Van Winkled

When he awakens from his gin-induced slumber high up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Rip Van Winkle does not realize that he has slept for twenty years, nor does he realize that while he slept the American Revolutionary War has been fought and won.  He drifted into sleep a British citizen; he awoke an American.  He drowsed off a colonial subject; he arose and made his way back down the mountain the sovereign subject of a democracy.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Rip is bewildered when he returns to his village home.  The place has undergone a singularly disorienting transformation.  Time seems out of joint.  The village’s accustomed demeanor of phlegmatic snugness and timeless tranquility has been transformed, into the clangorous babble of disputatious voices using baffling words like citizens’ rights and Congressional elections and liberty.  The male bastion of Nicholas Vedder’s inn has disappeared and, in its place, stands the Yankee Jonathan Doolittle’s ramshackle Union Hotel.  The inn’s sheltering tree has given way to a liberty pole from which waves a flag bestrewn with stars and stripes.  The inn’s sign, too, has changed, revised to portray General Washington rather than King George.  Rip himself, formerly a village favorite, goes unrecognized, is mistaken for his son, and suspected of being a Tory spy, is threatened with violence.

Confronted with such confounding change, driven to his wits’ end end, Rip comes undone, his sense of identity upended: “I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, . . . and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”  Eventually, however, Rip’s identity is affirmed by the village’s historian, and displacement replaced by replacement, he settles into a new role, a storyteller, a chronicler of the pre-war past, and comes to be revered by “the rising generation” as one of the village patriarchs.

It’s likely that Washington Irving intends Rip to represent the socially ameliorative role the artist can play by suturing the historical past to the cultural present.  But rereading “Rip Van Winkle” as autumn enters the not-to-be-denied bear-hugging embrace of winter, has got me thinking instead about change.

E. B. White says that “The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change – and we all instinctively avoid it.”  I have been such an avoider, I would rather listen to 18 straight hours of 120-decibeled Norwegian Black Metal music than make peace with change.   And gazing at the mounting evidence outside my windows of winter implacably choking autumn’s song in its throat, I find myself resonating to Robert Frost’s claim that such a change of season is, somehow, nothing “less than a treason.”

But then there is Irving’s ending to the story, that accommodation Rip makes, his détente with change, his capacity to roll with it, submit to the rhythm of it, use it, finally, to sculpt out a space in which he can attune it to his specifications rather than become its relic.

Rip is resilient.

*     *     *

Stability is undeniably comfortable; predictability, convenient; the settled, dependable.  Change can seem a snap-jawed disruption that cannot be halted.  Its signature is scrawled across the world in indelible ink.  Change happens, has happened, will continue to happen.  It time-warps our conception of the world and our function and fit into it. Change never stops, and to think it does, or to want it to, is a fantasy romanced by illusion.

Muttering to ourselves at the dusty rear of the caravan is no place to be.

The very fact that disruption erupts, however, means that it can be accounted for.  We cannot control the events and circumstances of the world, but we can control how we think about them, how we react to their turbulence.  There is the fact of change, but there is also the fact of my purposeful response to it, the fact of my pro quo for its quid, my imposition on its imposition. A world sunk in stability is a determined world, a world suspended between tock and tick.  In such a world, we never really reach childhood’s end.

The question is, which Rip will we be: the Rip garrisoned by sleep, impervious to the goings on going on, or the Rip who improvises and adapts, the Rip who intuits that roles change, but the need for one never does.  Do we settle with change or settle for it?  Do we work it, integrate it, or do we avert our eyes and practice careful unnoticing? Can we, even in small, quiet ways, shake the burrs of habit off our clothes; Houdini ourselves from rigidity of thinking and acting; learn what’s necessary, what to engage, what to let pass by?  I think the better part of wisdom says we should, must.  “Prudence keeps life safe.” Samuel Johnson says, “but does not often make it happy.”

Oh, and that relentless change from autumn to winter?  Seasonal change never changes, but I can winterize both house and wardrobe.  And, perhaps, myself:  I find myself itching for a snowball fight, and I’ve retrieved, from its long exile atop a dusty basement shelf, the box that contains my ice skates.

