Thinking About The Fourth Commandment

I read something this morning which had the term “filial piety” in it.  I liked the rhythm of the phrase, the balance of sound and syllable.  It was almost dance like.  Silly old guy that I am I got up and did a little waltz around the room muttering “filial Piety” in 3-4 time over and over.  You want to know something?  It worked.

I found that you can dance to Filial Piety.  On Dick Clark’s American Bandstand that would have made it a hit.  On the other hand, it does not seem the kind of song that could be made a hit of these days.  I mean could you think of “Filial Piety” being danced to in the modern version of a ballroom…a mosh pit?  Would it ever be a song sung by Lady Gaga, or her spiritual grandmother Madonna of blasphemic fame?

Now that I think of it, the very last time that a song named Filial Piety could have been written in 3-4 time and become a hit would have been back in the 1950′s.  The very last person to play it would have been Dick Clark.  Perhaps someone like Bobby Vinton or Bobby Darin would have been the very last recording artist to perform it.

Oh, something with that name might be put out now and be listened to by a zillion plugged in hoodie wearing zombies, but it would definitely not have anything to do with what I can think of as Filial Piety, and what it really means.  I picture a modern Filial Piety being performed by a group possibly named Total Destruction playing in a style called  Kroolmetal Annihilation…all the rage don’t you know..and the song beginning something like this:

Refuse, refuse, refuse to bend
break the back of fatherhood. end
and begin the death of you and him
pity pity piety weak and whining deity

Something way cool like that, you know, with a lot of screaming and slobbering and cannon loud pounding percussion going on all the time. A nice hate filled piece for the mosh pit life’s become.

Here’s what filial piety really is and really does, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
” Observing the fourth commandment brings its reward: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you.”8 Respecting this commandment provides, along with spiritual fruits, temporal fruits of peace and prosperity. Conversely, failure to observe it brings great harm to communities and to individuals. “

It really is like a dance, you know.

And the sad, sad thing about it is that the music is still playing and the ballroom has slowly emptied. Now mothers don’t want to have babies. And fathers don’t want to be fathers. And children? They are not allowed to be born, to grow and learn to dance to that sweet song.

Great harm has been brought to communities and to individuals.

Just sayin’.

Just Say No!

OK, ABC and Disney, Hollywood, Pepsi,the  Democratic Party, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, the other two nets, every newspaper in the country, and anyone who advertises in them or on TV, medical insurance, auto insurance, insurance insurance. It all stinks like fish gurry.  That’s what we’re being fed, and we think it’s filet mignon.

Are we really that stupid?  Have we really been such lousy pushovers?  Is it really the truth; that these guys have figured out that all we are is a bunch of stomachs, sexual organs and fat butts?  Seems like it.

No you say?  Prove it.

Don’t give them any of your time, and don’t spend any of your money on them.

Did I leave out anything?  Oh, yeah, the cable and satellite companies that carry alla that garbage into your home. Stop it all.  Cut it all out, the noise, the flash, the bling, the fly, the whatever the hell they come with next to make us forget that this is all a big swindle.

That’s gonna leave many of us with a lot of loose change and an awful lot of time on our hands. Try reading a book.  Try reading a good book.  Take a walk.  Actually have a conversation about something other than baseball or your nails and hair.  Put the money in a shoe box or a bank and forget about it.

Hey!  Here’s an idea.  Why not spend the time saying a prayer for the state of the world, these Untied States and our own poor selves.  And, another idea just occurred to my mind.  Why not use some of that new found money to help some folks; like folks with time on their hands because they have no work to do.  Or, folks with time on their hands because they never had any work to do, or because they can’t work…or hungry folks…or sick folks.  You know?

And, if or when the suits in the big buildings wake up and find everyone’s left the room,  and they come outside and say, “Hey!  OK, we screwed up.  Sorry.  Come on back.”  And their hands are out in supplication, and they’re smiling pleadingly, why not everyone say, “Nah, find another sucker.”  And, try finding an honest job while you’re at it.

‘Cause you know what all of this is, don’t you?  It’s “Bread and Circuses”, where the Big Deals figure out how to keep the lid on, keep the schmucks (that’s you Mr. and Mrs. America) happy so they never figure out how lousy life is; they never figure out that they are owned, bought and paid for in the greatest swindle since the original Bread and Circus deal back there in Rome.  Did you see the movie Matrix?  You’re in it.  I’m in it.

We’re all in it.

Wake up.

Walk away.

Just sayin’.

