I Thought You Might Like This

One of the things I like about the place we spent the last two weeks in is what comes to me over the radio there.  It’s very much the old fashioned kind of radio with some guy or gal inviting the listener into his or her “home” it seems for an hour or two, for a “sit and talk” or in this case listen.

When we were in Killarney there was a show on the local station from Limerick that I enjoyed.  The host would chatter amiably for a minute or two and then play some bit of music…from anywhere…plucked as it were randomly out of mid-air.  I heard a Beatles’ song the on the anniversary of Brian Epstein’s death right after he had played this.  I remember the first time I heard this song, too long ago for me to own up to, on a similar “unstructured” and loosely organized radio show, on a cluttered morning of the mind and made it a personal favorite immediately.

The segue from “Bailero” into the Beatles was a quick something about the one song’s being about love and Epstein’s managing of the Beatles.  Go figure, eh?

The wonderful thing about it was that it worked…for me…at least.  Now where in these Untied States would a radio show like that last for fifteen minutes after the demographics came in?  And not once did anyone shout or utter a “bleep”.

A couple of days before up in Galway we sat in a quiet place at the Glenlo Abbey Hotel in the late afternoon looking out the window at the clouds rolling by.

We were having tea.  The radio was softly playing a similar program of music and quiet conversation.  I never heard a word of the latter, but I did hear and softly sing along with Billie Holliday, Nat king Cole, Sinatra and Tony Bennet, tunes I hadn’t heard on any radio program over here for it seems decades.  It was another “no bleep” zone.

Oh, the soprano on the  video clip was Netania Devrah, a name I’d never heard until I heard it in Ireland. The Beatles song?  It was “All You Need Is Love”.  Yeah, the segue worked.

Tir Gan Aontacht Tir Gan Anim

“Para continuar en espanol…”  I don’t remember exactly how the rest of the phrase goes though I hear it often enough, and have been listening to it for more than thirty years now.  It is becoming one of the most recognized phrases in the land.  I almost said English language.  But, of course, it isn’t English.

I work at a little place in a big mall not far from my home.  Many people come and go there, lots of different kinds of folks wearing lots of different kinds of costumes and speaking lots of different kinds of languages.  I come from  New York City, so I’m well used to hearing Pashtun, Tagalog, Spanish and Urdu all in one block; not to mention Russian, Yiddish, German, French and, of course, English.

Some of them are visiting, but most of them are here to stay.  I like to listen to the little ones and hear the language I speak coming clearly from their mouths while Mom or Dad, or even Grandma and Poppa stand by smiling, proudly.  It’s as it should be if “E Pluribus Unum” means anything at all.  The little ones are becoming what used to be called “assimilated”.  They have joined the “main stream” though I do not have any real sense that there is much left to be assimilated into; that there is anything of depth or substance left in the “stream”.

Recently someone was speaking to me about the wisdom of diversity and the  virtue of tolerance as those two things are currently described, defined and practiced.  He explained how it was so very important to be open and welcoming, how crucial it was to receive the gifts of all cultures with equal measure of approval and affirmation, to be a person of an affirming and accepting nature, generous with praise and graceful and uncritical receptivity because we now live in a multi-cultural world.  Perhaps, it occurs to me to wonder now, we have begun to live in a post-cultural world, but I am known to be facetious.

I wondered aloud for my part of the conversation if all of this openness, receptivity, grace and generosity meant I must welcome many wived-Muslims, and poly-amorous couples with tolerant manners, yielding smiles.  Was it my duty to be kind to the voodoo priest and his animal sacrifice as well?  Had I the obligation to provide equal approval and affirmation to the celebration of a Black Mass at midnight on Halloween in a public park as I might to the fireworks on the Fourth of July?  Was it the better part of tolerance to allow and encourage  nudity, same sex coupling and demonstrations of “healthy” perversions during annual so-called Gay-Pride parades?  I wondered, finally about such things taking place outside of churches during periods of worship, and even inside of them…and begged to know if it was unfair for the trapped communicants to feel a sense of oppression and persecution, to feel a sense of intolerance for their way of living and their beliefs, to put not too fine a point on the matter.

My companion was upset to know that I was exhibiting what he thought was conservative, closed and reactionary responses to his more open and engaged, understanding and inclusive, point of view.  I thought him silly.  He thought me blind.  In the end we agreed, as they say, to disagree, smiled and parted friends.

Later on that evening I found myself in front of this thing thinking about those two words so important to our lives today: Diversity and Tolerance, that they are the drivers in almost all of our public and educational interactions, no matter what we may truly believe.  (And I do not doubt that a good deal of all of this is dissembling insincerity, though I have no proof.)  Do you doubt?  Let me offer the example of  the Oakland public school which offers lessons on “gender diversity” ; or this one.  They are only two of many links to articles and reports on the question of how to welcome “others” into your life.

Anyway, I went to an online Thesaurus driven by curiosity and an old English major’s fantasies about words.  This is what I found under Diversity:

“a hundred, a million, a myriad, a thousand, a thousand and one, a world of, all kinds of, all manner of, all manners of, all sorts of, allogeneous, and heaven knows what not, and what not, anidian, briarean, characteristic, crowded, daedal, decuple, dedal, desultory, different, differing, dioristic, discriminating, discriminative, disparate, distinctive, distinguishable, divers, diverse, diversified, diversiform, eclectic, endless, epicene, ever so many, full many, half a dozen, half a hundred, heterogeneous, in profusion, indiscriminate, irregular, manifold, many, many, modified, more than one can tell, mosaic, motley, multifarious, multifold, multiform, multigenerous, multinominal, multiple, multiplied, multispiral, multitudinous, multiversant, multivious, myriad, nice, no end of, no end to, not a few, not the same, numberose, numerous, numerous as the hairs on the head, numerous as the sands on the seashore, numerous as the stars of the firmament, of all sorts and kinds, of every description, of various kinds, omnifarious, omniform, omnigenous, omnigruous, other, peopled, plenty as blackberries, pluripotent, polymorphic, populous, profuse, proletaneous, protean, rough, several, some forty or fifty, something else, studded, sundry, teeming, thick, thick as hops, thick coming, unequal, uneven, unmatched, varied, variform, various, very many, widely apart.”

These are the related adjectives.  The entry goes on for a while.

