I'm OUT. I'm giving notice to the world that I'm withdrawing from further competition n LJ Idol. I've phoned in my entries for the last few weeks, not literally although that would be cool, and I'm just taking the spot of someone who deserves to be there.
Eggshells I can state with near-certainty that homo sapiens is the only species that is capable of building complex mental traps and then springing its own trap and foundering for days, months, years while disinterested passers-by move past them, oblivious and uncaring.
I say “near certainty” because it could be that somewhere flies an undiscovered bird who can worry itself nearly to death at 3 AM, awake in the nest while the other birds slumber unaware. The chances are low, but real, and if I’m going to be a good scientist I should never say never.
I walked over to the store today, ignoring the brutally-throbbing hole in my jaw created when a smiling oral surgeon yanked out tooth number 30 last week. The tooth was happy to go, and I gladly bid it farewell. At the time, I thought that the loss of the tooth would put an end to the week-long pain spree that it had put me through. I had lost a filling older than most professional athletes (the filling was younger than Jamie Moyer and Julio Franco, but just barely) and that had caused an oral chain reaction resulting in half of the tooth shearing away, global-warming-iceberg-style, and it had to go.
After it went, it kept hurting, and after it kept hurting the smiling oral surgeon diagnosed dry socket, and dry socket was the insult heaped onto weeks worth of injuries including the loss of my mother’s husband, my daughter’s guinea pig, and a former classmate, the latter of whom chose his own exit strategy and shot himself in a cemetery. Stupid tooth. Stupid mouth. Stupid month.
I walked to the store, framed in the rain that is so typical of mid-May here in Portland, and I looked at my feet as they trod the wet pavement, and the realizations came, step by step. Every stride felt like a move away from self-decreed exile in the cave in which I’ve lived for the past few weeks. Something in the cool rain, some little scent in the air, a muscle memory triggered by that precise length of stride as I worked my way across the parking lot - something made the little pachinko ball of life’s momentum strike the metal pegs a little differently and I could feel myself working my way down a slightly different path.
I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the theory that we exist on a million different planes at once, acting our lives out differently based on each of a billion tiny decisions. But, I like the sound of that, and I’m willing to try. Right then, maybe, right there in that parking lot, another Jeff was walking to store, head held a little lower, a little more of a scowl on his face. Maybe that Jeff would buy his bread and his coffee and he’d slink back and spend another day in that cave of his own design. Maybe. But this version of me suddenly became very aware that all it would take is a conscious step out of the rut, a different perception of that pain, a willingness to just look a little harder for the spark. This version of me, the one I have picked from all the possible versions, isn’t so afraid to step forward in a more insistent way.
Everything that is behind me is the same. What is ahead of me is without limits, other than the ones I impose upon myself. And, if you listen closely, the sound you hear is the cracking of eggshells under my feet. Far past worrying about walking gently upon them, the new plan is to break every single one. ---
Once upon a time... Being a well-traveled fellow in one’s 50s comes with a certain set of responsibilities. For example, as a guy of a certain age I’m expected to own at least one Hawaiian shirt, and I do (bonus: the shirts are actually made in Hawaii). I’m often called on to settle arguments about Andy Griffith’s TV career (okay, not really, but I COULD, which is frightening enough on its own). Mostly, though, middle-aged guys are supposed to know STORIES. At the drop of a hat, we’re expected to be able to regale the crowd with well-spun tales that come to some sort of logical conclusion.
As old guys, we hold the legacy of every rambly story in the collective old-guy consciousness.
As a verbose attention whore, I’m happy to fulfill my purpose. My story collection is like someone else’s wine cellar - lots of variety, some light and bubbly, some dark and difficult. I have stories for frequent, everyday use, and others that are only dragged out for special occasions. I have stories that can be served at a moment’s notice, and others that are in the far reaches of the cellar and require some hunting, followed by a ceremonial uncorking. I have stories that will leave a weird taste in someone’s mouth, and stories that you’ll find dizzying.
