"This only gets you this"

 

I remember when RFK and MLK, Jr were shot. I was 3 at the time so I don't recall JFK's assassination but I do recall the surprise I felt at the realization it had happened in my lifetime. I remember George Wallace being shot, and Jerry Ford, and John Lennon, and later Ronald Reagan. Any time violence mars the political or cultural dialogue, it's a blow against the safety we all take for granted.

Now Donald Trump has been shot at. I say "shot at" because, even after 2 days of reporting, I have yet to discern whether he was hit by a bullet or a shard from the screen behind him. It doesn't ultimately matter because the fact remains he was shot at, and this is something we can't dismiss.

Let me first reiterate, as someone else has, that the notion this was a false flag operation by his own personnel is absolutely ridiculous because there is no way anyone would sign off on putting himself in immediate danger like this. Whether it was a bullet or plastic that struck and bloodied his ear, any nearer and we would be talking about an assassination rather than an attempt. 

Trump's raised-fist response in some photos is legitimate and I'm willing to allow he is braver or at least appears so in the clutch than I would have thought (and maybe even more so than I would be). That wouldn't make him any better a president than he was before and it doesn't change any of the wrongs he's done. It makes for a great picture, is all. Let him have it.

Here is the thing. When we move from rhetoric to violence, as has happened, it diminishes us all. It says we have given up that, in MLK's words, "the arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice." If we would be content, we can't allow anger with one another, distrust in one another, or violence against one another to dictate how we behave toward one another. 

Neither should we forget Corey Comperatore, who was struck by a bullet while shielding his family, and killed, or David Dutch or James Copenhaver, both of whom were struck and hospitalized. And we shouldn't forget Thomas Matthew Crooks, who for reasons we can't begin to guess at decided to join the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, Lynette Fromme, Mark David Chapman, and John Hinkley. 

At some point, frustration and rage can flare into the certainty that "I must do something, no matter who it hurts." Before any of us reaches that state, we need to recognize that it's never the right response. The right response is long, arduous, exhausting work that can't take the shortcuts provided by a fist or a knife or a gun or a bomb. President Biden put it well in his address after the shooting: “In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box... Not with bullets." But perhaps Norman Lear's All in the Family put it more succinctly when the actor Gregory Sierra, playing a Jewish vigilante, tells Rob Reiner's Mike that, "One day you're gonna find out this [making Reiner's hand into a fist] is the only answer." Mike tells him he's wrong "because this [making another fist] only gets you this." 

the world tree and my dad

In sorting through boxes of photos last Wednesday searching for pictures of my dad I realized I have hundreds of photos of the outdoors and dozens of crooked, gnarled trees. I guess I have an affinity for them, which makes my walk up to this one outside Coudersport a pilgrimage. The invention of camera phones has made it unusual, I think, to look at old photos as usual process except, as in this case, when we sort through them for pictures of someone to illustrate one of those posterboard collections to put on stands at someone's funeral. 

Dad died a week ago this afternoon. It was, as I understood it, a peaceful death. I'm told by the caregivers at his nursing facility, who were taking turns watching over him, that one minute he was breathing and the next he was not. I was with him the week before, having driven out with my wife. The weekend before that he had experienced a seizure of some sort that, after tests came back negative for all sorts of guesses, they determined was yet another stroke, maybe strokes. He lost his gag reflex, at least for a while, and hadn't eaten or drank in several days. We knew this would be our last opportunity to see him. 

It was a good week. Dad had always been a nervous, anxious kind of man, but now he was relaxed, calm, at peace. He looked out at the world with the soft eyes I associate with someone in meditation. We spent hours daily with him. His ability to swallow returned, so when he asked for something to eat he could have a few small spoontips of applesauce followed by a few sips of orange juice thickened with nectar. We placed him on hospice, knowing that this wouldn't be enough to sustain him long. He recognized me by name the afternoon we arrived, and my wife by name (although he hadn't seen her in 6 years) the next morning. My sister was there and he sometimes recognized her, sometimes didn't. That was usual, this sometimes-knowing, sometimes-not. He could only croak out a couple words at a time, usually "good" when asked how he felt, "I should get up" when he was tired of lying in bed and wanted to sit at the nurses' station or one of the visitors' lounges to see people. We left him on a Thursday morning, knowing it was the last time we'd see him alive. 

After the phone call, I began planning my drive out for his funeral. Fortunately, we had already made arrangements for that and dad himself had already written his obituary. Dealing as I do with death on a more or less daily basis, I can attest to the help that planning out one's service is to one's survivors. It's not so much that we don't have the time or inclination to plan these things after a loved one's death, but we are experiencing grief and that can suck up so much brainpan activity that, if it's possible to do so, planning everything out in advance not only is easier but ensures what someone would like is going to happen. 

The events of my return to The Thick, dad's memorial and interment, my time spent with my sister and her family as well as cousins, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly 4 decades, the drive there and then the drive home, and the reconnection with my wife and animals, all that is personal and banal at best. If you haven't experienced something similar, you will. 

I'd rather talk about this tree. It sits on a hill outside the town where dad spent his last years, about a half hour's walk from the motel I frequented all these years, and something of a fixture of the many walks I took while visiting him. A couple decades ago I wrote, in relation to hiking, how for many wanderers in the woods there is a tree that he or she feels drawn to, a touchstone maybe, or a companion they can feel comforted by seeing. Sharing one's tree with others is like sharing one's personal name for God with them. In my very romantic view of my own death, I will somehow peacefully expire laid out beneath one of my trees, looking up into their old, gnarled branches and seeing something like eternity or redemption. In reality, of course, that's unlikely. But just in case, I choose a tree everywhere I go. Just in case. 