The synonyms were interesting too, ominously so, I thought for a place whose motto is roughly translated as “From Many, One”:

“assortment, dissimilarity, distinction, distinctiveness, divergence, diverseness, diversification, heterogeneity, medley, mixed bag, multeity, multifariousness, multiformity, multiplicity, range, unlikeness, variance, variegation, variousness”

I next tried Tolerance.  Here are the synonyms first offered; where tolerance is defined as open-mindedness, something with which no one would find fault, I suppose.  After all, doesn’t everyone want to keep an open mind?:

“altruism, benevolence, broad-mindedness, charity, clemency, compassion, concession, endurance, forbearance, freedom, good will, grace, humanity, indulgence, kindness, lenience, leniency, lenity, liberalism, liberality, liberalness, license, magnanimity, mercifulness, mercy, patience, permission, permissiveness, sensitivity, sufferance, sympathy, toleration, understanding “

But they don’t stop there.  They go on for another three pages.  Further on I found this list for tolerance synonyms under its definition as “luxury, gratification”:

“allowance, appeasement, attention, babying, coddling, courtesy, endurance, excess, extravagance, favor, favoring, fondling, fondness, forbearance, fulfillment, goodwill, gratifying, hedonism, immoderation, intemperance, intemperateness, kindness, kowtowing, lenience, leniency, pampering, partiality, patience, permissiveness, petting, placating, pleasing, privilege, profligacy, profligateness, satiation, satisfaction, service, spoiling, toadying, tolerance , toleration, treating, understanding “

I’d like to suggest that this understanding of what tolerance means has become the dominant and controlling one regarding matters of diversity.

Was it from motives of altruism or appeasement , pampering or permissiveness that we have been prompted to allow the spectacles of Gay Pride parades all over the land?  Was it kindness or kowtowing, patience or petting that led to “Para continuar…”?  Perhaps it was merely profit, it occurs to me to ask.  What then of teen pregnancy, abortion and all the many other cracks and craters in the culture that once was thought to be common among us?

Returning to Diversity and its adjectives, I was struck by two words I wasn’t familiar with at all.  The first is allogeneous and the second is anidian.  They mean something which is different in nature and kind and something which is shapeless.  The latter, anidian refers to something in an embryonic state.

The words above, the title to this little trip through my brain, are Irish.  Since only about 250,000 people speak it as their mother tongue you need have no fear of hearing it on the list of options when you call your electric company.  They mean, roughly, “A Land Without Unity Is a Land Without A Soul”.

We are n the process of tolerating the death of this land through the atrophy of its soul, I believe.  In its place we are diversifying into something entirely different, raising up from an as yet anidian mass, an  allogeneous, a dangerous new thing which I think is something we will have cause to regret.

The Kill Team

Yesterday I learned that some of the youngsters we have over in Afghanistan “defending our freedom” have been enjoying themselves after school, so to speak, playing outside with their friends.  The game?  Well, they have been hunting you might say.  And what they have been hunting, specifically is the folks who live in Afghanistan.  They even took trophy pictures of their kills. And, they took some actual trophies, at least once cutting off the finger of one of their murder victims.

Why?  That was my first reaction.  It was probably similar to the cry of someone informed that a beloved family member had committed a terrible crime, “Why?”  One searches for a reason, some way to make sense of something like this which shatters one’s soul.  I need look no further than our own daily headlines for the evidence that supports my  choice for a reason.   There’s a murder trial going on in my town right now.  Three kids broke into a home a year or so ago and hacked a woman to death, and almost killed her young daughter.  They did it because they wanted to kill someone.  On the way out of the wreckage they took a few small items as mementos of the experience; tokens, trophies, totems.

We’ve killed about 40 million people that way, hacked ‘em to death while they thought they were safe in their “home”, since 1973; killed ‘em because we wanted to.  Most recently we read about a “doctor” , an abortionist, in Philadelphia who kept the dismembered bodies of the children he killed in jars and plastic bags strewn around his office.  Trophies?

Our “boys” over there did the same.

There ain’t a bit of difference that I can see among the three kinds of murderers, kids, soldiers and pregnant women.  It doesn’t end there.  We have judges who allow doctors to kill old folks or sick ones because they have become burdens on their family or on the resources of the facilities where they are supposed to being treated.

And there are politicians, and pundits and professors who will say that there’s nothing wrong at all with killing old and sick folks, and folks who can’t walk, or who will be “burdens” if we allow them to be born, or who are just in the way.

Someone mentioned they thought it was ironic that the pictures appeared in a German newspaper.  Why should it be ironic that the Germans have pictures of some of the citizens of this place of death smiling beside their kills?  I don’t think the truth is ironic at all.

We have the choice to kill, so why not?  They certainly had the means and exercised their right to choose.  The photos are proof of that.  Who needs a motive when murder has become a right?  What I find truly ironic is that some forms of murder are still considered crimes.  Call me a reactionary; the kind of fellow who only makes right turns, whose gear shift only reads “R” for reverse because there are a few things I would reverse around here if I could, and most of them have occurred in the fifty years since I came into my own.

I’ll not give you chapter and verse, but you must know, as well as I do, the role played in the huge culture shift since mid-century by media, scholarship, science and politics, so that now we talk openly about such rights as the right to kill.  Well, we don’t call it that, but it is the functional equivalent.  The infection has spread so far that we find young boys thinking there is nothing wrong with invading a home in the dead of night for the sole purpose of brutally killing the people who live there and then bragging to their friends about the act, soldiers “defending” freedom committing murder and taking photos to prove it and women killing their children a million times a year while the courts and legislatures tell them it is their right.

I’ll grant you there may still be a few hardy souls  who have raised their voices or will raise them against this outrage.  They are drowned in the din coming from so many more on the side of choices.

The late Pope John Paul II said that evil spreads with amazing speed, and I think a direct line can be drawn from the cheapening, the loss of a sense of value and dignity in human life, that is produced by the evil of abortion to these other acts we witness.  Yes, it’s true that we’ve failed miserably in the past all over the world in protecting and caring for human life, but for 2k years we’ve seen slow advances on that kind of failure…a lot of setbacks, but slow advances.  But, within the last 60 years, at my counting, after the defeat of Nazism and the fall of Communism, and contemporaneous with them both, there has arisen a greater enemy.  That enemy has persuaded us that killing is as normal and necessary as breathing, laudatory in many cases and a right.

“From an attitude of skepticism in relation to the foundations of knowledge and culture,” again as JPII says, has come a rejection of it all in favor of a kind of Promethean attitude of reliance on ourselves alone. That way produces the inevitable outcome of death, a death with no resurrection on the last day, and a death to which a great many people march in ignorance and with great pride in their “accomplishment”.  You are right if you say we need to pray for them.  We need also to pray that some of the voices raised in defense of the indefensible will fall into silence.

I’d begin on campuses and in school rooms across the country to reverse that trend that has led us to descend from the City on a Hill into its sewer.  Over the years in those places we have exchanged an education in Virtue for values, Truth for tolerance and Reality for relativism.  The curriculum being thus emptied we have grown up generations of students, the first of whom now wander aimlessly in the desert of self indulgence and rights without responsibilities; rights with terrible consequences, though, for the weak and voiceless.

We have become Nineveh with no prophet to cry out the truth about us, with no ruler to accept it and declare a time of mourning, pour ashes on his head, wear sackcloth and order everyone else in this mad house to do the same; fasting from food and drink until God, who by rights should wipe us out because we deserve it, lifts His hand.