Like wine, stories can get tiresome if consumed on too regular a basis. My wife no doubt wishes that I would prepare a list so she could know when not to partake. It would be pages long. A sampler:
FROM DR JEFF’S STORY CELLARS - VARIETALS --- 1969 Little League Story - slightly sweet with a bitter aftertaste. Jeff’s rival Greg joins him for the Little League playoffs to replace a pitcher pulled away for All Stars. Jeff saves Greg’s shutout by pulling a homer back over the wall. Jeff and Greg go on to become best friends as well as extremely hardcore party buddies, resulting in the eventual death of Greg. Story length varies, as does maudlin aspect depending upon audience and climate.
1975 “I went to high school with celebrities” story - includes name-drops to spice up the flavor. Contains Curry, namely Ann Curry of the Today Show. The sophisticated palette will pick out subtle flavors of Ralph Nader’s 2004 running mate, Winona LaDuke. If allowed to air out, this story also features Captain Kangaroo’s niece, Tara Keishan. Tasters have usually moved on before this point.
1977 “Drove to the beach, realized we forgot the pot, drove all the way home” tale - This one leaves a bad taste in the mouths of some, as the beauty of nature loses out to a craven desire for cannabis. Welcome to MY cellar, people.
1990 “Accidentally touched a US Senator’s groin” anecdote. Best served quickly as a palette shocker before moving on to a meat course. ---
Like an overworked sommelier, I can deliver as many of these as the consumer needs. I have the list memorized, and can bring out the right story at just the right time, to complement a meal or to serve as the perfect capper for a long evening. You won’t get drunk, but under just the right circumstances, you’ll either find yourself pleasantly intoxicated, or running for the bathroom.
If you’re really lucky, I’ll don a Hawaiian shirt before trotting out the good stuff. Share wisely. ---
(Yes, this is for LJ Idol. Week 27! Crazy! Hope you enjoyed.)
Sated Guinea pig graves are, by default, shallow. My shovel easily pierces the soil of the back garden plot, and I start to dig. I have yet to share the news of Max’s passing with Riley. Still in bereavement for her bunny, who died a scant two weeks earlier, she might not take this news so easily.
In the morning, I arrive at my first day back from my gloriously extended wedding-break. I’m greeted with the shocking news that a former graduate-school classmate has taken his life. Like me, he had taken his degree from our school, and returned to our school to work - in his case, as a well-loved professor. In an instant, my wedding stories are shelved, and we begin to plan for the inevitable tsunami of grief that is heading our way. I decline an assignment that would send me to the graduate school campus to confront his death through the faces of his students. I want time to untangle my own feelings before helping others with theirs. I know it will be a matter of one day before I am scheduled with my own clients who will want to process the loss of their favorite teacher. I can’t tell them that he was a friend. This is about them. My time comes in private.
The grave takes no time to dig. I chose a spot next to Max’s long-since-deceased cage-mate and companion. Together forever, just like on the hillside at Sunset Memorial Gardens. Mere feet from their resting place will grow fresh shoots of green onion, and big leafy heads of lettuce. Guinea pig paradise.
I sit in my office, door closed, taking a moment to reflect. I can’t figure out how I feel. The shock, of course, has yet to wear off. My former grad program, as it is wont to do, is bungling the delivery of the news to students. Just two days earlier, my mother’s husband had passed on. Then Max. Now my classmate. What does one do with all of this mortality?
I place a concrete block over Max’s fresh grave. On the block, I put a sprig of lilac snapped from a nearby branch. I pause. This is when my own collection of loss, both old and new, finds me. This moment of peace for a tiny brown guinea pig is weighted with a million pounds of long-carried sadness. I don’t cry, because that crying has been done. I think about how we carry joy in the same little box that holds our grief. All these deaths are a part of me. All the loss. All the gains, the perfection of tiny sparkling moments of light. All of it. When Max’s companion Fuzzlow died, the kids and I had a little ceremony. We poured a beer on his grave, Compton-style.