Anent The Topic of the Day Politics and Political Solutions

No elected, appointed or self seated office holder, or seeker of same,  has ever in the history of humanity asked a question whose wording was designed to elicit an answer which did anything more than show he (the office holder) was doing exactly as the person answering the question wished him to do, or will have wished him to do in the future.

That is a fact better established and more sure of verification than the rising of the sun in the east mere hours after its disappearance beyond the horizon in the west.

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 GUYS I HANG AROUND WITH

I report here on a conversation which took place a few days ago on an e-mail list to which I belong.  It began when another member sent a link to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street journal by Peggy Noonan, who used to write speeches for Ronald Reagan among other things.  Another fellow replied that the article’s first half had elated him while the second half had disgusted him.  Do read it.

In passing he mentioned me, and suggested that I might be thinking, “Well, Satan is real.  Evil exists.  Get real.”

I thought about that before I replied.  My first reaction to the “Satan is real” sentence was, “Well, Du-uh!”.  Then I began to think further on what that might mean for us today, and the mess everyone but the editorial board of Playboy  the CEO of large corporations thinks we are in.  This has been coming on us since the end of the Second World war. The 50′s prepared us for it, a prosperous time where we as a country produced 2/3rds of the products made in the whole world. The 60′s accelerated it as we began to believe what we were telling ourselves, “We really are the best thing since sliced bread.” More-so, we could indeed have guns and butter, and no one had to work hard at anything. We could turn on, tune in and drop out…the functional equivalent of eating the forbidden fruit. The 70′s cemented us in that position, though there were danger signs and rumblings over the horizon in Vietnam, first, and then in Iran. But, we had that old dinosaur to lead us through the 80′s, Reagan, who believed and helped us believe in us. It all began to fall apart in the 90′s when Clinton proved a clever liar is more successful than an honest man; well here, at least. Now the Malls are full of fools and liars, and so are the halls of academies, corporate HQ’s, the Pentagon and Congress. The Liar in Chief inhabits the whitest house in the country, a sepulchre, the burial place of honesty and liberty.

So, yes, Satan is real, as my friend said I might say, and evil does exist; though we would rather not, like Scarlett, think of those things. However I would not add “get real.” I would add “Get over it.” “IT” being, specifically, the stupid notion that we have a snowball’s chance in hell of making the world and/or ourselves safe from or for anything. That is the seductive bait we have swallowed since Mac Arthur inked his name to the document of surrender on the fantail of the USS Missouri, and we chose to forget, ignore and be embarrassed by another old general fifteen years later on who suggested there were a few things we should be chary of getting ourselves involved in…

And, now?  Now we are hooked, being reeled in.

Left to our own devices we have always screwed up. We’ve been doing it since babel. Read the Old Testament if you want to know what happens next, because next is the destruction of the temple (read that as whatever our contemporary society holds sacred…and it certainly ain’t any notion that there is a God in heaven) and our exile in some latter day Babylon. As we are being led off into captivity of one kind or another turn around and look for the “remnant”, the faithful few who did not put their trust in “other gods”.

They will not be saying, “I told you so.” They will be begging God’s mercy on all of our sorry butts.

I ended this by writing, “I give us twenty years to the end.”  I had in mind a few things I’ve read lately about China, looming across the Western Sea.

The fellow who sent in the Noonan link commented that some of the stuff I wrote reminded him of  the situation in that science fiction classic from the Fifties, “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.  If you haven’t read it you should. If you have not read it in a while, do re-read it.  You’ll like it.  The author’s solution to the problem was a familiar one; right out of the Bible…flee into the wilderness.  If that captures your imagination, and gets you thinking about “life, the universe and all that” so to speak you may want to continue your studies.  In that case pick up an author by the name of Michael O’Brien, and begin with his first novel, Father Elijah.  He paints a similar picture, but points to a different solution.

This gentle man who started off everything among us had bemoaned the fate we’d prepared for our grand-children. Our poor grand-children, and theirs, indeed.  If, that is, we continue going the way we are/have been for the past fifty years at a steadily accelerating pace.  We are in a cart, a coach and four to some who choose not to see, being pulled by seven horses.  Can you name them?

That was the point, I think, of Noonan’s surprising essay which I finally read after coming home from the Vigil last Saturday.  I say surprising because she was an acolyte for the last True Believer to occupy the position of President.

I was thinking this morning how nice it would be to hand over the reins to the Chinese, and let all of those professional worriers, perfectors of the world for humanity and hand wringers inhabiting that marble and glass slab on Manhattan’s East Side move to Peking; how nice it would be to let Germany, France, Spain, Italy and their etcs. pull their own weight; how nice it would be to let Mexico and everything south of us depend on Venezuela and Brazil; how nice it would be to let everyone in Africa make a meal on their own….even if it was each other.

