Sorry, Plato
“How I have loved my physical life,” says old Pastor Ames in the novel Gilead. It is the kind of observation only an elderly person is likely to make. When one is young, he thinks he will always be as quick and nimble as he is at that moment, and therefore he cannot really reflect on how he loves his physical life. It would be like saying “How I have loved breathing.” Only after one has lost some of his physical abilities, can he come to a conclusion like that of Pastor Ames.
But I’m 69 years old. I can say it using that present-perfect verb: How I have loved my physical life. Virtually all of it. (I have just enough pain to make me relish the fact that I’m usually pain free.) The great love of my youth was basketball. In high school I could never get my basketball shoes and jockstrap on quick enough before practices or games, couldn’t wait to get out there. It was all fun—the wind sprints, the shooting drills, running up and down the court shooting lay-ups at a hundred miles an hour. But especially the scrimmages. And all the driveway ball, in the alley behind Kooiman’s Insurance. Better than the formal games with teams from other towns. Just a bunch of guys in shirts and skins on a slab of cement, leaping and sweating and laughing and shooting. Talking trash in the gentle way that boys in a rural village in the '50's where everybody goes to church might talk it. I have loved my physical life.
I played until I was 58 years old (I had vowed as a youth to play till I died, but two bad knees forced me off the court.) I was never able to dunk, but I remember that well into my forties I had wonderfully exhilarating dreams of dunking the ball (though I guess the dreams were part of my non-physical life).
Of course my physical life involved much more than sports. (One’s mind goes immediately to sex, but I won’t go there in this blog.) What a marvelous thing it is to do physical work when you are young. I remember the first time I stacked hay bales all day on the hayrack, the baler spitting them out almost faster than I could stack them, the sun beating down on me and the temperature in the 90’s. I felt so good about myself that day, I think I would (almost) have done it for no pay. Another day I lugged cowhides that had been stacked in salt in a cellar all winter over to a freight car about 20 yards away. Eight hours straight with a half hour lunch, keeping up with a 35 year-old-man. Later, the owner of the Rendering Plant where I was working said to my dad, “That boy of yours is some worker!” Ah! the physical life.
And singing! Surely singing is part of one’s physical life. Nothing throughout all of my 69 years has given me more joy than singing. The choirs and male choruses and quartets I sang in. And the daily singing as I walk and sit and drive. I can’t begin to explain why I do it (it’s not like I decide to sing) or what it does to me--except to say that it does something good to me, nourishes me, restores my soul. But it is a physical thing, singing. It happens with breath and muscles and nasal passages and vocal cords. (How ignorant I am of this physical act! Where are my vocal chords? How to they work? Is there a scientific word for vocal chords? Are they cords like rope? Or chords like four notes played simultaneously?(: Why don’t mine work as well as they used to?)
I could go on about my physical life, but instead this brief confession: I have never liked the word spiritual very much. I have a book of poems out called The God of Material Things; all the poems in it are about physical stuff. I have written about non-material things, like doubt, but had to use material things to talk about it. One of my favorite poets had as his most sacred writing principle: “No ideas but in things.” Pretty good advice. Kind of what God must have thought when he created the earth.
But I’m 69 years old. I can say it using that present-perfect verb: How I have loved my physical life. Virtually all of it. (I have just enough pain to make me relish the fact that I’m usually pain free.) The great love of my youth was basketball. In high school I could never get my basketball shoes and jockstrap on quick enough before practices or games, couldn’t wait to get out there. It was all fun—the wind sprints, the shooting drills, running up and down the court shooting lay-ups at a hundred miles an hour. But especially the scrimmages. And all the driveway ball, in the alley behind Kooiman’s Insurance. Better than the formal games with teams from other towns. Just a bunch of guys in shirts and skins on a slab of cement, leaping and sweating and laughing and shooting. Talking trash in the gentle way that boys in a rural village in the '50's where everybody goes to church might talk it. I have loved my physical life.
I played until I was 58 years old (I had vowed as a youth to play till I died, but two bad knees forced me off the court.) I was never able to dunk, but I remember that well into my forties I had wonderfully exhilarating dreams of dunking the ball (though I guess the dreams were part of my non-physical life).
Of course my physical life involved much more than sports. (One’s mind goes immediately to sex, but I won’t go there in this blog.) What a marvelous thing it is to do physical work when you are young. I remember the first time I stacked hay bales all day on the hayrack, the baler spitting them out almost faster than I could stack them, the sun beating down on me and the temperature in the 90’s. I felt so good about myself that day, I think I would (almost) have done it for no pay. Another day I lugged cowhides that had been stacked in salt in a cellar all winter over to a freight car about 20 yards away. Eight hours straight with a half hour lunch, keeping up with a 35 year-old-man. Later, the owner of the Rendering Plant where I was working said to my dad, “That boy of yours is some worker!” Ah! the physical life.
And singing! Surely singing is part of one’s physical life. Nothing throughout all of my 69 years has given me more joy than singing. The choirs and male choruses and quartets I sang in. And the daily singing as I walk and sit and drive. I can’t begin to explain why I do it (it’s not like I decide to sing) or what it does to me--except to say that it does something good to me, nourishes me, restores my soul. But it is a physical thing, singing. It happens with breath and muscles and nasal passages and vocal cords. (How ignorant I am of this physical act! Where are my vocal chords? How to they work? Is there a scientific word for vocal chords? Are they cords like rope? Or chords like four notes played simultaneously?(: Why don’t mine work as well as they used to?)
I could go on about my physical life, but instead this brief confession: I have never liked the word spiritual very much. I have a book of poems out called The God of Material Things; all the poems in it are about physical stuff. I have written about non-material things, like doubt, but had to use material things to talk about it. One of my favorite poets had as his most sacred writing principle: “No ideas but in things.” Pretty good advice. Kind of what God must have thought when he created the earth.
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