Sitting on the Curb Together

Late last week I was at Daybreak on my regular Thursday walkaround. The place closes down at 11 to allow staff an hour lunch, so a number of people collect out back, smoking, napping in the sun, sitting and relaxing. This happens every weekday but I go there on Thursdays.

The volunteer coordinator calls it my "social day" because what I do is wander around in back and ask people how they are. Most times they answer in the affirmative and I might sit with them to catch up on stuff. But when they say "Not so good," I make a point of sitting or squatting with them to hear their story. 

That's all I do, listen to their stories. I'm not a social worker or RN or therapist, I don't have access to any resources and my knowledge of what's available, even a year after moving here, is woefully inadequate. But I can listen and I'm aware from my own time on the road that this is often something not available to lonely people; someone who will uncritically and calmly sit with them and listen to what's going on. I can't solve any of their issues and they're aware of that, but I can make them a little less lonely.

In seminary, this ministry was emphasized to me by the story of Job and his friends. While it's true they try to explain away his mistreatment by God by placing the blame on him, what they do before that is

set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

This is the critical part of ministry for me, that rather than immediately setting out to interpret his suffering, his friends sit with him and share his misery. For a week and silently. That is truly sharing in someone's grief.

I don't try to put myself in the shoes of Job's friends because they are convinced of their own righteousness and eventually give in to judgement. But I do accept the wisdom of their first actions, to sit on the ground and be with the one who is suffering.

So this past Thursday I noticed one of my regulars sitting on the curb away from the property and drinking a beer. She looked unhappy, so when I could I wandered over and sat down, said I was glad to see her and asked how she was. 

Her issue was nothing new to her, it's a problem she's been trying to solve since January, and I'd heard it before at length. But I didn't say anything about that, I just listened. After she finished her beer she stood up to go inside and we walked over together. She said, "Thanks for sitting there with me." I said, "That's what I do, it's about all I'm good at." 

That's when she said something that floored me. At first I was unsure I'd understood her and asked "What?" She turned around and looked me full in the face and said, enunciating every word, "You keep people from ending their lives."

I don't know if she meant overall people who do that or just me, although I'm certain in that moment she meant just me. It pierced me. That is, I believe, the closest I'll ever come to a personal divine message.

 

It's About How We React

 

No doubt, it has to be one of the most frightening experiences, made more so by the recognition there isn't anything you can do about it. That it doesn't happen more often is a miracle of design in itself. That anyone can remain calm in the wind and blast of it is amazing.

I speak, of course, of Donald trump's appalling ascendence in the republican polls.

A week ago, this happened as well. The panel of an Alaska Airlines plane dropped off midair. No warning, no immediate explanation, just a sudden bang and blast of cold air. Who wouldn't scream at that? Well, not the pilot. Note the calm in her voice. Apparently none of the passengers either. All witnesses report that, whatever people might have been feeling as individuals, the immediate effect other than the sound of rushing air was silence. 

And while that also precipitates the certainty of doom and collapse, I want to point out what the passengers and flight crew of Flight 1282 out of Portland did not do. They did not panic. They did not put themselves or others in danger by ignoring the dropping air masks or unbuckling their seatbelts in order to move back further from what more than one witness has called "the gaping hole two-thirds the size of a refrigerator." 

What they did was, after I'm certain an immediate round of screams and expressions of astonishment, to behave the way people are supposed to in an emergency: they trusted themselves to the professionalism of the trained crew to keep them safe and return them to land. And it happened, exactly the way it should have. If it weren't for the novelty that a panel blew off in view of the passengers it might not have even been reported beyond the local news. 

The latter is the way we must react to the news of the former. After acknowledging trump's resurgence  as something unprecedented, we need to relax, damp our individual panic, allow that it is happening, and allow the crew, which is us too, to get us through this safely and securely. It's unlikely trump will reach the presidency again, and if he does we will deal with it, but American voters are our own best pilots. We know what we must do and trust ourselves to get us back on the ground without casualty. 

Old People at Concerts

 

Last night my wife and I attended a concert and at intermission I went to the restroom. I was surprised at the sight: the women's room was nearly empty while both entrances to the men's room had lines ten deep. I said, "You've got to be shitting me, no lines to the women's and long lines for the men's?" To which one ahead of me shot back, "Yeah, look at the age of the guys waiting."

I've written in the past of the hope I draw from the energy young people bring to music from before they were born, but I want to celebrate too the opposite, the energy of old men and women to music they may have grown up with but is being played by people younger than themselves. This concert was one by the Allman Betts Family Revival, a rotating group of musicians made up of relations of Gregg Allman, Dickie Betts, Berry Oakley, and Butch Trucks. Other than a few geezers who played with Duane and Gregg while alive, the average age of the musicians was probably late 20s or early 30s. 

