Ordinary Goodness

Picking Raspberries

We are picking raspberries
in the bramble tangle
that your carefully tended bed has become.

After all those years giving…
this was the place for savoring
this home you called summer...
staying from spring to fall.

You couldn’t come this year or last.
We phoned to ask permission 
your frail voice cheerful with consent.

The thunderstorm prowls   impulsive
strangely indecisive.

We pick with familiar greed— 
sometimes from the litter 
of fallen purpled fruit   we pinch 
pink almost-ripe till they release 
because we won’t be back in time.

We lift arches   expose hidden berry clans
plunder till they stain our hands
then turn like memory 
back down the same row
for the unnoticed and unseen.

Strangers have already been here   
trampled vines.  Two ash saplings
a few burdock have moved in.
Even the bear may come.

The rain releases just as we are done.

All the time we picked
you were there with us   
welcoming   yes
to this place you are leaving
with that other yes.

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My father’s youngest brother, Fletcher Van Gorder Parker was a wonderful expression of the Protestant Christian tradition in which he was raised. I think he got most of his kindness, insight, and affectionate good humor from his mother, Katharine. He told me his father, Fletcher (who preached for over thirty years at Immanuel Congregational Church in Hartford, CT) generally conveyed the message that “he should be better” whereas Katharine offered him complete love and acceptance with companionship for his own adventure in living.

Van was married to Lucille (Hemple) Parker for 62 years. They shared and practiced together a deep faith that welcomed the unknown, the stranger, cherished the Earth, worked for justice and equality, raised three remarkable children. Not judgmental or dogmatic, the churches they served were truly supportive communities. In retirement, Van turned to writing poetry that is observant, witty, wry and always caring. Reversal is a poem included in his fifth and final volume, Growing Still, which combined new work with earlier poems (and whose title is a wonderful play on words).

Reversal

It happens sooner or later
If you live long enough –

A sense of not being in charge
Or, as the French might put it,

Of being passé. It’s not necessarily
A bad thing to be a back number.

In some ways it’s a relief.
No need to keep up with

Somebody’s expectations.
A time to learn about plants

And animals and other people,
To do less judging

And more appreciating.
To begin to connect the dots

And figure out how you
Might fit into the picture.

A chance to re-invent yourself 
And discover there’s more to you

Than you thought there was
And most of it is better than

You dared to believe.

What a gift to celebrate two people who shared with us lives of genuine goodness! I know you have people you honor and remember for the hope and joyfulness they bring…whether they have practiced a particular faith or it just seemed a natural part of their being.

Sharing gratitude for human goodness is essential to remembering who we are and hope to be. In a time when so much deliberate effort is expended to turn us against each other, it’s a touchstone that helps keep us sane—even hopeful. Clear and straight-forward, not weighted with obligation, not strenuous or self-righteous—as though this is just the way we’re meant to be. It leaves us wondering why it’s so hard to figure life out much of the time.

I think of Van and Lucille’s lives as the fertile soil in which democracy flourishes, and it’s the way of living that a real democracy supports and nourishes in return. Of course, individuals, families, and communities all over the world experience and share this kind of ordinary goodness, whatever political system they live in. But what a difference if we live in a system that values and honors this goodness rather than trying to suppress or eliminate it!

There is an intimacy and connectedness to this goodness that lets us join the world around us in its diverse, widening and mysterious presence without the obstructions of guilt, resentment, fear, and judgment.

The gift of picking raspberries, feeling Van and Lucille’s welcome, enjoying the fruit, the place, knowing this might be our last time there.

We are also holding in our hearts Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti…ordinary good people, moved to go out and stand up for others being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis.

How can their presence be treated as a threat—their lives snatched from them—in an instant of viciousness? The goodness of caring people is under systematic attack.

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