The ancient Norse had their concept of Yddrasil, the World Tree, and there isn't much I have adopted from them but I do like this idea. It's reminiscent of the interconnectedness of everything, the reliance on everything else that each individual has. In this view, old and gnarled trees are to my father as they are to my own sense of my mortality (as well as my wish for how my mortality plays itself out). At one time in my life, I cherished the notion that my ultimate reincarnation would be as a tree on a cliff. In reality, it's nice to think of, and it's nice to think my dad may have had such a profound life that he's earned a turn as a sequoia or a fir. But it's as unlikely as anything else, or as likely as anything else, and I suppose what's important is that, if I think of my dad or myself as a tree, it only means I think that being one is better than being a person. 

What the Beloved Community is

It is a concept embraced by, but not created by, Dr ML King, Jr, an idea that in the radical community of people inspired by God (and for King, the words of Jesus), there is no hate, no poverty, no separation between what we can be and what we are. In this wild inclusivity, a person doesn't just look out for himself but for everyone, knowing that all people are also him.

Here are some examples. In this first one, from 2017, it's the efforts, first of the two men who lift up a woman who is nearly on her face in the final yards of a half-marathon in Philadelphia (!). They each take an arm, effectively ending the times most marathoners care about and need to keep up if they want to submit for longer marathons, and walk her together toward the finish. I think it's clear that for her, it isn't the time that's important, it's the completion that's important. But finally her legs are just too weak and buckle and it's at this point another man, yards ahead, stops, turns around, and scoops her up to carry her there.

In the second, from earlier this year, a teen waitress is rewarded for helping a customer eat his breakfast. It isn't the proclamation by the town's mayor of "Evoni 'Nini' Williams Day" or the gratefully accepted money to help her with tuition that's an example from the Beloved Community because there wouldn't be a reason there for those things. It's in the simple, unselfconscious act of Evoni Williams, at the customer's request, of reaching across the counter and cutting his meat for him, the way billions of fathers and mothers have done for their children. It isn't an infantilizing gesture and Williams doesn't seem embarrassed by the request. Presumably, in her mind and in Adrien Charpentier's mind, it is what people ask for and do in the Beloved Community.

Visiting Dad, Coda

I left Pennsylvania this morning after seeing Dad one more time. He surprised me by waiting for me  at the end of the hallway furthest from his room. He was concerned, he said, about my traveling in the snow (it had snowed a few inches in the night and morning) and he wanted me to get an early start. So I told him I loved him, kissed him goodbye, and took off after gassing up and getting a large coffee for the road.

It used to be that I would go a year or more between visits to my parents, months between phone calls. Before she died, I used to call my mother a couple times a week. Now I call Dad once a week and drive out to visit him at least twice a year. I can't say this change in visitation is in response to a greater realization of their mortality, because I've always been aware of mortality, theirs, others, and my own. I have a relationship with death and dying that is visceral and I am, in most cases, comfortable with it. I didn't cry when my mother died, not because I didn't love her, because I certainly did, but because I always knew she would die. This doesn't, of course, stop my tears in the case of some others.

When my father dies, I'll feel, as with my mom, a sense of loss, but not a sense of missed opportunity. I'm glad to have the chance to see him, and glad that my relationship with him has changed for the better. I'm unsure what to ascribe this change to, maybe it's a change brought about by change itself. But I'm thankful for the change.

Visiting Dad, Day 7

This was my last day on this trip visiting Dad. It was a good day, although we didn't do much talking. Like the last couple days, he dropped off and on asleep for the length of my time there, which is an average of four hours each day. I read my book, I do my crosswords, sometimes I fall asleep myself for a little while. What stood out today was that he didn't have a sun-downing episode at three or at any time I was there. He woke the longest about four until I took him to dinner, and during it he knew who I was. And while he didn't seem to know how long I'd been visiting him, he knew I was returning home soon.

This is a photo I took today while he was alternately sleeping and watching out the window. He is relaxed and meditative. This is a relatively recent situation. I'm a child of the late 60s and 70s, a generation that focused on its feelings and ethics, looking at ways we should get in touch with what and who we are. I fear, however, that the epithet that we were the Me Generation is accurate, because it was our own feelings, and sometimes those of our peers, that we were interested in. Had someone asked me then what feelings he was in touch with, "relaxation" and "meditation" are not words I would have used. I know that in my own case I have become more relaxed, at least most of the time, than I was when younger and learning meditative techniques. My dad of course would not know asana from prana (and would skew up his face at the words, saying "What's that?"), and yet here, in his 80s, I would say he's more poised and relaxed than I can pretend to be.

Visiting Dad, Day 6

The reason I never give up hope is that everything is so basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything--the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the hearts of our families, the animal confusion within us; the madness of King George. But when you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it's not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood or chosen; at church for me; and at peace marches.

--Anne Lamott, Small Victories

Seeing dad today was good and different. Good because he was in a very good mood, different because I realized his desire to sleep most of the day has become central to his life. This wasn't a new realization, as I recognized the importance of sleep to him last week. No, I think the important thing was my discovery that this is primarily his life. It's not a bad life, I think he's as content as he's ever been. But I think too that I'm finding that I need to not only to accept it but to live with it as well as he has. I must be as all right with his life and the way he lives it as he is. Can I be? Yes, I will have to be.

Visiting Dad, Day 4

Today went well but didn't have much going on. Dad was in bed napping when I arrived and woke after about a half hour. He spoke for a while, and then drifted to sleep off and on. Much of the time when he wasn't sleeping he lay on his back watching the birds, mostly nuthatches and chickadees, eat from the feeder outside his window. When I'd filled it I'd also strewn seed along the window sill. He'd grin and say, Oh!, when a dark head popped up and seemed to peek in at us.

