I Just Like It: Walk Humbly Together

 

Like many millions of you, I could not bring myself to watch trump's second inauguration, with its political overreach and underhandedness. But like also many millions of you, I have watched the now-famous inaugural prayer service from the following morning by The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of Washington, DC, at the Washington National Cathedral. You should also watch it. It is inspiring. 

Her sermon, preached to the nation, gave voice to the hopes and fears so many of us face as we enter a second phase of rule by That Felon Guy, and her final words, delivered directly to him, resound with compassion. 

In a tone both measured yet commanding, she reminds us not only of the ideals of the American Experiment but of the best of our ideals that lead to unity, dignity, honesty, and humility. She asks for mercy. 

(I've heard some of my queer friends and others complain about her last word choice, that they would not ask for mercy from trump and it's a fair point; my own tradition might have used "compassion" rather than "mercy," but in her Episcopal tradition mercy is an important idea, reverberating as it does down the ages and translations, and I honor that). 

She is not strident, she is not placating, she does not harass, she does not deliver a Jeremiad denouncing the king before her. But she is a teacher and a shepherd, guiding the thoughts and behaviors of the faithful who would follow her. 

We would all do well to live by her words to trump. 

Old People at Concerts

 

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

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

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

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

Showering Starfish

I've volunteered at a day program for travelers and homeless in town the past couple weeks. For two afternoon I'm at the shower table, giving out baskets of body wash, shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, towels, sometimes socks, and checking for folks' mail. In between guests, I mop and spray down the shower stalls. It's not what I envisioned doing there but it's solid and it's a ministry.

My single fret is, no matter how I try, I can't get everyone in a shower who wants one. When I arrive in early afternoon, there can be as many as twenty names listed. Each person gets fifteen minutes before I begin to ask them to finish up. But the program closes at 3 and the showers end at 230. Even when everyone complies, it still won't work.

My initial impulse is to stay later in order to get the last folks through but I know the downside to that.  If I do so for one I need to do it for all, and it's unfair to the volunteers on the days I'm not there. A couple days ago I caught myself getting frazzled as I tried to get everyone through, so much so one of the staff touched my back and said, "You're all right, you can do this."

I move slowly and purposefully because I want everyone I come into contact with to know they aren't a burden on my time, that I have the time and patience to give them. The stalls are clean and sanitary. I remember the showers on the lower levels of Grand Central Station. There were two, you paid 50¢ for maybe ten minutes and the attendant was very aware of the number of people waiting, telling you to hurry. He sat on an overturned box in e corner of the tiny anteroom you waited in. There was a communal bar of soap, no shampoo, probably a towel. The dim light was a blessing because you couldn't see how grungy it was. But you could still feel the film on the floor and the slime if you touched the walls. But I still felt cleaner on leaving.

This informs my work and I've realized that, like counseling the dying and listening to the mentally ill, I can't do far them all. Like the fellow on the beach told his throwing a star fish back in the ocean makes no difference, it makes a difference for that one.

Joys and Concerns: Guy in a Wheelchair

 

About a month ago I was visiting a patient at a facility that recently reopened to me. We were sitting in one of the common rooms, chatting, watching TV together. A resident I didn't know was wheeling by and as he passed the door he said, "Chip? Chip Mahr?" I said, "No, I'm Bob," and showed him my badge and repeated, "I'm Bob, I'm the chaplain."

He came in and said, "Your name's not Mahr? You're not related to him?" I said, "I don't think so." Then he started talking about how much he enjoyed living at the facility and what good care they took of him. He was younger than the usual resident, late 60s, early 70s, and looked in fairly good shape. He mentioned that his house was visible from one end of the facility.

At some point, he made reference to what brought him there. "Just this January, this happened," and he dropped his head to show a large impression, like someone had stamped it, in his skull. His hair was just starting to cover it over. "I was just walking down the street and the next thing I know I'm waking up in March at the hospital. I had slid on some ice on the sidewalk and been knocked out. Brain bleed, coma, all the good stuff." He was pretty okay with it, he said. He had lived alone and didn't have any family and now he was here and they were making up his new family. He repeated that the food was good and they took great care of him.

I asked what he had done for work and he said he'd delivered packages. "Here 's the funny thing. I used to deliver to places like this and I'd walk in and I didn't know anyone. But pretty soon someone would come up to me and just start talking. I'd end up sticking around longer just to talk to them, you know, they didn't have any family or friends visiting, so I just felt good talking to them about anything. And now here I am, one of those guys I used to talk to."

Working in hospice, we often deal with people who have been ill for a while or whose ailment has been apparent and can be traced back. But it isn't always that way. Sometimes what changes our lives is as simple as an unseen patch of ice that puts us in the position of our patients. As with a lot of things, that's neither good nor bad. No warning, sudden change. It happens. I'm not suggesting we keep an eye peeled for the unexpected, that'll drive you nuts. Just being aware it can happen to us and the people we love is sobering.

Always be the helpers

I'm not generally one who reads advice columns, but this one, aimed at parents, nudged at me, making me want to share it.

Too often, it strikes me that the person writing in for advice is asking for something specific to him or her, a response to a problem that's unique to him and him alone. But this mother's plaint is common, and not just to parents. I struggle, too, with the question of how to effect optimism with friends and others without, as she puts it, "overloading" them.

Carvell Wallace puts it plainly: "To be a child in 2018 is to know that the adults have completely abdicated our collective responsibility to make a decent world for our kids." Game, set, and match. Abdicated is the polite way to put it; the truth is we have, as a species, gone out of our way to fuck this world up with a passion.

