It is Easter.

A holy day. Regardless of your beliefs, you and i should reflect today, if only for a few moments between egg hunts.

i believe i’m not smart enough to really know about religious beliefs, which are true, which are right. i also believe there are some inherent things we all know are good, but we cast them aside for the more primitive ideas of self-protection, whether that be a group, family, or self-protection. i believe those who work to achieve the behavior we know inherently to be good will be rewarded and those who don’t will be tormented because they know inherently, deep inside, what is right and what is wrong. i believe this is an individual choice and how we deal with each other individually, not as a member of any particular group. i believe those inherent ideas of right and wrong have been most accurately ascribed to Jesus Christ in the New Testament of the Bible.

So in my way, i believe in Jesus Christ. i do not condone or condemn what others believe unless it hurts other people as a group, a family, or an individual. i am saddened when any religion (even if they claim they are “Christians) veers from the internal goodness, the teachings of Jesus Christ as i believe them, to spew hatred and fear of any other group, any family, any individual. i don’t think they are smart enough to know who is guilty and who is pure. i am absolutely, totally convinced they (or i) don’t “know” anything concerning belief.

i think that is what Jesus intended those many years ago. i hope my thinking is close to what is right.

Today is a day of a fulfilled promise according to the Christian religion. It is a day for me to somberly rejoice. Somber because our humanity chose to slay a man who believed in goodness. Somber because a political system put itself and its self-interest above justice for all, above freedom of men. Rejoicing because Jesus overcame such cruel insanity and rose from the dead, giving hope to all for peace and goodwill.

i reflected on that this morning when i went outside just past first light and heard the birds rejoicing. It is spring. It is time for renewal of hope. It is time to try again to work for peace and goodwill. It matters not what we believe, nor whether we accept the literal accounts of what happened this day two thousand and eighteen years ago.

Easter is a funny day. Non-practicing practicing Christians turn out in droves after not practicing for nearly all church services in the previous twelve months. Like that makes it all right. Funny. Most businesses normally open on Sundays remain open, unlike Christmas when the country shuts down. Business as usual for the fulfillment of a promise. Shut down for hope. Funny.

This Easter is a confluence: Easter Sunday, April Fool’s Day, my brother Joe’s birthday.

i will ignore the April Fool’s day part in this. i’ve never been real good at that sort of thing since we would “fool” Uncle Snooks Hall at dinner on April Fool’s Day with a sugar spoon with only a rim and the cup of the spoon being a hole. The three children would howl in delight when Uncle Snooks would look surprised when he tried to put sugar in his coffee. i’m over that now…except for the wonderful memory.

However, the other two events involved in this confluence are appropriate. You see, Joe Blythe Jewell, is the kind of practicing Christian i want to be. He believes. He doesn’t judge. He tells things they way they are. He loves. His ideas and mine are similar, but his beliefs are based on solid and never-ending

reading and contemplation. His knowledge is astounding, but he is not a “know-it-all.” He cares.

One of my greatest regrets is he and i chose opposite corners of this country to settle down (if what i have done can really be called settling down) — of course, this goes for my sister who is in yet another corner. i would like to spend time with both of them and their families on a much more frequent basis like our parents did with their families in Lebanon, Chattanooga, and even Florida.

Today, this Easter Sunday. Today, Joe Blythe Jewell turns 69. i write his full name because i searched for

“Joe Jewell” on the internet yesterday. One is an Phd in “aeronautics.” Now, Joe is smart enough to have been this guy, but i don’t think he is prone to work at the US Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio.

Then, there is this Joe Jewell who is the lead guitarist of the Irish band Aslan. Although my Joe loves Ireland and visits frequently, i don’t think i’ll be watching him doing guitar riffs.

