Category Archives: Gratitude

I’ve Waited Long

I am typing in the room where my mother’s ashes sit in a box in a beautiful paper bag.   The elegant bag is in the corner, out of my view, and I haven’t looked at it in a long time, but it is a distinctive bag.   The bag is brown paper on the outside, a pure slate gray on the inside.   My mother would like the bag.   She has no worries now, nor any wishes, either.  I decided years ago that I’d scatter her ashes in the Long Island Sound at the public beach at Wading River, but we haven’t done it so far, in eight and a half years.   I haven’t been to that beach in more than fifty years, who knows if you can even get on the beach now without a resident pass?   When I was there last there were swings, seesaws and a sliding pond on the sand, and a small parking lot with maybe eight spots painted on the once black shore road.

The idea of scattering my mother’s ashes in the water at Wading River was a sentimental one.  I  think of those months in that rented green and white bungalow a hundred yards from the lapping water as the happiest summers of her life, but who knows?   She always said she wanted to live near the water, and for a couple of summers we did.   I don’t know if she was happy there or not, hearing the waves breaking at night.  What I do know is that at the moment she truly doesn’t care.   Her concern at the end was about not being eaten by worms and bugs, the thought terrified her.  I assured her it would never happen and it will never happen.  

The scattering of her ashes is more a poetic matter, really.   Every so often it gives me a pang, that I haven’t managed to scatter her ashes into the gently lapping Long Island Sound,  that her ashes are sitting there in that elegant paper bag.  On the other hand, I am positive she doesn’t mind, even if she would chide me about my long failure to do it, if she were somehow able to.

That I can sit here, a few feet from her ashes, writing thoughtfully about it in words almost nobody will ever see, is a blessing and my form of daily meditation.   Thinking these thoughts, molding them into sections that I then comb carefully for readability, focuses my spirit, clarifies my beliefs, sharpens my sense of purpose.   That I have little clue about the only thing the world understands — attaining financial success — does not distract me while I work.  The hard work of vainly striving is not a remote consideration while I concentrate on making my words express my thoughts, my heart, as clearly as I can.

                                                                           ii 

I had a call just now from a one-time good friend of my mother’s, a woman a year older than my mother.   My mother would have been ninety last May, this woman was ninety-one last month, and still going strong.  God bless her, as we say.  Her mind is sharp, her language is crisp, she is upright and walking and driving great distances– still a force at ninety-one.   In the course of narrating a lot of horrors she asked me to keep to myself, while assuring me that she is up to the challenges, taking them one day at a time, she mentioned something that gave her a glimmer of hope in these dark times.

She attended an interfaith vigil the other day, the great throng of several faiths who had gathered was inspiring to her.   The hall was very crowded, with a big crowd outside also.   Somebody came through the mass of people outside and ushered her inside to a seat she didn’t want.  “I can stand, I’m perfectly fine,” she insisted, “give the seat to someone who needs it.”   In the end, she took the seat, though she felt bad about it.   Her ninety-two year-old friend, who had declined the seat in another part of the crowded hall, regretted it afterwards as her lower back tightened up painfully after standing on the concrete floor for a couple of hours.   Better to be seated than aching, I say more and more often now.

Small mercies take on a bigger and bigger significance as life goes on.   We see few enough of them in the world now, as so many nations stand on the brink of merciless horrors many of us believed were a barbaric relic of a bygone, insane age.  I’m talking about a small mercy like finding a vacant bench at the point of a walk when your arthritic knees are barking.   The relief you feel, taking the weight off your troubled bones, a gift you give yourself, provided by a merciful side of the universe and gratefully accepted.

There was a lot on this woman’s mind, and much of it I agreed not to share with anyone, so there’s that.   At one point, God bless her, she couldn’t resist giving me just a little shit about not calling her lately, after I’d spent hours on the phone last month advising her about some very vexing things– and sent her several more pages about my father’s life that she was too vexed to really take in.   

                                                                  iii

After the Saudis murdered a journalist in their consulate in Turkey last month there was a period of several weeks during which the vicious, smiling thirty-four year-old Crown Prince had his advisors and marketing folks make up and spin multiple lies about what happened to the disappeared critic of the regime.  Our president, also born to great wealth that made him feel truly exceptional since childhood, stalled along with the Crown fucking Prince of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy.   “We have to wait until  the Saudis finish investigating whether they murdered this vicious, lying journalist, which they strongly deny, look, they strongly deny it, like Justice Kavanaugh denied all those lies against him  — whatever happened to the presumption of innocence that liberals used to talk about?  Here they go, rushing to call MBS a murderer, which we don’t know, we may never know, certainly not until he’s done investigating whether he is or not, look, this kid is a gem, a great, great future king– no presumption of innocence for him?   Typical of the lying haters and hypocrites, funders and defenders of the raping, leprosy and smallpox infected terrorist hoards advancing on us …”

All we have, any of us, is the impression we leave behind on those who knew us. We are whispers, after our death, not even ghosts.   The example of how we lived is the only thing we leave to the world of people who knew us.   The power we may have wielded over others is nothing, it is how we used that power that is remembered, that lessons for the living can be drawn from.

