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Thursday – New Year’s Day
Christmas was special for the Robin Bates family this year as my youngest brother and his wife, my two sons, and my five grandchildren descended on our house in Sewanee, which meant four raucous days of non-stop foosball, puzzles, caroms, mancala, violin playing (from my oldest grandson), tennis (with my eldest son and three granddaughters), s’mores (cooked over our indoor wood stove as temperatures dropped into the 20’s), and general joy unbounded. Although I’m not an Edgar Guest fan (famous for “it takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home”), I must admit that his poem “The Stick-Together Families” gets at what we experienced:
The stick-together families are happier by far
Than the brothers and the sisters who take separate highways are.
The gladdest people living are the wholesome folks who make
A circle at the fireside that no power but death can break.
And the finest of conventions ever held beneath the sun
Are the little family gatherings when the busy day is done.
The poem is a bit too dismissive of those families that don’t stick together—there are many reasons why splits occur—and in the final stanza it appears that Guest is chastising a “weary, wandering brother” who has chosen not to join the family celebration. Setting that aside, however, “sweetest music,” “finest mirth,” “all the charm that life can give,” “gladdest playground,” and “happiest spot to live” were all apt characterizations of our reunion:
It’s the stick-together family that wins the joys of earth,
That hears the sweetest music and that finds the finest mirth;
It’s the old home roof that shelters all the charm that life can give;
There you find the gladdest playground, there the happiest spot to live.
And, O weary, wandering brother, if contentment you would win,
Come you back unto the fireside and be comrade with your kin.
Our joy was modulated by two occasions, however, that lead me to conclude with a quieter (and better) poem. One was the death of my brother David, who passed away in February. This past year was also the 25thanniversary of the death of our oldest son.
In addition to those memories, we recalled my parents. Julia and I have inherited the house in which my sons spent most of their childhood Christmases, which meant that memories kept welling up. (My mother died three years ago at 95.). The past also returns in Li-Young Lee’s “Eating Together.”
Lee is an intensely sensuous poet, and in this poem he captures the sweetness of a family gathering a few weeks after the father has died. Death serves to intensify the senses and immerse the family in the colors, smells, and tastes of the meal. A tiny gesture by the poet’s mother brings the father back.
I love the comparison of the departed to “a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him.” “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” I hear Frost saying, and although the father is alone, he is not lonely. I think of our loved ones experiencing that quiet.
Eating Together
By Li-Young Lee
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
Here’s to the memory of those we have lost and looking ahead to a sensuous immersion in the year ahead. Happy New Year!
Further thought: I’ve just read an article in the latest New Yorker about family estrangement that is causing me to read Edgar Guest’s poem in a more negative light. In some families, “the brothers and the sisters who take separate highways” are escaping toxic situations and are by no means less happy than “stick-together” families. Author Anna Russell writes,
Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame. There is relatively little data on the subject, but some psychologists cite anecdotal evidence that an increasing number of young people are cutting out their parents. Others think that we’re simply becoming more transparent about it. Discussion about the issue has “just exploded,” Yasmin Kerkez, the co-founder of Family Support Resources, a group for people dealing with estrangement and other family issues, told me. Several organizations now raise awareness and hold meetings or events to provide support for people who are estranged from their families. Becca Bland, who founded a nonprofit estrangement group called Stand Alone, told me that society tends to promote the message that “it’s good for people to have a family at all costs,” when, in fact, “it can be much healthier for people to have a life beyond their family relationships, and find a new sense of family with friends or peer groups.” Those who have cut ties often gather in forums online, where they share a new vocabulary, and a new set of norms, pertaining to estrangement. Members call cutting out relatives going “no contact.” “Can I tell you how great it was to skip out on my first Thanksgiving?” one woman who no longer speaks with her parents told me. “I haven’t heard family drama in years.”
From the perspective of someone fleeing a genuinely damaged family, one seemingly heartwarming story suddenly takes on a dark tinge. In Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny, there’s a mother who refuses to allow separation. “If you run away,” the mother rabbit says over and over in different ways, “I will run after you”—which is all very well and good unless it is toxic possessiveness rather than love that drives her. Edgar Guest appears too smugly confident that families are automatically healthy places as he accuses his wandering brothers and sisters of making serious life mistakes.
This one dimensionality pretty much characterizes all of his work. Edgar Guest and the poetry of platitude.
