"White dawn. Stillness"

I remember when I first heard those words intoned.

This is College of Wooster. This is my freshman year. The year is nineteen hundred and seventy-seven. Denise Levertov is speaking at the installation of Henry Copeland as the college's ninth president. I am mesmerized as I hear her read "A Tree telling of Orpheus", and like the tree, I too am changed.

Years later, I read "Chekhov on West Heath"

"This is Hampstead. This
is Judge’s Walk. It is nineteen hundred
and forty-one.
The war? They take it for granted;
It was predicted while they were children,
And has come to pass. It means
no more ballet school, Betty is ill,
I am beginning to paint in oils.
The war is simply
how the world is, to which they were born.
They share
The epiphanies of their solitudes"

I often come back to these words. When I think of my own childhood or when I think of the childhoods of my children, it is simply how the world is.

This afternoon, I picked up my middle daughter from play rehearsal. She is 11 and experiencing her own epiphanies. Her mother is a theatre director and I, her father, am a weird combination of Wall Street technology executive and political blogger. Her parents lived on a sailboat when they first married. Years later, they moved into Orient Lodge, a hundred year old log hunting lodge. There is a cartoon on the mantel of a cave man saying to his wife, "You didn't like living in a tree. Now, you don't like living in a cave!" Both my ex-wife and I have remarried now, and I an still in Orient Lodge.

A week ago, a special supplement to the local paper had an article about log houses which featured Orient Lodge. I’m quoted as saying, "It’s not the typical three-bedroom colonial in Fairfield County." The article comments that this is an understatement.

As we drove home, This American Life was on. The episode was:

"The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together. The Jarvis family, a group of eight, goes on the run from the law–for seven years. They live on a boat, in a treehouse in a swamp. They escape capture time after time. And how do the kids turn out, living a life outside of society, as fugitives? Surprisingly great"

I was struck by a comment from the eldest daughter about how living on a boat or in a treehouse was how the world to which they were born, is.

She turned out 'surprisingly great'. I turned out okay. I have high hopes for my daughters.

Note: Quotes are from The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov copyright 2002.