Both of the verses below are based on memories of real experiences. In “Absence” it was Saturday afternoon, and my parents were off to the country for some reason which I have forgotten, and I w as off with them. Reluctantly, of course. I was probably 10 or 11, having finished the fifth grade. I had arranged to meet my young lady friend, Mary Kay, at our grade school playground at four o’clock. I kept reminding my parents of the importance of that rendezvous and they kept reassuring me that we would be home in time.
It turned out that we were 15 minutes late getting home. Alas! In great eagerness, nevertheless, I ran the two blocks from our house to the Miami school playground, only to encounter absolute emptiness. I was devastated, of course. The emptiness was overwhelming. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t waited, I assumed. Thus I slowly returned home, probably angry at my parents for frustrating my desire, angry at her for not waiting. The experience of the empty playground, however, and my frustrated will, became for me a major image of Hell, that absolute emptiness, no person there but me, and my will, an image I then used and developed in a public lecture on Dante’s Hell for a sophomore course at Berea College.
The final irony in the experience though was that I found out on the following Monday that she hadn’t remembered we were to meet there and thus had not gone at all. She and I were also at another time to go together to a movie one Saturday or Sunday afternoon. That didn’t work out well for me either. I walked the mile to her house, but she couldn’t leave then to go with me because her parents and she had company, guests. We agreed, therefore, to meet at the theater, the Ritz theater, the only theater in Tiffin, since I was told to go on. We were to meet on the left side of the theater. Of that I am absolutely certain. There were two rows, three sections. I sat on the outside seat next to the row in the middle section, on the left side of the theater, so as not to miss her; she of course, it turned out, went to the right side. I never found her then, and walked sorrowfully home alone after the movie which was probably a western. More desolation. Girls!
Absence
My parents made me go with them
To a country destination.
They made me late for a fifth grade date;
O, vanity and desolation!
We were to meet at the schoolyard,
Perhaps at half past four;
When I arrived she wasn’t there;
I was alone just like before.
The schoolyard was so empty;
No one on the swings.
It seemed as though this was the worst
That life could ever bring.
In later years I saw the place,
As an image of broad Hell:
All alone in a schoolyard
And nary a soul to tell.
The next one is about a neighbor’s child who with several of her friends went trick or treating one chilly Halloween evening. She lived two doors down the street from us. Her parents are good people, still there. We are still here, two doors up the street. Later in life she contracted some hideous cancer and died at age eighteen, on a blustery March day, 2005. She was a beautiful child and becoming a beautiful adult. She died; no one knows why. Neither do I. The cancer was unbeatable. What we desire in life, however, are answers, final causes. Meaning that makes sense. Purpose.
Sara
When she knocked that Halloween,
I jumped back with a start!
I gave her all our candy,
But I would have given my heart.
She was a child enjoying life,
Innocent of adult-made strife.
The monster thing that stole her life,
A looming shadow in the night.
That shadow follows each of us,
From dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk.
It caught her in her early days;
Death devours, so many ways.
Yet, always life is ours to praise.
Amen and Alleluia.
