Listening To Early Voices: The Poetry of Sharon Olds

Lay sermon by Jackie Michael and Phil Vitiello
January 21, 1996
First Parish Church, Unitarian-Universalist
Bedford, Mass.

A thought to Ponder at the Beginning

"One always learns to love in association with a parent who has his own peculiar way of expressing and wanting love. When a child grows up, he will understand, feel and want love as he learned it.
We live our lives listening to early voices."
- Jackie Michael

Music by Nancy Hair and Nathan Kimball

"Sonata IV in B-flat for cello and basso continuo," Largo by Antonio Vivaldi
"Canonic Sonata for two cellos," Vivace by Georg Philipp Telemann
"Duet No. 3" by R. Gliere
"Sonata in C for two cello," Allegro by Luigi Boccherini

A Story for All Ages - Kirsten Kunz

"Knucklehead's Door by Hugh and Gayle Prather (adapted from "A Book for Couples)

Poems of Sharon Olds

"Looking at Them Asleep", "I Go Back to May 1937", "The Elder Sister", "Late Poem to My Father", "Station", "Primitive", "Poem to My Husband from My Father's Daughter", "The Promise", "January, Daughter", "Bestiary", "The Sign of Saturn", "My Son the Man"

Early Voices 1: by Jackie Michael

Four Generations of Eldest Daughters (1934 photo), Vivian Johnston (left), Jacqueling Johnston Michael (bottom), Marie Peterson (sitting), Hannah Paulson (right)

It was always August at the farm. The heavy sun of August hung low over the flat fields and the leaves of the trees which enclosed the farm house, hung still, coated with the dust of full summer. The air was stirred only by the monotonous rasping of cicadas, the sounds as dry and brittle as the discarded brown cases found fixed by the files of tiny feet to the furrowed bark of an elm tree. Early afternoon of those deep days was a time of stillness. The men had returned to the fields and the women, dishes from the noon meal washed and dried and stacked away, had sought the deepest folds of the house for a lingering pool of coolness left by the darkness of the night before. I was the child who lay in the shade of the house elm, the dry grass prickling my back. I took the heat of endless August days as a promise of my ripening.

Each August, my parents, sister and I travelled the hundreds of miles from our apartment in Chicago to the farm of my grandparents, Claus and Marie Peterson. We passed through the dwindling of the city and the small towns of northern Illinois. We travelled the entire length of Wisconsin with its promise of mystery in the names of never-visited towns: Eau Claire, Menominee, Prairie du Chien. The highway halved green fields filled with eternally-grazing black and white cows. We crossed the invisible border of Minnesota and snapped the imaginary ribbon. And, finally, we glided through the tiny town of Upsala onto the dirt road which always ended at the farm.

Many relatives gathered at the farm during those Augusts. There were great uncles, substantial and suspendered -- Oscar and Andy D.K. Anderson and Adolph and Bernard -- all newly sunburned from the mighty work of raising the new barn or pitching August hay or threshing golden wheat. There were the young uncles, my mother's brothers, lithe and belted, flushed from their work beside the great uncles. The young uncles laughed and joked and arranged outings to lakes and dance halls and never joined the great uncles in their late afternoon nap on the parlor floor.

And there were great aunts -- Agnes and Yvonne and Ethel and Bernadine and Alice and Hannah. And cousins and second cousins once removed and a single aunt, my mother's sister Joyce. And there had been three others -- a tiny great aunt who died in infancy and two little girls who died of diphtheria, within a few hours of one another, many decades before my trips to the farm. These two remained in the form of a sepia photograph taken the day after their deaths. After assuring the great aunts I would hold it so carefully and sit so still on one of the straight-backed chairs pulled up to the oil-clothed kitchen table, I would spend long periods of time looking at the ghostly photograph of the two children, seated and leaning lightly against one another, fixed forever in flounced dresses and buttoned shoes, fixed in their sepia world as delicate insects are fixed in amber.

The great aunts and my grandmother and all the women cooked the five meals needed by the great uncles and all the men to stoke them for the work of the fields and the barn. There endless pots of coffee made in the huge blue-and-white speckled pot, an egg white always stirred into the ground coffee before the pot was placed on the great black and shining nickel-trimmed stove. And there was turkey and roast pork and homemade sausage and boiled potatoes and all the vegetables of full summer and pastries of every sort and breads with perfect arched tops. An earthen cellar lay under the kitchen. It was lined with shelves which held shiny jars of last summers bounty: gooseberries and plums and peaches and applesauce and pickled beets and green beans standing upright and perfect.