Her suggestion, taken from a now-famous Fred Rogers' quote, is spot-on: In order for our children to find the helpers, we must be he helpers. What good does it do them if we're all behaving like chickens with our heads lopped off or, worse, as if the issue doesn't matter? America claims it hates a bully, and goes out of its way to elect one. We say children are our future and are important to us, and defund and beggar the very schools and programs meant to help them grow into that future.  We insist school be a safe place for them, and offer nothing more than thoughts and prayers to keep guns out of them. 

Everyone knows kids aren't stupid and we all like to brag about how intelligent ours are, but then we behave as if they're not only dim but blind and deaf too. The note that little ones have big ears and eyes is so common it's trite, but it's not only their own parents they're listening and watching. It's what we mean by having compassion: When you're outside your home, act like there's a kid watching and mimicking you. I do this myself. I feel better for it. Because there often is one somewhere. And they will eventually treat me the same as they see me treating others 

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. 

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

"Some of these issues are so important you can't not speak out"

We live in an age of hyperpartisanship, for better and for worse, and a part of that is tagging the opposing team. It doesn't really accomplish anything, but it feels better when you're the side doing it. Sometimes, when it seems the whole nation is against you, seeing an opposing viewpoint that mirrors or excedes your own is the right thing to keep you off the ropes and in the struggle. Billboards and artwork like this exists for the same reason cheerleaders are a big part of professional football. And generally about as helpful in the final result. (And in the event anyone thinks I profess this because it's Trump, no, it isn't.)

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.

The Women's March at human scale

I could not make it to the March, as I've reported, but the host I was going to stay with took several photos and gave me permission to post them here. And while they are not as staggering as the aerial pictures in breadth or scope, they help bring the event to human scale.

Democracy wears pink

Listening to the speeches during yesterday's coverage, I heard this conclusion to one that turned out to be by Van Jones: "[Trump's supporters] came to this town yesterday. They had red hats on. They were proud of their accomplishment. And they thought they had taken America back. What they never counted on was a million women in pink hats that are going to take America forward." 

Your silence will not protect you

To say I remember Audre Lorde fondly may seem like an odd thing--her messages were intended to generate nearly every kind of feedback except fondness--but in her I had the sensation of a fellow-traveler, a black, lesbian me who could write better and had a better sense of what it was she fought. She wrote in 1977 in "The Transformation of Silence into Languge and Action":

To question or to speak...could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now [she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and then with liver cancer], without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

 I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

258 candles-one more day

258 candles-6 days

Yes, I know, I won't feed Pedigree to my dogs either. And I know I'm just perpetuating the notion that a commercial maker of substandard kibble really cares about the political atmosphere rather than raking in a few million more shekels from rubes who say, "But look, a dog!" But look, a dog. Political animal though I am, some things are truer than politics. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

258 candles-one week and one day

As we are coming to the end of waiting for our opportunity to decide this election, and for the wild conjecture and nastiness to be, if not over, then perhaps lessened, we should be looking further both inward and outward to others. This is a wonderful memory by an administrator, someone who most of us are inclined to think of as a bloodless bean-counter, about three victims of shooting violence that focuses on who they were in her life. We should all have such an effect on others.

258 candles-day 21

Sometimes you need to see nothing more than the sheer joy someone takes in the work he or she does to be heartened by humanity.

258 candles-days 30-22

When I was much younger I stayed in an apartment where there were often people sleeping on the couch, on the floor, in chairs. We found one drunk guy curled around the toilet. We weren't always drunk or stoned there, but it helped. We called it "The Home for Wayward Transients."

I'm reminded of that place when I read this story about volunteers who collect and repair and display discarded deities. It's a belief in many Asian nations that a business or families prosperity is improved by the presence of shrines and icons to the local gods or to the family's faith. I've made a game for myself of stepping into Asian stores and finding the shrine. (Hint: It's often near the door.) This is no different than the Christian practice of votives; indeed, it's no different than most Christian practices. What's a cross or a crucifix but an icon? But individuals feel drawn to the ceramic and cheap plastic and plaster deities enough to care for them, not out of a religious duty, but because destroying them "goes against the conscience." This is heartening and a sign that there is such a thing as an interior sense of reverence. 

258 candles-days 36-31

In the same way religious liberals decry that all faiths have their share of fundamentalist thinking and actions, so we must celebrate that all faiths also have a deeply progressive strain that often runs counter to that. These Pakistani clerics deserve to be recognized as pioneers.

258 candles-days 40-37

It's been many years since I've explored that aspect of my sexuality, but I keep track of many things in the gay community, One of them, of course, has been the number of deaths in it, especially the largest recent massacre of Americans by an individual in Orlando, Florida. And while I might be late to the party when it comes to this video, I think it's both an exhilerating way of celebrating men loving one another and a unique way of supporting the families victimized by Omar Mateen. I light two candles, one for the video and the other in memory of the victims.

258 candles-days 48-41

When I was a kid, I knew two things (well, I knew a lot more, but I knew two things about the New York Post): They had the best selections of comic strips (two full pages!); and they were pretty reactionary in their outlook on the City. Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper in the mid-70s solidified that outlook and codified the neo-conservative view.

As I grew up I discovered that a lot of good writers also wrote for the Post: Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton whose work I'd come to admire in The New York Review of Books, and Drew Pearson whose book Washington Merry-Go-Round I found long after his death.

The point is that as a result it comes as a surprise to me that the Post published a feel-good, touchy-feely, "That smile made it all worthwhile" human experience like the following. But it's a good surprise.