Sorry For Your Sorrows

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin  

Funny sometimes, sometimes and more often than you might think a stranger can sense your sorrows better that some of those who are more familiar with you. You know your family, friends and workmates. Maybe that notion is an old wives’ tale but in at least the situation that will be described below that was in fact the case, although everybody knows sorrows come in lots of ways. Take my old growing up friend, Frank Jackman (nobody, but nobody, except his late mother ever called him Francis), who is, unlike myself who wears his emotions on his sleeves, an emotional stoic, at least in public.

I had not seen Frank for a couple of years since he had been living in California for a number of years and so that cut down on our times together since I had been hanging out in Centerville here in Massachusetts since my full-time work days were over andI could do what work I needed to do out of the house.  He had only recently returned to his old hometown of Hullsville down on the shores south just outside of Boston (and north of Centerville). One night he called me up to talk about this and that to get us up to date, and about some family sorrows that had happened shortly before. So this is really Frank’s story and I will let him tell it just the way he told it to me.

[By the way, Frank and I met in high school when a group of my friends and me went down to the Shore and Surf Ballroom  located in Hullsville in order to hear a great local cover rock and roll band, the Rockin’ Ramrods and Frank was chasing the same girl that I was that night. That girl, the details of our meeting, and the evolution of our friendship are not germane to what happened to Frank recently and moreover has been told before so let’s move on]:          

One of the reasons that I had come back to old battered down town Hullsville was that there had been a death in the family, a close relative, and while back there I got some old time longings for the old place and decided to stay awhile to think some things through. And thinking things through from kid time on always meant a long walk along Hullsville Beach to silently listen to the rush of the waved intersect my thoughts, my sorrow-filled thoughts this time. Back then it was about girls, cars, getting my hands on some dough, and off-handedly what was up with the universe, and, more importantly, my place in the sun. But hell it was mainly girls really.    

While walking, head bent a little against a rising headwind coming over from Boston Harbor, and while adjusting my jacket against the sudden cold, a woman, a young woman yelled something in my direction as she passed by going in the other direction, maybe twenty or thirty feet away but hard to hear with that raging wind rising. (Although her age in not important I mention it to indicate that this was no boy meets girl thing like in my youth when I would flame and crash over every young thing, every human female young thing that was not tied down on the shoreline. Markin was like that too, maybe even worst with less results, in case he would try to speak otherwise, especially that crash and burn part (including that young woman we both chased that first time we met at the Shore and Surf. Naturally he lost out. What did he expect on my turf.)        

I asked her to repeat what she said and with a certain amount of gravity in her voice she repeated “sorry for your sorrows.” I was not sure how to respond to this statement because she did not look like some daughter of some fellahin old days friends or some distant relative that I might have missed at the wake and funeral. And after I asked her she wasn’t and hadn’t, had in fact only lived in town for a few months and had come east because she had accepted a job in one of the high-tech companies that dot Route 495 in the outer suburbs of Boston. 

No, what she sensed, and I am still somewhat surprised at her perceptions, was that I was in deep sorrow, some ancient sorrows beyond that of a death in the family. As she explained further she said that she could see it in my gait, see it in my downturned eyes as she passed by. And truth to tell I was mulling some ancient sorrows just then, some lost family brothers dead in childhood taken away by one of the various maladies that sweep away children. Thinking about first experiences of death when one or another assortment of cats, Mums, Smokey, Sorrowful, Snowball had met untimely deaths and were buried in the “pet cemetery” in the family backyard.  

Mulling too buddy deaths, neighborhood buddies from the hard working- class streets of youth where we took more than our share of losses, and Army buddies, from bloody Vietnam. Buddy deaths now etched in black marble down in cold-hearted Washington, D.C.  Thinking too as I do maybe far too often of some intellectual construct about approaching death and at that beach moment I was trying desperately to remember some lines from Wordsworth’s Intimations Of Immortality to see me through. And as that young woman continued after blowing me a sisterly kiss after our short talk, maybe to reflect on her own sorrows, I asked myself how the hell did she sense my sorrows enough to take a chance and blurt what she had to say to a passing stranger    

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536. Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.	5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,	10
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;	15
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound	20
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;	25
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea	30
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy	35
Shepherd-boy!
Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,	40
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,	45
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:—	50
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet	55
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,	80
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.	85
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!	90
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;	95
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long	100
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,	105
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;	110
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!	115
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,	120
A presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;	125
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?	130
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,	135
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—	140
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;	145
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,	150
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,	155
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,	160
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!	165
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,	170
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!	175
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright	180
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;	185
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,	190
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight	195
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;	200
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,	205
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.