As a grade-schooler in Berwyn in the mid-1960s, I would sit occasionally on our bungalow’s roof at night, looking at the stars and the moon, sensing that even though I had a good family and loyal friends in the world below, there had to be more than the life I was living. Too often people down there were ready to fight over stuff that didn’t matter. The neighborhood could be so closed to others. But at the time, I didn’t know what that “more” could be.Â
The sparkling stars overhead, the glowing moon, visible but out of reach, seemed to say silently, “This isn’t all there is” to me. They’ve whispered the same to many others, privately as well as through widely shared stories.
Christians recently celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany. As the Gospel relates, the Magi followed a star in the east that led them to Bethlehem, where they encountered the divine child. To keep Herod from knowing Jesus’ location, following God’s instructions in a dream, they didn’t return home the way they came. Jesus was that “more,” a new presence in the world who came to change it.
An epiphany — a sudden realizations or insight — can burst forth from what had been a vague, quiet sense that something was coming. The insight might illuminate a change in oneself or a new direction in one’s life. Such a realization can follow a conscious search, or it might erupt from the unconscious, as through a dream.
My daughter’s birth in 1987 triggered an epiphany — “I’m her father!” — in me. There was something arresting in holding Kathy, realizing what her arrival meant. Two years later, came Tim and David, sick and at-risk at first, struggling. A whole new “more” continued to open. By the time Greg arrived in 1994, it had redefined me.
During the early years of being a dad, a new sense of my calling emerged that changed my relationship with my work. During this time of profound transition, poetry helped express the churning sense that I was changing but didn’t quite know how. One night in 1991, a lit-up body in the sky over Harrisburg, Pennsylvania caught my attention. I responded with a poem.
Hauntingly
Glowing orb set in gray,
Moon above, silently
You emit a note, a pulse, a spray,
That in mystery lures me hauntingly.
Hovering globe beyond the clouds,
Soul up there, unrelentingly
You utter a call, a tone, a sound,
That through the quiet draws me dauntingly.
Mystery moon in mystery’s air,
Surrounded by mist, temptingly
You cast a shadow, a chill, a stare,
That in dampness thirsts me tauntingly.
The yearnings stirred by celestial bodies are sometimes suggestive of paths that our hearts sense, but our minds haven’t clarified; the nudging can wake us up to what might be possible or already happening.
Last summer, while visiting Navy Pier with friends from California, as I looked south over the calm waters of the harbor, I experienced another one of those alluring views of the moon. There it was, hovering right where the bow of a docked ship seemed to be pointing.
Standing on that venerable pier along our lakefront, spectacular and yet quiet, the realization struck me that, as an older man, my desire for more had been tempered by a feeling that I’d arrived: my ship had come in. In me rested an inner harbor as calm as the one at which I stood.
But that kid sitting on the bungalow’s roof is still awake in me. I see what he saw. I feel the scratchy tiles on which his hands rested. My life in a variety of communities has taught me that he couldn’t appreciate at that point all that Berwyn did give him. But I understand why he, in his time and place, had wanted more.
From Pennsylvania, he would move to Oak Park as a dad; its openness and vibrant, participatory culture gave him some of that more. His children grew up Oak Parkers: On the north side of 12th Street, their dreams then played out under the same moon on which he had gazed from his perch over 15th Street and Clarence.