Two Poets

continued

matter how central to the local economy, he thundered against it from the pulpit. In Virginia, he preached against tobacco; in Kentucky, against grain alcohol; and everywhere, in the 1880s and '90s, against racial segregation, child labor, and the refusal to give the vote to women.

As one offended congregation after another dismissed their too-visionary minister, Daddy would come home to find his patient mother bent over a packing barrel. Trunks were expensive. Once more she'd be placing books on the bottom, dishes for her family of nine next, then a layer of blankets. . . .

She never complained. A move was a chance to extend her prison ministry "I have all my young ladies sewing. There'll be others where we're going."

Undaunted by his failure to sway his flocks, Grandfather continued all his life to voice unwelcome truths. When I first remember him, in the 1930s, he was warning about the military buildup in Germany. My last conversation with him concerned air pollution. It was 1948, a year before his death at age ninety-three, a time when "environment" to me was still just a word in the dictionary. I'd taken the train out to California to see him, hoping to draw story material from his wealth of memories. Like the time he'd stood by the train tracks in Ohio, a boy of seven, sobbing as Lincoln's funeral train passed by.

But out in Santa Barbara, Grandfather refused to look back. "Past history! Now if we don't control auto emissions," he pounded his chair arm for emphasis, "fifty years from now the air in Los Angeles won't be fit to breathe."

It was a rigorous religion to which Grandfather introduced me. A passionate stand in God's name against all forms of exploitation and inequality. I never once heard him say the word Jesus.

Perhaps exhausted in their youth by so demanding a creed, only one of Grandfather's seven children professed religion as an adult. This was Daddy's sister Helen. A social worker in New York City, Aunt Helen attended the austerely functional red brick Unitarian church on East 35th Street, where I often went with her. In that calm and rational sanctuary, I encountered a moral God I found more satisfactory than Daddy's creator-of-pencils. I was only a visitor at Aunt Helen's church, but whenever I had to fill in a blank under Religion, I would write "Unitarian."