A “chapter” about money
So, that is that.
02.20.23
All will be well.
Except what won’t be, part 2.
“Albert agrees,” Roz said. “If you are going to go mad, please don’t go quietly mad.
“The way you usually do,” she added. “Make some noise.”
“What sort of noise?” I said. “Like a duck, like a goose, like a gull, like a siren?”
“Like a dove,” Roz said.
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| ‘All will be well’ And if it doesn’t be, there are boxes they can put you in. |
Her new cat, Potato, can purr like a dove, or like several doves. I can’t make a dove sound, nothing near, though if I went crazy quietly enough, I might be able to when I got there.
Roz said this, “Albert agrees. Please don’t go quietly mad” this morning, before she left for work. Then, she kissed me, and she left.
I went back upstairs and knocked on Uncle Albert’s door. He said, “What?” and I said, so it would be like every morning, “Are you ready for breakfast?” He said, “Almost,” also like every morning. And I went in to help him with his slippers. Otherwise, he was dressed, but the every-morning litany is not the every-morning litany if he isn’t having trouble with his slippers and I don’t help him.
Then we came down the stairs, and we went back — from the front of the house to the back of the house, from the front door to the back door — we went back to the kitchen. He sat down at the table. I said, “What?” And he said, “Oatmeal.” And it continued, the litany.
And I started the kettle and poured him a mug of coffee, added half-and-half and a spoonful of fake sugar, and put it in front of him. When the kettle sang, I made the oatmeal. It’s instant. The oats in a bowl, the boiling water on top to the right amount, stir. Add brown sugar and milk.
“Am I about to go mad?” I asked.
“Indications are,” Uncle Albert said.
For the last several months — I’m not sure how many — Uncle Albert has eaten oatmeal for breakfast and a peanut butter and bologna sandwich for lunch. He drinks coffee at breakfast. He drinks grape Kool-Aid at lunch. He takes his fiber pills with one glass of Kool-Aid. Then, he has a second glass to wash down his sandwich. Every other week or so, he thinks out loud about changing from grape Kool-Aid to “red,” but the next day, or sometimes in the next breath, he decides not.
On the other hand, he doesn’t care what brand of bologna we buy or what brand of peanut butter, only not crunchy.
Uncle Albert has been 96 for as long as I can remember. Or in my mind he has. In truth, I have no idea how old he is. Some days, ninety-six seems about right; other days, he seems much younger. He can still get up and down the stairs, without help if he has to. He reads in the morning. He goes out most afternoons. Nils Sundstrøm or Carl the truck driver from the rooming house he used to live in or one of his lectio divina friends comes by. And off they go I don’t know where except sometimes I tag along when it’s Nils — then they go to Corner Coffee and talk about politics and religion. I listen.
I asked him once what he and Carl talked about. “Roads,” Uncle Albert said.
After breakfast this morning, I got him settled in his chair. He won’t have a recliner, but he has a rocker and doorstops for under the rockers and a footstool and a number of different sized pillows I can adjust according to his instructions. I get him settled in his chair with his little pile of books beside him, LaRochefoucauld and Montaigne and Weymouth’s New Testament. And he chooses one — this morning, the New Testament, which he opened to the middle of John’s gospel, blew a raspberry, and turned forward to Acts.
I went back to the kitchen to rinse the breakfast dishes and put them in the dishwasher.
I sat down at the kitchen table, and I thought about going mad. Was I? Again? If so, it was going to be quiet. I couldn’t make a noise about it. I didn’t have the right one.
02.20.23
_______________
About Roz here. About Nils here. Carl is here. And I take Uncle Albert to lectio here.
continued from here All will be well.
Except what won’t be.
“What did you preach on yesterday,” I said to Axel, sneezing — the books in his office were shedding.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Yes.”
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| ‘All will be well’ If you just stay inside, it won’t matter if things change out. |
“No,” Axel said. “No.” He shook his head. His hand asked for the Bible back; I pushed it across the desk. “But,” he said, “the whole passage: it’s about steadfastness, isn’t it? — about reconciling with your brother, or your sister, about remaining faithful to your wife, or your husband. It’s about constancy, about not wavering. We make bad choices, or we think we have. We decide we don’t want to be brothers or sisters any longer, we don’t want to be married any longer, because the choices we made then are no longer satisfying. They no longer delight us. We’re no longer, I don’t, enthralled. But satisfaction/delight/being enthralled is not the same thing as love, is it?”
“I have to say no,” I said. “I will. I will say no.” And Axel put his hands out, palms facing me. They said, “There it is.”
And there it was, if it would only stay there. But it never does.
02.14.23
All will be well.
“It’s become her mantra, that I worry too much. I should not. No! ‘All will be well and all will be well and every manner of thing will be well.’ Finally, when I’d had enough — where did it come from? I asked — she said, ‘Look it up!’” I was talking to Axel about my sister, Hannah, who seems to be calling every other day now she seems to have religion.
“Did you?” he asked from behind his desk at Grace Church.
“I did. Here’s the full quote.” I handed him the piece of paper— or I would have even five years ago, but now I handed him my cell phone with the screenshot:
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| Click to read. |
He read it, looked up. “What I want to know,” I said, “is who said about sin that it was ‘inevitable but not necessary’? I tried to look that up but couldn’t find it. I thought I might have heard it from you, so . . . ?”
“You may have. It sounds like Niebuhr, but I don’t know, to be honest.”
“Well, whoever said it, it sounds right to me. We don’t have to screw up — it’s not in our very natures — but we will screw up. It's inevitable in the world we have made. Our life is like a busy intersection — maybe I heard that from you, too?”
He shrugged. He swiveled in the chair, this way and that, this way and that, an inch to the right and back, an inch to the left and back. The chair didn’t squeak, but it was clearly thinking about complaining; so he stopped. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“If everyone obeys the law and no one drives recklessly but rather with all the care he or she is capable of, all will be well. An accident is not necessary. But say it rains or snows, say the traffic light fails, inevitably . . . .”
“Crash!”
“Yes.” There were motes in the shaft of sunlight pushing through the window. Axel’s books were shedding.
“Yes. I see,” he said.
My mouth felt dry. “So, what is Dame Julian about, saying sin is necessary. Inevitable, yes, but necessary?”
Axel was turning in his chair again. I was about to ask for a glass of water; I’d go get it, of course. He said, “Obviously she hadn’t read Niebuhr.”
I opened my mouth as if I were going to reply though I wasn’t. Instead, I gave him that no-shit-sherlock look.
“Not that she would agree with him anyway,” he picked up the thread. “But it isn’t that. She’s using ‘necessary’ differently — in a different line of argument.” He paused, swiveled right and back to center. “I think. So don’t quote me. I only think, I don’t know.”
“ . . . ”
“In your damn blog. Don’t quote me.”
“Of course not,” I said.
So, I’m not. But what I understood him to say was this: As far as Dame Julian was concerned, it was in God’s wisdom that — it was in God’s plan for salvation that — there would be sin. What else could we be saved from? So, it was necessary — by definition: if God planned it, it was to be, it was from the beginning part of the fabric of everything: there would be sin and there would be salvation. The fortunate fall shizzle.
“I like inevitable but not necessary better, I think,” I told Axel.
“I’m not sure that was Niebuhr,” he said. “Don’t quote me on that either: it just sounds like him. To me.”
I shook my head. And sneezed. “Sorry,” I said. “What did you preach on yesterday?”
to be continued
02.13.23
Through glasses dimly*