It won’t happen, of course, because the guys who really run things, the foundation guys, the think tank guys and the corporate guys have “interests” all over the place, and these interests produce compelling reasons for keeping, or trying to keep, the lid on.  It’s become like a tangle of fishing line, I suppose.  My final thoughts were of a scene from the film “The Gladiator”; poor Marcus Aurelius up there on the Rhine trying to stem the tide. He was successful in the film, of course, but that’s Hollywood for you.  We know what really happened, of course.  It’s the reason we speak what we laughingly call English instead of Latin…for as long as we may have it around to speak.

There was another article sent for our amusement, a kind of follow up by an historian named Kaiser.  I decided to read it after reading one of the comments posted about it.  I found two things mildly interesting:

“Two centuries of the Enlightenment had convinced mankind that the application of science and reason could improve their lot.”

“The second is the destruction of the rationalist ideal in the humanities. English and history departments no longer acknowledge the existence of objective reality. Language, many professors will now tell you, cannot mirror objective reality, only the feelings and interests of individual speakers, or of their gender, race, or class. In short, they have destroyed the Tower of Babel that had been built up over the past two centuries, enabling us to use a common language to speak of the common good.”

I was very much amused by his “Tower of Babel” reference and wonder, now, if the whole thing was tongue in cheek.

Maybe it was, and maybe, also, what the fellow is saying is that we’ve become too smart for our own good?  Convinced as we have been since, oh 1750 at least in the West, of our brains and sure of our purpose and destiny, our bright future, we built many versions of that tower all over the place.  A lot of us have worked away inside of them for forty or so years believing all the while we were making the world safe for democracy, or serving Truth, Freedom and the American Way…or something.  The fruits of our labors, and proof of our theories and beliefs was of course a chicken and two cars, along with 500 channels and one small step.  What more could an honest man want?

He thinks, that we may turn around.  We may do it with God’s help.  But, He only helps those who ask for it.  I do not see anyone seriously thinking of doing that, aside from a little fellow in a white cape.

As someone might say, “It’s not the economy, stupid”; nor is it rationalist ideals.

Never has been.

Now comes a new thing.  Two fellows deep in the Pentagon have written an essay calling for us to to re-think what we’ve been up to all over the place for the past nearly seven decades.  They appeared on an NPR talk show yesterday called On Point and spoke about their thesis that we need to get less muscular and more subtle.  I particularly liked what was said at the end by one of the men.  He spoke about being a newcomer to DC and what he’s seen and heard there.  According to him almost every article of the Constitution is discussed by people interested in the rights attached to it/them. He continued by saying he has never heard anyone mention the Preamble, though, the bit which articulates the reason for it, and the reason why there is an Untied States of America…oops did I say UNTIED?  I mean United States of America.  Then he said he specifically never heard anyone pay any attention to the last phrase of the preamble.  You know the one which goes “…and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity”.

Anyone?  Bueller?

As a certain old Yankee catcher might say, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

WEEDING (A Story For The End Of Lent)

While nothing seemed necessary, everything was.

The old man walked slowly down the alley alongside the building.  It was no true alley he thought, but he had taken to calling it one.  It was really a driveway, a passage in England or Ireland, leading to the garage.  “True” alleys are narrow spaces between tall brick buildings.  To his left was the rectory, an old Victorian mansion.  On his right, a narrow space of struggling Bishop’s Weed and Periwinkle, some old trees and vibrant, vigorous, healthy invaders, weeds.  But this was an alley because he had named it “alley”.  It was a word from home, a place filled with alleys, “true” alleys; and so, an alley to him it became as he walked a bit unevenly, a bit gingerly down it.  He had work to do.

Long, long ago alleys figured in his life.  Alleys were hangouts, hiding places, respites from the summer heat; a place to play blackjack for pennies or nickel-dime poker, experiment with cigarettes and beer, joke with your buddies or begin to explore the differences between boys and girls; until Mrs. Third Floor Busy-body, the neighborhood conscience, called the “Super” and he chased everyone out into the sun.  Growing up he’d enjoyed being in the alleys of home, and didn’t even mind that the rest of the world might think of an “allee” as some tree lined avenue leading to a chateau in the French or English country side.  He didn’t mind, really, because he’d not come across that word until years later in college.  He’d spent a lot of time in alleys. He knew them well, those places of cool shade away from the light.

