Letting Go

By Eric Jan Larsen

Letting Go is my latest collection of autobiographical poems and short stories. Having been writing for over sixty years, and trained as as folklorist and educator, I sometimes think of myself as a collector of my family's stories. I have also always been amazed with what I remember about my life, and what I do not. Perhaps this explains why I feel the need to record these stories, because they mean so much to me, and therefore represent higher ground. For example, as an adolescent, I spent my summers in both Mexico and the Northeast, and some of my favorite stories are a direct result of having spent time in these two beautiful but vastly different worlds. Further, much of Letting Go is also about trying to understand my place in these two distinct places, particularly now as an older man. I hope my observations support the notion that old age has its benefits and is nothing less than the experience of youth.
Walking recently in the narrow streets of St. Augustine, FL, surrounded by the colonial Spanish architecture I grew up with in Mexico City, I happened upon a small museum of Norman Rockwell prints. I chose to buy a print entitled "Doctor and the Doll," which presents an older doctor looking quizzically at a doll held up to him by a young girl. The expression on his face is priceless, and I could not get it out of my head as I continued to stroll through what many feel is the oldest city in our country. I thought the painting was a valiant attempt to portray the special relationship between doctor and patient, something I have spoken with at length with our oldest son as he has made his way through medical school and now onto his residency. Perhaps as a gentle nod towards empathy and human kindness, I bought a large print of the painting and have had it framed as a wedding gift. In an effort to continue our conversation from afar, I asked the framer to add a quotation to the bottom of the frame: "Be playful, like you were as a child. It's a good look, and it never gets old." As Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, "Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350900897

Eric Jan Larsen

With his ancestry going back to Scandanavia, England and Germany, and his education encompassing the study of English, Folklore and Education, Eric Jan Larsen writes autobiographical poems that explore family relationships, tradititon, faith and love. Calling on past experiences as a youth as well as an adult, he is particularly interested in telling his life story through the lens of a father, husband and older spiritual adult. Growing up in the urban environment of Philadelphia but living for years afterwards in small Northern and Southern towns, he is a grateful for both experiences and the perspectives they provide on race, religion, family and politics. Married for over thirty years, and the proud parent of two children, he lives with his wife in a small coastal community in North Florida that he still calls “the shore.”

Book preview

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This collection of poems and short stories is dedicated to my wife, Becky, and our two children, Robert David and Spencer Lee, without whom I would not be who I am.

When I let go of what I am,

I become what I might be.

- Lao Tzu

© 2023 Eric Jan Larsen All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Letting Go

First Edition

[e-mail]

ISBN 979-8-35090-088-0 eBook 979-8-35090-089-7

Table of Contents

Always Sister Elizabeth

Enlightened

Like a Times Op-Ed

Maybe Minutes

No Time Like the Present

Fare Thee Well

After Fixing a Hole

Affirmation

Old White Men

United States of Mind

Plain and Simple

(The Battle with Rattle)

Some Things Never Change

Solamente Singular

(Only Loneliness)

Between the Lines

For The Tortured Soul

Letting Go

Just Like Precious Cargo on Board

I Choose Joy

A Treatise on Ethnicity, Language and Grammar

An Anachronism

(Just Like the King’s Gambit)

Cancel Culture and the Proverbial Girl

The Epitomes of Sickness and Irony

On Seeing Mick

Straight Up

No Excuses

Dear Degradation

Of Her, Of Him

Love and Belief

The Secular and the Sacred

Resolute

We Know What Comes Next

A Picture of Us

Young and Smart

By the Numbers

For the Ukrainian Poet Who Wanted to be an Archaeologist

The Demise of Civility

All My Allusions

That’s Not What I Said, That’s What You Heard

Always Sister Elizabeth

My mother was like a nun,

a devout Catholic to the very end.

She never ceased performing good works,

and she considered everyone she met a friend.

Born in the city of Monterey in Mexico,

she was a child of immigrants from Germany.

My grandparents fled the Third Reich,

knowing they left an evil regime for a second chance at life, love and prosperity.

Her full name was Carlota Elizabet Carmen Joerger,

but she was known as Lilo as a child,

the Germanic diminutive of Lieselotte, meaning a generous one.

Emulating the way she acted with others was something in my life to which I became reconciled.

The family eventually settled in Zacatecas,

but my Opa died young leaving Oma alone with Adolph and Lilo.

She found work as a housekeeper in Mexico City for an old wealth family from the Motherland,

and my mother had a childhood of privilege our family would never know.

She met my father on a night out in Philly with the college boys from Happy Valley

while attending the University of Penn.

She was this beautiful woman, and he was a handsome man.

Their wedding truly seemed like a match made in Heaven.

I was the first of three children,

Mom’s miracle after a heartbreaking miscarriage.

She absolutely adored me,

which made up for the hard times with a difficult man in a tumultuous marriage.

As a child, I remember my father calling for Lilo in a lilting voice that carried throughout the house.

Leeeee Looooo, he would coo as she was getting us ready for Sunday Mass, almost on the run.

In our family, it was a venial sin to be late for Sunday service, and we never were, just like we never

missed the trolley into Philly after church for a Horn and Hardart hot cross bun.

I cannot forget the glow of God’s light in her face every morning

after prayers with her rosary for our moral morass.

She often spoke of our precious time, but I never knew what she meant until hers started to run out.

She only said, Don’t you dare doubt, this too will pass.

I have never known another soul whose belief was so certain,

and I inherited her strength,

and even though I struggled with Catholicism,

I know now her resolve kept the Devil at length.

I still recall a conversation as a child about my dissatisfaction with the color of my eyes.

I wanted them to be hazel, like hers. Your eyes are turquoise, she mused,

"and like the ocean, they are sometimes both blue and green. Today they are blue

as the sky to which we will all ascend," and with that she believed my impertinence was diffused.

I learned a lot about life and love from my mother.

There were the Ten Commandments, of course, and certainly our saving grace.

Seems like I spent a confessional childhood learning about dignity and respect,

and that in this world, as well as the next, we all have a place.

In my darkest times, she was always there to say there was an angel looking after me,

but deep inside my adolescent angst, I did not want to believe it.

I can still here her words like it was yesterday.

She was the purveyor between the secular and the spirit.

We lost my mother at 62,

and in looking back, maybe that was the hardest part.

She was so young, so full of life,

especially at heart.

But while she was here, she truly touched all she met.

She had a brilliant mind, but in the end we began to see the cracks.

It started with what the doctors called TIA’s,

or mini strokes, what we now know as transit ischemic attacks.

I remember one night we were out walking with her,

and she was talking up a blue streak,

when suddenly she began to stumble over her words as she fell to the earth.

I was crestfallen at the sight as she knew four languages but suddenly could no longer speak.

We literally carried her back to the house, and it wasn’t long before she was her old self again.

But we all knew something was desperately wrong,

so we took her to the hospital and the doctors ran tests all night,

and in the gray of morning they told us of her diagnosis, terminal brain cancer. It would not be long.

There was an operation.

The surgeon, who happened to be Guatemalan and thus a kindred spirit, worked almost eight hours.

But late in the evening he finally approached us in the waiting room, tersely saying, I did all I could.

I remember praying she would get to spend quality time with a new grandchild and her Spring flowers.

I still recall her throwing herself into her rehabilitation after the surgery.

There was daily swimming, and sensory stimulation like learning to paint,

and to no one’s surprise who knew her, she created a portrait of a pelican done in hues of blue,

but there