Don't call me Al.

 Don’t call me Al. 

“What do you have to do with this Go Around Back blog?” I ran into Bel Monk this morning on the corner of Center and Division, where the Methodist church is. “He’s a friend of yours, this Tom Nashe, not an illusion?” She hesitated. “Or delusion,” she said.
     “No,” I said. “No. He’s as real as you or I.”

“Song Sparrow”
4" x 5"

“No doubt,” she said.
     She said, “I liked this week’s, the President as Gumby, dammit. But I have been thinking about the one of Al Sharpton as a circus ringmaster. I agree, I guess, with what I take to have been the intention, what an egoistic, publicity hound he is: ‘Look at me. Look at me! Look at me!!’ Look at how angry I am, too. There are, I take it, people that enjoy that. They enjoy being angry, especially if it gets attention, and they enjoy infuriating others. There is the attention.”
     She looked around to see if anyone was looking at her now. Center and Division is a busy corner but in a not busy at all town, especially mid Tuesday morning. She looked back at me. “Am I keeping you from anything?
     “I’m sorry if I am.” I said she wasn’t. I wanted to ask her how the Buddhism was coming and to remind me of the name of it, but I didn’t. “I am not one of those either that doesn’t care what other people think. You know, ‘It’s what I am. What you see is what you get with me!’ That kind of statement seems to me both the height of egoism and a lie.” She looked at me for agreement; I nodded.
     “You see what I mean, don’t you?” I nodded again because I knew she was going to explain. “Because this I is also all the things you don’t see. This includes all the things you don’t see, especially the things you don’t see, because the I is hiding them from you. The I is lying on the face of it: ‘What you see is what you get!’ is a pathological lie, but there are other pathologies beneath. ‘Oh, you don’t want to go there, honey!’ This is the same one talking that has said so certainly, ‘What you see is what you get.’”
      She stopped, looked up and down the street again, up and down Center and up and down Division, then back at me, down at her feet, and back at me. “Granted,” she said, “we are all masses of contradictions. But a little modesty, please.” She paused. “Humility, I know, is too much to ask for.”
     “Certainly among public figures,” I said.
     “Yes, or among the wealthy, even the middle class, among intellectuals, in the clergy, in law enforcement, these so-called ‘influencers.’  Where are the meek to inherit the earth? Where are the poor in spirit; no one will see God.” She started giggling. “Don’t tell Axel I said this, but doesn’t even Jesus get up on his high horse from time to time?
     “I probably shouldn’t say it to you. But in the Gospel of John, for example. Actually he is up there from the beginning, and he never really gets down.”
     I looked at her. She was embarrassed and defiant at the same time. I thought, “Like her little paintings; it was the perfect description: embarrassed and defiant at the same time.” I smiled before I could stop myself: her latests of sparrows smaller than the birds themselves. And she was looking at me:
     “What?”
     “Nothing,” I said.

“I wasn’t saying he was ever anything like Al Sharpton,” she said.
     “No,” I said. “No more than Al Sharpton was anything like Jesus.”

05.24.23