 

Replay It, Sam

Language geek that I am, I of course have a favorite word:  “syzygy,” which refers to the alignment of the sun, earth, and moon.  It is not, however, the astronomical phenomenon that makes the word interesting to me; rather, it the word’s sheer oddity.  It’s an outlaw, an outlier, a renegade in the clubby, stuffed-chair company of English words.  It’s a muscular word, ripped and vascular and six-packed, a word that could clean and jerk an Audi.  It’s a martial word, a word with a soldierly march and Spartanish austerity, three syllables of two letters only, each containing “y” clinched to a consonant, a word as stalwart as Leonides at Thermopylae, a word undaunted  by its union of consonant-vowel clusters that appears at the beginning of no English word.   And then there’s the sound-sense bonus, the no-nonsense, military procession of syllables suggesting the alignment the word denotes.  It almost seems a made-up word, though it in fact combines two Greek words, syn, meaning “together” and zagon, meaning “yoke.” 

But my language geekdom extends beyond having a favorite word.  I have a favorite prefix: “re,” from Latin meaning “again,” “back,” “anew.”  “Re” attaches itself to verbs to indicate that the action is redone, revised, revamped, reiterated.  “Re” is the Xerox of prefixes; “re” is a keen edged coulter that turns the encrusted up and back and over; “re” is a verbal do-over make-over.

*     *     *

Sometimes, to purposefully renounce our self-awareness is to restore it.  Sometimes, we are reprieved from memory, rekindled by a seizing impulse, released into the swelling urgency of a moment.  Sometimes, like old recordings, we are remastered, recapturing the rhythmed tune that sings us.  Sometimes, we are bitten by remorse.  Sometimes, we are maladied with no remedy but resilience, retrenchment, rebellion, or the recuperative strength of renewed resolve.  Sometimes, religion ligatures us to an expression of reverence or a renaissance of wonder; sometimes, it redeems, buying us back to ourselves; sometimes, it resurrects us with a resurgence of hope and gratitude; sometimes, it reveals what we already knew by heart but could not find the words to utter.  Sometimes, we reject regret, repress repression, reserve our reserve, reproach our reproach.

*     *     *

I witnessed a retreat that was a resolute act of courage.  In a meeting of academic division chairs and department heads, my Humanities Division colleague presented and defended a proposal that received a dour reception. The discussion quickly regressed into contentiousness. Objections were raised, dire implications prophesied, tangents expounded, tangents of tangents were recounted.  Voices grew loud, angry. My colleague responded, calmly answering objections, pointing out misreadings and clarifying misconceptions, but moment by moment the mood of the meeting was fast unfastening. 

Suddenly my colleague stood up and said, “I’m going to step out into the hallway for a few minutes.  I’m finding myself growing angry at your anger, and I don’t want to say something I’ll regret later.  I’ll return when I’ve cooled off, and maybe then we can reconsider this issue more deliberately.”  He left, we sat silent, he returned, we deliberated.

My colleague refused to react by re-enacting, refused to reflect a resentment he did not feel, refused to recoil into a motion not his own, refused to reciprocate that meeting’s heat, retaining, instead, a steady temperature of his own.  For me he redefined what I thought I knew of rectitude, resolution, and resilience.

*     *     *

At the age of 22, Benjamin Franklin resolved to reorient his life by pursuing “the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”  After all, he reasoned, because he knew right from wrong, he “did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”  But rescinding faults and reinforcing virtues entailed more than simple resolution.  To succeed, moral rehabilitation required a method. It must be actionable, not merely speculative.  So, he created an 18^th century version of an app: a spreadsheet designed to promote his behavior to incorruptibility.

First, he chose 13 virtues, sequenced such that success with one leveraged success with the next: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.  Then, for each virtue, he created a page with seven columns, one for each day of the week, and thirteen rows for each of the virtues.  Focusing on one virtue per week, he marked every relapse with “a little black Spot” in the appropriate cell.  He anticipated the pleasing visual evidence of his having repelled fault and reinforced virtue.

