Two Miracles.

There is not enough snow to
ski. Not really. The tips of my poles hit the asphalt path beneath the thin layer of snow with an unsatisfying thunk, sending little shock waves through my elbows.

At eight degrees it’s too cold
to go very far down the
cross-country trail anyway.

But day is beautiful. The sky a vibrant sapphire. The February sun has crept just high enough in the northern sky for me to feel its warmth on my back. So different from the fingers of the wind poking at my face. My freezing front and sun-warmed back average out. It’s enough to keep me going a little further down the trail.

The world around me is silent. I am alone with my thoughts.

For some reason those thoughts turn to another time skiing, so many years ago. It was night. I was skiing with my wife, a quick trip around a nearby golf course. The snow was deep and fresh, lit by a cold moon.

My ski tips buried themselves in a snowdrift at the bottom of a small hill. The rest of me summersaulted into the snow, filling jacket and mittens brimful with icy powder. In the process of unzipping and shaking everything out, I must have shaken off my wedding ring.

When we got home it was gone.

Then the weather turned crazy. It warmed up. All the snow melted. It rained hard for a day and a night. The temperature dropped like a stone. The rain turned to snow. The wind blew and piled up big drifts.

The weekend finally came. A cold and sparkling February morning just like today, with the sun scattering its light across the crystalline snow. It was an unhappy me that retraced my path around the golf course that morning. My wife and I weren’t that far from being newlyweds. My newly emptied ring finger weighed against the ski pole.

I noticed a scruffy pine at the bottom of a hill. It looked like the spot where I’d fallen, although there were no tracks to confirm this. The rain had washed away everything. The storm had added a fresh blanket a foot deep. I stopped and took a random swing at the snow with my ski pole, making a small furrow. There at the bottom was a glint of gold. My ring.

That was the first miracle in my life.

Small and direct. A starter miracle, perhaps. It makes me think of some lines from an old John Berryman poem:

And I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul
as I believe I sit in this blue chair.
Only that may have been a special case
To establish their initiatory faith.

I would need it, that early miracle. I would need the initiatory faith.

The second miracle in my life is unfolding still. It began not so long after the first. My wife, young, beautiful, five months pregnant with our first child, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer.

Getting through that was not small and it was not direct. It took a smart young oncologist staying up late, reading, searching for another case like it to learn from. It took finding a way to slow the big tumor that was killing her, just long enough to allow a child to be born. And that would only get us through to the beginning of endless months of chemotherapy.

Even now, decades later, I cannot say where medicine and love and unshakable determination end. Where miracle begins. I can only tell you it was all of these things. The first miracle informs the second. One, abrupt and astonishing. The other, difficult and consuming and almost impossible to define.

I ski down a trail on this frosty February day. Back at the warm house my wife is healthy and beautiful. The son that was born is now a doctor himself. Our daughter, born later and against all odds after the radiation and the chemo, is also going into medicine.

That’s the mix of science and miracle in my life, and there will never be a sorting out of one from the other. For me that is sufficient. If you’ve ever read John Berryman you know his life was a mess of booze and womanizing and self-doubt. But the poem finishes like this:

Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.
May I stand until death forever at attention
for any your least instruction or enlightenment.
I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.