PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
A call to serenity This is a difficult hard-pressed to find a time to write a column topic of diversion. that I hope people Then I came across turn to as a source of a quote by writer diversion and perhaps Annie Dillard: “A writer mild amusement. looking for subjects Even the spreading inquires not after what virus and ensuing he loves best, but after lockdowns could what he alone loves be fodder for jokes at all.” So, I thought about weight gain and I’d start there, first quarantine beards focusing on what I and wine tours that love, which is a lot of took you from your ROBIN’S NEST things, then trying to kitchen to your identify that thing that Robin Conte lives with her bathroom to your living husband in an empty nest I, uniquely, love. room. Creative types Chocolate and coffee in Dunwoody. To contact repurposed popular are easy to cancel out, her or to buy her column tunes and masterworks as they are items of collection, “The Best of the of art with coronavirus universal adulation. Nest,” see robinconte.com. Mountains and themes. (My favorite was “The Girl with the beaches, sunsets and Purell Earring.”) waterfalls also garner widespread I thought it was a tribute to the admiration. human spirit that in the face of I am developing increasing a global pandemic, people found appreciation for Mason jars, a way to laugh. Humor gets us versatile little things that can be through a lot. But there’s nothing used as drinking vessels, rustic entertaining about the current vases and storage containers and events of our nation, and I’ve been are useful as a measuring utensils
to boot, but they’re making a comeback, so I’m not alone there, either. And then, suddenly, I thought of the whippoorwill. I know I’m not the only one to be enchanted by the call of a whippoorwill, yet for me it is singular in that it is the song of my own memories. The very sound carries me back to my childhood and nestles me softly down onto the old couch on the front porch of my grandparents’ house in rural New Hampshire. It was there that I learned of this bird as a herald of the night and heard its call, a piercing sound that begins at the first dusky moment of twilight when the sky melts into mystical shades of bluish gray (shades which I’m sure Benjamin Moore has a found a way to can and number). It was there that my grandfather Nono told my siblings and me a legend of a pair of star-crossed lovers who became separated, as lovers of legends are wont to become, and whose nightly calls to each other were immortalized in the whippoorwill’s repetitive trill. It was there that I would sit as
the evening deepened and cooled, by then just with my siblings and our grandmother Nana, because Nono always retired early. We would sit in the comfort of her presence, watching and listening, and use the time to rest and reflect on the day that just faded and how it was spent and the promise of not much more to come but sleep and rejuvenation and the prospect of rising again. I think of the song as mine alone because it is the call of my wise and loving grandmother, as well as my own naive youth. And with it I remember the words I spoke at her funeral almost 20 years ago, when I struggled to describe her to the congregation. I admitted that my words were flat, like snapshots, and that to truly reveal the person that she was, I would have to take you with me, to her house on the hill, where you would feel serene just to be in her presence … the presence of a woman whose soul was as pure and clear as the call of a whippoorwill. Perhaps that’s why I love that bird’s call, because in reminding me of her, it calls for me to be the same.
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AUGUST 2020 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
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