I had an old friend who lives the frenetic, embattled life of a successful suburban citizen.   His many stresses and frustrations have few, if any, safe outlets.  It appears that I became his best option for relief.   More and more, particularly since I’ve devoted myself, from before my mother’s death, to restraining my angry reactions as much as I can, he took to provoking me.    I pointed this out to him each time he did it, but he always argued that he was not provoking me, that I just get mad unfairly, that maybe I was the one with the provocation problem, not him.    I had more than one opportunity to throw him on the ground and kick him, but I breathed and fought my way to remaining as peaceful as I could.   This restraint apparently goaded him to ever greater provocations.

In the end, he provoked me into detailing the many things I don’t respect about him.  I don’t know if I mentioned his lack of basic courage, which I think is probably encompassed in the unfortunate phrase I do recall using “moral retard”.   In the wake of this his wife called me, basically offering me an ultimatum.   You have to forgive him, she told me, because he loves you, we all love you.  

I explained why it’s impossible to forgive someone who takes no responsibility for hurtful things they repeatedly do.   Futile, really, since those hurtful things continue on and on into the future if they are not acknowledged and corrected.   The only option, to pretend everything is fine because people tell you that they love you, is not one I’m willing to take, even for the high moral cause of professed love.

Besides, I told her, love is the way you treat people, what you reflexively do when you see a loved one in pain.   Love is action, not a word.  I told her to let her husband know that I’ll be happy to hear from him once he gets some insight in the therapy he assures me he is working hard at.  “That’s not going to happen,” his wife told me, and it had the ring of truth.   He would rather lose his oldest friend than admit that the annoyingly superior fuck might have been even partially right.  Zero sum, baby, he can’t help himself.  If you don’t win, you lose.  What could be worse than that?  Ask the president.

It began to bug me more and more that because I’d taken a principled stance in regard to an old friendship I’d lost the longtime friendship of his wife and his two sons, as well as the friendship of a close mutual friend, apparently enraged at how badly I’ve hurt his troubled old friend.   I called the guy on Halloween (spooky, I know), to ask him three questions that had formed in my head.   I left a voicemail.   I heard nothing back from him, though I’d spontaneously left him the option of doing nothing, saying I’d email him the questions if I didn’t hear back.

A few hours later I rethought my offer.  What was the point of sending questions to someone who could not even reply to a voicemail?  It would only increase my aggravation if I never heard back, give him an easy, an effortless, final provocation.  I called again, left a second message, asking him to text, email or call me if he was willing to help me by answering three questions.  

Two days later, having heard nothing, I texted him, asking if he was out of town or too weak and unJewish to respond.   “Weak and unJewish”, an admittedly provocative formulation (especially to a Jew who fervently prays every morning), but, in context, restrained, I thought, particularly after two days of silence by way of reply.

I soon got the texts one would expect, explaining how he’d heard the first message and thought he’d be getting an email, and then no email came, and then, belatedly, he saw the other voicemail from me but didn’t actually hear it until after my recent text a few hours earlier and so on and so forth and so, you see, there was a rationale to all the delay, a hazard of digital communication (which is what I’d called to avoid in the first place) and, yes, please send him the three questions.

I sent this:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R___, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out.  Not to mention you.   I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still.   And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R____ that made him cut off communication with me?   When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived.  Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence,  I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you?    I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance.   I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser.   I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement: 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

I heard back quickly by email.  He’d received my questions, but I’d have to give him a few days to answer them.

I took a breath and typed back: OK.

How Do We Learn About Life?

I will grant you at the start, learning real lessons in this difficult life is hard work and many people do it only haphazardly, when some crippling tragedy knocks them back and forces them to take stock.   In fact, if you’re like most people, you might want to skip this entry entirely, because I am pretty much talking to myself, and for myself.

I find I learn some of the most valuable things I know by studying the lives of people I know well who do not learn the lessons of their own lives.   My father was one I knew very well, watched very closely for decades, and there are many others.   This makes me sound judgmental, I know, but I don’t stand by, like a scientist with a gigantic pair of tweezers, observing my lab rat friends.   I was once accused of that, actually, by one of the cheekier lab rats, he actually said to me “I get it now– you’re the scientist and we’re all your lab rats!”   I smiled, because he was right, in a way, but I said nothing, because, you know, I don’t talk to lab rats, as a rule.  I try to help the people I know as I hope they will help me if the need arises.   It is sometimes subtle, but I like to think my good will is always apparent.  I am willing to listen and keep talking until the story breaks apart into incoherence.

