Lionesses' Teeth

 

This 2nd round of the trumpanista government, while it often leaves me depressed, has also roused in me the sensation about how important my religious faith is to helping people remember they're worthy, they're strong, and they can help. Thus, I'm reposting a sermon from 2013 which is also a reworking of a message from 2 years before that that focuses on those attributes we uniquely have and why they are necessary. (This post is so old that the technology taking people to associated websites will ask if going there is really what you want to do. I have checked them, and yes, they are safe."

   

“Lionesses’ Teeth”

 

Homily presented to the

Dakota UU Church of

Burnsville, MN,

 

            Normally during my celebration of Flower Communion my contribution is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  I use it because we all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

            We have yet to see them this year because of the incredibly late winter we’ve experienced—only a week ago my wife and I were stranded because our driveway had sixteen inches of snow unceremoniously dumped on it by whatever malevolent snow-god or whatever sleeping spring-god there might be —but I guarantee you they will be coming and they will be everywhere.  The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  They existed long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return to the dust they will continue to be here. 

The name “dandelion,” which I’d always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming vanity, actually comes from the French dents de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots, between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where no hearths have burned in decades.  They are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready, the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places.  Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred meters.  They do not need us at all.

            Dandelions are often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall bladder.  Its juices aids detoxification and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce eczema and cough and asthma.  The root can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable).  And most of us are of an age when we have had dandelion wine.

            Had Jesus been born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount might have included the following: 

Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

             Now don’t mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion.  I relish nothing more this time of year than to walk barefoot among my lawns, swiping the heads off these parasites with a few well-aimed kung fu kicks.  There is a deep, satisfying, bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from my gardens.  Few things are as pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my lawnmower.  I do not love the dandelion.  I tolerate the dandelion.

            Because, try as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as a part of my landscape.  I cannot escape its existence.  I mow and weed and even spray the lawns, and still they come back up.  That is their unique power. 

A story now, a contemporary one, about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions.  Our relationships with our mothers, with either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best.  I had what I think was a pretty good relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.  Those among us who are mothers or parents likely have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

            This week we saw the end of a news story that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  I refer of course to the story of the three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted nearly eleven years ago, the last of them nearly nine years ago, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their presumed kidnapper. 

            We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced over the past decade.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the six year old daughter of Amanda Barry and her captor, whose name has yet to be released, has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself will retain little memory of what her life to now has been. 

[Note:  In illustrating this post I purposely chose a photo in which her daughter's face is blurred.  There are many images available where it is not but I think she should be allowed as much privacy as possible.]

            There are so many things to be said about this situation, about the Castro Brothers’ activities and what they hoped to accomplish [update]; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical, emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood of a major American city and not in some Hills Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite what are supposed to have been multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about Charles Ramsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the right thing. 

            But what I’d like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter.  And how what little we know might suggest about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that a week ago today Ariel Castro left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  If he did this on a regular basis we don’t know, and if he didn’t why he chose this day to do it, no one apparently knows, but when he did Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the door as she could until someone responded.  Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man, who partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around, and after listening to her story that she was being held against her will kicked the bottom panel out of the door.  Berry, carrying her child, squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his house to use his phone, and then called police.

            Some of us might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be.  To make it more interesting we often presume that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically material question.  What thing would we save?  Amanda Berry did not have the luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved.  The material object she left with was her daughter.

             To put this decision in perspective, consider what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years.  Berry was just under seventeen when she was abducted.  After years of sex with her abductor and probably his brothers—we presume the middle brother, Ariel, is the abductor because it’s his house the women were found in but the abductor could be any of the brothers[see update above] or, worse yet, someone we’re not even aware of—she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark, airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future.  We don’t know if she wanted this girl or feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of others.  She may have wanted to abort the fetus, although we have heard suggestions from one of the the other women that Castro beat her when she was pregnant to spontaneously miscarry.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel, who DNA tests have proved to be the father, had a change of heart over this pregnancy and decided to allow it to be brought to term. 

            This girl, born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the company of the other two abducted women and the Castro brothers—what can be going through her head?  She is six years old, she has known only these six people in her life.  Two of them are her parents.  One of them carried her out of her world into the unknown, into what she can’t possibly know.  So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s daughter is experiencing now:  Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.

              It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother:  To deliver your child into great uncertainty and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty.  But that is what you must do. 

            It’s well known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness.  Perhaps the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency of entropy to crumble us from within. 

