Count No Day Lost
This week’s column was supposed to be about my visit to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s boyhood home in St. Paul, a side trip I had planned for last Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after leading a Minwax wood finishing workshop that morning in Minneapolis. But when a television segment scheduled for me on Monday got bumped to Tuesday afternoon, I had to cancel my little journey to St. Paul in order to catch my flight out early that evening.
Rather than flying over the state of Illinois on my way back to North Carolina, I grabbed a flight to Moline, just twenty miles from my own childhood home where my parents have lived since 1950 — a classic two-story “four square” with both a full attic and a large front porch ideal for rainy days and sultry summer sleepouts.
One marriage, one house, one career, four kids.
It’s a Midwestern thing, at least it was for their generation. My parents are both in their eighties and have been married for nearly 64 years. Both are in amazingly good health, despite a couple of scares along the way. Hanging in my mother’s sewing room is a framed 1930 needlepoint sampler, hand-stitched by my grandmother, that sums up my parents’ attitude toward life.
Count that day lost,
Whose low descending sun,
Views from thy hand,
No worthy action done.
And so when I awoke on Wednesday morning, my father had a list of projects he had been saving for my arrival. After early morning coffee uptown with a dozen or so of my father’s friends, during which time the group discussed the price of soybeans, which local farmers still had corn to be planted, odds that Orb could win the Preakness (he didn’t), and whether or not the new cop (they just have one) was too tough on them for not wearing seatbelts in town, we started for home and The List.
By lunch we had installed three window air conditioners (their 1919 house does not have central air), trimmed the weeds around the house, garage and trees, moved some planter boxes out of the garage, and watched the black squirrels chase the fox squirrels away from the corn my dad puts out for them beneath the maple tree in the front yard.
That afternoon we drove out to the small cemetery where all of my closest relatives are buried, including both sets of my grandparents, and where someday my ashes will be spread as well. We filled in a shallow depression in a grave of a young woman who had died in 1917, most likely during the national flu epidemic, buried at a time prior to the implementation of concrete vaults. Such depressions are not uncommon in older graves, as they occur when the wooden caskets finally collapse. As we walked around the cemetery, my father told stories of people he had known as we walked past their gravestones.
Too many, it seemed, were people I had known growing up.
Some, I noted uneasily, were younger than me.
Back home, however, thoughts turned to the freshly tilled garden, and the decision of which vegetables to plant: tomatoes, potatoes, onions, radishes, green beans, and cucumbers, alongside the bed of strawberries my mother will have to share with the sly blackbirds, who, much to her dismay, only take one bite out of each berry.
Far too quickly, we were back at the airport a few days later. But, I sensed, my parents were as anxious to get back to their regular schedules as I was feeling drawn to my own list of things to do. In addition to spending two unforgettable days with my parents, I left with my grandmother’s verse dancing in my head:
Count that day lost,
Whose low descending sun,
Views from thy hand,
No worthy action done.
Until next Monday,
May you count no day lost.
Bruce
Early in his career, Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft Shops, began writing and publishing a series of biographical essays entitled “Little Journeys.” Some factual, some fictional, they proved popular and helped propel him to fame as one of the most prolific writers of the Arts and Crafts era.