The music they played was pretty spot-on versions of original Allman Brothers tunes, sometimes a little harder rocking than the originals. Make no mistake, there were younger folks there too, but the bulk of the audience, and the ones making the most noise, were geezers like us who had seen the Brothers in their heyday. Now when I call us geezers, I am referring to an audience whose average age was probably 65, and whose younger selves would have looked down their noses at their balding, pudgy, finger-shaking, Indian-whistling, lite beer-sucking, trucker hat-shaking, snake-dancing elders for all that uncool behavior, but didn't give a fuck anymore. They were just digging the vibe of listening to music played by young people who understood its appeal and what it meant for them. 

Are they going to watch those videos they took on their phones at some future date? I think they're likelier to than most people who record concert moments. We wish we'd had that technology in our prime to waste. Were these old men wagging their fingers and shaking their cowboy hats trying to get in touch again with their younger selves, or were they touching something divine? I'm biased, but I think it is the latter. Enough people in wheelchairs were slithering and sliding to suggest, not their youth, but some liquid self that could still lay in all our futures. I don't doubt today there are lots more creaking bones and handfuls of ibuprofen going down instead of hangovers, but that we can still embarrass ourselves this well this late in our lives fills me with a kind of contentment maybe unique to our age and ability to appreciate. 

Shane MacGowan Wishes You a Merry Effing Ho-Ho

 

[Shane MacGowan died and he was much too young, although at 65 maybe he was also too old. In memorium, and because 'tis the season, I repost this essay I wrote a decade or so ago, a sample for my research classes examining the then-recent development of traditional (read: vanilla) Xmas songs clogging up pre-Thanksgiving radio. This was pre-satellite radio with its devoted channels and the year-round slogfest of a dedicated Hallmark Channel. Shane, we only wanted you to live.]

 

            I was driving my usual commute during the first week of November.  I hit the “scan” button on my radio and various music and talk shows faded in and out.  My attention was caught when dulcet tones sang, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

            I knew those dulcet tones.  That was Perry Como.  When I was a kid my folks were avid listeners of what’s now called Adult Contemporary Music but in my childhood was simply referred to as Elevator Music.  Perry Como, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Kate Smith, Rosemary Clooney.  I’d learned to know those singers in the first couple notes as a child by repetitive play on the stereo.  But the novelty of hearing the late Honeyed Voice in the Sweater on the radio was soon overtaken by the realization that I was listening to a Christmas song.  On the radio.  The first week in November.

            Now, when I was a kid, Christmas was my favorite time of the year.  I didn’t have to come up with excuses not to go outside if I didn’t want to, and the cold nipping at my exposed nose on waking was neat.  Plus it was wonderful to lie on my belly and read a junk novel by the bottom lights on the Christmas tree with a plateful of cookies and some hot chocolate.  I’d start playing Christmas albums around September and not cut it out, despite firm requests from my family, until about the first week of January. 

            But that stopped when puberty kicked in.  Here were adults—Professional Adults!—programming Christmas music when everyone’s Halloween candy was still fresh.

            Rather than ranting and raving about it, I decided to look into the reason for this.  There had to be a reason.  There were several.

            No radio station exists as an island.  Every station, whether owned by a conglomerate like Clear Channel or Fred over at the Fish Shack, exists as part of a market.  The market can be as small as a city and its environs—the Twin Cities, for example—or as large as a region—the Iron Range, which is the full upper third of Minnesota from Bemidji to the Canadian border (excluding Duluth).  There is an unwritten agreement between radio stations that one station, generally the Adult Contemporary or Lite station, within the market will provide twenty-four hour, seven-day-a-week Christmas music starting in November.  On December 24^th, every station is welcome to play as much Christmas music as it chooses. 

            The reasons this agreement came about are diffuse.  Some argue it is because, well, someone has to do it, so it might as well be the station whose listeners are accustomed to listening to Easy Listenin’ Music.  If the station is an oldies station, whose listeners are accustomed to the sounds of the classic Christmas songs from mid 20^th Century—Patti Page, Mitch Miller, the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, Sinatra, Como, Torme—so much the better.  It should come as no surprise then that the most often played Christmas song is Nat “King” Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” but what should surprise us is the number of popular songs with at best a tangential connection to Christmas, often merely a mention, that also pop up regularly in rotation, such as Joni Mitchell’s “River,” the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” and DanFogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” (this last divorced not only from the holiday but from reality:  how hard is it to find an open bar on Christmas Eve?), while ignoring several more controversial ones with secure roots in the holiday, like the Kink’s “Father Christmas” and ThePogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

            The difficulty may come when a market has only, say, country and rock stations.  One of them will likely take on the duty, but this will often be a choke for regular listeners, since there are comparatively few Christmas-themed country or rock songs, and certainly not enough to program twenty-four hours a day for nearly sixty days.