            Our message, the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals but necessities—must be heard.  We must endure for these messages to be heard.  We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from our perch.  We must be willing to grow quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned.  To endure as a faith and as a people we need to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion. 

Why I didn't end up in DC

It's a sort of a for-want-of-a-nail type story. Except in reverse. And not really about a nail, unless that's what the thing in the above photo started as. I expected to be in Washington, DC, for the Women's March the day after Trump's inauguration. I had the time off, I had a place to stay thanks to the UU congregation in the city.

But from the beginning it was almost as if I wasn't going to end up there. I planned to leave home around nine o'clock Friday, but I didn't leave the house until nearly eleven. My GPS had timed my drive at about thirteen hours, so that would put me in DC after midnight. Then as I was crossing the Chicago Skyway Bridge, a mere couple hundred yards from the Indiana border, my tire went flat. I spent roughly an hour on the Bridge changing the tire, which threw my shoulder out something fierce. I was successful, but then I had to get a new tire. A donut simply wasn't going to last from Chicago to DC. Waiting around for another tire and for it to be changed chewed up at least another hour.

I got back on the road, but shortly after leaving Gary, I was engulfed by fog, dropping visibility to nearly a half mile. By seven o'clock, I had only made Elkhart, Indiana, perhaps a third the distance I needed to cover. So I hedged my bets, decided my best option was to travel on straight to Pennsylvania to visit my father (my intent for the vacation anyway), contacted my host, and stopped for the night at a place on the Michigan border.

I called my wife this morning and told her of my divided sensibility, this feeling of wanting to be in one place but opting to be in another. But my wife, who likes to downplay her own wisdom, pointed out that my decision to visit my father was more what was necessary than another body at the protest. The elderly, she said, were among the most vulnerable of populations, and it's the vulnerable who need the greatest love and help during what will come. Wisdom, as I say.

So today I spent driving the rest of the distance, listening to the coverage on Sirius XM's Progressive 127. It was, in some ways, both an enjoyable and humbling experience. I was envious, looking at occasion at FB friends' pictures from their own marches, some in DC and some in other cities, feeling I was missing out, having given up an opportunity to be a part of history. But I was also made hopeful in new and unexpected ways by the numbers of people who were. Listening to the radio, songs playing on the radio seemed to me like messages of kismet from deejays: "Revolution" by the Beatles, "Evolve" by Ani DiFranco, "People Have the Power" by Patti Smith, "Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane, "Stand" by Sly and the Family Stone, "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" by both Tracy Chapman and Living Colour. I felt, if not the pangs of birth for a revolution, then the opening salvo across the bow of the Trumpocalypse.

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

TV dinners for xmas

A few days ago one of the residents at my CPE facility mentioned to me that his mother and most of his brothers were coming to visit on Christmas. “And they’re bringing TV dinners with them so the kitchen doesn’t have to cook for them.”

“TV dinners?” I said. “Was that a tradition at your house too? We used to have TV dinners every Christmas for dinner.”

He looked at me as if there were bugs crawling out of my nose.

“No,” he said slowly. “They just don’t want the kitchen to have to cook for them and TV dinners are easy to put in the dining room microwave.” He started to back his wheelchair up a little to get a better look at me. “My mom’s over 90 and I don’t think she wants to cook a big dinner anymore.”

My mom, on the other hand, never reached 90 but we ate TV dinners every Christmas as if it was a gift itself. The best part was that my sister and I got to choose two of whatever we wanted: her
taste ran to fried chicken because it came with a brownie, but I always chose two differing Asian dishes, Polynesian and Hawaiian. I loved the contrasting sweet and sour of them, the tastes of meat and fruit.

The official reason we ate TV dinners was so my mother didn’t need to cook a big meal on Christmas, but the truth is my mother never cooked a big meal on Christmas. I think we simply liked the ease and comfort food of TV dinners, which were the content of meals pretty regularly at our house, and wanted to extend that relaxation to Christmas, which for us was a really big day that involved watching parades, opening gifts, playing in the snow, watching my dad burn the wrapping and boxes in the fireplace, and drinking hot cocoa with little marshmallows.

cookies

you could get carpal tunnel waving to people in this town. I've been in the thick since 11 last night and it seems that, besides listening to my father tell me variations on the same local news he told me during my last visit here, is all I have been doing.

he's known here, though, and that's important to him. not as some local celebrity but as "uncle harold," a regular and constant, consistent presence in the village. I've written previously about the effect this has on him, this being acknowledged and recognized as a member of the community and that hasn't lessened with my mother's death, only increased. we sat tonight on the porch of the local store and I counted at least 2 dozen cars and trucks whose drivers lifted a hand at sight of my dad (not a one in the direction of my cousin or his wife, owners of the porch we sat on, and sitting on the other end; my dad remarked later on that, saying, "well, they don't wave or say 'hi' to any of those people so I don't know what they expect otherwise").

last night, before I arrived, his new neighbor got drunk and tried using the mailbox on the corner like an atm (or so my dad interpreted his shoving his bankcard in and quickly out several times) and before anyone else could see he brought him up onto the porch to sit and chitterchatter until he sobered, and failing that took his hand and walked him to his trailer where my dad called his wife out to take him inside, telling her he "ought to lie down for a while". today the neighbor came by with a sheepish look and a plate of stillwarm homebaked cookies.

at 1 point in my life I fantasized I could live in a village this tiny and empty. I don't know now if I could, but I could live with stillwarm homebaked cookies.

not drowning but waving

it's important to my dad to live in a place where people wave to him and he waves back. I don't think I'd realized this about him when I was younger, since we often lived in the country and when he went walking the only people who returned his waves were his immediate neighbors. but here in the thick to walk down the street with him or even to stop at the local cemetary to wander among the headstones is to see him constantly throw up one arm as a vehicle passes and to see the same response from the driver and passengers. I've met dozens of new people in passing who treat him as if he was a long-known beloved relative and I'm often regaled with the stories of kids and some adults who referred to my folks as aunt and uncle. I know that's a special comment on them but it's only recently that I've come to see how much it means to him.

my old man

in anticipation of father's day in a week, here's an essay I published 13 years ago. I was thinking about it this morning and thought it was time to trot it out.

My Old Man
by R.T. Bledsoe

I could kick him. Just a quick one to the shin would do it. Then a fast jab in
his ribs, and when he doubled over an elbow to the kidneys, and he'd be
down.

It'd be absurdly simple. There's no doubt I'm more imposing physically. My
old man portrays tall very well, and until my growth spurt last year I thought
him the tallest man in the world. But at twelve I'm taller and broader. In a
few years I'll play an undistinguished defensive position for the Taconic Hills Titans and
years after that I'll run distance races just for the love of motion.

There's an oak in the front yard next to the road, and it looks like the three of us are
lined up tallest to smallest for the bus: the oak, me and the old man. I could leave him
behind the oak and nobody'd be any the wiser.

It's hard to be cool when your father loves you. It isn't even some sick, incestuous
thing. Nothing that good. My old man loves me. He took me shopping for school at the
Government Exchange this year. I figure, here I'm twelve now, practically a teen, I think
I can choose my own clothes, just pay for them, thanks. But while I'm eyeing Levis and
fantasizing Laurie Gallop will take the hint and start calling me "stud," here he comes
with an extra large pair of Dickies, saying "These should fit, honey."

The bat at the counter looks to think that's the darlingest thing she's ever heard. I could
belt them both.

Other kids are lucky. My pal Pfeiffer doesn't even know where his old man is. He took
off after Pfeiffer was born. Bone is even luckier. Every couple weeks he gets on the bus
sporting a new shiner the size and color of an eggplant heel. Once he showed me a
cigarette burn on his shoulder.

"Wow," I breathed. "Did your old man really do that?"

"Yeah," he says. He's wearing the shirt with the burn hole still in it. He centers the burn
with the hole so it looks fresh. "We were watching SWAT and he tipped over to put out
his smoke. He was tanked and I was asleep leaning on the couch and he missed the
ashtray and got my shoulder."

Bone's old man works at the tire shop. His fingers are the shape of Oscar Meyer
weiners. I imagine they operate as individual hydraulic lifts. "How'd it feel?"

"It didn't hurt too much. It was kind of like when you get that booster shot with all the
pins. Only it burned after and it smelled funny. My old man put this stuff on it and kept
saying he was sorry." He rubbed the shoulder to put a red burnish around the wound
and then ripped the hole a little wider. "Don't tell anybody that last part, okay."

My old man is a banker. He might as well be an accountant. He wears ties and suits
and a too-large black coat when it rains or snows and a plaid fedora with a yellow
feather. He and Mother are teetotalers and most of their meals come out of boxes or
cans. They go to church sometimes but don't make a religion of it. About the only thing
my old man has in common with the fathers of my friends is that his old man used to
get tanked and beat the snot out of him too.

