My youngest daughter Sophie and her husband Jon are wanting to get into their first house and in this day and age that is not an easy task. Not that it has ever been easy to buy your first house but right now in the fall of 2023 it really is difficult. They have no airs about them these two and quite frankly individually and together they have a skill set that will allow them to improve any house they buy. They just need to get into the market. So they are looking for a house with good bones. That’s how realtors describe the type of houses they can afford. That’s what realtors say when there’s not much else good to say.

My wife Mac just read me a poem called ‘Good Bones’. It’s by Maggie Smith and it is powerful. At least for me it was:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shit hole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

I thought it was dark and depressing, the written words of someone who upon reflection had found her Life to have been punishing and disappointing. That is not how I live my Life so it confused me when I went back several times to reread ‘Good Bones’ and then, over a glass of wine, heard myself asking Mac what she thought about it.

Now I am not a deep thinker, I am more an observer, observational, seeing all of our actions and interactions as creative content, part of Life’s stories. I am rather like a gull mindlessly floating on the sea breeze, every once in a while swooping down to pick up some discarded morsel. I really want to describe myself as an eagle but ‘that dog don’t hunt’ as they might say in Louisiana. Mac on the other hand is a profound thinker, spelunking around the caves of her thoughtful mind, wrestling with uncomfortable thoughts or collapsing happily into the soft comforter that is her new Life as a grandmother. We are so different and it is why I have never tired of talking with her.

(By the way when I asked Mac what kind of bird she would be, if she was a bird, explaining of course my self description as a seagull, she gave it some thought and then said “maybe a chicken, you know a homebody”. Has to be a joke in there somewhere. Good Lord I get distracted easily!)

Now where was I, ah yes.

I said to Mac, “This poem is compelling, how brilliant is the poet but it is so

dark!”

“No, Tony she’s not dark, she’s optimistic.” Mac said that for her Maggie Smith is describing the contrast between dark and light so that we can know there is a way to look at things with hope and optimism.

Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shit hole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

It is an attitude. It is a way of absorbing some of Life’s disappointments, it is how Mac has lived her own Life. I admire her, in case that wasn’t obvious to you. And that brings me back to Sophie and Jon. They are of course disappointed they can’t buy right now. They have a beautiful young daughter, Sweet Baby Rowe and they are in the ‘dreaming of the future’ years of their lives. They are realistic and not feeling sorry for themselves and they know it might be some time yet before they can get into their first house. And they know when they do it may well be Maggie Smith’s ‘shit hole’. About that they have no illusions. But that’s okay, they don’t need it to have double paned windows and solid wood doors, they can wait to install new floors and kitchen cabinets. What they need is for their first house to have just one thing:

Good Bones.

A house, a marriage, a career, our selves, our friendships; they all get rocked by the inevitable high winds, sometimes by terrible storms but they can all survive and prosper if they have been built upon Good Bones.

The Joke in There Somewhere

So a gull and a chicken walk into a bar.

The bartender turns to the gull.

“What can I get you?”

“Hold on, hold on bartender. Me first.” says the chicken.

“There’s a pecking order here.”