He entered the garage through the open door, the broken one which wouldn’t stay on its track so dust and leaves entered the place and had to be swept up and thrown away once in a while. The garage would look neat for another week or so, until the wind and rain filled it up again and the broom needed wielding on the floor.  There were two brooms in the garage.  Both had seen better days, had served well.  For that matter, so had the garage itself seen better days and served well.  The brooms stood just inside the broken door, leaned against the wall near some old garden tools which, if anything, had seen and served as much as the brooms.  One or two were dangled from sturdy old nails pounded long ago into the wooden beams, thick unfinished oak still showing the cuts made by the tools which gave them their roughly rectangular form.

There was an old hoe, a small headed gardening spade, a garden rake, an old claw hammer and a four tined haying fork still sharp and dangerous.  And there was his favorite, an ancient cultivator with a mantis shaped head angled back at about fifteen degrees from the shaft.  Slender, thin and deadly it looked.  It was.  Only an eighteen inch fragment of the shaft was left, split and sharp edged; a place of splinters as mean as snake bites if not properly handled.  Nevertheless, it was his favorite tool.  It had been his favorite before it broke, and it was his favorite still.  It looked mean and useful.  It was.

Maybe it was because he had to get closer to the work he did with it that he liked it more now. Maybe it was the satisfaction he felt doing all of that ripping and tearing.  He’d bend low, bracing himself, his left forearm on left thigh, and plunge the tool into the earth behind an invading weed, some unwanted plant, and pull away.  Young oaks and maple saplings, clumps of grass, all would yield.  Some went with no effort at all and lay where they were thrown a few feet aside wilting in the heat; dead on the field.  Others, the deeper rooted ones, needed several stabbing thrusts into the dirt, each plunge deeper into their tangled roots, deeper into the web of weeds and worse the old place was covered with and buried in.

The point would sink into the earth; then a pull, a strain of muscle and tendon and wood and steel against earth and stone and root; then the ripping sound, the feel of things breaking underneath, letting go, and, sometimes, an explosion of soil and lines of roots came ripping free from the earth.  The offensive weed’s tendrils had spread all over.  At first he was surprised at how far and how deep those things went.  But, why not?  They’d had all that time and all that neglect to “settle in”. Often old pieces of machinery, wire, tin cans and other debris dumped back there years ago came free, too.  This was no liberation, though.  This was their defeat.

The old man took his tools from the rusty nails on the garage walls and walked outside.  Shade covered most of the old lot.  There wasn’t as much shade as last year, when the place had been twilight dark at mid-day.  That was before he and some friends had removed nearly a hundred saplings and small trees, and about a ton of long buried junk; the bad memories of other days.  What a bonfire they’d made.  But there was more.  Oh, boy was there more.  “Begin anywhere,” he thought, and he bent to the work.

From a great height, with a great force, the weapon fell directly into his heart, deep and deeper still.  Full into flesh it fell penetrating beyond all boundaries into the center of self; an intelligent weapon, a seeker, purposeful, single minded.  It was made so. And it cut away.  And it dug away.  And it tore away, leaving heavy with the waste of wrong, bringing to light the years of neglect.  Removing itself it returned again into his heart, and again, each return deeper, each stay shorter, each leaving lighter with each wrong removed.

The old man looked around him as he straightened, slowly, from his posture of attack over the torn up ground.  His mantis-headed tool was polished now by the scouring earth, a clump of black soil clinging to its point.  Like an extension of his right hand it hunk from his fist at his side.  He looked around at the work and was satisfied.  Dead Amorites, Jebbuzites and Canaanites…  They lay all about on the field; the enemies of the Lord.

It was a start.  Only that he knew.

Clean and Dead

The fellow down the street in the yellow house
has built a swimming pool in the backyard.
Last year he had all his trees chopped down
the land was cleared, the soil was scraped away
and a big hole was dug that stayed that way
and filled up with snow all the winter long.
He filled it with a pool this spring.  Put sod
around it.  The sod died.  I saw a dead mouse
at the end of his drive when I passed by
the other day walking down the hill early in
the morning; though I don’t often walk that way.
If you look for it you can just see
the pool from the corner of his property
sparkling clean as dawn on a summer day.
There’ll be no leaves in that pool come Fall’s winds
what with all the trees gone now.  There’s just sky
above, bits of grass, empty flower beds.
Everything else is wiped clean, clean and dead.

MY CHOICE

Death came to my door
Neither late nor early.
Death is, if anything, on time
Though I was not expecting him.
The house was unprepared for any guest.
In fact it was in a more than normal mess,
And Death I think soon saw his chance was slim
Of welcome, pleasant visit.  The hour chimed
Behind us.  I turned.  Death smiled, “My hour. Three.”
I smiled, “I should have cleaned.”  I closed the door.

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.

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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.

___________________________________________________________

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