So the years pass after all and hot summer is here again...not as hot as the Texas summer my father James C. White was born, his mother sighing and pushing this intellectual, poet, railroad worker and teacher out into the world. An irascible birth of course, and there he was fully formed in the arms of his mother...later on picking cotton as his sister spun tales for him from the movies she had seen..
and then onto Baylor to be the handsome president of his class...Japan summoned him for his military non active duty.. time to have a girlfriend and sip sake...oh how the boxes in the back room sing of those time...and thus time tumbled by...a brief first unhappy marriage and then meeting that beautiful Viennese woman. My mother Emily.. oh the complexity and the passion..the shared feeling for poetry, the clash of culture and clash..all to be worked out here on the tundra of Minnesota..and me their first born..smiling into the world in the fall of 1952..and how he showed me Greek Poetry..and oh how a life tumbles by..and more children...my brother Wallace, Raymond and Margaret..His work
teaching at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design and then working for the railroad...handsome and erudite, always opinionated and passionate about politics and movies and poetry...the years did pass after all..and there I was calling him on his birthday to tell him that I had indeed rented a cottage on the island of Inisheer off the west coast of Ireland and wasn't it now a gift to him..but that he would have to support me...and 3 years later he and my mother walked the stony roads and we ate the weird and wonderful ray fish..and he charming the islanders with his stories and talk..the years just kept tumbling by and he kept writing poems, but never quite published and kept sending friends his patched together letters he Xeroxed....aging ever so slightly and then yes right into old age.... and finally finally after Emily was gone a year and a half we sat out there in my vine hut in early 'August and he said to me :"It's a Big Old World and I am getting tired of it." I drew him with a sigh and had a feeling he would not be long for this world.... less than a week later he was hospitalized... as I ran between hospitals as Josh lay in another one with a leg infection...I was filled with premature grief and ran to see him yet again with a poetry book under my arm...I read to him The Mower and The Glow Worm by Andrew Marvell...and he paused looking revived as if he'd had a blood transfusion...and later that night he did and he was gone...but ah, before I left that afternoon he smiled and said to me...You Sure Are Pretty...his last sweet oh so sweet words to me...
and he was gone.
the next few days a blur of activity and grief and now four years has passed and his box of ashes is not scattered yet....it is on a shelf with his shoes and glasses and a hodge podge of beloved books...I made sure not to organize the books..just have them the way he would want them...full of thoughts and ideas and papers ....pounded and beaten by his deep reading...
today I took that heavy box down from the shelf and of course a sheaf of carbon paper came down with it...
oh the weight of the years and yet now it is time to sing him home...and place the ashes in several special places..
out in front amid sunflowers he loved to grow..
in a bright red pot with the hibiscus flowers big as dinner plates ready to bloom.
down to the falls and scattered to the stream that will bring them to the mighty Mississippi and thus the sea eventually....
and surreptitiously to Emily's grave with a stick poked into the ground and the ashes shoved in.....
and a small amount kept and saved for that inevitable journey south to Texas to plant in the vicinity of a place in east texas...
yes.. I will sing my father home soon...and the sheaf of carbon papers will accompany the journey.