“I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining,” Franklin confesses.  Life intervened: business and public affairs intrude and divert his attention.  Habit resists reform; inclination repulses principle; conjured ideals exceed the time and attention we have to give—the littoral shelves against which most resolutions founder.  And yet, for me, the most important word Franklin utters is “arrived,” for that means he started.  We always, like Franklin, fall “far short” of perfection, and while that can occasion regret, it is no reason for resignation. Franklin says, “I was by the Endeavor a better and a happier Man than I otherwise would have been, if I had not attempted it.”  The launching forth, the enterprising itself, the heart-deep reluctance to settle for being only what we already are—these repurchase us from reproach and recrimination. 

*     *     *

Periodically, mom decided the furniture in the living room needed to be rearranged.  Dad and I, knowing this reorganization would require our physical labor, plaintively inquired, “But why?  It looks fine the way it is.”  Mom gave no reason beyond “it was time” but beyond that beyond she intuitively knew what Dad and I could not comprehend:  things need to be repositioned, regrouped, reshuffled, reconfigured, recombined, repositioned, rerelated, reinvigorated.  Space needs to be respaced, reshaped.  Things need to be jostled into fresh dialogues of color and form.  A room, like a life, needs to speak in a fresh dialect, a repatterned idiom, if it is to impart a renewed nuance.

*     *     *

“Re”—just a chip of language, really, but brimming with linguistic power.  “It is a mischievous notion,” Emerson says, “that the world was finished a long time ago.”  “Re” is “plastic and fluid;” it confutes fixity and baffles the encumbrance of the given.  It pitches woo to the remodel and recast.  It says the made can be remade, the done, redone, and that means the made and done can be made and done, differently, better.

 

 

 

 

 

A Halloween Tale

He could not sleep so he went for a walk.  The winter-crisp night was windless.  A full moon candled a sky pebbled with stars.  He remembered the Ibo proverb in Achebe: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”  And what was that story that described each pinpoint of starlight as the cold cry of an anguished purgatorial soul?  He walked.  He had no destination in mind, no place he particularly wanted to go.  He just walked.

Crossing a snowy field he came upon boot tracks.  The punctuation of another night walker.  He followed them until suddenly they stopped.  Just disappeared, as if the walker walked up into the night sky.  Ascended into the pale energy of the white moon.  The night massed.  Something, he felt, lay in wait, lay just out of sight, clamped and lidded, hidden perhaps beyond the tree line ahead or in the seam of shadow and light or behind the moon--some summons, some surging epiphany, some something that would send him spinning, out over the field, over the town, over the horizon.  The cold deepened, entered his flesh and rippled him with shivering. He felt he might be unraveling.  He turned and followed the two sets of tracks until they became only his set of tracks.  He followed his tracks back across the field and returned home.

He snugged himself under a comforter, sealed himself to keep from untangling.  He slept.  But he did not dream. 

Bead Counting

For almost six years, a rosary has hung from the brass shade bracket of my banker’s desk lamp.  It has been five decades since my fingers trundled along the beads of a rosary’s five decades;  five decades since, as one of the “poor banished children of Eve,” I sought the merciful intercession of the Mother of God by praying the five sets of ten Hail Marys, each punctuated by an Our Father;  five decades since Sister Mary Joseph told us the etymology of the word “rosary”—rosarius, a crown of roses—“Mary’s flower, you know,” Sister said, and told us a story of Mary appearing to a monk praying Hail Marys and transforming each prayer from his lips into a rose with which she wreathed her head; five decades since I contemplated, with each uttered decade of Hail Marys, one of Joyful or Luminous or Sorrowful or Glorious mysteries of the Catholic faith; five decades since I had used a rosary for the purpose for which it was designed.  Yet, I still use it.

The rosary, in a white velvet pouch, lay, with dozens of others, in a basket marked “Take one, please” located in the narthex of the church at which my mother’s funeral mass was said.  The priest misidentified my mother in the opening prayer, confusing her with a woman whose funeral mass was to be said in the afternoon.  An attending deacon whispered in the priest’s ear, he apologized, correctly identified my mother, and began the mass.  No doubt, he was a busy man.  But this was my mother he had misnamed.  I seethed.  I expected a priest who was present in the clarity of right now, a priest more mindful that he was saying a mass for my mother.