About 330 he woke up again, this time saying, Did you tell me my brother Georgie died? Yes, Dad, I said. So that means there's only two of us left? Two out of six? It's just me and Carroll. Yes, Dad, you and Carroll are the only two left. He laid back again and said, Oh, Carroll, I don't know. It's so hard.

I said, I know it's hard, Dad. But I'm Bobby, not Carroll. He leaned up on one elbow. You're not Carroll? No, I'm Bobby. Your son, Bobby. You're Bobby? You're not Bobby. Yes, Dad, I'm your son, Bobby. You're sure? Yes, Dad, I'm sure.

That's when he laid back down again and said, Oh, Bobby, I don't know. For the rest of our afternoon he knew who I was.

Visiting Dad, Day 3

I like Anne Lamott books. The first I read was Bird by Bird, which is an excellent book about writing and one I really enjoyed. Her books I read most, and find most enjoyable, are her religious books. Traveling Mercies, Plan B, Grace (Eventually). These have not only given me comfort but have resonated with what Mary Oliver has called "the soft animal" in me.

This interests me from a separate perspective, because Lamott professes to a Christianity I'm not entirely comfortable with. It is, to be sure, a liberal Christianity but focuses too much on a personal interaction with God as well as an insistence on Jesus' divinity and, frankly, on her own history of drug and alcohol overuse as both the way she came to religion and the reason she continues, as if a missed daily prayer might be replaced by a shot of vodka.

But that's my issue and not hers. So I have been reading Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace while sitting with Dad since he spends most of the hours I'm with him sleeping. Today, I sat with him while he slept for an hour and then joined my cousin for a care conference about him. There wasn't much of anything new to be learned. He continues to decline, has gained and lost about ten pounds since I saw him last, and is continuing to lose his recognition of people close to him (although he also regains it, at least with me, by being with him). He has at least two urinary tract infections each year, which according to the RN, may be caused by his having been colonized by UTI bacteria, so that infection is more his regular state than noninfection.

No one, least of all my dad, thinks he will "improve" or "get better." We are all aware, at least intellectually, that we will reach his same state. Dad, so far as I'm aware, has never been unaware of this. My cousin recounted how he will sometimes cry, saying he wishes he had a gun and could be done with it all, and he said the same to me at one point this afternoon. It's not a sentiment I'm unfamiliar with, not having felt it myself (not yet, anyway), but something I've heard from slowly dying patients. But as I read in Small Victories, "Redefinition is a nightmare--we think we've arrived...and that this or that is true. Then something happens that totally sucks...and it is like changing into clothes that don't fit, that we hate. Yet the essence remains. Essence is malleable, fluid. Everything we lose is Buddhist truth--one more thing that you don't have to grab with your death grip, and protect from theft or decay. It's gone. We can mourn it, but we don't have to get down in the grave with it."

Visiting Dad, Day 2

Today I saw Dad at 10 this morning but he was asleep and stayed that way for the 20 or so minutes I remained with him. I left a note for him, saying I'd be back at 1:30. When I returned, he was awake and being wheeled to a bingo game. We sat in the little soda shop at the end of the hallway. In contrast to how he was yesterday, he wasn't sure either who I was, and as I realized a little later, who he was. He did ask whether I was his son, and I told him yes. He asked more questions about his brothers (I had told him yesterday his next eldest brother had died last year, which his daughter, my cousin, had told him shortly after the event but didn't think he'd understood), and finally asked, Are you Harold? I said, No, you're Harold. I'm Bobby, your son.

We were offered sherbet and he ate about half the cupful. It seemed to make a change in him; he had been itching and when I came back with lotion from his room, he called me Bobby and said he was tired and wanted to lie down. I agreed, but said first we should look at the bingo game. We did; he said he'd still like to lie down. On our way to his room, two RNs asked him to walk for a bit with his walker. Dad agreed, reluctantly. He stood with help and used the walker to walk, slowly and with some pain, about 15 or 20 yards down the hallway. I told him I was very proud of him and he said, My legs hurt. So I took him to his room, helped him into bed, and he sank into deep slumber. But before he did he reached out for my hand.

Visiting Dad, Day 1

He didn't recognize me last night when I arrived.

My dad has been in a nursing facility for nearly three years, since he had his first series of strokes a few years after my mother died. I get out here in the Thick a few times a year in order to visit him. In addition to his illness he also has a mass growing on his brain, which may or may not be cancerous. It's not in his best interest, at his advanced age and physical frailty, to have it surgically looked at or removed, so his dementia, which is advancing and may or may not be connected to the mass, takes from him small bits of memory and control daily.

I last visited him early last summer, before my detached retina limited my ability to travel, and planned to visit again in late November for two weeks. However, I've been covering two regions since September when another chaplain left, and so there was no one to cover my vacation. So I have waited until January to come here. I'm here for two weeks and may take note of each day or I may not. Like so much of life after a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal illness, I will take it all a day, even an hour, at a time.

To be fair, he had been asleep when I arrived, although per his aides, he had been talking with them about my visit all day. But he looked at me like he might look at any stranger who showed up in his room and it took at least fifteen minutes and several hints before he said my name himself. Even then, he seemed unable to accept or understand that I was there. But he let me help him back into bed and kiss him and tell him good night, and he said he loved me too.

