FRED FIRST: Poems, Prayers and Prompts

WHERE WE ARE FROM

The answer, when someone asks where you are “from” might be to tell the place where we get your mail these days. That’s the easy answer. But where are your roots? Again, the answer is more than a location. You are from and have been made fully YOU by family and community, tradition and custom, the music and culture of your childhood and youth, and so much more.

As I offered here a few weeks back, the template-guide adapted from the Where I’m From poem by Kentucky poet George Ella Lyon has given countless ordinary folks who are mostly not poets a framework to explore more deeply their roots that guided their growth from their past into their present.

Alyson Shelton has had conversations with almost 200 people on the single topic of their response to the prompts in the poem-template for Where I’m From. Recently, she reached out and found me. I was an early source for the template to blog readers in 2003. Here is the taped part of a longer conversation with Alyson that was a high point on my calendar and quite a pleasure. Seeing my old self on camera, not so much.

Where I’m From #196 with Fred First

Where I’m From #46 with George Ella Lyon

I watched the solitary man, feeling the weight of his aloneness as he sat at a table for four, two weeks after his wife’s sudden death. They sat with us at our table in the cafe a few times, he–a story teller; she–rolling her eyes but happy for his new audience.

And I wondered which is the greater emotional burden: The finality of a death that removes the partner for good (depending how you fell about Prompt 1) versus the loss of a spouse who continues to be alive in the body but is dying by degree in loss of memory and mind over months; over years. What does “closure” mean to these two men? How does the shape and depth and duration of grief differ.

I have come across profiles that would connect Person A to Person B based on their answers to a list of questions–most of them trivial and silly and I haven’t bothered. One was “If you could have a meal with a famous person, who would it be? How about three who died on the same day? Table for four, please.

Three Great Men Died That Day: JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley

From recent screen-time comes the unremarkable TV character mom whose dying little boy asked her:

To which she replied : “It is any way you want it to be. That’s what heaven is like.”

And I took the bait. I added that prompt to my “ideas to expand” because I think it will be a valuable exercise. Having told myself this imagined story, it might be easier to write a couple of things: My Life Manifesto; my living obituary; and other weighty homilies— if there are enough hours, synapses and keystrokes remaining.

You don’t have to hold any belief in life on the Other Side to respond to this prompt; but if you do, and you are also playing the back nine and can see the Club House, this exploration based on your imagination, your gut, your denominational understandings and your highest hopes could be a comforting and exciting exercise in future-building.

I will probably take a stab at it.

Elaboration on this topic would happen apart from long-relinquished Baptist notions of thinking that the ultimate gain of heaven is “eternal life.” I’ve held that the hope of Heaven is that, in that state, you live the “God kind of life (Zoe)” and no longer the human / material/ finite/ entropy bound kind of life (Bios). But that’s just me.

IF we (in some throttled-down version ) take on Attributes of God (Imago Dei) THEN…what possibilities would the new state of BE-ing with regard to TIME and SPACE allow us to do that we can’t do bound in bodies?

And so in my imagined heaven, I finally get my Time Machine. Oh the places I will go.

Now you:

And finally, here’s one I sang to Ann in the 70s. I can’t get through it now, it hits too close to home in so many places.