When it’s time to open my door, I stand and stretch for a minute, and breathe in whatever extra tolerance I can muster. As the week goes on, as I sit with crying students, my energies directed to them, as I struggle find sleep at night, I think a lot about life. We do that when someone leaves us, and we talk about how we should always appreciate our friends and our lives and our kids and our pets and our ability to breathe, because we truly don’t know when those things will be taken from us. Or, when we are ready to give them up. My classmate made his choice on his own.
I wipe my hands together a couple of times, and shake off the dirt from Max’s final resting place.
There’s a student in our waiting room who needs to talk about the death of his favorite instructor. As full as I am, as topped-off with mortality as I feel, I will put myself aside.
There’s always room in the garden. There has to be. ----
Closer I have a scant few memories of my dad - an early one, five o’clock shadow scratchy against my face when he hoisted me one evening, booze on his breath. A later one, me at 13, him telling his twin daughters that I had mountains right in my town as I showed them a picture I had taken at my junior high school. Tarry sands at Holland, Michigan. A promise to go to the NFL Hall of Fame in Ohio. And a recurring dream.
He told me about this dream a couple of times during that age-13 visit. He was a child, running through an open field. He’d be sprinting, without care, and he’d fall headfirst into a narrow passage. As he dangled, suspended, arms outstretched, a fox would appear and relentlessly tickle him. He’d struggle to wake up, fighting through sleep, through the inevitable rhythms of the dream, up from REM to the surface where he could wake up and stop the tickling that he had grown to hate. Sometimes as he ran across the field he knew, just knew that the hole was there. He’d look for it. He’d try to avoid falling, or he’d clutch his arms to his sides so the tickling wouldn’t be so bad, and he’d fail each time, and fox would come, and he’d struggle once again.
I was thirteen, with all lack of wisdom that comes with that age, but I think I knew he was trying to tell me something, or trying to relate, or maybe in some weird way letting me know that things weren’t always okay with him. The most I had seen of him since I was in kindergarten was his name on the child support checks that showed up each week. To this day I can probably fit everything I know about him into one five-minute conversation. Maybe he was trying to get closer to me by relating this dream. I’m sure he didn’t know that, once told, that kind of dream is contagious. I’m sure he didn’t think that for weeks after that trip to Indiana to visit my stranger/dad, I’d be having a similar dream, arms outstretched. Or that to this day I can’t fall asleep with my arms over my head. No fox appears, but I always wake with a start.
I don’t dream much, or at least I don’t recall them. In the rare times when I do dream, I’m often able to control the circumstances of my dreamscape. If I’m falling off a building, I can make water appear. If I’m being chased, I just stop and tell whoever is chasing me to get lost. Were a fox to appear, ready to attack, I could draw my arms across my chest and stay un-tickled. I guess my dad never had that ability.
My dad is still around, or so I hear. He lives in Georgia, I think. The child support checks obviously stopped coming a long time ago. That visit, four decades past, represents the last time I saw him in person. His telling me about his dream didn’t draw me closer to him, as he may have wanted, but it did leave some sort of lasting impression, as did the memory of his whiskers scratching against my face, fifty years ago.
In the dreams that I do remember, there are no foxes. ---
I was another intersection week in LJ Idol. My partner was the infinitely talented <lj user=alycewilson>. Here's her entry. You can read them in any order.
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For Boog Powell, it was pulling the inside fastball - whipping around, wrists snapping through the zone like lightning, hips turning like a lathe, eyes following the rotation of the red Haitian-sewn seams - the inside fastball was his and then it was gone.
For Ken Jennings, trivia. For Dave Navarro, notes shredded like frozen steel. For Admiral Perry, ice. For Satan, fire.
For me, love.