Humans need a story to grasp anything.  I’ll tell you an old one, featuring the brilliant, troubled lab rat above.   He was the youngest of three brothers, always felt he got the short end of everything, that life was a zero sum game he was always losing.   He learned to negotiate, wheedle, demand, pout, glower.   These things served him well in business, I suppose, I believe he eventually made a shitload of money by nickel and diming everyone involved.  It did not make him successful in friendship or love, sad to say.   But here’s the thing:  over the years I watched him stage and brilliantly perform an identical three act play maybe a hundred times.    There is a lesson in this.

Act one: meet a new person and view this new person in glowingly idealized terms.  If the person is funny, he’s the funniest person ever.  This goes for coolness and every other perceived quality.  Act one is animated by playfulness, infinite promise and  the protagonist’s belief that he has finally found a great person, not just another neurotic asshole like all the ones who have previously let him down.    You will always be compared, unfavorably, to the new person, just so you have a personal stake in the rest of the play.  Audience participation, you dig.

In Act Two: complications arise, as in any good drama, or any good comedy, for that matter.  The person is still very funny, sure, but there’s a snide edge creeping in sometimes.   Yes, the person is very charismatic, but also, careless, not very thoughtful, kind of dumb, in a weird way.   The promises made in the first act are being strangely revisited in act two and everything is suddenly coming into question.  Reality itself is starting to come into doubt.  Drastic corrective action is called for and eventually taken by the protagonist.

Act Three reveals that this is no tragicomedy we are watching, it’s a rather stark tragedy.   In Act Three the inevitable betrayal comes, sometimes in a terrible form.  One time it’s an anti-Semitic outburst and threatened punch in the fucking face.  Another time it’s the trashing of your commercial kitchen.   People break into your house, almost certainly people you know, steal a bunch of your things, including every valuable in the house, take a shit on the piano bench, for good measure.    Or you’re invited to the wedding of illegal immigrant, underpaid workers of yours and are then served food stolen from your own kitchen.  Or the new best friend is fucking your now ex and the two of them are laughing about it when you confront them.  Or, paint your own betrayal picture here, the possibilities are truly endless.

Classic repetition compulsion, one of the defining neurotic behaviors of our time, maybe of any time.  I could not have learned about it more thoroughly from even the best psychology course as I did from watching a close friend tirelessly at work for many years.   It’s a simple process, keep repeating the same painful thing the same way until, well, just keep repeating it.  

If at first the play seems a tragedy rather than an enlightened comedy, recast the play and play it again.  You dig how this works, right?  You get a new star to play opposite you, you stage the thing with a genius director, or better, direct it yourself, who knows your vision better than you yourself?   No need to change the script, because this time– THIS TIME– everything is perfect for the desired result.   The play cannot fail to entertain and enlighten because– look at the incandescence of the new star I have cast!

But back in the dressing room, it’s always the same.  Opening night and the incandescent new star is loudly having sex with your mother, who is loving the sex and shockingly uninhibited about expressing it, not even looking away when you walk into the dressing room shocked.   Another fucking putz!   Un fucking believable… Another shocking betrayal, is it not?  IS IT FUCKING NOT?!!!

You look at this lab rat, after he tells you story number one hundred identical in every detail to the ninety-nine that came before: idealized new person, disillusionment, betrayal.    Every story exactly the same dramatic arc, exhausting.   You think to yourself: how can you not see this, my dear lab rat?   Hard for the scientist in me to truly understand.   When they hook me up to the machines that deliver that awful shock, I try to figure out how not to get the electricity full blast, there is always some way to get less pain from the sadists who designed the experiment.  That’s just me, OK, I get that, and maybe I haven’t come up against a sadistic enough experimenter, but still.   I’m left holding my clipboard and scratching my head when I see a rat rushing constantly, inexorably toward the button that delivers electrocution.

Now I have told you a simple story, about a rather extreme case, yes, but true in every detail, I assure you (except for mom and the star in the dressing room).  Most people conduct their repetition compulsion business on a much more subtle level.   We are, virtually all of us, geniuses of justification.    We can give a rationale that makes insane behavior seem more or less rational.   Why did you march all those indigenous people to their deaths when you could have made an arrangement that would have served everybody, preserved peace, honored wisdom and honor itself?   Manifest Destiny.  Social Darwinism.   Freedom on the march.   Done.  What is your fucking point, asshole?  Get off my land.

I am trying, as I believe I sometimes demonstrate in these pages, to understand the sources of pain in my life, in the lives of my friends and loved ones, and behave in ways that seem productive, healing rather than harming.    It is better to be gentle than to be harsh, better to help than to hurt.  I may not always be up to that challenge, but it seems better to struggle with remaining gentle than not to.  For me.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of struggle, it’s a matter of temperament.  I understand that, even as it sometimes makes me sad.  It is, to my way of thinking, cheating yourself out of the full richness of this life, not being open to looking deeply into these highly educational situations that shed what little light there is to be had here in a world of darkness.  