At the cemetery he conducted the burial wearing a Green Bay Packers knit cap and gloves.  I got it.  He was a regular guy, a Packer Backer, and in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi has been canonized and various players from the legendary 1967 “Ice Bowl” NFL Championship win over Dallas have been beatified, not to display one’s Packer loyalty is an act of apostasy.  Perhaps, as it was a cold November morning, that hat and those gloves were the warmest he owned.   Perhaps, being busy, he simply grabbed on the run whatever was handy.   And yet, and yet . . .  I wanted a priest, not a Packer fan, not a regular guy.  I wanted a man “configured to Christ,” a man through whom Christ acts, a man whose ordination aligns him in an arc of religious history stretching back to the Apostles. 

It was ungenerous and selfish thinking, angry thinking, unfastened, unshelved, unanchored.  I took offense, and the impulse of my displeasure supplanted thinking, understanding.  I churned with an unpoulticed resentment wholly unfit for the occasion, a maladied spirit my mother would have found foreign, and certainly mortifying in her son.  I wanted to treasure the light of my mother’s life and the solemnity of its passing, not the darkness of my smoldering and bitter indignation. After the funeral, I drove back to the church and took one of the rosaries.  It hangs on my desk lamp as a memorial, and as a self-rebuke, perhaps, even, a spun thread of atonement.

All things invoke; all things conjure.  All things gesture beyond their thingness, point away from themselves, away from their function and use, to an elsewhere, to a something other, to another meaning, more tacit than the thing.  They are charged with social assumptions and perceptions; they say things about us, about others.  They are inlaid, infused, with a social significance, with impressions and interpretations and feelings beyond their application.

Some things, however, go beyond even this beyondness and become sacramental objects.  They address us, hail us, as we hail Mary, to tend, to attend, to not defraud ourselves and give part of ourselves away. They act as talismen, media for a transcendent “herenow,” not a vaguely somewhered “hereafter.” They make moral claims, take us beyond choice and will and calculation, confront us with the force of passionate love, sublime beauty, profound tragedy, shearing sadness; transfer us out of our hermetic monologue and its all-immersive self-regard.   The rosary that hangs on my desk lamp, for all its cheap translucent plastic beads and its tinny chain, makes me stand outside the inhospitable, uncharitable anger I felt at my mother’s funeral, unannexes me, takes me to a place beside myself, a place where my opacity surrenders to my own gaze, where I see myself, what I was, did, could and should have been and done.

Maybe, just maybe, I am, after all, using it for the purpose for which it was designed.

 

Baring Threads

 

Take no thought . . . for the body, what ye shall put on.                     

Luke 12:22

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.                              

Henry David Thoreau

Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.         

Epictetus

 

I walked into the kitchen and said to my wife Kathy, “Look at this.”  I held up a sweater I had found in the bottom of the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers.  My mother had sent it to me some 15 years earlier.  “A perfectly good sweater; why haven’t I worn it?”

“That’s easy,” Kathy said.  “It was new.”

“Well, that’s ridicu—“ I began, until, with a kick-drum thud, I remembered I had yet to wear the T-shirt, fiery red with a stylized blue and white scene of sailboats on the bay, I’d bought in San Francisco in 1987.  Or the six years’ worth of T-shirts from the 10K Bellin Run in Wausau, Wisconsin, back in the 1980s.  Or the three Graceland University T-shirts I received for three Julys, 2002-2004, I’d spent manning the academic table during Iowa Private College week.  Or the Eddie Bauer slippers I’d received in 2009, or several pairs of slacks, at least three sweaters, probably half a dozen dress shirts, three neckties, one belt, one University of Iowa hooded sweatshirt, a Green Bay Packer windbreaker, a leather overcoat, one package of ankle socks, and a Titleist golf cap.  As usual, Kathy was right.

