Leaving Paradise

 Leaving Paradise 

Uncle Albert asked me to do three things before I left today: sweep the front porch and walk; fill the bird feeders; put my sheets, pillowcase and towel in the wash. I did the sheets first, then filled the feeders, then swept the walk and the front porch.

     I came in the front door, put the broom away in the closet. My suitcase was packed, sitting beside the couch. I said,

     “I need to get going, I guess. My plane leaves at eleven, and – what is it? – an hour and a quarter to the airport.”

     He said, “I don’t know really. Sounds right.” He had both hands on top of his cane, climbing up out of his chair. I walked over. He waved his hand as he got his feet under him. He didn’t want help. But I hadn’t walked over to help him.

     Now he extended his hand, as I knew he would. I shook it.

     I went to get my bag. He continued standing.

     Hand on the front door knob, I looked over my shoulder; I said, “Till next time, Uncle A.”

     He nodded. “Au revoir,” he said.

And that was that.

07.30.16

Brenda Lee and Gracie Allen

 Brenda Lee and Gracie Allen in the bubble wrap of Uncle Albert's mind 

    “Brenda Lee,” Uncle Albert said. [See here.]

     Pause. I’m thinking.

     I’m still thinking. “Not Connie Francis?” I ask.

     “No. . . . Hell, no.”

     “Not ‘the chicken and the egg’?”

     “No, that one is solved.”

     Pause. I’m thinking. I say, “By whom? And how?”

     “I don’t know who solved it. Maybe I did, though more likely I read it somewhere.” 
     Pause.

     The pause lengthens.
     Until I give in.
      “Are you going to share?” I ask him.

     “What?”

     “The solution.” I look at him. He doesn't look back. “To the ‘the chicken and the egg.’”

     “Actually, there are two.”

     Pause. This is like pulling hen’s teeth, I think. “Yes?”

     “If you accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, the egg must come first, laid by the immediate forebear of the chicken.”

     “That makes sense, I guess.”

     “If you are a creationist, the chicken comes first. See Genesis 1:21 – God creates whales and every water creature and ‘every winged fowl according to its kind.’ et vidit Deus quod esset bonum.”

     “‘Say ‘goodnight,’ Gracie,” I said.

     “Brenda,” Uncle Albert said. “Lee.”

07.28.16

A very short conversation

 A very short conversation 

I asked Uncle Albert last night - the Pittsburgh police chief’s speech clearly wasn’t engaging him: “What are you thinking about?”

     “Brenda Lee,” he said.

07.27.16

Gin-and-tonics

 Gin-and-tonics and the small matter of God 

Dateline, Paradise, late Friday afternoon: Uncle Albert and I head to church for gin-and-tonics. A long sermon described short. Words of comfort from Uncle A.

Uncle Albert was asleep in his chair, I was pretty sure. I slipped away to take a break from CNN; I’d just lain down on my bed, when I heard him pushing his walker down the hall. He rapped at my door.

     “Get dressed. We’re going to church.”

     “It’s Friday,” I said. “It’s five in the afternoon."

     “I need a drink. . . . And don’t say there’s wine on the counter and beer in the fridge.”

     “It’s not beer,” I said, “It’s . . . .”

     “I don’t care what it is, it isn’t drink. Get dressed. Look decent. We leave in fifteen minutes.” He went on into his room.

We went out.

I followed him through the loose collection of wooden tables and chairs in Paradise Pub to a table by the window that looked out onto the street. I’d gotten just gotten him seated, and I was just sitting, when our waitress arrived, carrying a tray with two gin-and-tonics and a saucer of pretzels. She was talking over her shoulder to someone I couldn’t see: “I hate that movie.

     “Anything else, sweetie?” she asked Uncle Albert. He shook his head. She went back to the bar. “It’s worse than Joe Dirt,” she said.

     Uncle Albert raised his glass, and I raised mine. We drank.

A big man in khaki shorts and a yellow golf shirt came toward us carrying a bottle of beer– Birkenstocks and an iron-gray pony tail.