We’ve all got that thing. Born with it? Maybe. We labor at other tasks. I can’t garden so well. My sewing skills falter. Socially, I’ve been grinding it out since Tammy Hald asked me for a homework answer in the fifth grade and I couldn’t hear her voice, just my heart trying to pound my eardrums into pulp. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins, carrying my self-confidence away to some distant planetoid within my scrawny pale ten-year-old cosmos. My knees shook so hard that the needle moved, almost imperceptibly but scientifically valid, on a seismograph somewhere.
I’ve come around as a communicator, with work, and now if asked a question by an attractive woman I can represent my species in a relatively decent way. I no longer sweat at the thought of all those x-chromosomes in close proximity. I can maintain an even strain without going insane in the membrane. But, it’s been a grind.
Love’s no grind.
A few days ago, in a sizable hotel room perched atop the fancy Mandalay Bay casino/resort in Las Vegas, deep in the the brutal/reclaimed Nevada desert, I had the good fortune to marry the woman of my dreams, that girl that boys spend their lives wishing they were with, the tan and gorgeous sunshine of my soul. The room overflowed with love. Friends had flown in from all over, including some I had met in person for the first time a scant 24 hours earlier. They were all there to celebrate the existence of love. My heart did not pound, nor did I sweat or shake. I am at my best when I am the epicenter of a universe of love. I am the king of the vast realm of the heart.
Love is what I do.
I can wax rhapsodic about all of the facets of my love-blessed relationship, and trust me, I will. But, it comes down to the ability to give and receive the most beautiful gift of all, and that ability was handed to me, carefully and casually, by my mother. I learned from the day I was born that all of the money and cars and wars and deceptions and executive jobs and washroom attendant slaveries in the world would not hold up to love. I learned that most of the fun of getting there is getting there and that love poured generously and willy-nilly into a hungry world would return, a zillion-fold, before the earth had cooled as the day’s sun set. You give it, it comes back, and if you believe then it will always be.
I’m lucky in love. And love is lucky in me.
Some people are scholars, or poets, or mechanics, or mobsters. Some can carry a tune. Some can make fancy things. Some sleep better than I do. Some are taller, and more beautiful. Some people are achievers.
I’m a lover. And that, my dear loves, is its own reward, sustainable and perfect. And that’s all I want or need.
I’m lucky that way.
---- This week, our LJ Idol task was to write about "in your wheelhouse." Love, my friends, is in my wheelhouse. Or so I feel. Thanks for reading!
weak force There are cloudless days now, from time to time, and those bring a little mustard-squirt of bright direct early yellow sun under the broken blinds on the east side of the room. She faces me when she sleeps, often, and one of the jobs I’ve assigned myself is to keep that direct light from her eyes. I move my pillows to block the light as I quietly get out of bed. This act of care is how I choose to start my day.
There is a heat vent at the bay window that looks into the back yard, as crowded with life as one of those deep-sea vents in a National Geographic special. Cats, not strange sea creatures, but just as in the sea they gather and hope for food. My arrival bodes well, for nutritional purposes.
I look into the back yard and my gaze is captured by a squirrel meandering across the power lines that run parallel 15 feet or so above the back fence. It’s a lazy high-wire act, this tiny Wallenda just taking his damn time traversing the 75-foot aerial superhighway. How tenuous his life must be, up there in sky, or darting across the street out in front of my house, or avoiding the gathering predators. His tiny heart beats a mile a minute up there as he keeps his eye on the prize, a return to his family, a few moments stolen in the safety of his lair.
The cats rub up against my feet. They depend on me. The ecosystem of my house, while partly interdependent, would collapse without the two responsible adults at the helm. We’re surrounded by lives hanging from a thread. We’re providers, stabilizers, the givers and the blockers of light, preservers of sleep and safety. Each act within this system is a measured effort to keep the system alive.