Lucky bastard.

The bus comes down the road. It stops at Russel's a half mile off. The old man says
"Have a good day, honey," and leans up to kiss my cheek.

On mornings like this I praise this oak to the skies. For two years it sheltered me while I
watched Kim Russel tanning. Last summer my old man caught me with his binoculars.
He didn't even bawl me out, just chuckled and said "well now."

I haven't been able to look at Kim since without blushing. Bone says she thinks I like
her but what could I do with a fourteen year old girlfriend? She's just watching material.

The old man runs into the house to lock up before he heads to work. In another two
years, when I have my ulcer and Dr. Bardwell, bless him, explains to my parents it's
caused by riding the bus, these goodbyes will be tendered in the privacy of his car after
he drives me to school. The old man will make himself ten minutes late every morning
in order that my ulcer doesn't worsen. Later, when my stomach gets better, it'll turn out
it really is from riding the bus. But for now Mother swears it's the horror comics the old
man buys for me.

I get on the bus. The coolest place to sit is on the back bench and Pfeiffer saved me a
spot. We trade comics weekly and today he's got a Swamp Thing to exchange for a
Tomb of Dracula. I hold out. Swamp Thing's lame. He throws in The Demon and I say
okay.

The bus rumbles on and maybe it's because I called his first offer lame that Pfeiffer
says, loud enough so everyone in the bus hears, "Hey, is that your dad following us?"
I turn around and sure enough there he is, less than five feet from the bumper. His
Monte Carlo looks like a Chihuahua sniffing a Doberman. It's winter and my old man is
a black crumple at the wheel. He's a plaid-topped nightmare.

I turn around. "No, man" I mumble. "That's not my dad, I don't even know where my
dad is, we think he's in Indiana somewhere, I don't know who that guy is--"

"Hey, he's blowing kisses, man!"

There's a blur and sixty kids pile into the back seat. My head sinks and it would hit the
floor if my hands weren't there to catch it.

I have to look.

Bone asks "Is your dad a fag, man?"

Because there's my old man in his feathered fedora puckering up and popping off a
couple good ones. I wonder if there's a shelter for kids who are too-loved. He smiles
and it makes him look like one of those insipid felt-covered dogs that sit in the rear
window of old people's cars and nod at anything. I hate him. I hate him the way
magnets hate each other, juttering away when you put the wrong end near them. I hate
him and he loves me as absolutely as metal filings love static.

Just before the bus turns left and he turns right, my old man waggles his fingers at me.
One hundred twenty two eyes look at me.

I wave back. What else can I do.

pennsylvania has a state smell

I've already come to the conclusion that my best strategy to make it through my time here is to treat it like jack kerouac did his stint on desolation mountain: simply to be here and take each day as it comes without noticing it much. as with every state, pennsylvania has a state bird and state flower and so on, but it also has a state smell, and on this edge of the thick it's burning garbage. fire regulations are laxer here--when we took my mother's leftover medications, several bags of prescriptions and vitamins and over-the-counter meds, to the pharmacy to have them disposed of they simply said, "burn 'em"--and it seems everyone takes a shift to burn something nettling. the smell too is thick here.

I'd forgotten my father's syntax which has also gotten thicker as he's aged: nearly every sentence has some variation of the king james phrase "took and went." "I took and went to the store." "I'll take and bring this over." "we'll take and send this in the mail." also, his use of the word "thing" as a synonym for any noun. "your sister and ken went to the thing." "jayne is in the bathroom cleaning the things." "I'll take and walk this thing over to my sister's for the thing." these may be symptoms of alzheimer's or they may simply be an extension of the way he's always talked.

my mother collected cherub paraphenalia and it's hard to turn around without bumping into a plaster statue or wall hanging or photo holder. her theology was simple--one acted in accordance with the wishes of god, although telling what those wishes are might be hard to decipher, and then one went to heaven where one spent eternity doing pleasurable things--and it was understood there was a heaven and a hell (although like universalists she didn't think god was much of one to actually damn anyone for eternity, just until he or she shaped up) and there was a god who could be known through christ and who operated supernaturally. she was a big one for the supernatural, both religious and secular. cherubs, angels, ghosts, poltergeists, spirits, premonitions, dreams, messages, visitations--all were on equal footing to her. she was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to fate magazine and read everything about edgar cayce as well as being a believer in whatever the weekly world news printed. what she was in addition to gullible was a beleiver in believing, and to the extent that belivers are also people who hope, we have that in common.