     “Sit down, Alf,” Uncle Albert said. “You’ve heard me talk about Ted.”

     “Yeah.” Alf sat. He looked over my shoulder out the window. “You’re the guy that writes about religion.”

     “Sometimes,” I said.

     “You’re a believer?”

     “Sometimes.”

     “What the hell does that mean – ‘Sometimes’? In any case” – he didn’t wait for an explanation – “you’re full of shit.”

     Uncle Albert put up a hand. To me: “Alf is here to prove you’re . . . ‘full of shit’ I believe is the terminus technicus atheologicus.”

 “I’m a science guy,” Alf said. “Do you know what that means? I read science.”

“There’s no evidence,” he said. “None whatsoever.”

“Santa Claus,” he said.

“Has God ever talked to you?” he said. “Well not to me.”

“Look,” he said, “at the facts. This table is a fact. This chair is a fact. The Grand Canyon is a fact. Am I right?”

     “It would appear so.”

     “It is so,” he said. “Not a fact? God!”

It went on like that for I’m guessing twenty minutes, but it could have been ten – or fifty. Bit probably closer to the ten. The man was a storm but one that blew up then quickly blew away. He stood up suddenly, mid-sentence, and went back to the bar.

     “Thanks, Alf,” Uncle Albert called after him. He shook his head, chuckled. Uncle Albert chuckled, Alf walked to the bar.

“I didn’t acquit myself very well,” I said.

     “What do you mean?” Uncle Albert said. “You were perfect: you walked the second mile, you turned the second cheek. You let the man build his straw god and knock it down – an act of charity.

          “You’re not a man of faith anyway – so you keep saying - you’re a follower of Jesus. And the matter of Jesus was never broached.”

     “I could have broached it.”

     “When?”

     I shrugged.

Uncle Albert held up his empty glass. “Finish your drink,” he said.

     There was only a small swallow left. I swallowed it.

     “Now, bow your head,” he said.

     “What? Why?” But his head was bowed. I followed suit.

“Shall we go, then?” Uncle Albert said, looking up.

     I headed for the door, then stop top watch him crab-walk – he won’t use his walker outside the house; he leans on a thick wooden cane and walks sideways.  I watched him over to the bar I watched him say a word to Alf. I heard him say, “Bullshit” and Uncle Albert laugh.

“What did you say?” I asked outside, as I helped him into the car.

     “I told him he’d won, that we’d had a brief prayer and God had told you that you needed to become an atheist.”

In the car: “Poor Alf,” Uncle Albert said. “He may not believe in God, but he’s got to believe in demons. It was an act of charity, my young friend – it really was.”

          I started the engine. Uncle Albert pointed through the windshield. “Home, James,” Uncle Albert said. “Home.”

07.24.16

Fathers and sons

 Fathers and sons 

Dateline, still Paradise. Late last night.

“My father,” Uncle Albert was saying, “was an anal pore – most fathers are. But he was a well-intentioned, just wildly incompetent anal pore – most fathers are. And he cared about me in his own way as most fathers do. 

     "What do you say when your father’s a narcissist, not to mention an ogre to your mother?

DT Jr by m ball

If you’re on national television and you’re scared to death of the old man, because he still outweighs you by a hundred pounds no matter how much you’ve grown and how much he’s shrunk. You’re still scared to death – most sons are - what do you do? You burble along about how much you love him and you imagine aloud what a great guy he could have been if he weren’t your father and a narcissist and an ogre to your mother. And an anal pore.”

     I didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go to bed – help me up,” Uncle Albert said, reaching out. “I’m not going to listen to this Gingrich fellow. He’s a sociopath.” He shook his head. “Bad as Hillary,” I thought I heard him say; but he was swallowing his words. But when I got him to his feet, he said clearly: “On passe souvent de l’amour à l’ambition, mais on ne revient guère.”*

    “La Rochefoucauld?”

     He shook his head, meaning “You dope! but yes, of course.”