As I write this, the sun has slowly crept time-lapse-style across the wooden floorboards of my living room. I sit on a sofa at the other side of the room from the bay window, and the progress of time is marked by the creeping sunlight. It approaches my bare toes, and as I watch time unfold I’m keenly aware of my momentary stasis. This is how time catches up with people - they sit on the couch, lie in a bed, living as spectators or as well-meaning people frozen in fear. They dare not reinvent their lives, as they have always been this way, worn this hair, loved this one particular person, had sex in that one position, watched that one show. They pretend like life isn’t tenuous, and linear, and flowing like a rain-swollen river toward some cold and unknown sea.
A cloud has drifted across the sun for now, and my feet are safe. The progress of the sun, though, has not been altered, but obscured. The cats, fed, search for a new place to find warmth now that their pool of sunlight is gone. I try to tell them that it will be back, but in their bones they know that it won’t be back forever.
Reggie "This team, it all flows from me. I'm the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and Munson, but he can only stir it bad." - Reggie Jackson, 1977
Ah, Reggie, we thought, and by “we” I’m talking about the teenaged white small-town baseball fans who grew up in a certain era and watched Reggie rattle the ball around Oakland Coliseum in the late 60s and early 70s. We’re the ones who laughed at the Reggie Bar. At the time, grown up in a little white town, possessed of a little White mind, I probably laughed when someone said the Yankees-era Reggie Bar was “just like Reggie - chocolate on the outside, shit on the inside.” I like to think that even then, I got what was wrong with that statement. But I’ll bet I laughed.
What’s wrong with us, when we’re young? We all pretend that we've grown out of all of our prejudices, but that's no certainty. I think back to the Black athlete of those times, to the ones who stand out, who “earned” my fanhood. The white small town boy nursed a revolutionary on the inside, and I didn’t know how to express it other than my love (frowned upon by my otherwise all-knowing grandpa) of Dick Allen, dugout cigarette-smoker and general malcontent. I look at Dick Allen with grown up eyes, in historical light, and combine my mind’s Dick Allen (Richie Call Me Dick, we called him, as though it was not his right to shirk a sportswriter’s sobriquet and claim his own identity) and I think about the state of American Blackness in the late 1960s and I realize that Richie Call Me Dick was in the public eye as people who believed in him were being shot and killed and fire-hosed. His contemporaries, Reggie’s, Dr. J’s - struggling for a cause with faint echoes in rural southern Oregon.
I’d watch the electric Julius Erving and I’d wonder why Wilt Chamberlain was so angry all the time. Reggie hit three homers in a World Series game and now I can see that some of that had to be powered by a gigantic FUCK YOU. Angry homers. Angry dunks. You’re killing us. Here’s Jim Brown shoving a touchdown down your face, smash-mouth to a James Brown soundtrack. Here’s Ali laying claim to his beautiful African brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe, rumbling in the jungle.
In that wan light of history, maybe a little golden as I muster up the memories, I can see now how my small town courage was buoyed by these men. Nixon ignited whatever Reggie and Jim and Julius started.
In 1972, as a member of the Oakland A’s, Reggie wore a black armband in solidarity with his two Jewish teammates to commemorate the horrible slayings at the 1972 Olympics.
Nobody else on that team had the guts. ----------------
This was an "intersection" week on LJ Idol. My partner was the awesome cheshire23 - story here.
Bridge There are uncounted times when powers of abstract reasoning fail and the fog of doubt clings to the shoreline without hope of lifting - in those disquieting moments there is pure solace to be found in the power of the body, motor movements both gross and fine, regression to the physical mean of sinew and synapse. All inward-gazing philosophy rests upon the grounding power of the body, the sweet slide of muscle fiber, the beating of the human heart, the symbolic weight of the human grasp.
