Love’s austere and lonely offices ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 243rd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

John Hennessy is said to have the rare gift of being able to pick a line of poetry that constitutes the most appropriate response to an interesting point in any conversation. A poet, editor and teacher, John would of course have a treasury to draw from, but he does so sparingly, as is best.

One day, my sister and his friend, a mother of three young girls, had mentioned how during the dead of winter, knowing her youngest had to leave home around 5.30 am, she would get up before that, open the gate and turn on the heat in the car. This is in Philadelphia. John had said, softly, ‘love’s austere and lonely offices.’

It’s a line from ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden (1913-1980), the first Black American to be appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a title which would later be changed to Poet Laureate. It is a poem about how Sunday began for his father, how he didn’t know what his father did to make things comfortable and therefore never felt the need to express gratitude.

The labours of fathers and mothers are not often announced. They are not always seen. They are not always acknowledged. Whether or not appreciated, in ‘the blue-black’ discomfiture they spare their children, they get the little things done with those ‘cracked hands,’ hearts and minds that constitute the inevitable yield of everyday-labour that cannot be avoided or postponed. They work overtime in the work spaces of love, often alone but always empowered by boundless love.

And so I went back to that other time where I was the recipient of that incomparable giving beyond comprehension. I didn’t notice my mother ageing. Wrinkles and grey hair, like the love given, came unannounced. What was there was enough, this much we learned, but we never wondered how it all happened.

It was not that our lives were unexposed to the horrors of the world around us. We could not be insulated from all the fires. She did her best to make sure that our minds were not too disfigured. The pain she made sure we didn’t have to feel came with a price. She hid the costs. We didn’t see her pain. We never fully understood the dimensions of her fears and anxieties. The same goes for our father.

That’s how parents age, I feel; it’s not the passing years. And the only thing that slowed the process was the hope that what was done and said, what was avoided and the moments of silence was the best options. That, and the small joys of watching the children grow, rejoicing in their little triumphs and delighting when they were happy.

Parents do their best to alter the world just so their children wake up to warmth that may not have been there if those fires weren’t lit. Parents. That’s mothers and fathers. Hayden wrote about his father and I could say the same about mine.

I’m thinking of my mother, though. Today, as I write, it’s the 13th of October, 2023. It’s my mother’s 14th death anniversary.

So I remember how she made the mornings brighter, not just for me but all her children and grandchildren. All those things I didn’t notice and they didn’t have to say ‘thank you’ for. I am dwarfed by the enormity of her silence in the long years of her absence.

And, as I believe would please her, since she taught literature, I share Hayden’s poem with my readers so they too know something of ‘the austere and lonely offices’ in which my mother spent her solitary years. Their mothers and fathers too, I’m sure.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

13 October 2023

Love’s austere and lonely offices

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