Her grandparents had come to Detroit from Sicily in the early 1950s and were, as is the case is many Italian families, the sturdy foundation upon which their entire family was stacked. A few years earlier, her Uncle had died far too young from cancer as well. These two events drew an indelible line across their family map and the disease has colored every doctor’s visit and annual checkup since then.

I wrote this poem in the months after his passing. One of the tangible things he had left his family was the tradition of making palm crosses. Tina and I had to figure out how to make them by gently unraveling one of his and then refolding it.

Dave went the extra mile and made his own for the picture:

I’ve seen these before and never thought I had the dexterity for it. Delicate manual projects usually crumble under my frustration. Out of curiosity I checked Google for videos on making palm crosses. There are many, so I watched and I thought, if I screw this up, maybe Andy will have some better ideas. So being a good Catholic still in possession of last Easter’s palms, I gave it a try. (Note: this is easier if they aren’t so dry.) In shock at my successful failure to destroy a dry palm, I set up the shot on a satin pillow case cover, freshly unfolded from the linen closet. With a little help from Andy on post processing, we decided to use it.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. –Milan Kundera

Over a year ago, the day after Christmas 2010 — my son’s thirteenth birthday — my Dad called 911 because he was having an extremely hard time breathing. It was late morning as best we can figure; to emphasize the drama, he happened to be home by himself. I received a call just before we were about to have some cake that evening that he was “missing.” His car was home. His cell phone was on the table. His shoes were near the door. A scary two hours later, we caught up with him in the emergency room, maybe eight hours after he had made his call for help. If we are connected on Facebook or you follow my other blog, I probably shouldn’t repeat myself. Let’s just say it was the start of a terrible month.

I began writing “From All Anxiety” on January 1st, a few days later, after he had been transported to the University of Michigan’s CICU, which had very literally saved his life a few years before. The hours in a hospital are rarely pleasant — something ominous lurks behind every door, every tone, every loudspeaker crackle — but they are even worse when your patient is in an extremely serious place, unable to communicate with you, and the path forward is uncertain. Eventually, sitting in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair next to his window overlooking the helipad and, a bit further on, the Huron River, it felt like it was time to write something down, if only to preserve my fragile sanity, and as the writing went on I had the idea that it was also time to pull this collection together.

At the start, I wasn’t sure if the poem was going to be an elegy or a narrative, if he would ever even read it. We were lucky. Fifteen months and probably three hundred games of Words with Friends later — it turns out to be a good way to keep connected — I continue to be inexpressibly thankful that he was able to pull through that extremely difficult month. (Except, of course, when he has just played a 100-point word, which is frequently.)

The Detroit image that Andy captured always felt like a natural companion to this poem. My dad grew up in Detroit and I did just outside it. I worked in the Renaissance Center for a few years and always admired its broad-shouldered stance on the river and the views it gave us of the city. And the emergency life preserver, tucked into its strange yellow cabinet, was just what we had been looking for.

Here’s Andy’s caption:

As a child, Windsor, Ontario, only existed for me as the first of many cities on the way to family vacations in Niagara Falls, Toronto or Montreal. When I turned 19, it become a legal speakeasy where my college buddies and I would spend Saturday afternoons drinking beer and watching football. In my adult years, the visits to Windsor stopped as the family road trips were no more and I had turned 21.

One beautiful Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2009, my wife and I were trying to decide how to spend the day and settled on a day trip to Windsor. I had not visited in over 10 years, so I was not sure what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised to find a very clean and family friendly community. After having a wonderful meal at one of the city’s many unique restaurants we walked along the boardwalk watching the sun set over Detroit. I was amazed at how beautiful the city appeared from across the river and I wanted to capture that moment to offset all the negative articles I read about Detroit with the collapse of GM three months earlier.

Looking at Detroit from the Civic Terrace, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. AS

All the poems
laid out on the page
are liars
taking longer than they suggest
on either side
of their equations.

According to Evernote, I wrote this on March 6th, 2011, as the fragment:

Poems laid out on the page are liars.
They take longer then they advertise
on both sides of their equations.

I remember that I was in Florida waiting in the airport to fly home after a business trip; the original has the impatience so characteristic of air travel, but I think I like the edit better.

Andy’s saturated azure photo is either right out of a German performance-car commercial or, more likely, frames a road that leads through the clouds into another world. Here’s the real story right from him:

My wife’s favorite vacation destination is Hawaii and, to be more specific, Maui. For those that have not visited this beautiful island, two volcanic mountains dominate the topography. One of the mountains, Haleakalā, is a US national park and most vacationers to Maui visit it during their stay. On my first visit to Maui, my wife was very excited to take me to the summit of Haleakalā so that I could experience the breathtaking views. I was also excited — until she explained that the best time to visit was at sunrise and that the summit was a three hour drive from our hotel. Being the devoted husband that I am, I agreed to get up at 2:30am so we could experience sunrise at Haleakalā together. The next morning, I found myself standing at the summit in freezing temperatures just before 6am. As the sun was about to rise, a cloud settled over the mountain and I was barely able to see 10 feet. But I could see the disappointment in my wife’s eyes, and I immediately committed to the 6 hour journey again the next morning. We ended up with a perfectly clear day. Was it worth the 12 hours of driving? Absolutely!

This photo is from our second ascent of Haleakalā and was taken from the highest point on the volcano, Red Hill. In the background you can see the lower Magnetic Peak, so named as it has large quantities of iron that interfere with compass readings.

The first thing I realized after reading this photobiography is that all the photos are liars, too.