I’ll be in spitting distance of your beloved UP next week. I’ve enjoyed a faculty
position at Western Seminary for three years now, truly a gift made possible due
to the influence of a dear friend. It brings to mind the ways Alfred Kazin advocated
for you at picturesque Stony Brook. We get by with a little help, and sometimes a lot,
from our friends. This truth only grows more clear as we age if we’re paying attention.
My guess is you were familiar with Donald Hall, poet married to poet of equal force
Jane Kenyon. Years ago I came across his article “The Third Thing,” his belief that
“objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that
provide a site of joint rapture or contentment”—are essential to marriage. You can
gaze into each other’s eyes making love or when one of you is in trouble, but most of
of the time that gaze is too intense, or at least it can be. So, a third thing is needed.
For Hall and Kenyon that included ping pong, poetry, and a daily dose “reading aloud.”
For months I’d felt our marriage needed a new third thing. Our children (always third
things) are these days mostly off on their own. Our home in Arkansas (again, always a
third thing) has, apart from upkeep or occasional upgrades, achieved a cranky stasis.
Opening our hearts to a 6yr old Cockapoo has kindled a flame of happiness, especially
in my wife, that’s taken me by surprise. Although I by no means gave permission, as it
was a joint decision, she almost daily says Thank you so much for letting us get Conger.
I believe she deserves every happiness, so almost daily I look up and say Thank you.
The church of my childhood pitted holiness and happiness against one another, the
former a sweet aroma to God’s schnoz while the latter was frowned upon as fleeting
and usually only pleasing to me. I put such cornball thinking away as I became a man.
To see someone truly happy, if even for the biblical twinkling of an eye, might just be
among the holiest experiences we have in this sorrow-soaked life. If given the chance
to, as Durante sings, “Make just one, someone happy,” and you either don’t take it or
worse stand there and gawk as it walks by, then I believe that falls under the heading:
SINS OF OMISSION, which yes are certainly forgivable but can still be quite the burr
under God’s saddle causing this sweet griefy life to also sadly include pain in the ass.