I was guiding him down the hall to his room, wondering as always, how he gets there when no one is with him – which is more of the time than not. He stopped midway I thought to rest but turned toward me: “Thank God, my boy, that you’ve never been ambitious. You think that’s a failing, but it’s not.”

07.21.16

_______________

* People often go from love to ambition, but they seldom return.

Another day in Paradise - Michigan

 Another day in Paradise 

I am back for the week with my Uncle Albert. Mid-afternoon. I am dozing.

Uncle Albert by m ball

“Time seems stand still,” Uncle Albert is saying, “except when it is passing.” I look at him. His eyes are closed; I can’t tell if he is awake or talking in his sleep. “Yes?” I say.

     “What were we talking about?” he turns toward me as far as his old neck will allow; his eyes pop open.

     “You were talking.” I say.

     “Were you taking notes?”

     “Yes,” I lie. If he presses, I think, I can cover the lie by saying I was taking mental notes.

     “Let me see them.” He reaches out a hand.

     “Mental notes,” I say.

     He waves them away.

“We were talking about essentialism,” I say. “You were arguing against it.” One can also cover a lie – always – with a greater lie.

     “I see,” he turns back. “I must have fallen asleep. And no wonder: it’s not a matter I have any interest in.” He stares out at the lake.

     “What was I saying?” he asks after a short pause. “What do your notes say?”

     “You were saying,” I lie on, “according to my notes, that essentialists are people that believe there have always been people like them, but . . . .”

     “Yes. I could have said that, even if I’m pretty sure I didn’t. My essentialist colleagues, when I was teaching, would argue something like: ‘There have always been people like me’ – meaning, they would lift their shoulders in a whiney shrug, misunderstood as I am misunderstood, put upon as I am put upon, bashed – ‘There have always been people like me - there always will be - but from my vantage point I know more about their enemies and detractors than they did and more than their enemies or detractors did themselves. And the people like them today’ – meaning the enemies, the detractors – ‘need to wise up; they need to realize that their days are numbered.’”

     “Yes,” I said. “That’s what my notes say.”

“Good,” says Uncle Albert.

“Bullshit!” Uncle Albert says.

And he turns up the sound on CNN’s coverage of the Republican National Convention and recloses his eyes.

07.20.16

Over the top.

 Over the top.

We went to early church this morning to hear two of my least favorite passages of New Testament Scripture. Don’t shoot me if I say one of them is Colossians 1:15-20, which every time I hear it seems to be trying altogether too hard – as is poor Martha, if we are to believe Luke 10:38-42. That’s another least favorite. Jesus has just told the parable of The Good Samaritan in praise of helping others; so why does he dispraise Martha for trying to serve him?

     My view . . . Well, here is the story from the TRV (Ted Riich Version):

From there, Jesus and his disciples went on their way and came to a village, where he knew people. One of them, Martha, invited him for lunch.

     Martha had a sister, Mary, who welcomed Jesus into the house as if it were hers not her sister’s and then sat down with him and listened to him talk. This added to Martha’s distractions, getting everything ready to put lunch on the table, one that would be worthy of the rabbi. And why did Mary sit just there? – not because it was the best place to hear Jesus but because it put him on her best side.

     Finally, Martha could stand it no longer. She came out of the kitchen. “Teacher,” she said. “Could I borrow my sister for a few minutes?”

     “Why?” he said, and her sister’s face echoed in feigned innocence, “Why?” Maybe he really couldn’t see why - probably not, men are such dopes - but she could.

     Martha bit her tongue, shook her head. “Men are such dopes,” she thought again, “not least rabbis, who think anyone not talking is listening to them.”

My rendering of the story is influenced no doubt by a poem by my friend Rick Dietrich, called “Mary”:

She sat (always) there,

where the sun caught her hair,

nodding at the conversation—

not to agree: did she listen?

But so it would glisten.

Influenced, too, by P. P. Rubens’ photograph of another Mary-Jesus story, where she’s washing his feet (John 12):

It is a “beautiful thing,” but isn’t it also just a little over the top? I hesitate to ask because that’s pretty much Judas’ point. But, isn’t it? No doubt Martha is shaking her head, especially at the way her sister’s dress slips off her shoulder and . . .  Well, look at the photograph. What is James looking at? Why does Peter put on his glasses? It is a little much.