At no time since they were uttered, it seems to me, have Moses words been more worth hearing and heeding:

Moses said to the people: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. 

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.

For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Cain asked the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  We’ve given the answer, “Not only no, but hell no!” Or, as John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable.” We now have “kill teams” in our Armed Forces.  To my mind it is the direct result of a culture which condones, celebrates as a right, murder, such that “conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life.”

A friend of mine saw the photos and was appalled by them, as was I.  He was the one who thought it curious and ironic that they appeared first in the German paper Der Speigel.  That paper also has 4,000 more photos and videos of similar atrocities committed by the group, a “kill team” as it called itself.  Well might one ask where is the irony in a German paper publishing photos of American atrocities?  We now join them in shame.  Will you say, “But wait, the Germans killed millions, these are only a few.”  Will voices claim that this was merely the fog of war and the pictures merely bad manners?  Will the trophies cut from the dead bodies amount to more of the same slight failures in decorum; the mess of the battlefield?  Why not Germany, or Russia, China, Uganda, Cambodia or Bosnia?  We used to think we were different.  We have no right to think so anymore.

Sleep well, and make sure your doors are locked.

UPDATE: Another friend quoted a dead Roman: “Homo homini lupus”, meaning to say that man is a predator of man.  I have no evidence to point to that wolves kill wolves because the think they have a right to.  Even when wolves fight each other,  such struggles rarely lead to death or serious injury.  We alone love to kill.



Julian, Julian, Julian What Have You Done?

From the passage in St. Mark’s Gospel that was read at Holy Mass on Friday, December 10, Father Paul drew a direct line to the short story by Flannery O’Connor, “Everything Which Rises Must Converge” explaining the Gospel by analogy with the story. That story involves a young man, Julian, and his mother, and a bus ride one evening.  Julian does not like his mother, he criticizes almost everything she is and does, even though she lives her life around him, thinks the world of him and believes only the best about him.  Nothing she can do seems to satisfy him.

In the Gospel passage, St. Mark shows us Jesus wondering about those who criticize everything He and St. John the Baptist do:  “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ ”   Nothing they can do seems to satisfy their critics; the one lives on wild honey and locusts while the other dines with sinners, and both are equally judged wrong.  The passage ends, rather cryptically for me, with this allusive sentence: “But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”  It could be a good title for a short story.

Father Paul spoke quietly about the story’s point that Julian came too late to understand and value his mother’s worth to him. and the worth of their family’s heritage which he never spoke of “without contempt, or thought of without longing” as O’Connor puts it.  Julian’s family had once been great, and though they had little, now, his mother reminded him in her attitudes and beliefs of what they once were, something he both longed for and hated, and did not understand, finally.  She answers his assertion that “True culture is in the mind”, his harsh insistence that she and her beliefs were dead letters, with words he scorned.  She had said these quiet words:  “It’s in the heart and how you do things, and how you do things is because of who you are.”  Scornfully and meanly he replies, “No body in the damn bus cares who you are.”  She simply answers him, “I care who I am.”

In the end, she is knocked to the ground, suffers a stroke and Julian, after ignoring her distress for some time realizes something is very wrong.  He runs towards some lights ineffectually calling for help.  They recede into the distance,  And at that point:  “ The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”

While Father Paul spoke I began to think of another Julian whose name has been in the news lately, Julian Assange the fellow behind WikiLeaks.  We were talking about him just the previous evening, trying to get a grip on why someone would do what he has done.  As I recalled that conversation….it’s funny how one thing leads to another…I wondered what the people St. Mark’s Gospel, the Julian of O’Connor’s story and the real Julian Assange all had in common, if anything.  Father’s remarks focused on our all too common fault of dismissing the
“others” whom we do not see worthy of attempting to engage on any level, the “others” who are in a word “beneath” us.

I don’t know Assange any better than the next fellow, and from what I have been able to read about him, the “next fellow” doesn’t know him too well at all.  If rootless can define someone, rootless will do for him.  He has no fixed abode as the song says.  In a long article in the New Yorker about him one reads that he spent his growing years moving from pillar to post with his mother, hiding out from something or other, and breathing the air of her particular disdain for most things organized, including education, work and wages.  But, he’s a brilliant guy, the article shows us; doing the job himself of education, reading his way through libraries all over Australia.

He learned all about computers and the Internet, when it finally lit up, and early on began to associate himself with those who in another age would have been called “Peeping Toms”.  He was arrested and convicted of a computer hacking crime in Australia.  The article goes on for a number of pages detailing Assange’s growth and metamorphosis from a precocious self-educated techno-geek into the man just bailed from a London jail after an arrest for some sexual crimes.  Several details from the New Yorker story, aside from his mother’s influence, caught my interest.

He developed a theory about what the article’s author calls the “human struggle.  ” (H)e came to believe that: truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit.”  And, as his answer to that problem he had identified developed into WikiLeaks he showed a growing interest in and determination to make sure everyone everywhere knew what governments were doing.  He would be the one to make that come true.

That he would do it secretly, using hidden sources, suborning treachery and stealing, that his methods would possibly injure, possibly kill some people seem not to have been matters worthy of serious consideration considering the goal he was  aiming at; a world where one can live in love with everyone else, because there are no secrets.  He is aware that there will be what he himself calls “collateral damage, and that WikiLeaks will have blood on its hands in some instances.  That end, one must conclude about Assange, is worth any means taken to achieve it.  And, so it goes with Julian.
 

I thought of another Julian on the way home after Mass, the anchorite of Norwich so long ago; she who talked a lot about Love and courtesy, referring to the tactful, gentle, modest ways of Christ which are so different from. O’Connor’s angry son and Assange’s angry, well, son, both of whom were slowly morphing into one person in my mind.

“The old manners are obsolete, and your graciousness is not worth a damn,” Julian says to his mother at one point in O’Connor’s tale.  In a self-description on a dating website before he established WikiLeaks Assange says he is interested in “Changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery,” and “directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated.”  So much for love, or graciousness.

On the other hand there is  Julian, in her cell witnessing a vision of the Crucifixion and coming to understand and lay special stress upon the “homeliness” and “courtesy” of God’s dealings with us, “for love maketh might and wisdom full meek to us.”  The work of Wisdom is Love.  The fruit of Love is Wisdom. 

Only one Julian does the work.  Only one shows how to reap the fruit.

Possibly this may not be the conclusion you had thought of, the ending you expected to my little exercise.  Perhaps you feel lied to by the title, misled to believe you would read something about leaks, disclosures, skulduggery in high places.  Honesty requires me to tell you who have endured this far that I thought about doing something along those lines.  I have a little experience in that kind of thing.

But, this is all I have for you, poor fictional Julian’s tragic awakening in darkness and even poorer Julian’s fatal flaw, the same one all supermen have; his belief in the “general idiocy of his fellows” and his desire to save them from it by any means.  They both ignore what the solitary Julian knew; that wisdom which produces the “greater love”.