The fear of clothing is called “vestiphobia.”  The fear of the new is termed “neophobia.”  Could it be I suffer from “neovestiphobia?”  Is it possible I’ve been Cotton Mathered to the point of renouncing new clothes, fearing an apostate capitulation to “the creature,” the things of the world, not wanting to take my eye off the ball of more redemptive pursuits?  Am I simply indulging in a self-delusion, flattering myself on my frugality and wise clothes management?

I can safely say that my reticence to wearing new clothes is not the result of being deprived of them when I was a child.  I think I’m on firm ground affirming that my superego is not laying  siege to my ego, or that I haven’t erected a defense against repressed impulses—at least I think the ground is firm, though, really, when it comes to the uncontinented ocean of the Freudian unconscious, how would I know?  I will admit that I tend toward sameness and routine. I will concede that I do not like to draw attention to myself—I should probably add scopophobia, the fear of being stared at, to my list of fears—and would be basketed by anxiety that, in displaying myself in new clothes, I would appear a vain, exhibitionistic poser trying desperately to pull off some look.  I’ll cop to being unduly influenced by an article I read in AARP: The Magazine that advised always and everywhere to dress age appropriately, which, I take it, means staid, muted, and absolutely no skinny jeans.  And I’ll concede to being haunted by the 37-year-old memory of donning a brand-spanking new pair of burgundy double-knit trousers only to have the pet cat leap onto one leg, clinging by its claws and rendering the slacks unwearably pilled. 

For whatever reason, I have this idea that I should wear out the old, threadbare it, consume it until it fades, tatters, and becomes rag-bag ready, before putting on the new.  Giving myself over to the seduction of something new while the old retains its use value strikes me as being a moral kneecapping.  It’s imprudent, it’s impudent, it’s prodigal, it’s profligate.  I simply cannot bring myself to slip into those Bauer slippers, for instance, until the demise of my current slippers, which, calculating by age, condition, and use, should occur on or around mid-March, 2015.  Alternatively, I’ll tell myself that I’m reserving the new for a suitable occasion.  Strangely, however, that occasion never seems to arise.

Mostly, though, I suspect my reluctance to wear the new lies precisely in its newness.  The new is magical; it lies in a crucible of suspended time and pluralled possibility.  It is crisp, unwrinkled, frankincensed.  The new loiters in the bright morning of conceivability, of the unencumbered perhaps.  It is unfallen.  But newness doesn’t last.  Nothing new ever does.  Something can be new only once and only in one way; used, it tocks and ticks, frays and     tuckers, becomes way-worn and, finally, laid away.

How, you may wonder, did I manage to accumulate so many new clothes?  My life has been blessed with generous women who possess what I conspicuously lack: a keen eye for fashion.  They have taken it upon themselves to do what I cannot: dress me, and in a manner that at least shares the same zipcode with the stylish.  The process usually happens like this: on some present-giving occasion, when they ask what I’d like, I reply “I don’t know; there’s nothing I really need or want,” and by default they give me clothing. 

Obviously, I need to provide a more specific response to their query.  If I don’t, it’s likely that by this time next year I’ll be adding G. H. Bass loafers, a Ferragamo military-style jacket, and ck one jeans to the list of the unworn.

 

 

Knight of the Altar

Sister Mary Joseph beamed and spread her arms wide, as if to embrace us newly-fledged altar boys, as if to gather us within a zone of spiritual exclusivity.  “You are knights of the altar,” she declared.   We looked at each other and smiled.  We knew about knights, and they were cool: the stalwart rectitude, the round-table brotherhood, the sword-on-the-shoulders dubbing, the designation “Sir,” the armor, the colorfully draped horses, the lances, the beautiful and soulful-eyed maidens.  And though we knew our only armor would be ankle-length cassocks and crisply white surplices, our only lances the extending taper used to light the altar candles, we nonetheless anticipated cutting a valiant enough figure to wilt the reserve of even the most aloof maidens in our 6^th grade class.