Each day in my internship, I would stride across a bridge that spanned a small creek. The creek was gorgeous and verdant, a riparian paradise no matter the season. I’d stop on the bridge, the beams worn smooth by hand and foot, by generations of students who parked their cars in the real world and then trudged across into the academic fantasy land of Reed College. I’d stand in the middle each morning, halted halfway, and I’d make the transition to work with a small physical gesture that reminded me to be open to what happened there. I’d open my arms and welcome the grass-scented air, my mind conjuring the smell of ivy clinging to hand-hewn limestone, no ivory in those towers. I’d pull my day into my consciousness with that small physical gesture, and I’d continue my walk to the counseling center.
Each day I’d toil in the service of the university, in the hope of bringing comfort to the students who were struggling to succeed in such a lofty environment. Successive clients would bring successive tensions, and I’d carry them in my body and in my mind. Lunch breaks were often sodden with the damp weight of disappointment or depression or drug abuse, my mind racing to make sense, to discover what to do next, how to help. I was new at full time therapy, and I was overwhelmed, and in my job you didn’t show it because everyone else was overwhelmed too, students and staff and faculty all in it together, holding up the crushing load of a top-level university. Everyone bore their share, everyone supported a wall or a staircase or a shelf in the library, and no one wanted it to come crashing down.
These were my days at the Reed College Counseling Center - halt halfway on the bridge in the morning, willingly accept the piling of trouble on emergent trouble, stay engaged and open and try to learn while all around me others did the same. The secret, the thing that kept me from dragging everything back to the car and packing it up to bring home to a young family, was what happened on that bridge at the end of the day.
At the end of each workday, after the notes were filed and the lights were turned off and the chairs were moved back into place, empty of sobbing students and struggling new therapist, I retraced the steps that had brought me there. On that same bridge, above the mossy green banks of that slow moving creek, I’d halt again. This time, though, I’d bring myself into my body, deep into where my heart beat and my lungs filled and emptied, and I’d pull my day out through my veins and I’d will my day into the warm and empty palms of my hands. I’d stand with my hands cupped, and I would fill them with my day, with all of it. When I’d emptied myself of my day, when my heart beat with fresh blood and my lungs filled with air free from the worries of students, I’d step to the worn handrails of the bridge and I’d turn my upturned hands over. I’d drop my day into the slow moving creek, watch it as it dissipated, some caught in little eddies by the moss, some flowing straight and true, all the way to the ocean.
Some days all it takes is the knowledge, deep in your bones, that a few simple movements can change everything.
Errands There is much to be said about running errands on a brilliantly sunny Monday morning. Or maybe there’s nothing at all to say. Errands don’t mean a thing, right? Or, maybe they mean everything.
My errand list was short. After all, this was the first day of my vacation, and I didn’t want to do so much that I felt like I was working. I had to go drop off a document at the county. I had to venture downtown to trade in some old bus tickets for newer, high-tech bus tickets before the old ones expired and magically transformed themselves into useless bits of colored paper. And, I had to pick up my pain meds at the pharmacy. Nothing, right?
The first step in doing any errands anywhere, ever, is to make a plan, to chart a course of action based upon geographic locations and ideal time points. A quick scan of the internet revealed that the county offices opened at 8:30, and my pharmacist at 9. The bus ticket office also opened at 8:30, and was located in the heart of downtown. As I pondered this information, I thought about planning, and organizing, and how these exact things are a terrible weak point for me. Some people thrive on making lists and getting things organized. To me, these things are death - slow, uncomfortable death by strangulation. If I had to save the lives of a town full of innocent citizens by organizing a few tasks, the people in that town would DIE. And they would die quickly, because the pressure to organize those things would just make my distraction and my planning handicap that much worse.
The plan was set, despite my cognitive drawbacks. I’d hit the county office, cross the Hawthorne bridge into downtown, and trade in my tickets at the Pioneer Courthouse Square TriMet office. After that, I’d hit the freeway back to the east side and then slide up Sandy Blvd to the pharmacy. Easy enough!
