Nesting: Tribute to My Folks

The other day my father recalled the first time he’d heard the phrase “extended family.” We visited Makalamabedi—the place where the two rivers meet. This was the village in Botswana where I’d lived for two weeks during Peace Corps training and where I’d begun my journey in becoming fluent in Setswana. A place where I’d gone out fishing and learned how to carry water and sponsored my first goat feast.

At the time we visited, the people I’d stayed with had gone to work their crops at the lands. We couldn’t find my closest friends. But everyone who was a relative or a friend of the people I’d known stepped in to welcome us with great warmth. They considered themselves as members of the extended family of those who were not there. And, they considered us as members of that extended family as well.

Pop wanted me to welcome you here today in that spirit, as members of our extended family. Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary is dedicated “To Julia and All.” This is a very personal book and yet, it is also a book that reaches out to the human family…our joys and sorrows, our losses and gains out of those losses. In your presence today, you’ve now entered into the heart of our extended family. I welcome you and thank you for coming to join us today. This work seems especially apt to me this Easter weekend, a time of hope born out of death.

My wish is that the poems in Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary benefit those who read and hear them. The Romantic poets believed that if you described something with enough particularity that you would strike a universal chord. This afternoon my theme is family, specifically parents. You can consider this Mother’s Day and Father’s day all rolled into one. In listening to these excerpts and poems from Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary, my wish is that you will come to a deeper appreciation of your parents, your family, and your own place within it.

My mother has recently turned poorly, to the point we are concerned about her. My father, her husband of 63 years, is here today. Both have hefty sections in Sightlines. I dedicate today’s talk to them: their strength individually and together as they raised three very distinctly different children and lent a helping hand to a multitude of people along the way.
Mother thought that the births of her three children gave a hint of what kind of people each of us would be. I mention this in “Reaper,” a poem I wrote on my sister Julia’s birthday, the first year after her death.

Julia Thompson, my parents oldest child, went through her 61 years like a comet. Here is the story of her birth from “Just Like You and Me” in Julia’s section of Sightlines:

The wonderful thing about having siblings for me was the feeling that they completed me. Julia was the family genius that the world could understand. Gary has given my life a sense of normalcy, grounding, and balance. In my acknowledgements to Sightlines, I thank my brother in this way: “ . . . an Eagle Scout at an early age, still earning those merit badges. I am the never-to-resign President of the Gary Arthur Thompson Fan club.” I dedicated “Streaker,” in mother’s section to my brother, who is so devoted to her care.

And, then, myself, the baby of the family, the poet, whose life is like a meandering stream touching many places and people. Julia was fire. Gary is earth. I am water. My life moves between two great bodies of water—the Mississippi River in Southwestern Illinois and Clear Lake in Northern California.

My parents gave birth to three radically different children: Julia, a world-class physicist and social crusader; Gary, a retired industrial arts teacher who turned out the nicest, most capable man in the world; and myself. Daddy kids me that I am a woman of the world—who traveled as the currents of creativity and culture carried me. Who are these two people who brought the three of us into the world and never ceased to try to raise us?

Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary is structured into five sections. Two of these sections are devoted to my parents. At the beginning of each of their sections, I’ve included a praise poem. This is a form borrowed from West Africa. My parents visited Africa three times during the five years I lived and worked there. My parents loved the people I worked with and they loved my parents. Curiously, there are many things in common between rural Africa and the rural Midwest of my parents’ generation. The honoring of generations and heritage is one of these. Here is my Pop’s Praise Poem.

Mother, of course, must have what Pop has and so I wrote a praise poem for her as well. It’s a little more complex than Pop’s praise poem. Hers speaks of her weaknesses as well as strengths and traces the tension in our relationship and how that was finally resolved. This is the complete text of the poem, so just relax and sit a spell.

Music is close to my father’s heart. I remember one morning in Botswana, out on the lands where my parents had gone to visit. My father woke up, stretched, and said, “Janet, I have never heard music so beautiful as that I hear in my dreams.” I wrote “Rehearsal for Papa’s Song” to honor my father’s musical heart. He’s going to help me out a little bit on this one.

My mother’s section in Sightlines is titled “Sweet Little Dove.” This is a small family joke, because my mother’s temperament is pure mountain goat. “Sweet Little Dove” comes from a song Pop and I often serenade mother with because the title, “Evelina,” is as close as we’ve ever found to my mother’s middle name, Evelyn. Pop’s going to help me sing this for you now.

Now that you have a small sense of my parents as individuals, let me speak of their strong bond as a couple, parents, and stewards of an extended family and the land that has been in our family since the 1860s through six generations. They are 90 now, their birthdays just a few months apart. In “Rising,” written last year, I wrote:

Following a major stroke in 2001 up until just this month we were able to care for my mother at home. Many families would not have made this choice or had the resources to carry out this choice. My father, supported by a strong family team, has been my mother’s primary care-taker for roughly five years. I tell people that if there were a care-taking Olympics, that Pop would win in his class. One of the biggest benefits I’ve received in spending so much time with my parents in the last 18 months is witnessing the closeness between them, that is beyond words. . . and seeing my father as he carries out his marriage vows of “sickness and health.” The poem “Nesting” shares some of their intimacy that I was privileged to witness: