the first fifteen years of Mac’s life, as a young Jew living in the Pale of Settlement and wandering with his sister through a hostile Eastern European landscape, to give offense to authority in the wrong moment might, like a Black man or boy in the Jim Crow South – and even now – cost him his life.

What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Fortunately, I both matured and learned, and my father, capable of wounded, worried rage, was capable also of love without limit. I grew, in my maturing mind, to admire my father for just that capacity for selfless love and for other qualities he manifested late in life and throughout his long old age. Mac lived to 94, and in so doing set an example for me, in that ideal fatherly way, in the simple pleasure, determined independence, and stoic courage with which he lived out his old age, even after he lost my mother and until the very end.

So, too, does this essay’s poet laureate of hospice set an example, who did not come to write poetry until the last fifteen years of his life, who wrote it feverishly and gratefully as he neared his end, and who gave to others through his poems the solace and courage they sought in order to meet their own ends.

(Thanks to all my subscribers for reading this long introduction. Paid subscribers have access now to the account of this extraordinary ordinary person’s life. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I hope you’ll consider becoming one. There’s a free trial. You can also go to the first two entries in the series, which are free, to get a sense of what it offers. Many thanks.)