But maybe, just maybe. For you see, a third “Joe Jewell” is in San Diego.  The Joe Jewell Pscyhedelic Trio will perform at San Diego State April 13. We plan to be there

although we are pretty sure he’s not our Joe Jewell. Good guitar player though. i’ll think of our Joe a lot while i listen. You see, my Joe shared a room with me, upstairs for more than a dozen years. We got to know each other. He got the short end of that stick. i was into football, baseball, basketball, girls. That was about it. He was into everything and finding out about everything. Smart. Lots of common sense. Hard worker.  Oh, i could go on. Then i went to Vanderbilt. That story had been told. He went to Vanderbilt. Made it. He went to the Northeast, Boston specifically. Two masters. Wife, lifelong partner. Preacher, pastor really. Children. Grandchildren. And perhaps that is my Joe at his finest. Grandfather.

And that, appropriately, is where this birthday tribute ends. You see, i believe my 69-year old brother shows the beauty of him as this grandfather guy. Love, hope, caring. All in keeping with my beliefs of what Easter, today means, which just happens to be Joe’s birthday this year. A confluence of hope, resurrection, peace on earth, good will toward men.

Happy Birthday, Joe.

Happy Easter with reflections of what it really means.

It was a bit too early for her. The chair wasn’t fully exposed to the sun.

In fact, i did not intend to jog my memory when i placed the chair on the patio by the kitchen. i put it there last night while i waited for the knock-off egg grill heated up for the steak i was cooking for supper.

Then was the first moving moment i had with this chair. i was reading the Vanderbilt magazine and the tribute to Perry Wallace, a man, four years younger than me, who will always be a hero to me. Perry was the first black basketball player in the SEC. He was from the poor, black neighborhood of Nashville. He was a dreamer. He reached his dreams, and he cared. He overcame so much more adversity than i can imagine. i cannot adequately tell his story. Andrew Maraniss did in Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of  Race and Sports in the South and then Andrew did it again in the article i read last night. i was impacted emotionally again.

Then this morning, i put out my sun tea to sun and took on yard tasks. i cleaned out the nice bushes lining our backyard en route to our sitting area (yes, Joe, where i sometimes sit though never enough; never enough), then i erected the garden box for planting roma tomatoes and strawberries for the first time in about twenty years. You see, i used to have some wonderful tomato and strawberry plants alongside our northwest fence, but Maureen wanted flowers there. My plants went away. So i’m trying again.

After completing the minor destruction and construction required, i started inside when i stopped. There was this chair there, too early for the sun to hit full force, but it was there. i swear she was there too.

You see, my parents traveled pretty much all of this country and Canada during their retirement. They began in a RV, towing a little Toyota truck and then a Volkswagen bug, and then they  upgraded to a fifth wheel and a full-sized pickup. They took off. Saw all of the continental states except Alaska, which they tried to reach but turned back due my mother’s first really serious asthma attack. They also hit, i think, all of the Canadian provinces. Pretty amazing really.

Then they got into a routine and left in front of the first winter storms heading West until they reached our home. 1985 to 2001. Every year. They would stay in a motor home place for seniors on the ocean in the South Bay and come to our house every day (unless they decided to explore for a day or two). They would do projects (god bless them), read, watch television, nap. He never stopped except for his naps. She did the projects, knitted, read, solved puzzles, cooked supper (Maureen’s thrill was to come home to my mother’s Southern comfort food), and then we would play bridge. Glorious times. As i said, i am a lucky man.

The time was January and February. My mother loved to stop all of the going on’s and go out into the Southwest corner’s winter weather. She would move a chair from one of the places we had placed them in the shade into a place where she could sit and face the sun.

i can picture her in that chair above, facing into the warm sun. Her head would be tilted back; her eyes were closed.

She was at peace. Tranquility. i have passed through. i have learned to meditate to some degree. It is a good thing for me, but nothing like my mother, her drive to do things only surpassed by her husband, sitting there facing the sun in total quiet. At peace.

i wish we all could achieve her tranquility in those moments.

You all should know by now i have a Wonder Woman.

She turns sixty-seven today even though she looks much younger.

For her birthday, i have planned to place something here in honor of her birthday. Sunday, i was going to write a photo essay with the pictures being her in various stages of her life. Monday, i was going to write the history of our relationship. Yesterday, i was going to write a love poem.

This morning, i thought of just expressing how much i loved her. You know, like Robert Browning counting the ways. Too damn many, i decided. Then i thought i should empathize the ONE thing i find most wonderful about her. That is absolutely impossible.