I left a note beside his bed telling him when I would return today, a practice I learned helps lessen his anxiety and confusion as to whether I had been there or he was dreaming, whether I was returning, or if I had gone home yet. I went back there at one this afternoon. He was asleep again--as he's aged he spends a lot of time sleeping--and woke immediately when I touched his arm and said his name. This time he not only knew me, said my name at once, and struggled to sit up. I helped him sit up and then to make it into his wheelchair.

I asked if he wanted to go to the hallway to look out the window and talk, but he shook his head and said, Stay here. So for the next couple hours we sat in his room together, sometimes talking, more often just sitting quietly. Occasionally we both fell asleep for a bit, after which when he woke he asked me to help him into bed again. He lay there, falling asleep a few more times while I sat in the chair next to his bed reading.

Finally, we had the period I'd hoped for. He woke, looked at me, grinned like he used to, and hit my arm on that side, saying, You! Then he talked about growing older and getting sicker and how difficult it was. I'm tired, he said. I'm tired. I knew he meant more than just at the moment. It's the same "I'm tired" I've heard from dozens of hospice patients. "I'm tired of suffering indignities, I'm tired of pissing and shitting in my pants, I'm tired of living life a few waking hours at a time." I told him I figure I'll say the same when I'm his age and he grinned again, like he used to, and said, Yes, you will.

It was a good conversation for the little while it lasted, maybe ten minutes, and then he drifted off again. But before he did I told him I'd come back in the morning and spend time with him again.

I don't want to be in charge

I've spent the week in The Thick visiting my dad at his nursing facility, and while I'm here my wife has been having difficulty dealing with the Tall Kid, our foster son. According to her, one of the things he's told her several times has been, "Well, Bobby lets us [whatever it might be he wants to do and she doesn't want him to]. He doesn't have an issue with it."

So naturally relationships between fathers and sons has been on my mind.

She's right when she suggests I'm inconsistent in disciplining him. This is a part of why I've never wanted kids: I can be quite consistent when I'm working, say, with teenage boys and girls because it's only for a number of hours a day, and then I go home and I don't have to care about them. When I'm home, I don't want to be in charge, I want to drink a couple beers and read a book and go to bed. In my defense, I knew going into this situation that could not be how things happened, but I didn't really think much about it.

But I can't be like my dad who, for all his plusses, was not much of a disciplinarian or involved in my day to day life when I was a kid. My mother was easily the primary fount of good and bad behavior, punishment and praise, in the lives of my sister and I. When she was disappointed or angry, or proud or happy, we were aware of it. She was a larger-than-life personality, a Mama Rose without the pathetic demands for attention or the murder accusation. I think I was, somewhere in the back of my brainpan, under the impression I could count on the same happening as a foster dad.

Since my mom died my dad has played a larger role in my life than ever before. One of the things he's done of which I'm proudest is to have been the priary caretaker for my mom the last decade and a half of her life. A favorite memory from those years is his gently tugging a scarf around her neck and making certain her shirt collar was comfortably inside the scarf, reminiscent of my own actions readying residents of group homes where I worked for winter walks. After his retirement as a banker, my dad spent several years volunteering at the same sort of group homes, often doing overnights, work he has since said he wished had been his career.

The Tall Kid lives for basketball and I am watching a WNBA game, part of my determination to watch as many games as I can because I want to appreciate his playing and I want to share that appreciation with him in his language. This is another difference between me and my dad, who never tried to be a part of my life outside (or, so far as I could see, inside) our home. I don't know this will make me a better dad than him, I don't think about it that way. I like to think, since I'm not his father, this will make a difference as the Tall Kid matures.

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

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.

blackberries

my wife would doubtless argue the point--and there's some validity to her argument--but I like to think of myself as the neal cassady of my generation, both in my ability to drive just about anything I put my mind to (herein lies where she would argue) and my assertion that I was born to drive.  I am on my now-annual visit to my dad out in the thick of things, where the thickness has actually lessened it seems.  there is no one burning garbage nearby, and while the humidity is high and the heat the consistency of taffy, it is bearable.

my drive was good, having decided to put off my leaving until evening to take advantage of the coolness of night driving, and because there would be nothing to see at night, deciding to take the interstate system the full length of the way.  normally, I tick off in my head the pros and cons of each roadtrip I make, and on this one I jotted them down on a slip of paper in the final hours.

as usual, I have a number of pros and a single con, so I will get that out of the way.  the one minus is the abominable sweet potato frenchfries I "treated" myself to at a burger king at the commodore perry service station east of toledo, ohio.  they were a greasy, sublungate, shoestring-thin mass of unctousness that sat in my belly like a hot, hairy dog for hours.  I will not bother with them ever again.

the best part of my trip also involved food, and that was eating fistfuls of blackberries and raspberries that I had picked from the thorny vines around the house and garage in the days before leaving.  they were small but fat with juice and each squirt was deliriously delicious and my fingers looked bloody by the time I got here.  I drove leisurely although I also arrived a day earlier than I'd expected:  even using the interstate I planned to stop at a mall or library to nap and rest and so avoid using my air conditioning (I have an inbred dislike of using a/c, as it seems a rich man's thing), but midafternoon yesterday I decided it was too hot to stand on principle, and besides I saw a fellow whose car had a sign advertising his "rent a rambling naturalist" business who was using his, and decided it was elitist of me to refuse if he was doing it, and so I pushed on and arrived in pennsylvania a little under 25 hours after I'd left the rim.  I love the opportunity while driving to smoke and ruminate and listen to the radio, and while I've always had a soft spot for elton john's song "tiny dancer" (with which I have always associated ohio), hearing it no fewer than 4 times in less than 14 hours can try a man's soul.