If I manage to reel myself in from anger over and over, while provoked without mercy by someone who believes I am stronger than them and therefor able to take multiple punches and kicks, it is a good day for me– not giving in to rage, remaining calm enough to remain open and almost cordial.   It is not as good a day, of course, as a day when I don’t have to prove my ability to take multiple punches and kicks, but there is something worthwhile in it for me– proving to myself again that constantly giving in to righteous rage is not my fate.   If the person I finally have to walk away from is sobbing piteously, or cursing me angrily, convinced that I am a heartless bastard, it is something I just have to live with.   

All this is well worth thinking about, I think.  And if not– well, there’s always the weather, good books, politics, culture (and lack of same), our well-stocked catalogues of frustrations and the relative fascism of various nations to discuss. The vexing smugness of powerful lying fucking hypocrites who make decisions the rest of us must live by is always easy enough to bat around (see previous several posts, and the next few, no doubt).

There is also philosophy, of course, observations about life made in a general sort of way that don’t need to  touch on tangible details that are personal or difficult, don’t force us to take sides in moral pissing contests.   No need, in a philosophical chat, to go into the well-known intimate examples of the thing we are talking about– why go there?   There’s always all that to kick around.   But that shit is really not the beating heart of a human life, or why it sometimes grabs us by the throat, this flickering miracle of being alive.

Mehchaya

It was recently uncomfortably hot and humid in New York City (and much of the northeast, I understand) for about ten straight days.   The air was thick, heated to a sickening degree, and walking through it for more than a short stretch was like walking through warm vaseline.   It left a filthy slime on the skin that was most unpleasant.   The air went down hard to those trying to breathe it.   I would go out for a listless limp every evening slightly shaking my head.  Walking through it was like being slowly and deliberately punched in the face over and over by a giant, sullen, slimy fist.

We Americans have reason to be skeptical about any correlation between a century of escalating pollution due to refining and burning of fossil fuels and  the warming of the atmosphere, and the oceans, and the catastrophic climate emergencies: floods, droughts, catastrophic hundred year storms and raging wild fires,  popping up with horrific frequency on every continent.  American skepticism has been bought and paid for by the refiners of the dirtiest, most polluting form of crude oil, primarily Koch Industries, who invested three times more in “climate change denial” than even Exxon.  They certainly have nothing to gain by mounting this vigorous campaign against scientific consensus, easily observable catastrophic events and common sense.   I have to tip my hat to fucking Charles Koch, what an enormous and stunning cunt the man is.

Anyway, I was walking down Broadway one evening, at around my breaking point.  I’d been philosophical during the first week of the heat wave, summer in New York City has always been famous for airless humidity, certainly by day.  It began getting to me big time by day eight or nine.   I dragged myself down Broadway and looked toward a favorite bench, which was thankfully empty.  I sat down on the metal bench to check the score of the Yankee game on my phone.  I was damp from the short walk, my Hawaiian shirt stuck to my back.

From the south, without any warning, a cool breeze suddenly blew, and it kept coming.  I sat there like an old Jew in a sweaty shirt, two hundred years ago, my eyes closed and a big smile on my face.  “Oy,” I said to myself, or possibly out loud, “a MEHCHAYA!”   This Yiddish word indicates a pleasure that comes in the form of a great relief.  A cold drink to a parched throat– a mehchaya.  This beautiful, magnificent, life and hope restoring breeze, a mehchaya.  A fucking mechaya.

The breeze was actually wicking the dampness from my shirt.  It was indescribably beautiful.  It got me thinking, after the breeze finally died down and I made my way back up Broadway toward my apartment, that a mehchaya like that inevitably reminds one of other mechayas.

I recalled my father, at the dinner table one night when we were somehow not fighting, describing a woman he’d met recently, I have no recollection of who she was.   My father described her as a mehchaya.   A person as a mehchaya!   He had met her, possibly with some hesitation, and she had turned out to be a mehchaya.  Like a cool breeze on a hot, airless night.  A mechaya.

The view from the room my father died in

The large windows faced west, apparently.   I have no idea of such things, but that’s where the sun went down moments after my father died, staining the sky that beautiful blue orange gradient, the silhouettes of the palm trees turning black against the glowing sky.   If you want to believe in a merciful God, there’s your picture. 

My father had no sense of direction, did not know the names of trees, or birds.  He had no mechanical aptitude.  His one project, the towel rack he built in the basement bathroom out of one by fours and a couple of wooden rods, was serviceable, if warped.   He was unable to impart these practical things to me, he did not know them himself.  I understand this now and don’t hold it against him. 

That simple understanding took many years.  There was a war going on around us, we were in the middle of it.  With the constant gun fire, explosions, clouds of rolling poison gas, the trenches, the cries of dying horses, it was hard to focus on simple understandings. 