 

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand, #6

When we left each other last, about a month ago, I gave you some hint of difficulty looming in this journey which I had already told you was going to be, so I thought at the time I wrote it, a leisurely stroll, a pleasant interlude.  I should have known better.  We were, after all, in California, a place where the laws of the universe do not seem to operate.

Our limo driver, a kindly Asian man who had driven us to our hotel only the day before was happy to drive us back this sunny afternoon to catch our connecting flight to Los Angeles.  We were to leave at about 3:00pm, plenty of time, so the folks who schedule these things thought when they set this up, for us to connect with an 8:00pm flight from LA to Auckland.  It was shortly after noon when we arrived at the gate for our flight to LA.

Now a word of truth.  The airport at Los Angeles, LAX, is, I am sure, where Charon went when he got his wings and gave up his boat after the trip to hell was brought into the modern age.  It, LAX, must be an ante-room to hell.  More precisely, I think it is hell’s own terminal; a bedlam and torture chamber combined, containing every known device to heighten travelers’ anxiety, drain the spirit and create acute and heart pounding confusion and fear, and frustrating, impotent anger. And that is what is good about it.

There is the center of confusion, mis-direction, lack of care and mindless activity.  It extends for hundreds of miles in every direction.

As I said, we had checked into the airport at San Francisco quite early.  We settled at the gate for the long wait.  After a while I got up to stroll about the terminal.  I was almost back at the gate where I had left Mariellen with our carry on bags, when my cell phone began to ring.  “Who could be calling me now?” I thought.  The phone call was from Mariellen, frantic because the people at the gate had paged her to tell her they had changed our flight, moving it up by an hour and a half…and it was being boarded as she spoke to me at another gate.  Another gate in another place in the terminal, somewhere north of Vancouver, CA.

We were still speaking on the phone when I spotted her just outside the gate area covered with bags and coats and what alls, glancing frantically in all directions, a look of anxiety and stress on her face that i had never seen before.  I was instantly sorry for every sin of my past life which I believed was responsible for this calamity, and promised lasting reform.  I waved.  She saw me and we began.  We literally ran through the terminal for pretty near a mile, carrying and dragging bags of several sorts until we reached the newly assigned gate and our flight, just in time.  They were closing up as we arrived sweaty and breathless.

One of the gate crew quickly explained the reason for the change.  Our connecting flight had been booked for us by the folks in New Zealand.  They had no idea what hell was like, and so figured two hours to connect  passengers from a San Francisco flight with a New Zealand flight leaving LA was quite enough time.  They had even built in about an hour long cushion.  The United people knew different.  In a tone of amazement, she told me that wouldn’t even leave us time to collect our baggage and board the shuttle for transfer from the domestic to the foreign terminal; let alone go through the security check once more (God bless Osama bin Laden!) , check in and flight boarding.  We would have only 1.5 hours for what she said would take at least three.  In answer to my question about whether anything could be done, she suggested that I become disabled.  That way they could have a special bus meet the plane and ferry us directly from it to the foreign terminal.

I wished later on in the day that flying through LAX (an oxymoronic term, accent on the last two syllables, if ever there was one) itself was a disability.  Well, it is, but…

Anyway, the plane landed.  We got our bags after a twenty minute wait at the baggage carousel in some large cell of a room, and after another twenty minutes of blind wandering found our way outside through a deluge of traffic, people, trafic and more traffic.  (Do not wonder if we asked directions.  We did.  No one could give us an answer beyond pointing toward a wall and mentioning that buses were on the other side of it.  “Look for the “A” bus,” they all said.)  We found a small foothold of safety in the stream of cars, cabs, buses, limos and everything but skateboards on a narrow island in the middle of this stream of gas and noise.  We were supposed to find that mysterious something called an “A” bus that would take us to all of the foreign terminals.

Above our heads lighted electric signs indicated where to stand for taxis, limos and buses labeled “B” through “G”.  Hundreds of yards away from us was our destination, the one “A” bus stop in the universe.  On we plodded, arriving just as one of them pulled away from the curb.  At least, I consoled myself as I gazed at it’s slowly fading rear end, we will be first in line for the next one to arrive.

HA!  The next one did not arrive for more than an hour.  Buses emblazoned with every possible letter in every possible alphabet arrived and left with infuriating regularity.  The crowd of increasingly nervous and desperate people grew around us until it seemed to be more than one bus full of travelers and tons of luggage.

I had taken to asking the drivers of the other shuttle buses whether or when an “A” bus would come by.  Some simply looked stupidly at me, like cattle on their way to the hammer thud that would drop them, closed the door and moved on.  I began to ask them if they’d be kind enough to bring something to eat and drink for us stranded here on the island in the sea.  I sugested to my fellow “strandees” that we consider hi-jacking a bus; a suggestion that met with growing and more serious approval as time passed.

One of the bus drivers, perhaps the only one with the power of speech, answered me.  “The problem is that the shift always changes around this time for the “A” bus; just when it really gets busy.”  I shouted, “ARE YOU &*^%*()# KIDDING ME!!!!  How stupid do you have to be to become a dispatcher here?”  The fellow smiled and shrugged.  That meant one of several things to me.  Either he had no idea how stupid that was, or he wasn’t yet that stupid but hoped to be and it embarrassed him, or he just didn’t care.

The wait continued.  I noticed several cabs parked at the curb behind us and walked over to one to ask what the fare would be to take us to the Air New Zealand terminal.  It was within reach, I learned, but I was not yet that desperate.  I’d try hi-jacking and face jail first.  I wondered whether he had a weekend job leading illegal immigrants over the border and through the desert a few hundred miles south of LA.

When I got back to the milling crowd and fought my way through to where Mariellen was I was approached by a man with a New Zealand accent.  He was there with his family, wife and three small children.  “How much is the taxi fare?” he asked me.  I told him and he smiled grimly.  His flight left for Auckland in an hour he said as they gathered up their luggage.  I wished him bon voyage and thought, “Another friend for the US.”, as he drove away in the cab, the driver smiling like a Cheshire cat.

When the bus finally arrived about twenty minutes later nearly fifty people piled on in cattle car fashion.  The absolutely horrible thing about it, horrible almost to the level of being downright evil is that I do not think we were more than a quarter mile from our destination all the while and could easily have walked there in fifteen minutes or less.  We simply drove to the end of the building where all domestic flights arrived and departed, made a left turn around a short curve and arrived at the international terminal, got off the bus and entered.  Walking through the garage would have been the easiest thing to do.

Of course, once inside the terminal we had to endure the boring stupidity of the TSA and its procedures.  Have I asked God to bless O.b.L.?

We finally arrived at out gate a bare fifteen minutes before boarding time, our time on the ground in LA being longer by almost an hour than the time it took us to fly to LA from San Francisco.  I spent that short time composing another “letter I will never send”; this time to the Mayor of Los Angeles upon whose smiling face I looked all during my time as a castaway on that traffic island.