the pantisocratic pirates, part 1

"At first it was the Tesrifati's own shadow. Some strage refraction of the nowhere-light had thrown a dark double of his vessel off to port. Then it was his imagination, an image rising out of the silent hypnotic hours, now redoubted and returning. And then it was a black ship bearing down on him out of the fog. Hamit turned and began to shout. A dark form was running alongside his ship, the angle of coincidence so narrow it must have been there for hours. Hamit scrambled down ladders, through hatches, along gangways, shouting, cuffing the heads of the crew. None of the guns were primed. He could hear water rushing in the channel formed between the hulls. Two or three of the men were stirring themselves. Hamit...saw the black ship loom out of the fog to fill the gunport. He was hammering down the powder, tamping the ball. Lining the wales of the black ship from prow to stern were faces withered with age. Two crewmen were pulling at his arms. He pushed them away. The ship was almost on him, filling the sky, blotting out the fog, huge and black as night. He lit the taper. The crewmen were shouting at him, moving backward. Hamit touched the fuse and turned to see them running away from him with their hands to their heads, away from the cannon. The fuse hissed, he heard the first grappling hook fall with a thud on the deck above. Then the cannon exploded.

"From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound, and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the 'walls' and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space before landing on the deck of the Tesrifati's aggressor. He heared voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realized belatedly, and then the ships were free of each other. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars, and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew, and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prized off and a croaking voice above him said, 'Aha!' before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposti him on the deck. Crumpled, racked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

"'I am Wilberforce van Clam,' he told the disheveled heap. 'Welcome aboard the Heart of Light.'

"The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

"Aboard the Heart of Light, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not a one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

"'Take some tea.' He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. 'Wilkins!' he shouted. 'A cup for our guest, if you please!'...Wilkins, a spry sixty-year-old with a long white mustache, jumped to the task.

"'You are...pirates?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

"'Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren't we, lads?'

"'Oh yes!' came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

"'But we're Pantisocratic Pirates,' Wilberforce van Clam went on. 'We never really wanted to be pirates at all.' He paused and sipped his tea. 'It's society made us what we is now.'

"'Society?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. 'But how?'

"'Aha!' said Wilberforce for the second time that day. 'Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!'

"And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates."

--from Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk

I have been reading this book for a little over a year and a half, having come across it for a dime at a library book sale in rural pennsylvania. I've read a lot of negative reviews but I have to say I am on the side of the faction that argues it's worth the staying with. it's got many red herrings and sometimes lapses into strange digressions in the middle of a sentence, but on the whole it's been worth the time it's taken to read it. the parts I'm posting today and tomorrow are a little better than 2/3s through the novel, and remind me of some of terry pratchett's discworld, and wilberforce van clam himself has made me think of cohen the barbarian.

part 2, the story of the pantisocratic pirates, tomorrow.

if this paper is wet

most of my writing the past few days has been of little interest outside a very narrow audience. (really. locating proof of the jewishness of the author in the 1st 2 chapters of the book of luke.) but I have also been writing yesterday's sermon on the topic of forgiveness, particularly apt since rosh hashanah begins in a few days, after which is yom kippur. on my way into the hub to deliver the sermon I realized the congregation, like most uus conversational under the least circumstances, would want to gnaw at the topic like it was a bone, so I cut about a page from it so we would have a 25 minute congregational dialogue. I've marked those incisions with brackets.

“If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad”
A Sermon Delivered to DUUC,
Burnsville, MN, on September 25, 2011

This past July I drove out to Pennsylvania to spend some time with my dad. Having most of the summer free I avoided the Eisenhower Interstate system in favor of the old interstates and back roads. While there I drove out to my sister’s place in southwest New York and the Hudson River Valley where I grew up and then back out west toward Jamestown to meet up with my wife who was flying into Cornell to share my final week with my dad. Together we took another two days driving home.

What I noticed more than anything else on that long, circuitous route was the number of homes for sale and houses that have been abandoned. And not all of them were on the typical Hooterville-type roads that may have been paved at one time but now the only remnant of that is the occasional even patch where if you’re driving a car rather than a truck it might bottom out because the road has washed out lower than the transmission is slung. These were state and county roads that were in very good shape, where the bracken on either side is cut low and the signs are all new. I counted hundreds of such houses—all right, “counted” is not accurate because I didn’t count—but it’s fair to say I noticed what must have been hundreds of such places.

We live about five miles outside the little town of Baldwin, Wisconsin, where I’ve noticed that along the back roads between town and our house there are five homes for sale and four abandoned houses. You know the kind of places I mean by “abandoned.” A home up for sale, besides the telltale sign, often has the lawn cut and the hedges trimmed and all the buildings are in fair shape. Sometimes there’s a welcoming wreath on the front door and a nice little landscaped garden in the yard. An abandoned house can often be seen from the road only by a corner or a sagging porch end jutting out of the greenery. The grass has grown as tall as the top of the porch and the trees have shouldered together to keep the place seluded. Where I come from back east it’s not unusual to see large patches of fields where the farmers don’t plow because of variations in the terrain, but in this part of the country wherever there’s a clump of trees in a field or a flat place it surrounds a weathered empty house or the foundation of one. Sometimes in the winter in an area you’ve just moved to the bare branches uncover one of these places and on your drive home one night you’ll say, “I never knew that place was there.”

As a thought experiment I started keeping track of homes for sale and abandoned houses within a five-mile radius around our house but I gave up when I reached thirty-five. Perhaps the most disturbing part was the number of homes for sale where the house is still being kept up but the sign proclaiming it available and giving contact information is itself obscured by weeds or branches or overgrown by grass and shrubs, as if the owner has given up hope and is only willing to keep up part of the pretence that someone driving by might want to buy it.