If you’re lucky, errand time is thinking time, a little pocket of room in your day for some reflection. My life is such that reflection time is scarce, at least that sweet expansive reflection that happens when you’re out and about doing menial things. I made it to the county offices at about 8:40. Walking in to the building, I was greeted by a sign informing me that the offices now opened at 9, and had done so since last June. The internet was wrong, I thought, and I wandered into rumination about the nature of institutions so moribund that one hand not only doesn’t know what the other is doing, it’s often a hand on a different body. The county’s Frankenstein-hands had grabbed me and gently slowed me down. I wandered the building in my reverie, until someone said “Hey! Dr. Jeff!” ( there's so much more...Collapse )
Et tu? I assume the position, knobby knees in full contact with the hard floor. My jeans, a thousand times patched, seem ridiculously threadbare, so wrong for the occasion, so out of place amidst such splendor.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Hoo boy... that’s rich. I’m eight, unspoiled by much. To the likely disappointment of the church, I have not yet begun to masturbate, to lie, to drink, to covet my neighbor’s wife and lawn mower and teenage daughter, his Corvette, his fine trimmed lawn.
Hello, my name is Jeff, and I don’t covet shit.
“It’s been, uhhhh, three weeks since my last confession.” And it has. And I didn’t have anything then, either, like an actor who keeps showing up for auditions without bothering to memorize a monologue with which to wow the casting director, who in this case was a mildly disinterested youth priest named Father Bob. Everything about the Catholic church weirded me out, from the graphic depictions of Christ tortured on the cross to the gothic Latin ceremonies I struggled through.
To this day, the scent of incense takes me back to an aisle seat in St. Mary’s, my view restricted like a 60s basketball fan behind one of those giant girders at Boston Garden, robes whooshing by, powerful incense hung by what looked like a little cat-o-nine-tails, mumbled Latin like so much smoke following the men working their way up the aisle. I didn’t understand any of of it... Veni, vidi, carpe your diem, et tu whatever. Like a young Fox Mulder, covered in nascent acne and furtively copping glances at forced virgins in Sunday school, I wanted to believe. So badly, I wanted. I wanted the Latin, the weird smelly smoke, the robes. I wanted to do things that were so bad, like murder someone in cold blood out by the big holy-water bowls, and I wanted to be forgiven. I wanted that imaginary forgiveness for my lurid imaginary sins. What a beautiful tradition of master-scam this was going to be. I needed to understand! To be IN the church!
“Father, I cursed three times, and, uh, took the lord’s name in vain.” My real confession: I had not the faintest clue what it meant to take the lord’s name in vain. I imagined veins, pulsing with holy blood, maybe the father son and holy ghost. And why was there a ghost? Was the ghost good? What was the thing with the veins?
They sent me to Sunday school, and to catechism, and to this day I had to look up catechism to see how it was spelled and if that was what is was called and I still don’t know what it meant. Still don’t know, Google and all. It hangs there, cloaked in smoke and mystery like all else Papal and non-palpable.
“Son, the lord will forgive you.” Thank Christ! I mean, literally, I guess, huh? One thing I knew about being religious was the Hail Marys. With the Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayers, I was good and true, not to mention real damn fast.
I left the confessional booth. In line behind me was a group of people who looked as though they really needed to be there - like if the church had been closed for repairs, a couple of them would have just been swallowed up in the hellish asphalt of the parking lot and called on home. I was happy to give up my spot, but part of me wonders what they did. As I write this, I think about those people in line at confession, and I imagine all kinds of stuff.
Adulthood finds me in a career that consists of hearing all manner of confession, from all manner of people. The way we work, there’s no expectation that anyone will be swallowed up in the parking lot, and although we have an urn of water in the waiting area, it’s for drinking in small paper cups.
You have to wonder, though, about this career choice of mine. No Latin, but there sure is a lot of faith to go around. ---
This is written for my beloved LJ Idol, with the topic being "et tu, Brute."