The windows of his hospital room on State Road 7 in Florida faced west.  I know that now because I have heard the sun sets in the west.   After he died, the nurse quietly came into the room.   I gave her his oxygen line, after closing my dead father’s eyes.   I said “he won’t be needing this,” like a hardboiled character in a cheap noir novel.   Nobody knows how to act around death.  My father’s death was no surprise, although the suddenness of his last moments was striking.   

“Why don’t you all go down and have some dinner?  Take a little break, you’ve been here all day. Elie will sit with me, it’s OK,” my father told my mother, my sister, my uncle, my brother-in-law.  They’d been sitting with him most of the day.  I’d been the last to arrive, after being up with him until four or so the night before.   It seemed natural enough at the time.   None of us suspected that within twenty-five minutes he’d be dead.   

An hour or so earlier he’d suddenly become agitated, grabbed my sister and me by the hands, held us tightly.  This action, so uncharacteristic of him, was like an alarm.  It was electrifying.   I asked the nurse if there was Atavan in his chart.  I knew about Atavan because my mentally ill friend loved it.  He and his despicable wife fought over the bottle of Atavan, hiding it from each other, hoarding the pills. 

“I don’t want to take anything,” said my father, dropping our hands but still clearly terrified.  I knew what he was concerned about.

“Don’t worry, dad, it will leave your mind clear.  Andy takes it, I know all about this drug.  It will just take the edge off, relax you a little.” 

The nurse brought him the pill and he took it.  Within a few minutes he was calm.  The concerned faces of his wife, brother, children began to relax a little bit.   Then he told everyone to go take a break, go down to the cafeteria for a while.   He reassured them that I would sit with him, there was nothing to worry about.  He was fine.

They got up and left.  Two nurses came into the room.  One pointed to my father’s fingernails, which were turning bluish.   She said this was a sign that oxygen was no longer getting to his extremities, one of the final signs.   The other nurse, a good looking Jamaican woman, said that if you pray, this is the time to say your prayers.   I told her we were not particularly religious.   She took it on herself to hedge our bets, sang “Dayenu”, a Passover song of thanks to God, in a beautiful voice.   The two nurses helped me lower the barrier on the side of my father’s deathbed so I could sit closer to him, then silently left.

A couple of minutes later my father said “I don’t know how to do this.”  Then he did.  Then the sun set and it was Shabbat, the day of rest.

 

A Grateful Thank You

To the following, who took a moment in 2017 to click at the bottom of a post and let me know they read and liked a particular piece of writing:

Tetiana Aleksina, Tony Single, Beautybeyondbones, mresnick12, Rezzy Rez, Richard Erickson, jm zook, Avishek Singh, Success Inspirers’ World, Chitkala Aditosh, The Human Anvil, Leo, amanhimself, Rick Lunkenheimer, Geeze, Tim and Joanne Joseph, invertedlogic blog, Dottie, taka186, lemanshots, PMu, yzandy, David Montaigne, nsnunag, DGGYST, The Electric Oracle, petplayful, catladylives, lightningdroplets, AATIF, Whiskey&Lemon, Frank Solanki, chineseforbeginnersblog, LittleFears, Dr. Joseph Suglia, BlueFishh, welovethesecats, Jack Bennett, rachelbchatty, kelseysimmonsschmitt, Linda J. Wolff, mumercise, phicklephilly, hipstersfoodies, ourpawsrock, Archee, gabfrab, thedanieldouglasblog, bg, Linda, lovehappyanimals, stunninganimalpics, begintobelieve, Elan Mudrow, hotworkouts, and classypuppies.

If I wasn’t such a lazy, tired, asthenic bastard I’d have posted a link for each of these blahgs.  Alas, I am. 

Thanks also to friends of mine who took a moment to let me know a post interested or moved them in some way.  Particular thanks to a steadfast and responsive reader in Gaj, Poland, an interactive reader in our nation’s capital, as well as one in Australia, one in Africa and another in the Ukraine.  Youse all rawk.

A special thank you to the silent majority who read these pages without comment, no doubt sucking your teeth.  

A happy, healthy 2018 to one and all!

Screen Shot 2017-12-31 at 2.56.54 PM.png

Insights from a Jesuit

My sister alerted me to a recent Terry Gross interview with a Jesuit priest named Greg Boyle, Fresh Air from November 13, and said it was worth my time.  It was.  Then, as his new book “Barking To the Choir” is currently hitting the stands, Krista Tippett broadcast her chat with him.   I wrote to thank my sister, with cuttings from the transcript of Krista’s talk with Boyle, which I will provide here.

He covers some different ground with Krista Tippett, I’m reading the transcript, this just jumped out at me (and what a potent phrase that is below, which I emphasize for ye):

Ms. Tippett: One of the realizations you’ve said you made out of that is that peacemaking requires conflict. And while there’s lots of violence between gangs, there’s not conflict that you can define, like you can with a war.