It begins, “Dear Stupid,”

 

Little Guys and Dolls: The Great Race

I mean to write and tell you all about this when it happens two or three weeks ago, but life has a funny way of shunting my trains of thought onto a quiet siding while a few expresses roar down the track on their very important and attention grabbing way.

If you are not aware that St. Christopher’s School, which is where the little guys and dolls of this story go to school to learn about becoming good citizens and such like, wins big and is a few dozen “C” notes better off you should be.  They take a chance a couple of months ago on an offer from the outfit which runs the paper racket with the yellow and green dumpster down at the back of the parking lot near the school; which parking lot is also the playground where the little guys and dolls work off all that energy and give their teachers a chance for a blow. While the young scholars run around like chipmunks just before a snow storm, the teachers kick off their shoes and put up their feet; that is if they are smart.

Now, this is a two horse race they say between St. Chris and Infant Jesus School, another school for little guys and dolls with which I am not so closely connected but I know enough about to worry about them finishing ahead of m”nag”, to see who collects the most of what nobody wants, namely yesterday’s news, and we give you a little extra change for your effort.  “Such a deal,” my good friend Howie’s Uncle Max,  used to say,” you couldn’t get in a store!”   Uncle Max runs a pushcart down on Elizabeth Street in what used to be called Lower Manhattan but now has a dolled up name like SOHO or something no one else knows what it  is at all.  He sold old clothes and made a pretty good living off the stuff the “Swells” up-town, the top hat and white tie crowd, didn’t want anymore.  Uncle Max, a little guy, knew a deal.  He hung around with some Irish guys who worked the doors on the big houses where the “Swells” all lived.  When they drop off their old stuff, and most of the time it is a thing they wear once or twice, to Paddy or Mike at the door, they wait until Max comes around, gives them some spending money for the pile and brings it down to Elizabeth Street where people know what to do with it.

The funny thing is, Max says, the stuff he sells off his pushcart was made within spitting distance of his push cart.  He has a sister or two who does that stuff.  Max never wants a store with doors and walls.  He enjoys the open air, the free pickles from Morty’s barrels out in front and puts two sons through law school where they graduate and make a lot of money defending mobsters who live a few blocks away.

Anyway, back to the race.  Now Jack Daniels, who is from Brooklyn, which is part of New York City, which is the picture next to the word “deal” in the dictionary, has a big smile when he hears this.  Mr. D, as he is known to the denizens of the school and other citizens, says, “Saddle up the student body.”  Soon all over town little guys and dolls with bags, wagons, baskets and buckets appear at doors wearing their stable’s colors and say something like, “Got any paper for St. Chris?”  Two or three come to my door, even, their Mom’s standing outside near the road like a trainer at track side keeping an eye on his talent.

Now I know why God makes catalogs!   I drop an arful here and an armful there, and pretty soon the only paper in the house is Kleenex and the books I keep around for decorations.

In my dreams I see the little guys and dolls up on that paper horse in the St. Chris silks galloping around the club house turn and down the stretch to the finish line, low over the neck.  They stand up and wave at the finish, three lengths ahead of the competition which should have known better.

I am in the little room in the front of the rectory one bright day a couple of weeks ago and I happen to look out the window as the little guys and dolls flood out on their way home.  The joint is filled with them running into Moms and Dads, and the odd Grandfather or Grandmother.  All of a sudden it ain’t a parking lot any more.  It’s a Winner’s Circle!  I ask Linda, who is the glue that holds things together from day to day around the place, “Is that Jack Daniels out at the curb shaking hands and patting shouders and backs?”  “Sure is,” she says.  “They win the race with IJ and collect.”

There’s Mr. D at the curb in the bright sun looking like Nathan detroit on his wedding day, wearing a canary yellow blazer and bright yellow plaid slacks and I need welder’s glasses to look straight at him.  He’s glad handing the little guys and dolls like a Senator on election morning and if his smile ain’t as bright as his blazer then I’m a blind man which I may get to be if I don’t stop looking.   I am on my way to asking him what he thinks about today’s card when I think better of it.  I do not want to give the little guys and dolls notions, especially at this time of the year, about handicapping.

I walk back to the kitchen to build a salad and think, “What a grace…”

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa New Zealand #5

We slept soundly in the big bed in our room at the Howard Johnson’s on Camino Real in San Bruno, CA.  The previous day had been a long one, from 5:00am on the East Coast until Midnight on the West Coast, nearly 24 hours.  But Mariellen and I both woke up well rested early, and after dressing walked a few blocks to attend Mass at St. Robert’s Church.  Passing along the quiet residential streets I was reminded of similar walks I’d taken in new and strange places, our quiet conversation about the only other sound but birds and occasional passing cars.

It was Ascension Thursday, but the Mass was a daily Mass.  San Francisco, like many places, takes things easily, and has moved the feast to Sunday.  Our celebrant was an Irish priest, lending another level of newness and strangeness to the morning; and the congregation couldn’t have been more diverse, sprinkled as it was with Asians, Hispanics and what-alls, perhaps even another Irishman or two.  I remember the church as a large, open and attractive place, a concrete structure built perhaps fifty or so years ago, but not one of those spare and desolate emptinesses; a white building in the Spanish Mission style, I guess you might call it.

After Mass was over we walked back to the hotel, retracing our path through the quiet neighborhood, admiring all of the flowers and pretty houses.  On our way we met Max, a friendly and exuberant 1 year old Lab puppy who would have I am sure invited us to live with him.  I have rarely seen tails wag as eagerly as his did that morning.  The rest of the walk, after we declined Max’s enthusiastic kindnesses, was like a walk through a botanical garden; flowers, bird song and a few smiling faces once more being our only company.  I kept thinking of Eden and the world restored as we walked along.

Back at the hotel, we called Jay in his room and joined him for a light complimentary breakfast in a little nook just outside our quarters.  Then we packed and got ready for Joe, Mariellen’s brother, to arrive.  True to his word, and a bit early in fact, he showed up soon after breakfast to take us around the city for a quick your before we hopped on the plane for our connecting flight to Los Angeles, and he and Jay went waaay up north to Weed, yes Weed, CA.  We had stored our bags at the hotel (whose manager went out of his way, thank God, to help us) and took off with Joe into San Francisco with little delay.

He had done his homework on the drive down from Weed, way up near Mt. Shasta, and the front seat of his car we’d find filled with maps and brochures and printed out directions from point to point of all the places he had picked for us to see.  Good fellow that he is, though, he was open to detours from his chosen route, and Mariellen, with her Supple gene for “another good idea” in fine working order made the suggestion that we visit the Golden Gate Park.

Joe took us right there, and I applauded her suggestion after we entered the place.