After the wheat was threshed and the sweet hay had been pitched into the great bell of the barn's hay mow, the young uncles looked for adventures. Julian decided that mounds in the meadow behind the barn were Indian grave mounds which gave promise of great treasures: arrow heads and pipe stone jewelry and articles never dreamt of. Soon all the young uncles had stripped to the waist, had found a motley collection of shovels, and had headed off to the meadow through the great dome of light.

Great aunt Agnes made lemonade for the uncles in the large brown pitcher and asked me to come with her to the meadow to carry the glasses. As the heat of August's midday poured down on my head, the great aunt asked me to walk in front of her. She lifted her apron and created a pool of shadow for me to walk in. We adjusted our gait to one another and I walked close to her softness, awash in shadow.

One night, as I slept beside a window opening to a black, star-pricked sky, I was awakened by a moan so loud it hung in the air for several seconds after it ceased. Quickly it came again, even louder. Now it was a bellow which began deep and quickly slid up to a crescendo of pain. Then I recognized it. It was the bellow of a cow but with an insistence and a rawness which I had never heard before. And then I knew -- it was the cry of the cow whose calf had been sold that day -- the cry of a mother whose baby had been taken away. The sound rang out over and over again for hours. The noise churned in my stomach and I pulled the blankets over my ears but I could not close it out. And then I thought of the sepia photograph. Had my great grandmother cried out like that when her two young daughters died? Had her cries rung through the night and been heard by each alone in her dark bed? I thought of my great aunt and the softness of her body and the shelter of her apron. But the great aunt didn't come to me as I lay in my bed. I was alone with that bellow of pain and a new awareness that death comes even to August on the farm. I was alone with the awareness that death had entered my world and that pain was not to be escaped.

I never asked again to look at the sepia photograph of the two tiny aunts.

Early Voices 2: by Phil Vitiello

When I was growing up, I was part of an extended family that included my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. We lived, for the first years of my life, in a third floor, cold water flat on Henchman Street in the North End. My grandparents owned the building and lived on the first floor which meant not only that I saw them every day, but that I saw my aunts and uncles and cousins at least once a week and often more since they visited my grandparents frequently.

The North End in the 40's and 50's and even up till 10 or 15 years ago appeared to outsiders to be a very tightly knit Italian community, but within that community, sub-communities were formed based on the villages in Italy from which people had emigrated. My grandparents were from a small central Sicilian town called Pietrapezia. Once established here, my grandfather helped his younger brothers emigrate to Boston, as well as members of many other families from his village. They traveled thousands of miles on a great adventure to seek out opportunities in a new country, but wound up reconstructing their Sicilian village community in the North End of Boston. Relationships in this country very much depended on relationships formed in Sicily and the primary relationships were always among family members.

Life in Sicily had been hard not only economically but in its social rigidity. Your actions were always constrained by what the family, the priest or the villagers would think. I remember my grandmother telling me stories of young women being abducted and raped by rejected suitors and then being forced by their families to marry their rapists because no other man in the village would marry them.

One constant theme in all of their stories was that the only people you could entirely trust were members of your family. Oh my grandparents were prominent in the Italian community and had a large circle of friends, but if a dispute arose between a friend and a family member, my grandparents always sided with the family whether or not they believed the family member was in the right, and this did not ruin their friendships because their friends understood and subscribed to the same code.

When my grandfather became too old to do the heavy manual labor that he had done since his arrival in this country, he was able to buy a small home in Nantasket that included an extra lot of land for a garden. He had been a farmer in Sicily and having a plot of land on which he could raise vegetables was very important to him.

Not so co-incidentally several of his friends from Pietrapezia also had moved to Nantasket so once again my grandparents and their friends were able to recreate a semblance of their Sicilian village.

With this move appeared the first chinks in the family solidarity.

My grandparents offered to give the North End building to my parents, but my mother's goal was a single family home in the suburbs and she feared that owning a building in the North End would tie them inextricably to that community. My grandparents wound up giving their building to my grandfather's younger brother.

Once my mother's uncle took control of the building, he began a subtle and not so subtle campaign to get my parents to move so that he could give the apartment to one of his own children. Eventually we moved and a rift developed between my grandfather and his brother that never was bridged. Family loyalty had narrowed down to the nuclear family. Was this a sign of assimilation?

In spite of this rift in the larger family, the years that my grandparents lived in Nantasket are what I look back on now with fondness and nostalgia. When my grandparents died, the focus for family gatherings was lost and the extended family saw less and less of one another. In recent years there have been several family funerals, two weddings and a christening. As we gathered for these events we've reconnected as a family. We survivors have had the chance to share our memories of Sunday dinners with mountains of food and high pitched discussions about politics and world events.