Fr. Boyle: Yeah, it’s difficult, because I’m sort of the dissenting voice, I think, in the country at the moment, when it comes to this thing. And sometimes people will say to you, “Well, how can you be against peacemaking?” Well, obviously, I’m not against peacemaking. But I’m old-fashioned: I think peacemaking requires conflict, and it’s important to say that there is no conflict in gang violence. There’s violence, but there’s no conflict, so it’s not about anything.

So you want to understand what language is gang violence speaking? That’s important to me:

It’s about a lethal absence of hope.  It’s about kids who can’t imagine a future for themselves. It’s about kids who weren’t seeking anything when they joined a gang. It’s about the fact that they’re always fleeing something — always, without exception. So it shifts the way you see things.

Somebody, Bertrand Russell or somebody, said, “If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.” And that’s kind of how we want to, I think we need to proceed, in something like this. So if you think it’s the Middle East, you’re quite mistaken. If you think it’s Northern Ireland, wrong again. It’s about kids who’ve ceased to care. So you want to infuse young people with hope, when it seems that hope is foreign.

(as I wrote to my sister about this next clip)  WOW.  from the same interview with Krista Tippett:

So recently, I gave a talk, a training, an all-day training to 600 social workers, a training on gangs. I had two homies with me, and one of them was a guy named José. And he got up — he’s in his late 20s, and he now works in a substance abuse part of our team, a man in recovery and been a heroin addict and gang member and tattooed. And he gets up, and he says, very offhandedly, “You know, I guess you could say that my mom and me, we didn’t get along so good. I guess I was six when she looked at me, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself? You’re such a burden to me.’”

Well, the whole audience did what you just did. They gasped. And then he said, “It’s sounds way worser in Spanish,” he said.

[laughter]

And everybody did what you just did. And then he said, “You know, I guess I was nine when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of Baja California, and she walked me up to an orphanage, and she said, ‘I found this kid.’” And then he said, “I was there 90 days, until my grandmother could get out of her where she had dumped me, and she came and rescued me.”

And then he tells the audience, “My mom beat me every single day. In fact, I had to wear three T-shirts to school every day.” And then he kind of loses the battle with his own tears a little bit, and he says, “I wore three T-shirts well into my adult years, because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t want anybody to see them. But now my wounds are my friends. I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my wounds.”

And then he looks at this crowd, and he says, “How can I help the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?” And awe came upon everyone, because we’re so inclined to kind of judge this kid who went to prison and is tattooed and is a gang member and homeless and a heroin addict, and the list goes on. But he was never seeking anything when he ended up in those places. He was always fleeing the story I just told you.

D.U. never had this, too bad he didn’t learn the last part:

Our motto, still, on our T-shirts is: “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job,” but that does about 80 percent of what needs to be done. There’s still the other 20 percent, which is relational, and it’s about healing. And it’s about what psychologists would call “attachment repair,” because gang members come to us with this disorganized attachment. Mom was frightening, or frightened. And you can’t really soothe yourself if you’ve never been calmed down by that significant person in your life. And it’s never too late to kind of gain this, so they repair this attachment, and they learn some resilience.

Nice ending, she asks him to read the 14th century Rumi poem from his latest book.  Krista does a great job with these interviews:

Fr. Boyle: Yeah, I don’t know why I put it in my book.

[laughter]

And so now I’m living my nightmare of my interview with Krista Tippett.

[laughter]

Now proven myself shallow and uninteresting.

Anyway, it’s called “With That Moon Language.”

“Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’

Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?”

Merry Christmas From New York

I was headed downtown to visit friends in from far away.  After a groggy start to Christmas Day, a day that generally fills me with despair,  I was running late, well after the time I’d told my friend I’d aim for.   I had a twenty minute or so southward train ride to get there, then a short walk west.  

As you approach the elevated Number One line at Dyckman Street you can see up the track almost to the next station north.   If you see the southbound train coming around that bend, experience teaches you can catch that train if you run into the station, Metrocard in hand, and make a smart dash straight up the steep steps.  

I went through the turnstile and made my dash smartly, but there was no train.  The one I’d seen, apparently a mirage.  There was no train on the horizon either.  I noticed how winded I was, I’ve run up these stairs many times– this was the most winded I’ve been.  I walked it off.  

At the end of the platform a man was talking on the phone with his back to me.  He had a baby carriage with him.  The baby was also turned away from me, but I noticed how solicitous the man was, walking the baby carriage in little circles to soothe the baby.  I watched them absently for a moment, thinking of the human parent’s instinct, if everything falls right, to comfort their child.  I recall feeling impressed with how this guy was taking care of his baby.

The train came.  The man turned the baby carriage slightly to move his child on to the train.  I could now see that the baby was a full grown beagle, sitting very patiently upright in the baby carriage.   I made a note to tell this story to my friends when I arrived, but as things happened I forgot about it.

