somehow a marvel that I never got wet

on "love's austere and lonely offices"

Last night, for purely meteorological reasons, as I walked from the bright shelter of my son’s high school basketball game into the parking lot’s dark pummeling rain I was reminded of Ada Limón’s stunner of a poem, The Raincoat.

I first heard this poem read by Tracy K Smith on her podcast The Slowdown while I was waiting outside a different basketball gym for this same son on another dark, rainy night several years ago. It moved me to tears then, in part for how wholly unexpected it was, but now it is grafted like marrow alongside every other aching, pulsing maternal hope I carry. It is appropriate Limón includes it in a collection titled “The Carrying”.

My best friend Susan and I have a saying we established in the early years of life-building as we watched friends around us taking decidedly flashier pathways to success: “The reward for being healthy is… you get to be,” we tell each other.

In his thoughtful essay Health is Membership Wendell Berry persuasively argues that, “Health is wholeness” so this little maxim, our shared wager, holds fast to the simple idea that the daily, unacknowledged choices one makes on the side of trying to stay whole and intact, trying to build a life that feels coherent and true, is its own reward. There are no medals, no certificates, no bonus checks, or performance incentives for doing it well, but still… there is a measure.

And the measure, I would argue, is something akin to what Limón offers a glimpse of here. It is the same glimpse we see in Robert Hayden’s poem Those Winter Mornings which so searingly speaks of “love’s austere and lonely offices”. In both, it is the parent’s love and the child’s belovedness that dawn like epiphany. The light and truth that unfolds from the simple, routine, and faithful presence of a parent showing up, and showing up, and showing up again. It is its own testament, its own reward.

Smith’s mellifluous voice transforms every poem into its loveliest self and for this one, especially, I must insist that you listen to it first. Don’t read it at all to start, just listen to Smith’s reflective introduction and then her reading of the poem (5 min for all, for just the poem drag the audio timestamp to 2:53). Then, let me know what you think!