We cousins usually sat together at a kids table and were very close to one another in spite of some wide age differences. My cousin Grace, who was five years older than I, was often given the job of looking after us younger cousins. I remember going to the beach with her, some of her friends and some of my other cousins. Grace was a beauty and I remember a guy that day pressing her for her phone number, when she finally gave in and gave him a number, I was right there to tell her that she had made a mistake and to make sure that she gave him the right number. When I told her this story earlier this year, she had completely forgotten it and laughed with me about it. That wasn't her initial reaction back 40 plus years ago.

I remember hot summer weekends when this small former summer cottage held twenty or so people with cousins 3 or 4 to a bed. I remember one weekend when the house filled with smoke from a faulty hot water heater and it took the fire department which was only two blocks from our house over a half hour to reach us because they drove past us on their way to a similarly named street at the other end of town. Meanwhile aunts, uncles and cousins ran frantically, if ineffectually, about the house. For those of you who attended the Christmas Eve presentation of "A Child's Christmas in Wales", you'll understand that Dylan Thomas' piece has special meaning for me.

My grandfather never went to the beach that was only a few blocks from his home. He worked in his garden tending his vegetables while my grandmother was in charge of the flower borders. During times of drought, they argued about whether to water the flowers.

You see to my grandfather, flowers weren't worth wasting costly water on. To him the vegetables were everything and he was a master at getting the maximum yield from his small plot of land.

At harvest time, my grandmother, my mother and my aunts all gathered to can and put up food for the winter. On sweltering late August days while my cousins and I would go to the beach, the women would be sterilizing jars and simmering tomato sauce in the unbearably hot kitchen. This was tiring and uncomfortable work, but in the winter we all had wonderful canned vegetables and home

Oh there were a lot of disagreements and petty feuds, but there was a real sense of love and caring for one another that we all shared and remember with great appreciation. When we get together now we bemoan the fact that our children don't have the same sense of connection with their cousins and aunts and uncles that we had when we were growing up.

When I broached the religious services committee about doing this service, they asked me how it related to the theme of community that the committee was trying to emphasize throughout this year.

I answered without too much thought that the family unit was the basic unit from which communities are built and that seemed to satisfy them, but as I pondered what to share with you today, I realized that that answer was a bit too facile. Your family experience can both enable you to share in a wider community and make it more difficult for you participate in a community.

Certainly a lot of people seek out First Parish as a substitute for the extended family they either never had or that they have had to leave behind for one reason or another. When I first walked into this sanctuary, I wasn't looking for community. I was trying to find help for dealing with my children's questions about death and God without violating my own conscience. But I continued to come because of the warmth, intelligence and caring of the people in this church and eventually it did begin to feel like an extended family.

Inevitably I was drawn into working on various committees. I began to see another side to First Parish where less favorable attributes stood alongside the warmth, intelligence and caring. I thought seriously of leaving First Parish, but realized that what I was observing was just human behavior. I had placed first parishioners on such a high pedestal that when they showed their human foibles, I had a hard time accepting them. I made a conscious decision to accept the humanity of this institution in much the same way that I accept the foibles and shortcomings of my family members with love, and understanding, and a sense of humor.

I remember when, as a young man in my twenties, I visited Pietrepezia and met the relatives that my grandparents left behind when they emigrated in the early 1900s. A cousin who knew a little English was my guide. She was a wonderfully vivacious woman in her early 40s who had been engaged for years to a shopkeeper also in his 40s. They hadn't married because his mother wouldn't give her consent. You see, my cousin had been engaged to someone else who had been killed in the war, and because of this prior relationship was not considered to be a suitable match for her son. The welcome I received in my grandparent's village was overwhelming and there was such an outpouring of affection and warmth that I had a real feeling of having returned home. And this feeling never entirely dissipated even after I discovered that sometime during my stay in Pietrapezia one of my family members had helped themselves to half of the cash I was carrying.

In some ways, my experience of being part of a large extended family has interfered with my ability to relate to the larger community. My grandparents' admonitions to value family connections above all others still resonate in my head. Years back when I was in bed for several weeks with a bad back and Janet was starting a demanding new job, Barbara Laughlin called on behalf of the caring crew to see whether we could use some help. I found myself assuring her that we didn't need any help, that my parents and brother were in the area and would help out if we needed them.

After I had hung up, I asked myself why I hadn't accepted the help being offered and I realized that there was a part of me that mistrusted offers of help from outside the family. Being part of a community means trusting people enough to acknowledge your vulnerabilities and your need for the support of others. I didn't have a problem with offering my help to others, but admitting that I needed help from the community , that I couldn't take care of my own family without outside help was very difficult to accept.

Once I'd come to that realization, I've worked to be more open to admitting my vulnerability and to accepting help from others, so Barbara, if you think we need help in the future don't hesitate to call and if I tell you that we don't need any help remind me of what I've said in this service.