“And you know, boys,” Sister continued, “that the origin of serving as altar boys lay in the Last Supper, when Jesus sent two of his apostles, Peter and John, into Jerusalem to prepare a room in which to hold the Passover feast?”  We were stunned.  Jesus and the apostles?  Us?  To be doing something the trajectory of which arced back over an unimaginable two thousand years of history?  Us?  Baseball-playing, American-Bandstand- watching, cigarette-sneaking, dirty-joke-telling, smelly-sweatsocks-wearing us?   And then Sister told us that as servers, we were acting as acolytes.  We did not know what that word meant, but it sounded important and holy and confirmed for us that, having completed our training, we were no longer ordinary boys.  We were special, marked, singled out.  We had crossed into sacred precincts.  We realized, dimly, that more would be expected of us. 

Certainly, our training had prepared us for those expectations.  We had each been issued a server’s card and had spent months memorizing the Latin responses, from the opening “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem mean” to the closing “Deo gratias.”  We enlisted parents and relatives to quiz us.  We asked the Sisters to quiz us on the playground during recess. We quizzed each other as we passed in the hallway: “Hey, Jerry, `Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.’”  “Dignum et justum est,” I’d reply.  We quizzed each other in the restroom and on the bus ride to and from school.  “Dominus vobiscum.”  “Et cum spiritu tuo.”  And the pronunciation had to be perfect.  “No, dummy, it’s `cone-fee-tay-or,” not “confetti-er.”

But despite all the memorization and persnickety attention to pronunciation, we liked Latin and we yielded ourselves to it.  It was foreign and mysterious—our own secret language of sorts.  It had a poetic rhythm that unfurled like a bolt of silk off the tongue: “ET cum SPIRitu TUo;” “Qui TOLlis PeCAtta MUNdi, MIseREre NObis.”  We especially liked the repetitive  troche of “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” of the Confiteor.  The obligatory breast beating accompanying those clustered words made their cadence palpable.

After memorizing the responses, and after having recited them flawlessly to both the principal and the pastor, we rehearsed the basic moves we would be required to make: how to hold the hands (palms together, fingers pointed), when and how to bow (not too fast, too slow, or too deeply), when and how to genuflect (knee must contact the floor), when and how to ring the bells (twice, with a quick twist of the wrist), when and how to move the priest’s missal from the Epistle side of the altar to the Gospel side.  We practiced how to receive the priest’s biretta at the beginning of mass and how to return it to him at the end, how to turn (never face completely away from the altar), how to present the cruets of water and wine (handles toward the priest), how to pour water over the priest’s fingers (towel over the right wrist, dish in the left, water cruet in the right), how to prepare and hold the censer.  Finally, as the culmination to our training, we spent a week sitting in a small nave to the side of the altar observing experienced altar boys working a morning mass.  We were assigned our first mass the following week

Many of my fellow altar boys stopped serving at the end of eighth grade.  I continued well into high school.  I liked serving mass, liked the spectacle and theatricality of it,  the ritualistic discipline of it, the processional pace of it, the weighty sanctity and solemnity of it, the symbolic resonance of each gesture and movement, small acts that contributed to the larger act of praise and celebration.  I felt that somehow, in some small way, I was a co-priest; that the vital energy of the mass, its reverence and beauty, its very syntax, depended on me, if only slightly.  I was wholly held in the experience of it, the visceral sensibility of it.  I was determined to be perfect.

And, indeed, I did draw attention.  The sisters requested me for the 5 a.m. mass in their convent during Lent, an undertaking made more complicated because I worked without a partner.  The priest often called me to do funerals, for each of which he gave me a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and weddings, for which I received from the groom five or ten dollars.  I was asked to help train new altar boys.  I could do low masses and high masses and requiem masses, Christmas and Easter and Holy Week masses.  I never missed an assignment or obligation, never made a mistake.  My folks were proud.  I was proud of myself.  I was doing something important, something meaning-saturated, and I did it well.