We exchanged handshakes, hugs and pleasantries and then my friend said “I have a small gift for you,” as if remembering some trifle.  He went into the other room and returned with the best gift anybody has ever given me, possibly the best gift anyone has ever given anybody.  “It’s really nothing,” he said, handing me a hard-shell ukulele case with the imprint of a palm tree on its shell.

Over the years my friend has mentioned a dream image he has, of himself, sitting on a porch somewhere beautiful at sunset after his work day is done.  His work would be gently but firmly bending wood, plying it, smoothing it, skillfully using tools to turn beautiful wood into a beautiful musical instrument.  In another life, he’d have loved to have been a luthier.  

A few years ago he took a course from a master luthier and made a tenor ukulele, out of beautiful wood, over the course of several weeks.  He sent me photos of it at the time and mildly self-effacing comments about the instrument when it was done.   I opened the case and there was the hand-made ukulele, a very beautiful one.  Everyone I showed it to later could not help stroking it.  It is lovingly detailed, with several unique flourishes, and finished to the texture of perfect skin or something like that.  It is so silky that it’s hard not to pet it if you hold it in your hands.   Everyone who held it did.

It plays beautifully, with a rich tone I haven’t heard from most ukuleles.   He also somehow rigged the lowest string to be in a lower octave, as on a guitar, making this uke a much more useful instrument to play melodies on.  I smiled as I played a little Django ending that had been impossible to play on my other ukes.  Sekhnet could not stop commenting on its beautiful tone, just as I could not stop playing it in the car after we left our friends.  

“What an amazing gift!” Sekhnet said, “I hope you really thanked him.”  I assured her I did.  I think I did, I’m sure I did, I had to have.  Of course, now that I’ve played it for hours, and re-tuned it to concert pitch, I’ll sing its praises some more when I talk to him tomorrow.  He’d looked at the label inside, with his name and the year he made it, 2009, and told me, since he never played it (although he certainly could), that I should have it, since I would play it.  I certainly am playing it.

I played it happily for an hour or so in the background with Sekhet’s family.  Each of them had admiringly held and petted the beautiful instrument, a few even strummed the open chord it plays if you don’t finger the frets.  I then played it all the way back to the city.  When we got back I was concerned that the constantly sleep deprived Sekhnet get some sleep.  I left her and walked to the subway to head uptown.

Being Christmas, it was only natural that the train service would be fucked up.   The high-tech interactive electronic information signs on the subway platform gave random misinformation.   According to the fancy new sign the next A train was a Brooklyn-bound one scheduled to arrive in 46 minutes (average wait is supposed to be about twelve minutes).  There was no information about any uptown trains at all.   “We’re working harder to serve you better,” I said finally to two other sour-faced men waiting for information on the uptown train to take them home Christmas night.

A moment later there was an incomprehensible PA announcement and a Brooklyn-bound A train rumbled in on the downtown platform.   Another announcement began as the Brooklyn-bound train was departing, making a great racket across the station.

The MTA had decided, in its infinite puckishness, to have the crackling, irrelevant, over-driven announcement delivered by the employee with the heaviest and hardest to decipher foreign accent.   I don’t know where this guy was born, but I’m sure the last thing his parents ever dreamed of for him was delivering this incomprehensible message to disgusted New Yorkers over the public address system moments after the end of Christmas Day. I have no idea what he said, but I do recall sincerely muttering something about fucking retards that I do not now feel very proud about having muttered.  

A dirty, smelly beggar was striking out as he made his way toward me on the platform.  He’d start to speak and get waved off.  I saw this happen a few times, found I had a single dollar bill in my pocket and thought “what the fuck?”   When he came toward me I handed him the dollar, which he dropped.  

Before he picked it up, he looked me in the eyes and asked “could you please help me out with two or three more?”  I told him I didn’t have it.  It was true.  My other bills were twenties, and outside of that, I had two pennies.  He continued down the platform and I was reminded of my dislike of people who don’t have the grace to say thanks. 

On the uptown A, which finally arrived, a large man asked “may I sit next to you?”  This is not a question anybody phrases this way on the New York City Subway.  It was the only seat in the car, and I nodded, almost imperceptibly, and without looking up from my book, only because it was the right thing to do.  

Then, because you know what they say about unpunished good deeds, he began humming in a soulful way, and turned his head toward me as I tried to read, which made his humming suddenly way too loud.  He began to sing, in the same manner as his humming, turning his head like a slow moving leslie-speaker to heighten the effect.  

He did that African spiritual-inspired melisma, making every quavering note a long, stylized, if cliched, statement of his soul.   After a few minutes of this I wanted to do something to make him stop. I thought about my vow to remain mild and kept reading.  

A seat opened across the way, and I took it.  I couldn’t hear his fucking singing from over there, and it was a relief.  Suddenly, I smelled ass, dirty feet, filthy clothes.  The smell was coming from the seat behind me, turned out to be a homeless woman.  But the smell wasn’t that bad, it was better than the fucking soul singer.  