It’s a sad time in this country, we all know that. [In some ways it strikes us as a sadder time than ever before even when we remember the turbulent 60s or 30s or even if we reread our history and recall the 1850s and the Civil War. Sadness is often the emotion of the day. We read about young girls sexually abused and murdered and we say, “that’s so sad.” We read about men, high on amphetamines or cough syrup, or women on crystal meth and with nothing left to lose, provoking a standoff with police and pretending they’ve got a weapon or threatening a cop with a car, and the official gun comes out and ends their miserable life and we say, “that’s so damn sad.” Everything around us seems so rotten and people seem hopeless and, well, it seems as if there’s nothing we can do that can make it better. ]

The title of my sermon is “If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad,” and some of you might recognize that as a quote from a recent sad story. It’s one of the messages Steven Cross, a divorced, unemployed man with a young son, left his 11 year old boy in a note the morning he disappeared. Let me remind you a little of that story. It’s a local one so you might have heard it. Sebastian Cross is an 11 year old boy who woke one morning back in July to discover that his dad, architect and single father Steven Cross, had left him alone in the house with two letters. One, addressed to Sebastian, explained that Steven had left for good, and directing the boy to the home of a neighbor and good friend, to whom the other letter was addressed. Sebastian’s letter included this heartbreaking sentence, “If this paper is wet, it’s because I’m crying so bad” as well as the astonishing news that his mother, whom the boy had not seen since he was 2 after which Cross explained she had died from cancer, was in fact alive.

Sebastian’s mother, now known as Katik Porter, had never expressed interest in contacting either of them and her whereabouts at that time were unknown. To be fair, Porter, who has a history of substance abuse and arrest, has since reemerged and asked to be a part of the boy’s life.

In his letter to Sebastian, Cross explained that things were mighty bad and had been for a long time. Cross had been out of work for a while, had been the subject of several litigations by former clients, and his financial problems had been accruing since at least 2007. A bank was scheduled to foreclose on the house they lived in. In booking photos since police discovered him in Cambria, California, Cross looks like a shell-shocked 60 year old for whom the world has turned out to hold more misery than he’d been told it would. After spending a month living out of his car in various California towns, Cross had finally found work at a deli where he was known as a tall-talker for the stories he told employers and co-workers. Doug Lindsey, co-owner of the deli, has said, “It’s a horrible situation…It’s just a sign of the times.”

It is, isn’t it, a sign of the times? Cross has explained his leaving Sebastian as his attempt to keep the boy from seeing the father homeless and destitute. Most of us in this room are fortunate enough not to have to leave behind our kids and our homes in order to start new and better lives. But the chances are that we know someone, maybe intimately, children or friends, only a step or two away from feeling that packing it in, packing up, and walking away is the only honorable solution left. Who is only a paycheck or a job or a marital argument away from that home becoming empty, the grass growing chest-high, the trees slowly merging as if hiding from the world the shame of someone’s failure.

What do we do with those people? And by “those people,” of course, I mean us. Because much as we might think ourselves outside that demographic, if nothing else the current economic collapse, often referred to as the worst in American history since the Great Depression, is a visceral reminder for many of us that we are not that secure in our fortunes. It can take only the loss of a job, of an income, the closing of a place of business, to break out the sweat on our foreheads and make us start to look around wildly for what we can jettison from our lives, the boat or the motor home or the cable connection, the weekly dinner out, the new clothes, the
Christmas or birthday presents, the relationship, what we can do without to keep the wolf from the door another couple weeks.

The other day I had a knock at my door but it wasn’t the wolf. It was one of my neighbors come to ask a favor. Dennis, who looks and sounds like the Canadian actor Graham Greene, is a farmer about three miles to our west and he’d had four stray dogs show up on his property that week in sets of two. The dogs had obviously been cared for and he could see the outline of collars on each neck, although there were no collars on any of them when they appeared in his fields. He already has four dogs and they weren’t getting along with the new ones. He surrendered them to another farmer—our township long ago eliminated the budget for an animal control officer after the county pet shelter also went belly up, and the farmer, who is also the township’s council chair, has been the unpaid acting officer for years, holding strays in one of his barns—but they were scheduled to be shot in a few days if no one claimed them. Would we be willing, Dennis asked, to hold them at our place until he could find adopters?

I want to note this happens, abandoning dogs, in our area often. We’re a couple miles off I-94 and there are wide stretches of roads where no one can see anything you do. It’s not unusual on my daily walks during spring thaw to find deer carcasses some hunter has thrown into a ditch after cutting off the antlers and choice pieces of meat, leaving the head and legs and guts for my dogs to discover. Just the week before last my largest one found where another person, probably after having cleaned his freezer, had dumped about five pounds of uncleaned pond fish by the side of the road. They had bloated and exploded in the sun and the smell tickled his nose a lot earlier than it did mine.

Last year my wife and I were walking our dogs, including the lab we found curled in a tiny broke-leg lump on the side of the road nine years ago, on the trail near our house. There had been flooding that spring that took out a bridge and we used that as a turnaround for our walks. A large brindle-colored dog bounded across the creek and joined us and after he and our dogs sniffed one another, joined us in heading home. He had no collar but he was in good shape and we assumed he was a local dog we hadn’t seen. As we got nearer home and nearer the main road, I was nervous about him following us onto the highway, so I stayed with him and Jayne took our dogs home and came back with a car so we could take him back to his home. He bounded in the back and we drove from neighbor to neighbor, asking if he was theirs or if they knew where he belonged. About five stops in, we realized he had been abandoned.