Prints and grooms! Dudes, I'm having a small-scale, limited-time print sale to help fund wedding attire and other goodies. You can check it out at docprints.tumblr.com - ordering deets are there.
Unmown Grass The tree is ripe with the promising buds of spring, and its top branches are losing their grip on a fat full yellow moon slung low in the early morning sky. The moon must be a pretty desirable prize, as the tree seems to really be trying, clawing at the last buttery edge, fighting a losing battle but resolute in its desire to not let go. I descend the two slick steps from the front stoop and stride across the unmown grass of my front lawn, on a path to intersect the moon should it fall low enough to touch the horizon. Like the tree, I’m destined to fail. Like the tree, I’m resolute, and I shall make the attempt no matter how predestined the outcome. This is what I do.
There is a squirrel who greets me most mornings. I like to entertain the notion that it’s the same squirrel and that he has somehow been given the honor of guiding me to Oregon street from 108th. I envision a tiny doorman’s costume, maybe a bejeweled walking stick, toothpick-small, and a monocle. I bow to the squirrel, almost imperceptibly, but squirrels are social creatures and I know that I can see him bow back. Together we share admiration for the tree’s attempt to corral the impossible moon. I bid him adieu. There are places for me to be, and I’ve shared as much of my morning with the squirrel guide as I can. I wish good health to him and to his family.
These mornings, I can see my exhalations hanging for a moment in front of me before they dissipate. This is water, and carbon dioxide, and a thousand other things, and it’s a small miracle that an immutable law of physics can somehow render visible something so fleeting. How is breath not a miracle on any morning, though? How can we be so lucky as to possess within us a machine that is wonderful enough to pull life from the air around us? Some morning I’ll leave the house early, and I’ll stand with the squirrel, and together we’ll ponder this in full knowledge that there can’t be an answer to such questions. Not today, though. I have places to go.
Oregon street, 107th, Pacific avenue. The asphalt ribbon of 102nd awaits, stretching unbroken from the southeast almost to the Columbia river. It’s the recent recipient of beautification and fresh new pedestrian features. Street lamps, old style, with humming chemical bulbs that poorly mimic the color of this morning’s moon, stronger, harsher, without comfort. No cars at this time of day, as the only people up are the early commuters and the potato chip delivery guy I always see. We’re on the same schedule, he and I, and he pulls out of the driveway and gives me a nod. I wonder if he has a squirrel in his neighborhood who sees him to his car before he climbs into his car, and I wonder if he cares. For one minute, the potato-chip-guy’s imagined squirrel is my muse. What a sweet and complicated world it is.
Once I leave the tree-lined confines of my Lorene Park neighborhood, I’m swallowed in an endless sea of concrete. 102nd gives way to the Gateway Shopping Center parking lot, and for a while I feel as I once felt in a Greyhound bus ponderously cutting across west Texas, hours piled on hours piled on hours, no relief, no change. The parking lot never ends until it ends, and I’m nearly at the train station, and I’m a little sad that the walk is almost over, and I’m a little glad.
Here’s where you live. You live in that moment between inhale and exhale, in that heartbeat, in that acknowledgement of breath and bone. You live in the tree that grasps at the full moon. You live in a river of concrete. You live wherever your gaze takes you, to the last sideways crescent sliver of moon as it dips below the horizon line, to the faux-colonial roofline of an eastside grocery, to the indigo sky that warms as the sun slowly climbs up behind you. You live in every step I take. You live forever in every fold of my clothing, under every fingernail, in each laugh line that I’ve earned. I take you with me on my morning walk to the train station, and I bring you home, and then I find you alive and real in my warm home, and I know what real happiness is. And in the morning, as the squirrel steps out to find me and guide me to Oregon street, you live in me again. ----
This is written for therealljidol. This week, we are using a fellow contestant for inspiration. A talented contestant, unmowngrass has such a cool user name that I stole it and riffed away. Thank you.