            This is the interesting part to me.  While it’s been a given of every generation to bemoan how quickly the Christmas season begins, as if its generation could wait longer, and while I thought I had some memory that this was an omnipresent condition, radio stations starting earlier and earlier until we’d finally reached saturation point with Halloween, that isn’t the case.  While some stations make a practice of starting earlier—KOSY in Salt Lake City, Utah, is apparently the earliest, beginning its Christmas rotation Halloween night [although this has changed only this past January]—the practice used to have as a common starting point the day after Thanksgiving. 

            Until 2001.  Yes, 9-11 changed everything.  That was the year George W. Bush asked us to help America remain solvent by spending money, and one of the ways gleaned by merchandisers and radio programmers in tandem was to begin the Christmas season early, two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The practice has simply escalated and the dates fallen back since then.

            And here we come to the dirty secret why radio stations, especially Adult Contemporary and Oldies stations, fall all over themselves to be the first to begin the Christmas season:  Stores and shops generally play Christmas music for their customers, the better to suggest “buy early and buy often.”  A few stores, like Walmart and Kmart, have their own radio systems, and some big chains, like Best Buy and [late, unlamented] Circuit City, use piped-in Muzak.  But aside from the big boxes, the majority of stores and shops rely on the good old fashioned free radio signal to accelerate buying habits.  Naturally, the mix of garlanded shelving and spruce-scented spray with tchochkes and knickknacks with the background fuzz of Herb Alpert and His Tijuana Brass and their version of “Sleigh Ride” is a marriage made in Retail Heaven.  Most importantly, these stations are played at least for the operating hours for the store and occasionally simply left turned on for the cleaning crew.  This is a bump in Arbitron ratings for a station, sometimes as much as three points.  Arbitron ratings are an important part of a station’s profile.  The place each fits on the scorecard for its market determines how much it can charge advertisers for 10, 20, and 30 second spots.  In a market of ten stations, getting bumped from number 6 to number 3 for the year can mean a bump of tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. 

            It doesn’t matter, of course, if anyone actually listens to this stuff.  The stations provide “ears” to the advertisers, and they’re selling potential sales.  It isn’t important if the employees end up by the third week of November muttering x-rated versions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on its tenth play of the day.  What is important is that at least ten times that day, different customers have heard it and their desire for, say, another twenty dollar stocking stuffer for Jimmy has been pricked. 

 

 

Works Cited

• Arbitron Radio Ratings and Media Research Information.  2007.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://www.arbitron.com/home/content.stm
• “Christmas Music.” 2007.  Wikipedia.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_music
• Ho, Rodney.  2007.  “Bull Goes All Christmas.”  The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  November 23:  B1. 

·         Virgin, Bill.  2007.  “On Radio: All-Christmas format is a ratings gift for KRWM-FM, boosting it to first.”  Seattlepi.com.  Last Accessed November 25, 2007, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/300965_radiobeat25.html. .

Too Young to Lose My Best Friend

 I'm listening to my Cocteau Twins Pandora station. It was one of the groups she'd introduced me to, along with the Bush Tetras, Hazel O'Connor, the Sugarcubes and Bjork, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Violent Femmes, and dozens of others I've forgotten in the ensuing decades. 

I don't remember our meeting but I have an approximate year: 1982 or 83. I was a tutor and she was one of my students in for writing help. I don't remember what her issues were beyond misspellings and the occasional missing punctuation, but somehow we bonded beyond the needs of Composition 1 and our friendship took on greater importance as the years passed. She was the first to get me drunk. It was my 25th birthday and we celebrated with several of her housemates with Melon Balls, Kamikazes, and, in a final booze-filled marathon chess session played among a half dozen sleeping bodies, Malibu Rum. 

We attended a half dozen Rainbow Gatherings together, and at the Nantahala Forest Gathering, the 1st for both of us, she managed to dodge the dysentery that laid most of us low. After, she told me how she accidentally avoided getting arrested 60 miles inside Babylon, by absently reaching down to pet the head of the drug-sniffing dog that was about to find the stash in her pocket. The grateful animal, as she said it, "just looked up into my eyes with her tongue out and such a look of, 'Oh, hi, do you want to play?', that her handler yanked her back hard and that was the end of that. They had to let us go." 