We couldn’t take him in so we contacted Jim, the farmer who’s also the council chair, and he said we had about four days to find him a place. This story has a happy ending. We put photos of him on Facebook that night and within a couple hours our friend Liz, who’d only the week before lost a local election and whose own dog had been killed the previous year by a car, contacted us to say that now she had the time and energy available to take him in. Liz drove over to Jim’s with my wife the next day and they had cartoon hearts coming out of each other’s eyes on meeting one another. His name is Murphy now and we get regular updates and photos showing how well he’s doing.

They don’t all have happy endings. Jim has had to shoot ten dogs already this year. Dennis didn’t want to make it fourteen if he could help it. I said yes, we’d find some way, and he said he had a couple leads but wanted to have a backup plan. He called me that night to say he’d found placements for three of them and then called the next morning to say he’d found a place for the last one. But he’s keeping my number on speed dial, he said, because he expects the situation will happen again soon.

[We figure, by the way, there are probably nearly as many cats abandoned out our way too, but aside from the few that take up residence at local farms, including one that winters in one of our barns, we assume the coyotes get them.

We say, “how sad” and we go on because what else can we do? Dogs and cats are even less visible than abandoned houses.] People in desperate times do desperate things. It’s not all bad news. Yesterday we learn that a La Crosse mother, citing Wisconsin’s 2001 Safe Haven Law, surrendered her three-hour-old newborn boy at a fire station where she also provided health and medical histories. This boy will doubtless grow up with complications from his abandonment, but I cannot fault someone who recognizes when she’s in over her head, especially in light of the reasons the Safe Haven Law was enacted. Perhaps the flip side to the American Dream, the idea that you can someday have it all, is that when it becomes too hard to manage, you can walk away from it.

Here is my question. Do we forgive these people who do these things? And if so, how do we forgive them? Relationships can be more quickly abandoned as houses. For instance, Dennis is certain he knows at least one farmer who has dumped a couple dogs on his property. He asks me, how can you do such a thing to an animal you’ve cared for? And also, how can you even bring that up when you know the other person?

We don’t all know someone who’s walked away from his home, his child, a pet, but we all know someone who has somehow crossed the boundaries we might think are well-established and inviolable. Here’s a for instance: I had a friend, a good friend, Bonnie. Like me she had been homeless and in need and had gotten back on her feet. At least it seemed so. Back in the late 90s, after she’d been working regularly as an accountant for a homeless advocacy group in the Twin Cities, Bonnie’s employer discovered she’d been embezzling money from the organization to fund trips to Treasure Island casino. Bonnie lost her job and was arrested but it never went to trial and she didn’t serve any jail time. It was, the mutual friend who told me about it said, a sign of the times.

I was incensed. I can’t fault stealing, I’ve found myself in positions where I’ve had to steal food. I’m not proud of those times, but I tell myself I took things that weren’t expensive and didn’t cause anyone much pain. What Bonnie did was to take money from people who least could afford the loss, who had already lost everything, and taken it from a group helping people in situations she had herself been in. It was the equivalent of spitting in the face of a nursing mother. In a fit of self-righteous apoplexy I dropped her from my life.

[You probably have an idea how this ends. Shortly after entering seminary I came to the conclusion that I need to forgive her. After all, if, as I keep hearing at United, the best way we can live out a life like Jesus or Gandhi or the Buddha is to behave as they did, then I need to live out my belief that no one is beyond redemption or forgiveness. If I hope, after all the wrongs and questionable decisions I’ve done in my life, to be at peace with who I am, then I need to be at peace with Bonnie.

It hasn’t gone any further than that.] I know this is what I have to do but the situation hasn’t presented itself nor have I gotten in touch with her through that common friend to bring the moment to its crisis. There is precedent for this. Pope John Paul II forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish would-be assassin who shot him in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. Georgia Congressman John Lewis who, as a young civil rights advocate was spat on and had his skull fractured at Selma, forgave Governor George Wallace before his death. Bonnie didn’t shoot me or split my skull but I admit I’m afraid. She did a great wrong that hurt many people. Somehow the fact her actions didn’t affect me directly makes it harder. How do I say to her, “I forgive you” and mean it?

Someday Sebastian Cross will be faced with the need to forgive his father for abandoning him. Someday Dennis is going to ask that other farmer why he thought someone else should shoulder the cost he couldn’t anymore. Someday each person who walks away from a home or a dog or cat will need to face the need to forgive himself for having done that. Someday each of us will face the need to forgive someone we know, someone we love for having committed an act that, while it may not be the equal of abandonment or embezzlement, nonetheless pushes us away. What do we say, to them and to ourselves? How do we say it?

in what family are members sold off like cattle?

I recognize the lateness in commenting on this, given that bob vander plaats has reportedly removed the offensive passage from his family leader "marriage vow." the offender was the following:

'Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American president...'

however, since all the brouhaha caused by michelle bachmann and rick santorum signing the pledge in its original form, I've come across this passage in a review of mightier than the sword: "uncle tom's cabin" and the battle for america by david reynolds that answers it nicely:

"[harriet beecher] stowe took pains not to demonize all southerners, or beatify all northerners. in her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. but her story was effective because it directly assaulted southern pretensions. pro-slavery southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family...stowe's novel exploded this myth of the south as a land of paternalistic slaveholders. her description of tom's sale down the river to the deep south was an expression of slavery's core reality. the historian steven deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the upper south or the lower south between 1790 and 1860...without this domestic trade, the institution of slavery would have collapsed. more slaves were sold south than arrived on the north american continent via the infamous middle passage. they did not suffer the horrors of a transatlantic ocean voyage packed tight in a ship. but they did suffer the anguish of lost mothers, fathers, children, siblings, husbands, and wives. in what 'family,' stowe's book asked, were members treated this way, sold off like cattle by their supposed 'kin'?"

