Geese, like many boaters and tourists who show up on the Shore, are seasonal visitors. The arrival of geese in the fall is like the invasion of college kids on Maryland beaches during spring break; they’re everywhere. Geese gather in droves in the creeks, golf courses, and weekenders’ lawns, huddling feather to feather. They stay for the winters and then leave.

Whether arriving, taking off, or just floating around, geese make an extraordinary ruckus. One night in the fall some years ago, while anchored on the Wye River near Shaw Bay, a huge colony of geese settled in the water near us. I was unable to hear what my wife was saying across the cockpit for the din that the geese were making. Geese generate a thunderous volume because they all talk at once the way anxious people do. Why so much to say I have no idea, unless, perhaps, as frequent fliers, they’re relieved to be settled in and enjoy telling each other stories of where they’ve been, the ups and downs of their flight south and who they’d bumped into along the way. I heard a lot of stories that night, and although I couldn’t understand a word – a honk, more accurately – I didn’t sleep a wink for the din.

Once, in late spring, I woke in the middle of the night to the honking of a solitary goose in the creek in front of my house. I’m used to sounds that gaggles of geese make. It’s odd hearing only one. I felt melancholy listening to the goose. I couldn’t get back to sleep, but not because of the noise–the honking wasn’t intrusive– but for the suggestion of what this plaintive voice might portend.

In spring, I’m expecting nature’s new arrivals. This goose must have been around the Bay since the fall, anyway. I doubt it was a recent arrival. To hear the honking of only one goose when I know that he or she, only a month ago, was surrounded by the convivial chatter of friends and relatives, inclines me to think the worst: perhaps its spouse died or for health reasons the goose wasn’t up to making the long trip north. For this goose, spring was not a beginning, but an end.

There are gains and losses in the seasons of life. I think of the retirees who come to the Shore to live out their days in the gentle ambience of tidewater country. In my community, most of the people are of riper years, most over fifty-five.   The days of contentment endure for a while but then there’s the inevitable time of illness and death. One survives to live out by themselves the dream they once shared together.

Not far from my home just off the Bozman-Neavitt Road, a couple I knew once named their home, Final Decision. The name was inscribed on a plaque attached to a covered well housing that stood by the road. The home is still there, the well housing too, but the name has disappeared.

Final Decision was a word play on the husband’s profession – he had been a judge – and that this was the last move the couple planned to make. In short, like many here, they came to live out their lives on the Shore. The husband died and the wife stayed on in the house.  After some years she became disabled with age and her family saw the necessity of moving her to a facility providing regular care. After she left, the sign began losing letters, falling off one by one, until, when I last saw the sign, the remaining letters read, ‘indecision.’  Life decisions we make are rarely final; they’re tentative. The final decision is made elsewhere.

I considered another possible scenario to account for the solitary bird’s presence. Indeed, like Henry David Thoreau, the goose may have been making a statement. He’d had it with the noise, the crowded skies, congestion on the creeks, geese everywhere flapping and fussing, and spending long hours in the air. Like Thoreau, the goose found his own Walden Pond, on the creek in front of my house.

For man and goose, alike, there are tradeoffs to be managed. While it’s comforting knowing someone’s nearby it’s also important to have time and space to be still and alone. To be assured of the comforts and safety that companionship and society provide, most species congregate together in one way or another. For our part, we build and inhabit homes around the tranquil coves we love, sail the open waters that beckon us, and drop our hooks in the silent creeks and rivers that promise us a night’s safe anchorage. But we also insist upon having conveniences nearby like shopping malls with big boxes We profane the very pristine nest we sought for refuge, the place where we sought gentle space, where we could engage in the discernment that solitude brings, and where that soft, downy texture of stillness can be heard, the stillness that cradles the soul like soft pillows sooth sleepy heads.

After a month or so I never saw the goose again. Who knows where he’d gone. But I like to think that he went on searching for that perfect time which includes discovering the uncommon place for which many of us longed and found a while we lived on the Shore.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

‘Keep your pants on’ we’re exhorted when we become frantic, impatient and agitated. We’re urged to be cool, stay easy with things. The phrase, in addition to being a metaphor, can now be understood literally. An epidemic has been identified among post-modern men; we see droopy drawers everywhere.

