The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, April 18th. It is the 40th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Austin—My Austin
“The wind crosses the brown land, unheard.” -T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
“April is the cruellest month.”
Thus T.S. Eliot began The Wasteland, his five-chapter poem cobbled together from his own mind, like most poems, but in nearly equal part line after line of historic and then-maybe-contemporary works, such that every version I’ve read has been piled-upon by footnotes. When quoting it, you have to check to make sure you’re not quoting two or three others indirectly. But the line about April seems to be Eliot’s own.
It’s true, I’d argue, at least in the places I knew. I’d imagine it feels especially true this week, when I understand there was snow in Colorado, and snow in New England, and the threat of snow in the Midwest in a few days. In March, in the places I knew, warm days were the exception, gifts to be treasured and basked in. In April, warm days are desired but too-often rare, with nastiness and muddiness and wind—wind that feels colder than it should—the overwhelming actors.
Here in Central Texas, April isn’t unkind. Neither is March. But I’ve written of such things before.
The Wasteland was a popular poem in my collegiate English curricula. I don’t know if this was chance, or if The Wasteland occupies some space in the collegiate English curricula sphere akin to that of The Catcher in the Rye in the high school sphere (though now that I write that, I find myself compelled to acknowledge never having been assigned that book in high school, or in college for that matter). Whatever the reason, I finished my first three semesters of college having dug through each word of The Fire Sermon and having spent some time as well upon The Burial of the Dead, which are, respectively, the third and the first…chapters is what I called them earlier, I guess…of Eliot’s tuneless opera.
It was late in that second semester that my paternal grandpa died.
This grandpa was a great man—the image of everything so many romantics, myself included, so often want America to be. Grandson of immigrants, he worked the family homestead out in the northwest corner of Iowa. I’ve written of that place before.
Grandpa was a farmer, and he was all that a farmer is supposed to be, or used to be supposed to be. I’m far from that world now, but I get the idea sometimes that pop country and Facebook have taken pickup truck ego wars and applied them to tractors. Grandpa was no ego warrior. He was earnest. He was thoughtful. He was kind—kind in the quiet way, where it’s more about the recipient of the kindness than the giver. He was humble in the humble sense, and not in the sense of those salesman preachers who act as though saying the word “humble” enough will change its definition and make it apply to them. He was a great man. He was a good man. He was a good farmer, and a good grandpa, and a good many other things.
I was having a pretty good April before Grandpa’s death. School was going rather well. I had the happiest friendships I’d ever have in college. The air was turning warm in South Bend, and cold again and warm again, and I was enjoying most of it. I hadn’t gotten dumped yet, and I hadn’t yet realized I would get dumped. The chaos of the last month of any academic year had not yet awoken, and I had not yet cashed the checks of skipping class upon class, and I was still weeks away from sitting shell-shocked in my half-empty dorm room with my roommate gone home for the summer wondering where the hell the pretty good start to April had gone.
This—a pretty good April—was unusual for me. April was not usually all that kind a month. My allergies were often terrible. April had been the thick of high school baseball, and over the course of those four seasons I’d somewhat inexplicably ceased being able to hit the ball past an outfielder, acquired some mental block similar to the yips when it came to catching popups and fielding ground balls, and maintained competence as a pitcher but never without battling, making the calendar’s fourth month an annual source of devastation for my psyche.
Even the week Grandpa died was, on the whole, not a bad week. It was gut-wrenching to receive word of his struggle from afar (he took a turn six or seven days before he passed), and my heart ached for my dad and his siblings, but I was surrounded by comfort. The prior September, in my first full month of college, my maternal grandpa had died (he, too, was a great and good man, though in different ways), and it had felt like nobody had known, and it felt like if they did, nobody would care, and I had felt broken and lost and I walked from the dining hall back to the dorm one day, alone, and thought of how nice it would be to just not be in college. This go-round, it felt everyone around me knew what was happening. Sometimes silently. Sometimes vocally. Always presently.
My brother and I flew from O’Hare to Sioux Falls for the wake and the funeral. My memories of that funeral and that of my grandma nine months later blur together, but I believe this was the one where there was wind the night before, and the homestead’s new farmers went around the yard all morning picking up branches so the place would look spotless as we passed, hazards on, on our way from the church to the cemetery, and I believe this was the one where a farm down the road had a sign on its manure spreader labeling the thing an “Obamawagon,” which set my dad, grief and all, chuckling something fierce. I know this was the one where my grandma sat strongly in a wheelchair by her husband’s casket, and when someone—my brother, I think—commented that she seemed to be hanging in there, replied that this was the last thing she could do for Lenny, and that she was going to do it well. That afternoon, my brother and I flew back to Chicago, then drove back to South Bend. American Airlines’ computers went down. We were delayed.
I think Eliot was right about April. If ever a month were to be cruel, in the northern hemisphere at least, April would be the one. It’s when winter’s cage gets opened, and you don’t know just what’s going to come out. It’s a transitional month, but unlike August, it goes from order to disorder, and unlike May, you don’t know when exactly the disorder will start. It’s a restless month, a sometimes-reckless month, an often-feckless month.
When April presents itself to me in a conscious way, I think often of The Wasteland, and of that funeral. I think of the sunshine on the earth that day, soon to bring forth corn and beans, perhaps already bringing forth corn and beans. I think of the wind whipping across the gray campus the Friday prior, sweatshirt weather, hands-in-pockets weather. I think of how much unraveled after that return. But mostly, I think of Grandpa.
In the third semester of college, in my final formal dalliance with Eliot’s thoughts on April (and a whole lot else), we were told to make a poem of our own or some other written work in the style of a collage, pulling chunks of material from works of others, as Eliot did in crafting The Wasteland. I wrote it about that funeral. I pulled it up a few months ago, when I was missing him. It wasn’t as good as I remembered it. But it had a rhythm to it, and I suppose April does too. You can’t sit still in April. April moves. And it carries us with it, our cage opening, unsure where we’ll go.
“The wind crosses the brown land, unheard.” – T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Next week’s essay: On Growing Up
