Inspiration/Purpose  

Vonnegut said “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build, nobody wants to do maintenance.”  

We remember and revere the builders -  the creators - the people who were ahead of their time and manifested something grander than themselves that outlives and outlasts and stands outside of time. But what would these creations be without maintenance? Time forgets. Time relegates the maintainers to photographs, trinkets, letters - inanimate and mute until someone is willing to listen to them. 

I never met my grandfather, and almost all of my memories of my grandmother before she passed are of visiting her in a nursing home after church on Sundays.

Recently, I looked through her things in the attic. Just a glimpse into the old letters she kept reveal so much depth to her character and the full range of life she experienced before she grew old. A child of immigrants, raised in Roxbury, a social worker. She was beautiful - movie star beautiful - with no lack of male suitors. She married a linen truck driver turned navy sailor after his repeated attempts to woo her. They had a long distance relationship while he served in the war. She went on long walks with him after the Wednesday night Novena service at their Catholic church. He wrote her boyish love notes. She raised four children, became a widow too young. 

Time has no patience for the old. It moves faster than they can manage. Time moves forward, they stay as they are. Sometimes, it’s cruel in its indifference. People are forgotten to time and left behind doing the best they can given what they have and what they knew. 

Among my grandmother’s things is my grandfather’s honorable discharge letter from the Navy, signed by James Forrestal, then the Secretary of the Navy. Forrestal was the ultimate maintainer. He was tasked with maintaining a great American navy and he pursued that task with a singular bullish drive. After the war, Forestal began his poetic descent into irrelevance. Rather than appropriate funds for its storage, Truman had millions of dollars of serviceable equipment tossed overboard en route to the Pacific theater. Unable to cope with Truman’s policy of defense retrenchment and the decay of his grand navy, Forrestal was forced to resign. After his resignation, he was diagnosed with "severe depression" of the type "seen in operational fatigue during the war". He jumped from the 16th story window of a hotel. His suicide note quotes the suicide note of another great maintainer and tragic figure - the Greek warrior Ajax:

“Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar, / Wander around thee yet, / And sailors gaze upon thy shore /Firm in the Ocean set.

Thy son is in a foreign clime / Where Ida feeds her countless flocks, / Far from thy dear, remembered rocks, /Worn by the waste of time–  Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save / In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....  

Woe to the mother in her close of day, / Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray, / When she shall hear 

Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear! /“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail / Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale”

Ajax begins his speech on time:

“Long rolling waves of time

bring all things to light

and plunge them down again

in utter darkness.” 

I want to pay tribute to the maintainers, write a eulogy to the beauty in the mundane, and paint a full picture for the outline I have of the ancestors and people who came before without whom I would be nothing and about which I know almost nothing - loosely based on what I know about my grandparents, the letters in the attic, and the other anti-heroes throughout time connected to their story. The same themes run throughout families, through humanity. We should take the time to listen to them not just because we would be better off to learn from the hard-won lessons of the maintainers, but because their simple truths, their pictures, are so beautiful.

Lyrics

I. Waiting

I’m an old woman now 

Bereft of my home 

Seen the freeway give rise 

And the neighborhood go     

Now that there’s nothing 

But hours untold

Why does the time move so god damn slow? 

I clutch to a promise, 

A cross and a chain 

Round a cruel carousel 

Like mad men in rain 

Anointed with water from happier days

While my sweet Jesus works his mysterious ways 

A velveteen novel’s penultimate page 

Nowhere to turn 

Nothing to say 

We’re both fit for the fire

Be that as it may 

Both fit for the fire 

At the end of the day 

My Saint Thomas awaits so I won’t pass alone 

Why does the time move so god damn slow?

II. In fields

In light, in truth 

I passed my youth 

Entranced of idle flowers 

If their silence were 

The stuff of sleep 

I’d fill my waking hours 

My sailor waits 

on holiday 

Held tight and fast to some refrain 

Seraphim, cellophane 

Picket fences, pearly gates 

We’re not growing any fairer 

The world turns crueler still 

The time has come 

To fight or flee 

I suppose I never will 

In fields, in fields 

Where crosses grow 

All sprung from planted, sacred bones 

All flowers in the bitter snow 

All quiet, all quiet 

I worshiped once 

I bargain still 

In God or man

Or be what will 

Mercy on an empty till 

I call upon you now 

Oh forgive me father 

I know not what I’ve done 

There’s no recompense 

For this loneliness 

Tell me where is love 

A grey sky dawned 

And smiled upon 

The field of frozen seed 

My daughter born 

Of flesh and bone 

Take what you may need 

III.

IV. At sea

And I didn’t storm the shoreline of a blood soaked beach 

Just to meet a hero’s welcome in the waves beneath 

We were only party 

To the sacking of the sea 

Wasting islands in our memory 

On my liberty 

I caught the picture 

Dear Diane - where are you now? 

The radio it warps and whispers 

In the static of the bow 

My ship rests in a lonely current 

I was never meant for sea 

All the violence 

Only pining 

Wanting for 

The love of thee 

The sweet perfume of autumn lifts 

The threadbare splinters mourn their keep 

A forest floor of servants faithful  

Laid in color all to sleep 

But Ironsides or iron filings 

I’ll still work the factory 

Though the monster changes masters 

Oh my country tis of thee 

V. A New King

Mama made home in the quiet hours 

Of the warm twilight, bread on the fire 

How it broke with the force of a rising tide 

In the heat of the sun 

Oh, we die young 

We die young 

Faster than a fleeting flower 

We walk slow   

And high above the signal tower 

We don’t know what we can’t know 

Normandy waits 

For our brothers in arms 

And the battle hymn fallen 

From a velvet tongue 

And when we to war 

Oh, we stick to our guns 

We died younger then

Salt of the earth in our lungs 

Fore the year of our lord 

Oh my Jesus christ 

Syncopated violence 

In the automatic ides 

So every great reign must succumb in his time 

But I ain’t yet done 

Oh we die young 

We die young 

Faster than a fleeting flower 

We walk slow 

And high above the signal tower 

We don’t know what we can’t know 

Normandy waits 

For our brothers in arms 

And the battle hymn fallen 

From a velvet tongue 

And when we to war 

Oh, we stick to our guns 

We died younger then

Salt of the earth in our lungs 

And I pine for the constants - they come and they go 

And my children grow soft on the bounty I sewed 

When the mark of a man  

Was the strength of his hand 

And the queen on his arm 

We die young 

Normandy waits 

For our brothers in arms 

And the battle hymn fallen 

From a velvet tongue 

And when we to war 

Oh, we stick to our guns 

We died younger then

Salt of the earth in our lungs