It’s shortly after Christmas and near New Year’s Eve. In those weeks, I’ve eaten more than my share and I Know it. When I overeat, it alarms me. Various parts of my body redistribute themselves. In a word, I add volume while changing shape.

There was a time when all that was required of me to see the tips of my shoes was to cast my glance downward. I can do that, but it’s not my shoes I see, anymore. The space between where my eyes are set and my shoes are planted, a terrain once occupied by a firm torso, has been replaced with a more viscous substance I can only call fat. What had once been concave, is now convex. In order to see my shoes, today, I must bend forward some. My pants that historically belted navel high, given my evolving body shape, must now be buckled well below the navel in order to remain up. In the body, matter is neither created nor destroyed, just increased and moved around.

What offends me about my body’s redistribution of its mass is that I must secure my pants with a belt well below my navel, leaving to my shame, an unsightly mass draping over the belt for which no amount of gerrymandering (or sucking up) is able to alter. My roll of fat is visible to all and my drawers appear perilously close to dropping.

I’ve recently had some workers doing carpentry around the house. These are fit young men, at the top of their game, with lean bodies as straight as ramrods. I notice, however, when any one of them has to bend over, it reveals the upper portion of his butt. This phenomenon is common enough to have earned a diagnostic designation: “builder’s butt.” This describes graphically what happens to a man when his pants sit too low at his hips. Bending over to hammer nails or working on a pipe under a sink, his trousers decidedly fail him. His pants reveal the upper regions of those lower ones that pants were once engineered to conceal.

The corpulent old men of my youth, my grandfather and my great uncle, had significant paunches. I remember distinctly my great uncle’s silver belt buckle sitting prominently across the widest circumference of his girth. I thought it was neat. I recall both men’s large middles fondly, as if this was the distinguishing mark of age and wisdom. I don’t recall seeing an offensive overhang, which is the objection I have to my own paunch. Theirs, as I recall, would make mine look like an anthill. I wonder just how were they were able to wear pants buckled high along the upper waist, leaving no trace of an overhang? I would add that neither of them wore suspenders.

It seems to me that straight lean bodies should allow the belt securing one’s pants to ride just about anywhere up or down the torso. But today, even with young bodies, men’s pants rest precariously below the hip. I have concluded this happens not by the physical vicissitudes of aging men, but by a calculated decision of fashion designers.

I realized this while at the voting booth in Easton. While waiting my turn, I was dreamily people-watching. My glance fell on a tall man around my age. He was thin, rangy and well built. What seemed odd was how low his trousers were riding on his hips. Obviously, this did not result from the inability of his torso to accommodate a belt-tightening just about anywhere he chose to secure it. I can only conclude that fashion designers are flooding the market with slacks tailored to make men appear as if their drawers are dropping.

I can’t imagine why. I see no aesthetic advantages to such a design nor even a hint of erotic allure -which dominates most all products of fashion – except maybe handkerchiefs. To say the least, a man with droopy drawers does not present as someone dignified, a desirable sex object, or as someone having any idea of how to meet the public. He is definitely not cool.

Answers to this strange phenomenon may be found in today’s psycho-social climate. The unstable climate seems to be driving all kinds of aberrations. Truth telling has become a lost art today and we’re hesitant to believe anything we hear or see. The transparency we once valued in our relationships to one another has grown opaque with the incessant allegations of “fake.”

Transparency and openness with one another was once considered a social necessity, even a virtue. I wonder whether, while men’s pants don’t reveal all, they reveal just enough to satisfy us that a man is trustworthy; his pants present him as the kind of guy discreet and tasteful enough not to let everything hang out, but sufficiently transparent to assure us he is not hiding anything.

A bit of a stretch perhaps but there you have it. Nothing else I can think of explains it.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

.

If the New Years’ experience is nothing else, it’s our collective indulgence in nostalgia.

We all know that feeling of sweet aching, a yearning for some aspects of our past, however we interpreted them. The word nostalgia means coming home. And of course, ‘home’ begs the question: just where is home? Is home somewhere way back there that I’ve left behind, or is it located up ahead of me where I have not yet arrived? Is a homecoming a retreat? An advance? Or might it be just standing where I am and really know the place.