in the thick

my mother died in austin, pennsylvania, a place that almost isn't on the map. it seems that from the time she was born in the mid-1920s in shinglehouse, pa, she lived in places that were less and less visible from the interstates: whitesville, columbiaville, stottville, martindale, east taghkanic, and livingston, with a few exceptional bigger towns like mansfield and wellsville and hudson. she was a small town woman who spent all her life in places where, if they had a main street, people rode 4-wheelers up and down them all day, and the bar opened at 7 in the morning and stayed hopping until midnight. everybody tries to go home then cuz only the unemployed drink at the bar after midnight.

this is the kind of place I escaped from early on and have avoided ever since. I've been back here to visit at least once a year since they moved back 6 years ago, and when I got the telephone call from my dad at 5 o'clock this past sunday morning, I knew I'd be coming back for a while. the place is easy pickings to make light of: even the dogs here sport homemade tattoos and roll up packs of heaters in their shirtsleeves. we aren't on the rim of anything but in the thick of it all: thick air, thick trees, thick rocks, thick people. but my mom loved it and I love my mom.

but that's not why I'm here or not why I'm still here. I'm here because I love my dad too and these are his people now. they have taken him in like a lost starling. I could give a report of the trip out and the visitations and the funeral, but they were the same everyone experiences and there's nothing I could tell you that would be different than what you experience except with other people's faces. my mom's death was not tragic or unexpected. the rote comment I pair with handshakes is that it was "sudden but not surprising." my dad says he's lived with the notion for 14 years, ever since she was diagnosed with breast cancer. she's had at least 2 near calls in the ensuing years and we've all come to know what to expect.

here is what we've come to figure is what happened: she got up in the middle of the night to sit in a living room chair--a common event for her--and at some point stood and had a heart attack and died before landing on the floor. as these things go, it was a quick, painless death, the kind many of us, me included, could hope for.

so I am here for some weeks, in the thick of life, because this is what we do. we grow up, we move away, we start the life we want and we need, and then we find ourselves woken rudely by the news of death and we pack stupidly and rush back because no matter what we tell ourselves otherwise these are the people we really are. I am here for the immediate future because this is where I am.

alternatives to church

in place of going to services yesterday, I opted to relax at home with cousins of my wife. this has gotten me thinking about family, which is so important to them, and never has been for me. since our marriage I've been taken in by my wife's family to the point that I almost feel more tied to them than to my own blood, and while I know that's because of my own failure--after all, I'm the one who tended to disappear for months at a time without notifying anyone and show up unannounced in the middle of the night without having called and other suchlike--I also think somehow it's, well, "wrong" is the wrong word. "discomforting" might be closer.

I have a lovely pair of parents who are still alive and in reasonable health. they continue to live on their own with minimal help from my cousin and his wife (who own the house in which they live and have a small bait shop/grocery store across the road). my cousin, who I barely remember from childhood, asked them to come live in the tiny town of austin, pa, after his own mother, for whom he'd bought the house, was placed in a local nursing home.

my sister and her family are well and happy, for the most part, in rural ny, not many hours from where we grew up; and while we didn't get along too well as kids--we were each other's only playmate for years, and that can lead to intense closeness or intense hostility, with the focus in both instances on the intensity--we are better with one another as adults. I'm close with my niece, getting closer with my nephew, and reconnecting with my brother-in-law. I also have a first cousin about 50 miles north of my parents who I see each time I go out there and who has been a stable part of our lives since I was in my teens.

all in all, I'm discovering that family is becoming more familiar to me. I don't think it's from a sense of mortality since I've always been very aware of my own, although an argument can be made, given the rapid slide of my father-in-law's health, that I'm becoming more aware of other people's. I willingly spent my weekend playing games with jayne's cousins' kids and sitting quietly in a hammock listening to the older one as she told me about her summer and her concerns (they're exactly what you expect a 10 year old to be concerned with); and while I've always loved to drink and share time with the adults, this time it seemed a little holier, as if we'd reached a place where we had found a place to which we can return at will. I'm not entirely sure how to say that, not sure I have the language to do so. I've talked for years about making a space a holy place through honoring one another in it, but I think I'm beginning to understand what that feels like on more secure footing.