Peepers, Promises and Pentecost

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Story of a poem, written at Pentecost

After Cathy Tutton crossed the St. Ann’s Bay ferry in the evening of May 22, she rode her pink Marinoni bicycle _ 22 years old but with a new and softer seat _ by the marshes near Indian Brook bridge along Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail. It was late evening and she was attempting to reach Bill Nicholson’s place before dark.

Later, describing her ride to me, she said she heard her tires rolling, and she heard the Peepers.

Tinkletoes, they’re called in some places, and even Pinkletoes. Only big enough to cover my pointing finger to its first knuckle. I’m not sure what shade they are in those marshes. I imagine light brown or green. I’ve read they have small crosses on their back, perhaps helping them hide amid the grasses from predators.

Tiny and unnoticed alone, together they create a chorus of responding voices _ a musical presence that fills up the dusk and rises into the night.

By the next evening I was high atop McKenzie Mountain, awaiting runners from our Cabot Trail relay team as we continued our annual race over and through and sometimes steeply down those Cape Breton hills. I’ve been doing this for seven years. As you run here, you see the ocean, you breath salty mist, you look on the highlands carpeted with their blend of dark shadows and lush green. You also hear the Peepers atop McKenzie, if you move away from the rock’n roll finish-line music.

Look up, said the announcer as the sweaty and elated men and women arrived.

Look up at the sky and see the stars that are beyond counting. "Won't see that in the city," he said.

Had me thinking, later on.

Some things are present to remind you of God’s presence, of eternity. Music seems the best comparison. Some things blend to become a chorus. You might point one star out, you might hold one peeper in your hand, and they are each very much themselves. However, they choose to create their most powerful song together.

In his book about community, Where God Happens, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes about the Church’s mission to promote the work of being together. “Different voices, different instruments, but an intelligible and beautiful result,” he writes. “This is a work that takes protracted, committed time, which is why the church is so much involved in blessing lifelong commitments _ marriage, ordination, monastic life _ not as a way of saying that everyone has to be involved in one or more of these but to remind all baptized believers that, because of their baptism, they are bound to the patient, long-term discovery of what grace will do with them. And it is a work that requires the kind of vulnerability to each other that can only come with the building up of trust over time…It all comes around to ‘life or death with the neighbour’ once more.”

Thomas Merton, in the little book New Seeds of Contemplation, writes something similar about the purpose of spending times in quiet prayer or meditation. He says, “Go into the desert not to escape other men, but to find them in God.”

After my run, and the drive home listening to Johnny Cash and the Irish Descendants, I grumble through housework, nag my girls and go to Rosy’s soccer match.

I sink, sleepy and achy, deep in the green soccer-Dad’s folding chair, awaiting my daughter’s game. Suddenly, eyes alight, Ifesinache Chiekwe, is before me to say “Hello” and to tell me he’s become a footballer with Dartmouth United. He was so often a blur when I saw him more often, chased by his father around the Church hall, he would leap on and off the stage like a puppy that had escaped in a yard, just when I was attempting to begin the gathering with a song. I’m guessing he’s seven or so now. His sister Joy is on the soccer field, running down a forward.

I recalled a Sunday school class when his older brother Namdi tied the red and golden streamers to wooden dowels, and we ran across the grassy field beside the Church, watching the paper image of flame blow in the wind. That was how I taught Pentecost. In Christian terms, this was the beginning of community, of Church in early form.

It’s announcement through the flame image is powerful, as is the wind image. It wasn’t long after that the 3,000 are baptized and the real tensions and joys start to explode, and the frictions of our egos and differences were reignited. It is dynamic and a bit challenging, this living together, this hope of a chorus.

All about me there is this flow of people I know now in Halifax. Ena Paul, the ever-smiling team manager, hands me a medical form to fill out for my second youngest. Brian Slaunwhite makes fun of my overly serious demeanour by formally asking to shake my hand. (Later, he buys me a sugar donut and then claims the sucrose has fuelled my over excited cheering.)

That evening, I come home to hear that a former Sunday school student has called to seek a recommendation for a scholarship. Can she already be going to college? Once, the young girl opened the cans and carried the trays at Feeding Others of Dartmouth, and I could tell that she felt a connection to the poor, the exhausted and the mentally ill. When the friction falls away, when we look into another’s eyes and see them for the first time, the fires called a Holy Spirit burn.

Pentecost this year coincides with my marriage, 20 years ago, to Cathy Smith of Ste-Adele, Quebec, in the small Protestant Church, where United Church and Anglicans and some Baptists _ a tricky composition _ shared a single minister. We glimpsed this idea of togetherness when composing vows, and made it a covenant to be in a community. It would be a lie to say I’ve always succeeded, and to claim I am not still pulled by ambition, desires, etc. But there have been ways too we have been with others. We could be Peepers of sorts, by times. I write Cathy a poem or a song each year, as the anniversary approaches. With my blog, this is the first instance where I’ve noticed that our marriage almost coincides with a change in Church seasons. Here’s the poem of our 20th anniversary.

20-year peepers

I am hearing the peepers with you
As you roll along again.
They are singing.
Time has passed, it is true.
But there is this singing of countless singers still.
You just have to tell me, and I know it is so.

Funny you should tell me of the evening orchestra,
I was thinking while high up
In those brooding hills, amidst frosty vapours,
beneath stars
equally liberated, uncounted.
They too pulse
as a single presence.

We made note of the time, 20 years ago,
4 p.m. Evening. A green invitation with a yellow bow.
A time for making promises.
“Love makes us hopeful.”
I didn’t know then what hope was,
but there must have been an intuition and a covenant.
“We can offer strength to our community.”

Together, I like to think,
The peepers were sending you and I a memory song,
I am pinkletoe. I am tinkletoes. If you could see me (and you never shall)
I would sit boldly on Michael’s finger, head barely reaching
The first knuckle
I am so many names, so many shades.
It matters not, I sing in a chorus.

I sing you the truest love song.
Imagine me limitless, in my dark grasses,
Ever singing, ever singing.