I suspect it’s all of the above. Home is wherever the heart is.

When I was a boy, I wrote a message on a piece of yellow lined paper and placed it in a can that once held tennis balls. I dug a hole in the ground and buried it in the hayfields behind our house. I cannot remember what I wrote although I remember the yellow lined paper. I wanted the finder to know something, but for the life of me I cannot recall what it was. I do recall feeling powerfully driven to leave a message hidden for someone one day to discover. I would describe the feeling as one of nostalgia and a fleeting sense of life’s hidden connections that emerge to surprise me. Creating my time capsule was inspired perhaps by stories I’d read about people finding bottles on beaches, set adrift by someone unknown far away. I’ve wondered whether it was my way of leaving a piece of me behind that would outlast my days, a primal yearning perhaps for immortality, a statement across time that bears witness to the fact that I had once been here.

I recently retrieved copies of old newspapers I saved from New Year’s Day, Y2K; specifically, the Washington Post and The Staten Island Advance. They represented the worlds of my past on the Island, and my present home in St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore. I saved them thinking the millennium was an epic event and it might be interesting years later to see what our concerns were when it first came.

It turned out it wasn’t how we would fare in the new millennium, but how our electronics would. The bogey man then was the fear of the Millennium Bug, a problem in the coding of computerized systems that was projected to create havoc in computers and computer networks around the world at the beginning of the year.

The evolution of our computerized systems has in fact created havoc, not coding issues as such, but the impact electronics have brought to every conceivable aspect of modern life. Few would consider leaving their homes today without taking their cell phones than they’d consider leaving the house without clothes.

I saw in that edition of the Post that I was not alone in my desire to put time capsules in the earth. One headline read: “A time capsule from the people of the year 2000 to those of the year 3000.” The national millennial time capsule in D.C. contained among other things, a piece of the Berlin Wall, a Hostess Twinkie, a WWII helmet and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.” How the contents for time capsules were chosen is not clear. The contents of some raise the question in my mind of just what were they thinking.

Take for example the Billings Montana Campfire Girls Adventure Group 33; they sealed a time capsule in l976 to be opened 2076 Tercentennial. That they included a Princess telephone, a digital watch seems understandable, but a box of bullets was odd. Was it something like squirrels who bury acorns to be retrieved when the going gets tough? Maybe the bullets have something to do with the girls being called “Adventure Group 33,” or do the bullets suggest the incipient stages of the #metoo movement.

In 1976, a time capsule was buried at the Los Angeles Bicentennial to be opened in 2076. The contents included one of Cher’s dresses, a pet rock, a skateboard and Laker Jerry West’s No. 44 basketball jersey.” Mostly Frippery in my opinion.

A Time Capsule commemorating the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. was sealed in 1988 and slated to be opened in 2088. Here the contents seem appropriate; personal possessions of a great man, audio cassettes of the 80’s and recordings of the significant speeches of the civil rights era.

The Westinghouse time capsule sealed at the 1939 World’s Fare (I was there), was slated to be opened in 6939. Why so far into the future I can’t imagine. It contained no remarkable items or any whimsical material, but microfilm, news reels, fabrics and, presciently, seeds.
Since science is creating hybrids all the time, studying the characteristics of the original seeds might teach us how life mutates over time, perhaps like preserving the bones of a pre-historic man.

Most American time capsules from the 19th and 20th centuries contained a Bible, stamps, coins, newspapers and an American flag. Some offer predictions about how life will be when they are opened.

On the front page of The Washington Post’s millennial edition I read; “Yeltsin Resigns: Premier Putin Assumes Power Pending Election. He’s here to stay.

What became of my own time capsule that I sealed and placed in the ground in 1944? In 1945, the field was bull dozed for a housing development. No doubt my statement to the world was lost to development. As silly as it may sound, although I have no idea what I wanted to tell the world in my time capsule, I felt a twinge of nostalgia when I remembered placing it in the ground while I entertained the hope that one day it would be found and my words would become a part of someone else’s story.

That kind of moment is more than just a hole in the ground.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.