--from "the persuader: what harriet beecher stowe wrought" by annette gordon-reed in the june 13 & 20 issue of the new yorker

it does not take an advanced degree in semiotics to recognize that family leader's wording in its vow owes a considerable amount to the continued existence of a pro-slavery narrative.

words surrounded by rumbling diesels

I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of things in my times and travels, but 1 thing I can say I've never seen before: a bookstore located at a truck stop. and I mean a book store. not a news shop. not a portion of a store given over to books. I mean a store devoted entirely to books, and set in a small truck plaza between the travel centers of america and its affiliated motel (along with a barber shop).

well, okay, maybe it offers a little more than books ("now offering baked goods!" reads the signjust offcamera, and the line across the photo is the tail of a balloon that reads "open!"). but the focus is on books, hundreds of thousands of paperback (and a few dozen hardcover) books, neatly arranged into romance, science fiction, adventure, horror, western, mystery, war, children and miscellaneous. the romance section is obviously the top selling brand as the 1st several rows of floortoceiling shelves are nothing but romance, divided into authors like janet daily and danielle steel and others. but the western section was nothing to sneeze at either; at an average 125 books per shelf and maybe 30 shelves devoted to them, that's a lot of horseshit.

it's not a place for people looking for rare finds or for a maven of the odd like me. there was nothing weird or unusual. it was a place that caters directly to its clientele: bored and lonely truckers and travelers and their companions who want something to read. I'd guess nearly every book has been read at least 1ce, if not finished, and there were a number of volumes with bookmarks from places like lansing and atlanta and san diego and thunder bay, some with phone numbers and notes scribbled on them. they are exclusively novels, with a few selfhelp and history volumes thrown in.

I picked up 3 books I didn't really need but didn't have and want to read--neuromancer by william gibson, parable of the sower by octavia butler, and dangerous angels by francesca lia bloch (this last a collection I'd already owned and read in the originals but given away years ago to a friend, saying "you need to relax, this will help"). they put me back $12, more than I'm usually willing to pay for used books, but I wanted to help this place in a practical way. I was astonished when I asked the owner how long she'd been around: she'd only bought it a year ago but the store itself had been there for 30 years. who knew there was such a niche market? if kerouac and cassidy had been around then, flying facefirst through the long american night, I could picture them cocking an eye there and be comforted by what it means, the existence of these mounds of paper and ink among the burping trucks.

paperback writer

a couple brothers rent the house across the road from my dad, and while no one seems to know much about them--they're computer wizards, they work for a local lumber company, their mom pays their rent for them as well as financing their cars, none of which information is mutually exclusive--it is known that 1 of them spends most of his days and at least some nights in an upstairs room writing a novel. in an internet age when anyone worth his salt has published at least 1 autobiographical or semiautobiographical piece somewhere on the interwebs, this is still cause for comment here in the thick, with everyone mentioning it at least 1ce in conversation, in the manner of, "don't that beat all, he just writes."

I've never heard any guess as to what it is he is writing about, but I like to think it's a science fiction/fantasy hybrid in the mold of john norman's misogynistic gor novels. I've got no basis for this--I've only swapped "hi"s with either of them--but the writing brother, who has not cut his hair or beard for years while his brother trims his, is a pictureperfect stringy uncomfortable with women type who I suspect is less likely than his brother to have spoken with anyone female other than his mother and maybe a cousin and an aunt.

the story runs, and I know this part is true, that a window popped out of an upstairs window and sat on the porch roof for 4 years before it blew down onto the lawn, where it sat another year until 1 brother, I suspect the 1 who trims his hair and beard, got up the gumption to step outside and pick it up where he leaned it against the house on the porch. it remains there. but the uncertain aspect of the story is that the only reason the screen was eventually picked up was that their mother insisted on it, or she was going to ask my female cousin, who rents to them, to come by and tell them it needed to be moved. presumably, the prospect of a woman besides their mother at the house was enough to prod them to action.

44-55

"does driving these winding roads make you feel as comfortable as they make me feel anxious?" my wife asked as we zipped along us 15 that zooped the crests of ridges and around the edges of mountains. "yes," I answered, because the truth is that I am left feeling--in control, I suppose, even as my eyes grew heavy and started to droop.

the day before, driving to elmira to meet her plane, I annoyed her by texting as I whipped along the upsanddowns and edging of narrow places that have no shoulders or whose shoulders dip 20 feet before ending in scree and rock. when I visited the eastern end of the state, driving the shawangunks and along rte 9, I was reminded how much I miss these narrow passes with treeline and shrubs humped up on each side so that one can legitimately call them "shoulders," and of how envious I've always felt by people who lived in houses abutting such places. back home on the rim the roads are wide and getting wider by the day, the fields are pressing back but losing the fight as asphalt takes the place of hay. it is like riding in a windup car on a kids' racetrack; in contrast, driving some roads in the east can be like hugging the bottom of a huge canyon with very definite boundaries. such a thing leaves my edges sharper; in all my decades, through all my drinking and driving, nodding off and driving, being drugged and driving, I have never collided with bumpers to the right or vehicles to the left.

my favorite of these roads is 44-55 leading from new paltz to kerhonkson and specifically the above photoed curve, infamous as the spot where bob dylan had his lifeanddeath crash in the mid 60s. I've always been curious why there is no marker there, but I suppose dylan is appreciative that there isn't--who among us would want such a moment commemorated for tourists?