I'm unsure which of us graduated first, or if she graduated. Those years, graduation wasn't really very important to any of us back then, although we all expected to. What was important then were adventures, the sorts of events that happened and you talked about them later. We attended a couple weekend workshops but didn't have the money to stay in a motel. So we slept in my car. At one, after we'd finished for the day and had some dinner, we found an out-of-the-way road, mostly dirt track, and figured it was remote enough to safely sleep there. Along 1 or 2 o'clock I was woken by her insistent, "Someone's at the door" next to my ear, not so much whispered as said in amazement. It was a cop. 

Windows rolled down in cars then so I rolled the one closest to me and said, very quizzically, "Hi?" He said, "Do you know the owner of this property? Has he said you could stay here?" I said, "We didn't even know it was property, we thought we were out in the woods." He said, "Well, you're in someone's driveway and he's not around apparently, but if he comes by you'll have to move." That seemed reasonable to me, the having to move part, so I agreed and he got back in his car and we went back to sleep. In the early morning as the fog lifted, we could dimly see a house at the other end of the drive. The owner had either never come home or he'd never left. 

Another story, this one not involving me, one she told me. She'd been walking through the Student Union on her way somewhere when she'd got a whiff of someone's patchouli as he walked by. The tribe we hung with loved patchouli but found it hard to locate. She walked swiftly beside him and asked, "Is that patchouli? Did you get it around here? I love patchouli and..." He stopped suddenly, looked down at her--in her story he was over 6 feet--and announced, "It's obvious you want to engage me in  conversation but I don't want to." And he strode off, leaving her open-mouthed in his wake, incredulous when she told me, as if it was impossible someone wouldn't want to talk with her. I could not imagine why not. I was honored by her friendship. 

We attended more Gatherings, went more places, did more things. Most everyone wanted to talk with one of us everywhere we went. Somewhere in there we became lovers, although never exclusive, in defiance of everything we'd thought we were to each other. What she became to me, I'm sorry to say, was the human equivalent of home, someone that when you go there she has to take you in. I told myself that's all I was to her as well. Of course, that was wrong, both factually and morally. When she stopped talking to me after I married, my wife encouraged me to contact her. "You're too young to lose your best friend," she told me. 

That's a lousy story to end on, so here's a better one. Another Gathering, we had dropped acid together (when we talked about this last week while she was in hospice and I'd driven 1500 miles to spend time with her she insisted it was her first time, a possibility her sister later doubted, so we'll let it go) and then found ourselves at night at a jam session where, for some reason, she'd needed to take medicine. She dropped it and the two of us bent in the shadows, heads down, rummaging around among the leaves and twigs and loam for the pill. Suddenly, something dropped on her head, bounced, and landed in her open hand. It was the pill. We laughed because the universe opened a rift in time below our hands and another above our heads. It had decided to fuck with us and that was all right with us. That is how I will remember her, laughing. 

Plant the Sapling First

I've been reading this book, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamenetz, for about a week. I've been looking forward to doing so since I saw it, what, 25 years ago, as I was stocking copies in the Religions-Judaism section in Barnes and Noble. I had somehow thought of it all these years as an exploration of Kamenetz' own experiences in India, but he was actually operating as a journalist traveling with a Jewish delegation meeting with the Dalai Lama. Doesn't matter, it's a good book. 

It's in his position as the outsider, secular Jew traveling with rabbis and their coterie, that he raises fascinating and difficult questions about both Judaism and religion. The Dalai Lama had requested, after a visit to the US, to meet with Jews who might commiserate with him regarding being a part of a diaspora, recognizing  the reality of Tibetan spiritual homelessness. There are many good segments but this one comes during the presentation by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the Orthodox representative, who takes the Dalai Lama through the early history of Jewish diaspora. 

[The] Babylonian story offers...hope. But I knew why Yitz chose instead to make a parallel with events surrounding the Roman destruction. The Tibetans might well be facing a long exile. And not far from his mind was also the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises...How can Jews affirm faith in God and his covenant with the chosen people after Auschwitz? The question is settled for most secular and liberal Jews--they can't. Obviously such a position is unacceptable to an Orthodox Jew...In contemporary Orthdox Jewish theology, Rabbi Greenberg's own substantial contribution has been the concept of the "voluntary covenant." According to [sociologist Arnold] Eisen, "The word 'voluntary' is crucial...It emphasizes that the initiative--now, more than ever--is on the human side rather than on God's. It suggests that we will be faithful, we will uphold the covenant, even if God in the Holocaust did not." 