Somewhere in the middle of Golden Gate Park

It is, I think, larger than Central Park, and certainly makes the Boston Common look like someone’s back yard.  And, it is filled with treats for the eye, including a small herd of Bison…tame enough to be ridden..not.  But they were having a bit of a lie down when we finally arrived after zig-zagging all over the park in search of them for most of a precious hour of sight seeing time.  Time in which I felt, not for the last time during this trip, like an Israelite in Sinai.  What we finally did see were several hairy large brown lumps at the back of a wire fenced enclosure.  Standing outside looking in I wondered why Buffalo Bill had wasted so much time on them.  My last thought as we drove away was of big brown Schmoos.  We did visit one or two more attractions, mini-parks within the larger one, both of them quite pretty: a Japanese Garden and a Chinese one.

At the Chinese Garden, the Bridge Over Untroubled Waters

Though I did look, I could find neither bamboo or ginger root in either place.  There were a few geese and other waterfowl who seemed quite content to stay exactly where they were.  After a look and a few pictures we left to find our venue for lunch, a place Joe had chosen called The Cliff House.

Sitting now in the Patriot House in Devonport, Auckland, on Queen Victoria Street, and writing this while having a pint of Kilkenny Irish Beer that lunch seems a million miles away, but I remember it for this reason.  It was the first sign I had, clear and bold, that despite some rough spots along the way this trip was going to be a good one.  Jow had told us a bit about the place he was taking us; that the Cliff House was long a popular spot, the food good, the location spectacular, and that it was always crowded.  I worried about that, and our time constraints has he turned onto the road toward the place, and worried even more when I saw the curb lined with cars all the way up the hill.  It was right in the middle of the lunch time rush.  I figured that our wait was going to be at least a half hour.

Joe dropped us off at the door and then went to find a parking place, either in San Diego or Honolulu I figured.  I walked in, told the nice lady we were a party of four, and just as I was about to ask for a couple of cots and blankies she said, “This way, please.”  Just inside we were seated right at a window opening on the wide ocean and beneath a hpoto of a young Jimmy Stewart looking great in a suit with shoulders as wide as he was tall, with lapels the size of the Nile Delta.

You need a reservation for a table on the rocks.

Joe soon joined us. He found a spot just down the hill from the restaurant, and we had a delightful lunch during which I took a mere 60 or 70 photos.

After lunch we drove next to the Golden gate bridge for a look at it half covered in fog, a very dramatic sight.

The Little Mermaid from Copenhagen sometimes visits that rock.

It was, really, our last stop in San Francisco.  We’d spent a lot of time wandering through Golden gate Park and needed to get back to the hotel, collect our gear, kiss goodbye and leave Dodge before sunset.  Not before, though, Brother Joseph took us up Nob Hill in his car, and back down again.  Then we had a particularly interesting meander through the downtown streets.  It seems that one cannot make a left turn in SF, a place J>E> Hoover of happy memory would love for that alone.  Dogged perseverance, remarkably even tempered throughout, and the laws of probability operating in our favor we did find what I think was the one remaining legal left hand turn in the city.  Soon we were back at the hotel.

We collected our baggage.  We hugged.  We slapped each other on the back, growled, grunted and swore we loved each other forever.  Nah!  Brother Joseph sprawled on the couch in the lobby and we called the limo to come get us.

"Nah. Joe sprawled on the couch while we collected our bags."

Then we said, “See you soon.”  They left.  We left and were taken away by our friendly Asian limo driver to the airpoer for our flight to Los Angeles.  We were on the brink of death, well, not death so much as serious annoyance, but didn’t know it.

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand, #4

After watching Mt. Shasta slip by thousands of feet below me, and trying to follow the meander of the Sacramento River down California to the sea, I concentrated on preparing for landing, making sure my shoes were on, the book I hadn’t bothered to read was stowed away and my camera, too.  Then I sat back and waited, watched and listened as we came in over the bay and landed quite smoothly in San Francisco.  It took us only about twenty minutes to collect our bags and get connected with a shuttle to our hotel, a HOJO’s Express on Camino Real (not so) in San Bruno (the saint would have something to say about that, I thought.)

I was surprised, and so was Mariellen, at how neat and clean the place was.  I’d been steeling myself for much worse (not quite a fleabag, but near enough), and have been in much worse at twice the price, $48.00.  We checked in, but had to wait a short while before jay’s room next door to ours was ready.  I amused myself contemplating the view out our window, the backyard of several row houses and a dentist’s office.  Then we took the shuttle back to the airport and caught the BART train into downtown ‘Frisco.  We had a date to meet Mariellen’s and Jay’s nephew Mike Supple and his wife Melinda for supper.  Since it was only mid-afternoon we had a couple of hours to spend and decided it would be nice spending them exploring some of the city.

We took the train to the nearest stop to the Embarcadero, to broad avenue fronting the harbor, turning ourselves around once or twice before finally deciding which way was the right way to go.  We were on Market Street and decided that the clock tower in the distance was our destination.  I remembered seeing it in some movie or other and connected it with the Embarcadero in my dim recollection of the film.

Not a yellow brick road, but the next best thing.

Or, maybe it was my imagination.  Maybe I simply figured it would make a great “farewell” or “welcome home” shot.  In any event, we’d told Mike and Melinda that we’d meet them on Fisherman’s Wharf…and so.  I remember, now, that Fisherman’s Wharf was about a mile or so down the way from Market Street.  The day was lovely, though, and cool.

Funnily enough, It might have been a day in San Diego, bright dry and breezy.  I hadn’t expected that at all, thinking fog and misery when I thought of San Francisco weather.  Perhaps that’s only the visitors, though because I saw no sign of the natives in awe of the sun, breezy coolness and brilliant light.  They seemed as if this was just another sunny day; scads of them jogging everywhere, not a raincoat or umbrella in sight, and who wasn’t running was skateboarding, cycling or strolling hand in hand…s0metimes in the oddest combinations.

When we reached the Embarcadero I figured we had a little more than an hour for a leisurely stroll down to Fisherman’s Wharf from Market Street.  That was just great because the street was the perfect place for a mid-afternoon walk.  We wandered out onto the piers, along the water side.

The Lady and The Dock

What was once a working sea port was now filled with businesses, little bistros, restaurants, harbor cruise boats and the odd lawyer’s office or bank. Traffic along the avenue included a fleet of LRV’s harvested from similar places all over the globe.

Next Stop? Anywhere.

This one was from Philadelphia Suburban Transit, but there were cars from as far away as Sydney, Australia, still working long after the places they served had done with them in favor of the good old automobile and its conveniences.

One of the businesses operating out of the old piers is a place called TCHO, a chocolate manufacturer.  We stopped into their “store”, a little place hardly bigger than a large closet, and sampled several tasty and very interesting chocolate candies; one of which started off tasting sour and tart and finished sweetly at the back of my throat.  I found myself seized with desire to possess all of it.  Alas, too expensive, we satisfied ourselves with several small squares for Mike and Melinda.