But there is this one thing about her which i always come back to think about her. Yeh, she remains beautiful. Yeh, she is sharp and many (but certainly not all) of our ideas about things are pretty well aligned. Yeh, she takes care of me, and i love her love for me. Yeh, i married my mother.

Yet that one thing is very clear. She cares. Maureen cares about everyone and everything. She not only cares, she attends to those who need caring. Sometimes it takes her a while to get to that caring stage, but she always gets there. A synonym for caring is loving, at least in my dictionary. She is the most loving, caring person i’ve ever known, and she does it with good sense, good common sense.

Oh yeh, i forgot to really say how much i love her. Can’t. Too much love there.

Happy Birthday, beautiful lady. We love you.

i have somehow retained a lot of stuff i’ve written. Some nonsense, some self-pitying, some never finished, some just ugly silly, some with promise, and one or two okay. This one is one of those categories above. i’m not sure which. These lines were written in what will always be the darkest time of my life, and reminders still make me cringe. i will let you judge the quality of this one. i have a hard time taking the poem out of the memory of what was happening.

sunrise

it was a beautiful sunrise
this texas morning;
i could breathe the spring,
smell the bacon in the air;
dog and cat were restless,
ready to go out, feel the spring,
feel freedom as they know it;
the dawn was pink-streaked;
on the sea, the sun would have been a blazing pink disk;
here, the trees hid its newness;
it first appears as a blazing yellow blast;

freedom is here;
i can smell it;
i must find it:
tonight, a cold front will pass through
this part of texas;
will i find it in tomorrow’s morning?

Well, you see i was anticipating a relatively calm Saturday.

From experience, i knew it would not go exactly as planned as it never does, but i was anticipating getting quite a few urgent tasks completed. i try to go to the places i want to go during the non-commute hours in the week and stay at home doing those tasks on the weekend. i play my golf during the week to a) keep away from crowded courses and slow play — i may not be very good but i play fast — b) i don’t want to clog up military courses and give active duty personnel more opportunity to play on the weekends, the only time they can get to the courses; and c) it is considerably more expensive to play on the weekends.

So Saturday was relatively free for my home work.

Then, as i was working on some computer stuff, Maureen comes into my home office. i smelled trouble. We previously had a discussion about the new hummingbird’s nest in the Phoenix roebelenii in the courtyard’s center planter. We had not seen the mother for quite some time. At breakfast, we agreed it just might be timing and we had  missed the mother feeding her babies. Or, as we considered, they might have matured enough to leave the nest. i said something to the effect we should leave the nest there until the frond died, then we would be sure they were gone (Of course, that is the way i remember the conversation: i’m damn sure Maureen has a different version).

Then as i walked into my office with my last cup of coffee, i spied Maureen talking on her phone to her good friend Karen. She was on her new mobile phone (another story) in the courtyard. i noticed she was on her tiptoes trying to peer into the nest. i was a bit concerned but dismissed my thoughts. Apparently, she went a bit further and pulled the frond down enough to see into the nest.

Trouble. My trouble.

When she came into my office, she spoke in that tentative, little girl voice, which means i have no choice but to do her bidding.

“I hate to ask you this,” she began (uh ho) almost in tears, “But i looked into the hummingbird nest, and the little babies are dead.”

“Oh no!” i said following the script rather than muttering some asshole comment, which i have been known to do if i thought it was funny.

“With no regard for my pity,” she continued, “Would you please take down the nest and throw it away? I can’t stand to see them, much less handle them.”

i’ll bet you know my reply. It sure as hell wasn’t “No.”

Relieved as if she didn’t know she had control of me, she then instructed, “Be sure because the nests are known to have lots of mites and things with infectious diseases.”

“Yes, dear.” i mean what the hell was i supposed to say?

i went out to the courtyard and it dawned on me i didn’t have to handle the nest or the dead birds. i would simply take my bush shears and cut off the frond, then throw it into the yard waste bin for pickup.

Good plan.

Good plans can get screwed up.

i cut off the frond at the trunk. It fell onto the courtyard concrete. There was only one problem: the baby hummingbirds weren’t dead.