The singer got off a few stops later and I went back to where I’d been sitting.  I watched the poor homeless woman, who appeared to be very much insane.  I thought of the almost infinite varieties of suffering in this world, and of God and the mythical baby Jesus weeping over it all, less than an hour after Christmas.  I  took out the ukulele, played a bit of Django’s version of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” and put the lovely instrument into its protective case as the train pulled into Dyckman Street.

As I walked up the hill to my apartment, carrying the perfect tenor ukulele my old friend had made, I thought of the blessings of this life. Those blessings are not the physical things everyone is taught to covet, of course, but what lies behind them, what we might call their spiritual dimension– what they represent in terms of our souls.   If the physical manifestation is also a beautiful thing, that’s ideal.

I thought of my friend’s ancient mother, now well-past ninety and noticeably much older than the last time I saw her, not that long ago.  She made mention tonight of her approaching death.  I’d never heard her speak of death, but when I quickly broached the subject of Trump, during a moment when her son had gone back upstairs to fetch something she’d forgotten, she told me that the only good in it for her is that this would be a good time for her to die.  

I told her that my mother, at the end of her life, had begged me to promise her that Sarah Palin would never be the president.  I made the promise and I’m as sure as it is reasonable to be that Sarah Palin will never be the president of the United States.  There are things as unthinkable as President Sarah Palin, but that’s an imponderable story for another time.

When I put her son’s ukulele in her hands she immediately began stroking it.   She admired it for a long time, and mused about how many other hidden talents her talented son had (he was cooking a delicious smelling dinner at the time).  

Later, sitting around the coffee table, my friend’s mother smiled, and pointed at her son and her grandson, huddled over the young man’s cellphone, looking at photos of some of the grandson’s recent architectural projects, I assume.   To her daughter, with a big smile, she said “kvelling…” This is Yiddish for a parent’s pleasure in seeing their child do something that makes them kvell with pride.  The daughter looked at her blankly and asked “who?”   

“Me,” said the old woman happily, as she pointed to her chest with a gnarled hand.

Pants

The hospital room was quite cool and they didn’t seem to have enough blankets for some reason.  Down in the E.R. they’d brought me a heated blanket, which was delightful.  But once I checked in, put on a hospital gown, began shivering, the nurse told me they had to look for a blanket for me.  Meanwhile she covered me with several sheets, which almost did the trick.

A couple of hours later a guy came in to wheel me to the room where they do the stress test.  I told him I wanted to grab my pants, since I was cold.  He assured me I wouldn’t need pants.  

As we rolled I told him I wouldn’t need them if I was getting right on a treadmill to start running.  He smiled, doing his only job, pushing the patient in the wheelchair.  I noted idly that he had pants, and so did everyone else we passed in the chilly  corridors on the way to the echo room.

In the refrigerated suite where they do the stress test, I was the only person without pants.  I asked a worker there if he could get me some pants.  I pointed out that everyone else had pants and that’s probably why nobody else was particularly cold.  He assured me he’d find me some pants, then twenty minutes or so passed and I still had no pants.

“I’ll be right back,” I announced, getting out of my wheelchair, “I’m going back to my room to get my pants.”  

The original pants promiser called out that he’d bring me pants, and a few moments later came back with a pair of blue cotton hospital pants with a drawstring at the waist.   Perfect, thank you.  

I felt much better having pants.  Something as simple as a pair of fucking pants sometimes can make all the difference, if you know what I’m saying.  

Four or five hours later, when my twenty minute stress test was finally complete, I called out as I was being wheeled away “and thank you for the pants.”  The man who brought them to me smiled, the circle of small kindnesses now complete.

Gratefulness 101

It’s an often annoying cliche: we are happier and healthier being grateful for the good things we have than being bitter or anxious about the things we don’t have.  No less true for being an annoying cliche, of course.   I am grateful today, for breath going smoothly and deeply in through both nostrils, quietly out the same way.  

Pain in the chest, radiating down the left arm, numb hand suddenly tingling with pins and needles.  Doctor told you months ago the left atrium, one of four chambers of your heart muscle, is very weak, need to see a cardiologist, who will call.  No cardiologist calls, instead promises: two weeks, one week, any day.  No day.  Then one day, amidst payment denials from agents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, pain in the chest.    Directly over where the left atrium would be, here we go…. just to be safe, a trip to the Emergency Room.  

Twenty thousand dollars in state of the art medical testing and a day in the hospital later — a relatively clean bill of heart health.   Cleared to resume strenuous exercise.  

Bike ride the next day with two friends who have not fallen out of shape in fear of heart attack.  A pleasure, even if I was sweaty and gassed after a relatively short and not very strenuous ride.  I cannot describe to you the crispness of the world, the trees, the people, the deliciousness of cold water, of each deep breath, the miracle of the entire enterprise of being alive.  

It’s all a cliche, of course.  You really had to be there.  But I am one grateful dog today, still.