Groundhog Day

The actual truth  - - actual truth probably isn’t quite the same as truth that is not actual, but this is not my morning to wander down that philosophical trail - - the actual truth is that I only experienced one groundhog our eight years 1976 to 1984 in Pennsylvania, and that was actually 1990 six years after we’d moved to Apalachicola. Story told before that surfaces in my mind from time to time like a dream that I never know quite how to take it this time, what to make of it. But it doesn't go away.

We lived in Harrisburg - - actually again, Harrisburg is on the east bank of the Susquehanna River and we lived in a neighborhood about five miles west of the river, banks of the Conodoguinet Creek, which beautifully winds and loops north and south and north and south, flowing eastward until it flows into the west bank of the Susquehanna River under the N. Front Street Bridge just south of West Fairview. Who doesn’t get the picture can check this link https://www.google.com/maps/@40.2733124,-76.9029593,15.67z. Our house was - - creekside they call it - - on Indian Creek Drive. We loved living there, the house was just right for us, to the contractor’s annoyance it was finished under my daily visitation before going to my BOQ room at Carlisle Barracks a few miles west out Carlisle Pike. And I bought a canoe for Joe. No place is as good “now” as it was “then,” so I’m sure we lived there at just the right Time not only of our lives but of the area; and if we sold out here and moved back there it would never feel right again. 

As well as the house and neighborhood, Mount Calvary Episcopal Church, our parish community, was perfect for us and for our, especially my, finding that I was back to where I was headed in life until my sophomore year at University when I decided I was not going to seminary after all or ever. In Pennsylvania, it was a case of the entire congregation sensing something and calling, summoning, harassing me forward until the day I said, “Oh, what the hell, I give up” and started the process and seminary. The congregation’s ongoing encouragement of me was incredible. So from Mount Calvary to Holy Nativity and every place in between. “Whatever you say, Lord.” My breath prayer.

But oh, this is Groundhog Day, which, like many myths that we live with, is rubbish, sheer nonsense, but worth doing if only because it’s fun. Groundhog.

My groundhog was that August 1990 day after we drove Tass to her college in Virginia, left her there as a beginning freshman, and drove on up “home” to Pennsylvania. The "break" was more than good, for me it was lifesaving. We stayed with friends, and on this particular morning, as my depth of loss and grief began to set in, I packed a lunch, left Linda at the friends’ home, drove across the Market Street Bridge, turned north onto N. Front Street on the east bank downtown Harrisburg, and headed up the Susquehanna until I was well north of town, maybe about Fort Hunter, it was more than 27 years ago, I don’t remember exactly, and stopped for this day of thought, reflection, anguish and choosing, at a wayside kind of park with picnic tables. I had the little park to myself all day. 

Lunchtime I opened my lunchbag and sat looking up and down the river and across at Marysville. That August day in central Pennsylvania I remember as comfortable, a slight river breeze. Clear and pleasant. As I munched my sandwich and sipped my, probably hot coffee, I saw that, a few yards away, between me and the river, a groundhog, one of those Pennsyvania groundhogs the size of a small dog, was watching me. So as not to spook him/her, I froze. My consciousness was of watching him watch me. Watching him watch me watching him. Watching him watch me watching him watching me. We both froze for long minutes. Finally something happened and one of us moved, probably I scratched my nose, and the groundhog disappeared instantly, gone. As gone as daddy’s girl. It was a few minutes of memory imprinting that is permanent. I got a sermon out of it for the following Sunday back home at Trinity, Apalachicola, the sermon is still around somewhere, maybe on an old computer or disk, maybe my pulpit copy, maybe in a box in Malinda’s basement, I don’t know. 

But we were at a financial point in that Episcopal parish in a small town of 2,500 population, that it was never sure month to month I would get a paycheck, and I was struggling terribly with what some so lightly call the “empty nest syndrome” of never again going into Tassy’s bedroom mornings to wake her by kissing her cheek and saying, “Daddy loves you.” The emptiness lasted months and months and months, life itself salvaged by the fact that every time we could find an excuse, we got into the car and drove to Virginia. Or I drove alone. Or rode the train. Or took the bus. Or, once, when Tass fell or was thrown from a horse and her new best friend phoned us to say she was in hospital, and we got in the car and drove to Tallahassee Airport, flew, in a fog of fear, to find that she was going to be okay. Groundhogs, Groundhog Day, any groundhog, stirs to mind that life offers nothing dearer or stronger or more wonderful or terrible than loving one’s child. 

Anyway, in my sermon that next Sunday in August 1990, I told the congregation that both they and I were at a decision point, in Frost’s terms although I don’t think I quoted him, roads diverging, and that I didn’t know where either I or the parish would go from there, and they would have to decide their Way while I decided mine. The Navy had been sending me letters inviting me to come back as a Navy chaplain. That seemed tempting until I checked and found out that the offer was for priests, ministers, under forty, and I was over fifty. I knew that Apalachicola, which I had loved from visiting there with my father in the 1940s, and loved again until that summer 1990 until we drove off to Virginia, and love again on Groundhog Day 2018, would not be the same ever again; and it hasn’t been. You can go home again, but only in your dreams. 

Because my sometimes sad, or happy, or regretful, or thankful, and fortunate or unfortunate Way in life seems always to have been to take a safe road, I’m at 7H this morning, the right place for me. I do remember my coughing, hacking, choking sobs a 2014 morning as I signed the contract to sell my house, my parents’ house, my grandparents’ house, Alfred’s house that Pop had built in 1912. But Mom & Pop also sold it once, I have the original conveyance of deed. And my parents twice listed it for sale and it didn’t sell, so stayed. So it wasn’t as if this was my family betrayal. But it was like selling my heart, My Laughing Place. I seldom drive by to check on it anymore; my father did that all the years the house was out of the family, 1923 to 1962. Will it be there another hundred years? IDK. 

Why am I writing these things this morning. It’s what comes to mind on Groundhog Day.

DThos+ 

somewhere downstream and glad to be here

Again:

The Road Not Taken 

By Robert Frost 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.