Feb 20 | The Easy Ones (Letters from the Coast)

You can’t just love the easy ones

You can’t just love the easy ones

You gotta let ‘em in when you’d rather just run

You can’t just love the easy ones

Glenn Phillips, “The Easy Ones”

There’s a parishioner in one of my communities who is… difficult to handle. They have the worst emotional regulation I’ve ever seen, and no understanding of social cues to speak of. They are needy and clingy and must be the centre of every conversation.
We’re not saints for allowing this person to find a home with our parish. No one would be.
Because everyone deserves a home in God’s family. Providing it just means we’re doing the bare minimum.

You can’t just play the simple songs

You can’t just play the simple songs

You gotta knuckle down ‘til your fingers are raw

You can’t just play the simple songs

Ibid.

My father, who, before I was born, used to shut himself in the bathroom for hours to practice a beautiful arrangement of “Greensleeves,” shared his talents with me in the most frustrating way – or at least it was frustrating when I was a child.

“Daddy, will you teach me to play guitar?”
He gave me an old guitar of his, and a book of chords. “Learn these.”
The damn thing sat in my closet for a year.

 
“Daddy, will you teach me to whittle?”
He took me to Canadian Tire and bought me a good knife. Then we gathered sticks.
He put them in my hands. “Hack away at it until it looks like something.”
I got a fat blister between my index finger and thumb and gave up. The end of the branch looked vaguely like a snake’s head…if you squinted and had a forgiving heart.

But how can I fault him when eventually I learned that this dogged determination was exactly what it took to get good at Celtic harp, or make sculptures from twigs and stones and old guitar strings, or knit a blanket for a friend’s baby?

When I can face the ones I fear

It’ll all become clear

Oh, when I embrace the ones I fear

It’ll all become clear

Ibid.

Dad was sometimes judgemental and made fun of people, although never to their faces. He had a dry sense of humour and could be endlessly critical. But when I think of what he and my mother taught me, it’s love and acceptance. My dad even gave me a gentle lecture on cultural appropriation in the late 90s – not because he knew what that was, or why it was important for any reason other than it might hurt people when we try to mess with languages and cultures we don’t understand.
He also taught me to be humble, and to listen deeply. He would let me talk about my day until the silence spun out, but I knew he wasn’t just tuned out. He was listening.

You can’t just walk the shortest road

You can’t just walk the shortest road

You gotta straighten your back ‘neath the heaviest load

You can’t just walk the shortest road

Ibid.

My father’s mother Phyllis left my grandfather when their three children were little. She went home to Ontario – a gay woman in 1956 desperate and weary and struggling with alcoholism. After Dad died, Phyllis’s sister Betty told me that when Phyllis arrived at her place in Ottawa, Betty had made her phone my grandfather back in Princeton and promise Dad she would go home.

Dad was seven years old.

“He went to the Princeton bus depot every day for a while to wait for her,” Betty said sadly. “But she never came back.”

My grandfather eventually remarried. That woman, Nora, who ran the very same Princeton bus depot and let my dad empty the Coke machines in exchange for a piece of pie, became the person he would always see as his mother, and the person I knew as my grandmother.
When she began to succumb to dementia, he moved her into his house and cared for her with my stepmother’s help.
She died there.
I didn’t even know she wasn’t related to me until I was 21.

My dad had never mentioned it, and indeed he never did. My mother told me.

My dad walked with the burden of abandonment for over fifty years. He was the oldest of the three children, and the only one who came out kinder. His sister and I are estranged because she is a vicious and deeply manipulative Fundamentalist Christian. I’ve never even met Dad’s brother, who suffered not only from this trauma but a childhood injury that had him struggle with addiction for years. I don’t even know where he is.
My dad’s back was always straight, and he was deeply loved by his chosen community. He did all right for himself, but he still didn’t make it past 70.
One day the load gets too heavy.
We don’t get to choose when, and it can bring us down no matter how many people are around us to help carry it.

For all the suffering souls beside me

I pray love will guide me

I pray love will guide me home

Ibid.

My father taught me how to be an open ocean for hearts to sail upon.

He taught me that music gives everyone a voice. Later in life, he finally started to write his own music after years of telling me he couldn’t. He also spent hundreds of dollars of his own money to refurbish old guitars he found in thrift shops and second hand stores and give them away to people who wanted to learn to play. It was worth helping people find their own voices.

He taught me the self had to be slowly whittled with great care, and that the knife is painful, but it’s worth enduring, because what emerges from that work is something entirely new and beautiful.

He taught me we couldn’t just love the easy ones.