When i looked down in the frond, the two baby birds had tumbled out of their nest and were moving their wings and beaks.

Now, this is a guy who has shot guns, big guns. This is a man who hunted submarines. This is a man who was in charge of nuclear weapons. This is a man who was damn near close to blubbering because there were these two little hatchlings out of about a gazillion that would suffer from nature’s call of the wild and that food chain thing who were fluttering on the concrete.

i puzzled as to what to do. First, i decided to put them back in their nest. Now in case you haven’t seen me in a while, i have fat fingers, not to mention several other areas i’m not proud up. This makes picking up a hummingbird hatchling about the size of a pea back into a nest about the size of a large thimble quite difficult, no, impossible.

i tried.

No success.

So i succumbed to what i knew would be another saga, opened the door and called for Maureen. i explained my dilemma. Did she understand? Was she sympathetic? Did she want to help?

Hell, no. She got pissed because i told her those two birds were alive, not dead.

“Why did you have to tell me?”

i was speechless for a few seconds and then blurted, “i need you to put them back in the nest.”

She of the tiniest, most graceful fingers in the world even with gloves, put the two tiny creatures back into their thimble.

i took the frond and carefully wedged it between a couple of other fronds near where it was originally located in the Phoenix roebelenii.

We went inside and went immediately to, where else? the computer and the genius of genius google search. We read all of the things we should do, and patted ourselves on the back because we had done pretty much what we should have except, of course, thinking they were dead and cutting down the frond.

We read what we should do next. In case, the mother did not return, we learned how to make fake nectar, sugar water. We were prepared.

Then we learned we should monitor the nest to see if the mother returned. This is fairly tricky. Hummingbird mothers apparently are not dumb. Once the hatchlings have feathers, she stays away from the nest to not draw predators attention. She returns for literally seconds to feed them before taking off again. Her time away varies from about ten minutes to about ninety minutes.

Have you any idea of how boring it is to monitor a hummingbird’s nest for a mother’s return? If you look away for a minute, you could miss her, and then have to wait again.

Maureen, of course, had to go to her yoga class. Guess who got to monitor? Guess who was not very damn good at it? She came home. i had not seen the mother. i thought we should just let fate take its course. i thought she agreed. This is yet another in a long line of thinking incorrectly. As i walked by the window, i caught her on the ladder with twine around the base of the cut frond.

“What the hell are you doing?” i asked in my best tough old Navy guy voice.

“I want to make sure it doesn’t fall down, but i can’t tie the knot,” she replied.

“It won’t fall down; i wedged it between the other fronds; oh, don’t worry; i’ll tie it off.”

Sound like a man who is trying to ensure domestic tranquility?

Now if you don’t live in the Southwest corner, you may not know the traits of a Phoenix roebelinii, you should learn in case you are ever out here. A Phoenix roebelinii is like a dwarf palm. But the fronds have many, many needles about two inches long, that can hurt, draw blood. i know. After all, i have been assigned hummingbird nest monitoring and Phoenix roebelinii adjustment for hummingbird duty.

This task wielded about two dozen sharp pricks of two-inch thorns into my hands and arms.

The frond is now secure.

We then worried and continued to watch intermittently for activity around the nest.

It was cleaning day. Our two ladies, including one who has become as much a friend as a cleaning lady, Marde de Jesus, were in the family room. i was in the office. Maureen peered out the family room window and shouted.

“The mother’s back and feeding them.”

When i got out and indeed saw mom hummingbird taking care of business, the two cleaning ladies and Maureen were jumping up and down in glee with smiles across their faces.

Now, i’m not gonna tell you i wasn’t smiling or glad the reprieve of two small hatchlings had come about. i was just as happy as those three women. It was a glorious moment, a triumph. i was convinced throughout the entire episode, those two hatchlings would be dead, sooner or later, even if they weren’t as immediately. But we, including mom hummingbird somehow had done the right thing.

As i headed out for errands, Maureen was commenting to the ladies about the miracle and how wonderful hummingbirds were.

i, returning to curmudgeon status, added, “And they are awfully good at playing dead.”