Here, I would add a massive exclamation point to the text if I could. This is radical Orthodoxy as I understand it. 

[Rabbi] Greenberg told the Dalai Lama that the covenant is "the most seminal idea" in Judaism. The covenant that began with Abraham has not been abrogated--even at Auschwitz. Instead..."The creator God seeds the universe with life. Humanity can become a partner with the divine in making the world better or perfect." 

What has changed is the human role in the partnership. And that happened, not in recent times, but "about nineteen hundred years ago, halfway in the history of the religion. The Jewish people in Judea were conquered by the Romans and their Temple destroyed by the Roman  empire. It was devastating." 

...In the first century, many interpreted the Roman destruction as abandonment by God, the end of the covenant. "And since the whole Jewish idea of covenant is that the world can be made better, this would be such a victory for evil that many Jew simply gave up. They assimilated and joined the very dynamic culture around them, Hellenism. Another large groups, the Zealots, put all of their energy to recapturing and rebuilding the Temple..."

The Romans not only destroyed Jerusalem, they renamed the capital and drove her people into exile. More than one million Jews died at that time...But Judaism did not die..."There was one great rabbi of the time, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud says, when the Romans had Jerusalem surrounded and were about to destroy it, he was able to break through to the Roman emperor and was given one wish. He said, 'Give me Yavneh and its scholars. I want to set up an academy there.'" There he told his students that they would outlast the exile by teaching, interpreting, and preserving the tradition.

"Yochanan ben Zakkai basically said, 'If we don't have our Temple, but we have our learning, our texts--our Bible with us, we have the power by learning to create the equivalent of the Temple. It's a portable homeland.' 

"It's not enough to preserve...[As] partners in the covenant, fallible humans have the authority to add new insights, so that their activity was the equivalent of a renewal of the covenant. Their courage to renew preserved the past."

[Yitz said the first-century rabbis] did not choose to believe that God had abandoned them, and they insisted that the Torah was still fully binding and valid. They interpreted God's nonintervention with the Roman destruction as a sign that, henceforth, in history, the human partner in covenant must take more responsibility for the outcome...God was no longer going to step in and do the miracles for his human partners.

...The memory of the Temple was never lost--but it was turned into literature...More--the magical side of religion, especially the yearning for a messiah--was subdued, if not basically suppressed, by the rabbinic sages. And this became a dominant cautionary note in rabbinic thought for centuries to come, extended not just to messianism but to mysticism in general...Reason became the keynote of Jewish religion, and though some of the rabbinic sages were themselves mystical practitioners, the Talmud certainly expresses strong caution against too much interest in mystical topics.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had had good reason for such caution. He had seen that excessive messianic faith had led the Zealots to challenge Rome, only to bring destruction on all of Israel. His is quoted in the Talmud as saying, "If you holding a sapling in your hand, and someone tell you the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go looking for the Messiah." 

Look to the Bloggers

 I'm not bright enough to come up with a solution to the Hamas-Israel war/conflict, nor to the issues that existed before their Cold War became a Hot one. I wish i could claim to have one, since nearly everyone does. But the simple truth is that I can't even be certain which side has the lesser guilt.

That may sound like a copout. But there is no dearth of people, politicians, journalists, commentators, who are full of certainty. I am just saddened by the incredible loss of life. The killing has been indiscriminate and however and by whomever it is done, the result is the same. 

For my information I go to the BBC and The New York Times but they only provide me with the number of deaths and how they were done. The ways citizens celebrating or sleeping in their beds were killed or the ways citizens with no connection except they lived where missiles and rockets were killed. What I'm more interested in is in the people who are doing what I would be doing in their place: Reflecting out into the world what is happening all around me and what it does to me.

What I've been doing is looking for bloggers who are live in Gaza and the Israeli cities being hit. Thought experiment: Imagine yourself living your life day to day and suddenly bombs begin falling and people start dying all around you. What would you have to say?

I'm not listing any of the bloggers I'm reading, Palestinian and Israeli, because I want you to find them the same way I did. At random and through a lot of trial and error. What you will find is a lot of anger, hatred, fear, frustration, thoughts of vengeance; And you will find thoughts of forgiveness, exhaustion, pride, compassion, hope. No one has a monopoly on those, and certainly no state or group. 

Fred Rogers used to say, "Look for the helpers." I would paraphrase that to say, "Look for the bloggers," especially the ones who live in the areas under attack. They are the ones bearing the brunt of what is being done and blasting out, as best they can, what they experience. If we want the human condition, we can do no better than look to the humans under bad conditions.