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April 25, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Conversations with myself and Frank of Assisi

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — I was out in the side yard having morning tea with St. Francis when the sound of my own whining voice returned to me.

The night before on the phone, my youngest niece, who lives in my house in California, innocently asked when my next trip out there might be. Poor kid.

Auntie launched into her increasingly familiar list of woes: Money, staff cutbacks at work, extra duties, odd hours, money, professional commitments, personal obligations, less flexible schedule, money. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

“I don’t know when I’m ever going to get back to San Francisco,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get another vacation in my life.” My niece should have hung up on me.

Under the pine trees and behind the remarkably healthy hostas already up and out for the coming warm weather, St. Francis looked back at me with his kind but no-nonsense gaze.

“Yeah,” his eyes told me, “you were whining, big time.”

A gift from my sister last summer, the heavy concrete garden statue is 2 feet tall. As usual, Francis of Assisi is accompanied by birds, here perched on a pile of what look like lily leaves that rest on the back of a frisky fawn.

The animals are enthralled to their soon-to-be sainted pal, who not only talked their language in his lifetime, but listened as well.

Francis looks out at the world — such as it is from my side yard. He wears his customary rough, hooded monk’s robe and circular fringe of hair around his shaved monk’s head. He has a beard and mustache, too, which are imperceptible from where I usually sit — about 10 feet away on a bench I assembled from cinderblocks and broken concrete.

In fact, from the homemade bench, my sister’s St. Francis looks a lot (to me) like the late actor Cesar Romero. A handsome leading man and Latin lover in his young career, Romero is probably best remembered for his midlife TV and film role as the Joker in “Batman.”

Returning St. Francis’ gaze (and, fortunately, seeing the Latin-lover, not the comic book villain), I began to recall the many emotions I felt when I visited the tomb of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy.

It was nearly 20 years ago. An Italian friend had advised me ahead of time to notice the difference between Francis’ humble, subterranean resting place and the gold-and-jewel grandeur of one of my other destinations, the Vatican.

“The Vatican is breathtaking,” my friend said, “but I go to Assisi when I want to see the real church.”

I was knocked out by Assisi. And like a lot of the people who attended the same afternoon Mass I did — right there before Francis’ blessed, beatified, venerated, canonized old bones — I found myself crying and understanding much better why the Apostle’s Creed includes a stated belief in “the communion of saints.”

Sipping my tea and looking at handsome, concrete St. Francis, I counted up the number of times in the last 22 years I have visited Italy.

Seven. North, south, east, west, mountains, seashore, cities, villages and islands in the sun. For frequent travelers and ferocious Italophiles, seven times isn’t much. For somebody sitting in her side yard in Terre Haute, Indiana, it’s seven times more than never.

“What if you don’t get there again?” Francis’ eyes inquired. “What if you’ve seen all of Italy you are going to see in person? What if you never get back to Greece or Ireland or France or England? What if you never make it one single time to Spain?”

I put down my mug of tea on the concrete bench, stood up and turned away from St. Francis. Barefoot, I poked with my toes at velvety little clumps of moss growing around the edges of a short brick walkway that leads toward my back yard and patio.

A few feet from my house, I stopped to squat on one of several big slabs of stone that cut through the back garden. On either side of the slabs, young lilac bushes, columbine, more hostas and a corkscrew hazel tree are coming out of their winter paralysis.

The plants and stone are anchored in a small lake of river rock that my friend, Paula, spread around last summer as an alternative to mulch. Shifting to my knees and hands, I put on my reading glasses and peered closely at a patch of rocks about one-foot-square.

Scores of colors. From the darkest charcoal to alabaster. Amazing pinks of many hue and texture. Some coarse and porous, others smooth and shiny as marble. Plain rocks, striped rocks, dotted rocks, cross-hatched rocks. Rocks with cracks, rocks encrusted with other rocks, rocks that look like food, rocks that look like bones.

A whisper of motion caught my eye and I bent closer to the ground. An impossibly tiny black snail — five of them would fit on my smallest fingernail — millimetered its way up from under a dry brown leaf. Its antennae almost microscopic, the snail and its attached ebony house slowly crossed the leaf’s surface then crawled onto a pale gray river rock and disappeared below.

What a performance.

The chilly stone slab under my knees suggested it was time to stand up. I retraced my steps over the brick walkway to the side yard and the makeshift bench. My tea was cold, but I finished it anyway. A wind from the west rustled the pines, and the sun on its morning climb made me shade my face with my hand.

St. Francis hadn’t moved. The fawn was still looking up at him with adoring eyes, the birds were still perched on the leaves. With a quick nod, I thanked his concrete self for the gentle comeuppance about my whining and for reminding me what will happen if I never make it to Spain. I’ll live.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

III

Last week’s column about Rear Adm. Michelle Howard, the U.S. Navy commander of a new multi-national counter-piracy task force, brought a nice, polite e-mail correcting a couple of “minor” errors.

First of all, just because Adm. Howard has been selected for her second star, which would make her a Rear Admiral, Upper Half, does not mean she has been promoted to that rank. There are more than 25 rear admirals on the list ahead of her, so she likely won’t see actual promotion until sometime next year.

Second, when I mentioned many of the air and sea craft under Adm. Howard’s current command in a Navy Expeditionary Strike Group, I included an aircraft carrier. Not so.

I stand corrected and most grateful to the writer of the e-mail, Wayne Cowles, Adm. Howard’s husband.

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