Who we met shortly after near the aquarium.  They called Mariellen on her cell to say that they’d made great time from San Jose, the National Geek and Dweeb Sanctuary and location of the Pocket Protector Museum.  If smiling, holding hands and occasional shy and secretive glances at one another is a sign of something going on, happiness in each other’s presence, well then, M&M prove the point that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

They drove us over to the Mission District, once a rather unfavorable place, now becoming “discovered”.  There they took us to a little Mexican restaurant called Puerto Alegre,

Mike and Melinda at Puerto Alegre

a neighborhood joint with good food and a couple of guys who came in off the street to sing and play for spare change.  (Unfortunately, Mike informed us, the “discovery” of the place was ruining it, taking away some of its cruddy look and charm, cleaning it up for the “polo” set.)  We did eat a good meal, mine being a kind of seafood stew, a Mexican bouillabaise, which gave me a couple of ideas for my next try at the rectory, adding some cilantro and tomatoes to the broth.  The house Margaritas were darn good, too and I was glad I wasn’t driving.

After the meal we wandered back to the garage where Mike had parked the car.  I discovered that the “Mission” hadn’t been completely discovered and sanitized.  We passed a few shipwrecks, human “road kill” flattened by passing life I thought, living tears on the streets hiding in doorways.  One of them approached me, asking for a dollar, four quarters, explaining that she had AIDS and needed to get to a clinic.  When I showed her I only had a five dollar bill she changed her story to being entirely without money.  Just around the corner I heard our street musicians singing some dolorous Spanish song.

Singing some dolorous Spanish song...

God alone knows why but I thought of that story about St. Peter and the beggar.  I gave her the five bucks thinking all the while I wanted to do better by her.  Melinda commented that I’d let her fool me with her story.  I answered that I’d grown up in New York and knew from the beginning how little truth was being told; and knew, too, that she needed five dollars more than me.

We were soon back at our hotel fondly saying good night to the youngsters, wishing them well and opening the house to them when/if they come East.  I told Mike that I’d like to link to his site: SUPPLEWINE.COM.  He said that would be fine as long as I warn my friends that it’s pitched to a younger demographic.  Now, you’re warned.

You see, Mike is something of a “phenom” in the wine business, a fellow who earned the nickname “The Palate” when he was in college and know more about wine that I’ll ever know.

Kevin In The Morning

The voice on the other end of the line is deep and has a thick very authentic Brooklyn, New York accent.   “Hi, Kevin, ” I say.  and he booms back in his inimitable fashion, “Pete!  How Ya doing?”

How long has it been?  Five years? Ten years?  More?  I am not sure.  But, really, no time has passed.  We are together by phone, and nothing has separated us.  He mentions the time we arrested John Yancy, a black dope peddler, in Harlem one cool evening, and he carried him down several flights of stairs, dumping him in the back of the car, and, as an ominous crowd gathers, urges me to “Get the hell outta here!”  That was back in the late ’60′s when cops were getting shot not too far away, and two white guys “kidnapping” one black guy did not look like something which should be done without a battalion of black clad troops and a few tanks.  But, what did we know?

I remember the sunny afternoon on First Avenue when he clotheslined some guy running away from us and I, chasing him, stepped on his head just as he hit the ground.  Someone else scooped him from the street, threw him into the car just pulling up, and we all piled in on top, driving off while the well dressed folks stopped and gaped, trying to figure out what had just happened to their world. It took about ten seconds, after we’d been watching and waiting for about two hours.

Today, they’d have roped off Midtown and evacuated all the people.  helicopters would be all over the place, sirens day and night, searchlights, stun grenades, smoke bombs.  After a day or so the guy would give up, and MSNBC would break down the set and go off somewhere else for continuous coverage of another disaster, catastrophe, chariot race or what all.

What did we know?

“Where are you?  What are you doing, now,” I ask.  He’s down in Georgia, Brunswick, GA, to be exact, the only Catholic surrounded by Baptists for miles around.  “I gotta be careful on Sunday, Pete,” he says.  “I gotta be careful going out to mow the lawn and have a beer.  All them eyes on me.”  I give him the name of another fellow, another Irishman, another Catholic who has to be careful in the same way down there, and tell him to get in touch.  This guy is from Indiana, a Bobby Knight fan, an old prosecutor.  They’ll get along I say to myself.

This guy got his picture on the cover of some magazine years ago after he made a big deal case.  His boss was on the cover, too, which is strange because his boss didn’t think the case was the right kind of thing to spend time on.  Matter of fact, no one but him and one lone guy in the IRS wanted the case made.  Until it was made.  Then the defendant pays a $500,000.00 fine from their petty change account, and walks out the door.  See what I mean?

What did he know?

Then Kevin says something serious to me.  “I was working for the Children’s Court, Pete.  The judge down here was an ex-FBI agent.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  All these kids coming in raped by their uncles, their older brothers, and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it.  You know?,”   He says, “I wanted to grab a few of them and give them a beating.  I had to leave.  There was one girl who kept having kids, one a year.  She gives them up for foster care, but makes a living out of the money she gets when she’s pregnant.  And, no one does a thing about it.  Don’t talk to me about foster care, either.  That’s a racket, and no one cares.”  As he talks I’m thinking about another guy I used to know in one of the sheriff’s offices up here in Cow Hampshire, from some place like Alabama originally; another good guy.

The first time I meet him is in this big office in the new county courthouse, not too far from the county jail, and he’s surrounded by boxes and boxes of smut; evidence in a case against a guy who…; well I’ll leave all that alone. He tells me that his office sees this kind of stuff more than anything else.  He’s sick of it and wishes he could get lost in a nice murder case, or some boat owner smuggling dope in from a mother ship off the coast.  But, there’s only one other detective in the whole department.

Back in the present, I’m listening to Kevin going on about life down South; about him and his wife Judy, and his little dog; about how he goes for walks along the beach, and talks to the folks he meets, and nets shrimp from the shore.  “Pete, they’re the biggest juiciest shrimp you ever ate!  They’re great!”, he rumbles.

I’m smiling as he says goodbye, and we promise to call and stay in touch, and love each other forever.  I have a picture in my mind of Kevin about forty years ago in the middle of some street in Brooklyn where we spent four days and nights back then waiting for a shipment of heroin from Spain to leave the dock so we could follow it and arrest the rats who smuggled the stuff here.  There’s Kevin in the morning.  It’s early, and it’s cool and the sun is bright, the sky is blue and clear.  He has a football in his big hand, and the rest of us are down the street.

What did we know?

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand #3

The first day of the trip had ended when the lights went out away across the room on Mariellen’s side, and, as I lay wide awake wondering whether or when I’d get to sleep, I thought about the many miles ahead and tried to imagine what the next weeks held for us.  That adventure of the mind did the trick, eventually, and I drifted off.