Maybe I’ll regain my composure this afternoon at Tom Nashe’s aunt’s funeral.

07.17.16

 

One damn thing leads to another and I no longer exist.

 One damn thing leads to another and I no longer exist.   

e-book now available

Vacation 8mm: The cameras are rolling.

     We have dispensed with a laugh track – it is unnecessary: people laugh easily at other people’s pains and misfortunes. They weep at our own, but they laugh at others’. The reason they aren’t laughing at themselves, incidentally: no sense of humor.

     And complete lack of objectivity. In this, they resemble the mystics, who cannot be objective, who dare not be objective; for to step out of themselves might be to miss the God Within. In this the mystics resemble narcissists. Narcissists don’t even think about going outside themselves; and it’s not because there’s no need – because everything they need is within – but because everything at all is within. (Anything that might happen to be without is not.)

This is why I haven’t been around and am not sure I am now. A narcissistic acquaintance died some days ago, which meant . . . I no longer existed – none of her acquaintances did.

     So, if there are other holes in your web of relationships, people you can’t find to catch up with, you know why.

07.13.16

Dependence Day, sweet Jesus

 Dependence Day 

“They have hoisted him onto the judge’s bench.” This is Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’ The Fall on what the Church has done to Jesus, beginning with Simon, Paul, and Patmos John – the first of hoisting “they,” but hardly the last. Don’t we join them every Sunday: “from thence [the right hand of the Father] he shall come to judge the quick and the dead,” solemnly elevating the one that said, “Judge not,” to be Judge of All. And we join Peter in our certainty that we know what Messiah means better than Jesus did.* For him it seems to have been enough to be anointed to proclaim the good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, legs to the lame, new skin to the leprous, and parables to confuse the Pharisees, the Scribes, and Smug Pomposipots through the ages (Paul, Patmos John, Aquinas Tom, Geneva John and their ilk . . . but oh, schist, “their ilk,” including us when we stand up and parrot the Creed).

     And Jesus tries to smile and weeps.

_____________

* You know the story, how in response to Jesus’ question, “Who am I? What do you think,” the disciple Simon answered, “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed.” And Jesus agreed and said, “Simon, I’m going to call you Peter (meaning Rock), and I will lay you as the cornerstone for the ones that come after to follow me.” Then, you remember how, when Jesus said next, “Let’s go to Jerusalem. There’s stuff we have to do there,” Peter said, “Hey, wait a minute! You’ve got it all wrong.” And Jesus thought, “I’ve got to figure out a way to take that back. This bonebrain doesn’t have a clue; he’s going to screw up everything.”

     But he never did take it back. And followers of Peter invented the Trinity and made “Christ” mean “the second person” and hoisted the one that said, “Judge not,” onto the judge’s bench.

bicbw
07.04.16

Home repairs

 Home repairs 

New (Fiscal) Year’s Resolution: Cultivate whimsy.

Apply it to everything the way you apply spackle to a crack in the drywall, generously. 

Soft scramble an egg. Mix a Manhattan. Tabasco the egg. Eat and drink slowly. Another – scramble another egg, mix another drink. Eat, drink, slowly. Has the globby pink turned white? (The spackle; I’m talking about the spackle, Fuzziolio.) Mix and drink another Manhattan. Now! sand it. Paint it.

Here is the fey, laissez-faire genius of Aristippos of Cyrene as opposed to the puritanical, gradgrind endurance of Diogenes: his (Aristippos, the spackler’s) allowing pleasure to wander in from the world out there rather than relying on a will-forged intestinal fortitude. It’s the difference between giving up control one never had and trying to hold onto it white-knuckle-hard. It’s laughing at the mess you make when you spill your drink instead of cursing your clumsiness.

So in tomorrow’s noon-day light when you examine your work and the wall looks like shit, mix another Manhattan, scramble an egg; go for a walk.

07.03.16