I was wide awake at 4:00am, and grimly facing what I knew would be a very long day.  My first thoughts were that a shower at that time would be a hostile act towards all the still sleeping people in the house.  How many that might have been given the comings and goings of last night wasn’t at all clear to me.

So I lay on my back in my narrow twin bed, listening to Mariellen’s regular breathing in the far distance, occasionally glancing at the clock all the way over there on the other side of her own separate bed while begrudging her those soft metronomic sighs of deep and peaceful sleep, and begrudging the same in everyone else in the house.  Her little alarm clock woke her at 5:00am and she went downstairs to make us some coffee.  I took it as sign and permission to leave my own narrowing little bed.  It was after all her own brother’s house.  I leapt from bed, showered, dressed and joined her downstairs.

We grazed a little breakfast over the next hour or so, people appearing from time to time, and then came the sweet goodbyes of our hostess, the half awake handshakes of sons Will and Jack, and Maddy’s rather harried and distracted courtesy of the occasion as she herself made final preparations for her cold, windy and wet school camping trip in Maine.  She’d explained that it was a requirement of all the students.  I thought I would have chosen a school more carefully; one which required its students to spend three days inside some snug roost drinking tea, watching a warm and toasty fire and reading good books.  Mercifully, I kept my counsel.

Instead I tinkered with my injured camera, hoping that I’d only imagined what had happened yesterday afternoon.  But, it was one of those hopes that are hopeless at their birth, a hope against grim reality, a vain imagining, a fairy tale.   I wrote a short note to Mary asking that she mail the camera and its case to our friend Joanna in New York City who had promised to have the camera repaired, and left her $20.00 for packing and postage.

Bill, God love him, was  to drive us to the airport after we had collected Jay, Mariellen’s brother, from his place just a little way down the street.  Jay was going with us as far as San Francisco where another Supple brother, Joseph, would meet him and take him up north for a while.  I was picking up bags and lugging them to the car when Bill walked by, camera and note in one hand and my twenty in the other which he stuffed in my hand.  “You’ll probably have need of this,” he said, walking by.  “I’ll take care of the camera.”

One tends to listen to Bill.  I thanked him; once again considering how good it was of God to bring Mariellen and her family into my life.

___________________________________________________________

The drive in was on almost empty roads; another occasion for my thanks, being a little nervous about time and such.  While Bill worked the short cuts he knew so well I thought of him “traffic surfing” the way a person catches the crest of a wave and, out in front of the pile up behind us, shoots in easily and alone.

The thought was erased when we arrived at Terminal C where we were to catch the first of the six flights this trip would require of us.  Several dozen cars, several hundred people and several thousand pieces of luggage all crowded into a space half the size of a gridiron.  We were walking for the outdoor baggage check in when Bill, whose firm handshake still ached me, warned us off.  I think his cry was, “They charge you, there!”  Visions of 20 dollar bills fluttering away flashed before my mind, and we turned toward the doors.

We went inside to the Jet Blue check-in counters stretching the length of the back wall.  The size of the crowd wasn’t really a worry since it moved along steadily to the baggage check-in counters, each station along them manned and ready; a welcome sight and strange compared to the one or two agents lolling behind most others I have seen.  Several “crowd handlers” stood by directing passengers to available agents.  We were soon through that, facing the next barrier to the door of our airplane, the dreaded “security check”.

Shoeless and belt less we faced the clueless.  Well why not pick on ‘em, poor folks, the dalits of the traveler’s world.  They keep us from getting as quickly as possible to the gate where we may sprawl uncomfortably in seats designed by hateful people for legless midgets until our flight is called; in this case about forty-five minutes later.

Sitting there reflecting about the first few hours of the actual journey I offered a small prayer of thanks that things had gone so well with the TSA folks (Thousands Standing Around), especially since Jay, Mariellen’s brother, was himself concerned.  He hadn’t been on a plane since 9/11 and had wondered a bit about the whole process.

Mariellen produced her Kindle, where she was fast collecting everything written by man with the possible exception of Hammurabi’s Code and the Manhattan White Pages, and quietly read.  We shared a snack from the bag of goodies we’d prepared for the flight, Jet Blue having no meal service.  I wandered, read headlines, recoiled from sticker shock at the magazine, book and bottled water prices, gawked at people and tried to look the bored and disinterested traveler.  So much time.  So little to do.

Several centuries later the bright voice announced the good news.  Our flight to San Francisco was being boarded, by passengers and one “Service Animal”, a dog accompanying one of us humans.  I was grateful for this bit of clarifying information…

One of the flight attendants grumbled to another at the presence of this animal among all the people.  The “grumbelee” answered, “What could I do?  It’s a service animal, and I had to let them aboard!”  I pictured the S.A and its serviced human in separate cages in the baggage hold if permission wasn’t granted.  As my boarding pass was being scanned by the upset attendant I tried my best to calm her down.  “You know, that is what they call husbands, don’t you; service animals?”  The Rule Enforcer laughed and said, “I need one of them.  Where can I get one?”  She glanced over at Mariellen and asked if she could rent me.

Fortunately the press of the crowd pushed us past them or I might be doing the dishes in Saugus instead of sitting in a comfortable bed in Paihia, NZ, writing these words.

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Well, about all I can say for the flight to San Francisco is that it happened.  Jay was happy with the many TV stations available, and happier still that they came to him on the screen fixed into the back of the seat in front of him.  Mariellen fell into her Kindle, only surfacing from time to time for air and a look around.  She was reading the Mahabharata, I think.  I dozed until served one of the roast beef sandwiches we’d prepared for the flight, and then dozed some more.

We were in an almost brand new airplane, I think, something from the Boeing showroom with a lot of the number seven in its name.  The seats were wide and spaced far apart.  The crew was young and helpful.  I did not see a walker or a cane among them.  None of them dribbled.  None of them seemed to have loose dentures or back problems.  Aside from those shortcomings, the flight was as normal as every other one I have taken recently.  Properly prepared for things like that, you may actually enjoy Jet Blue.

In the row in front of us were two women traveling with a young girl of five or six who had some kind of developmental disorder.  During the flight from time to time she would stand up in one of their laps and peek over the seat to look around.  I tried saying hello, touching her hand or smiling and waving at her.  There was no reaction or indication that she noticed there was someone touching her or trying to communicate with her.  I was affected by this, and the devotion the two women showed her, offering a prayer for them all.

The Girl On The Plane

For a while towards the end of the flight I amused myself looking down at the world below, at all the brown and the very little green, at all the snow along the mountain ridges.  As we began our descent towards San Francisco I saw the whole of Lake Shasta below with the mountain from which it takes its name, and the dam which created it.  I didn’t know then that in a couple of weeks I’d be on the lake, inside the dam and near enough to the mountain to understand how some folks all those years ago…and today…make a big deal about mountains; climbing them, living near them and just standing around looking at them in all of their purple mountained majesty.

Mt. Shasta from about 25 miles away