And then, for reasons I still cannot satisfactorily explain, sometime into my junior year in high school my faith wavered, dimmed.  I declined invitations to serve, then removed myself from the active list.  After I graduated, I stopped attending church altogether.  I had fallen away, and have remained so some forty-five years later.  I suspect I began to find, and still find, other means to meet what seems to me the primary purpose of religion: to exceed our nearliness, our almostness, our in-partness.  When I served mass, I felt, intimately, what British writer Jeanette Winterson describes as “a doubtfulness of the solid-seeming world.”   I believed I witnessed, close up, a miracle.  When the priest uttered “Hoc est corpus meum,” that thin wafer of unleavened wheat became the body of Christ.  A transubstantiation had occurred before my eyes, and I was, at that moment, in the presence of something beyond my understanding, something otherwise and beyond that released me from the commonplace weight of my being in the world, something that gestured to an openness transcendent and never sealed.  So I believed.

I have since found, however, that if we look, really look, seemingly ordinary things, things taken for granted, unsecondthoughted, can be, are, quite extraordinary things, things, as Mary Oliver says, that “are something else . . . from what they were,” things that “my body whispers to me” are miraculous.  Small things can become large things, sacramental things, transfiguring things.  Epiphanies can occur daily.  Everything points away from itself ultimately; everything arcs beyond the horizon of available meaning, beyond the tongue of language to articulate: the human brain’s 100 billion tendrilled neurons; knowledgeable hands and tools of any kind; oatmeal bowls, a well-worn chair, and pencil marks on a pantry-door jamb; a student who says, “Oh, now I see;” the deep-blue stillness of a late summer day within which the spirit of autumn hovers; Grandma Jay bowing all day over a kitchen counter making ravioli from-scratch; my mother’s fingers playfully squeezing my upper arm, her right eyebrow arching just before she laughs; my father whistling Perry Como songs while he makes the kitchen table at which, forty-five years later, every day, I eat breakfast.

 

 

The Waiting

“Wait on the Lord, Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine Heart, wait I say on the Lord.”  So reads verse 14 of Psalm 27, which Mary Rowlandson, in the narrative of her captivity by Wampanoag Indians during King Philip’s War, offers to her fellow captive, the distraught goodwife Joslin.  Mistress Joslin, pregnant and about to deliver at any moment, carrying a two-year-old in her arms, 30 miles from the nearest white settlement, and beset, Rowlandson says, by “much grief upon her spirit, about her miserable condition,”  has found it “in her heart to run away.”

Unable, however, to muster the sufficient courage and strength of heart the psalmist recommends, she vexes her captors continually with pleas for release, until finally losing patience, they “gathered a great company together about her, and stripped her naked, and set her in the midst of them; and when they had sung and danced about her (in their hellish manner) as long as they pleased,” they tomahawk both mother and child and burn their bodies.  And though Mistress Joslin “did not shed one tear, but prayed all the while,” Rowlandson’s tacit message is clear enough: she should have waited.

By and large, we are all goodwife Joslins.  We hate to wait.  We hate waiting for online order to be shipped; we hate waiting for an apology; we hate waiting in traffic, in doctors’ offices, in airport security, in lines.  We hate waiting for water to boil, for winter to slipstream into spring, for morning to appear or for evening to fall, for people to get ready, for our cell phones to charge, for a rebirth of wonder, for red lights to turn green, for a restaurant meal to arrive, for the restaurant meal’s bill to arrive, for things to fall into place, for the time to be right, for a return text, for the microwave’s digital blink to reach zero, for what comes next, for our turn, for what lies in wait, for the cable guy to show up, for grief to end and hearts to mend.  We are exhorted to be in motion, always moving, always striving, and always with a purpose and a goal.  “The world is all gates, all opportunities,” Emerson tells us, and they are the proper waiters, “waiting to be struck” by us.  “Things may come to those who wait,” Lincoln says, “but only the things left by those who hustle.”  “I am to wait,” Shakespeare says in Sonnet 58, “though waiting so be hell.”

There are exceptions, of course.  We willingly wait, in long lines, in sometimes inclement conditions, to apply for jobs, to purchase tickets guaranteeing good seats at concerts and sporting events, to be among the first to burst through a store’s Black Friday doors.  But generally speaking, we hate to wait.  Our animal spirits are restless; they have legs built for racing. We want to be on about it, right now, this minute, this second, even if we have nothing more compelling, more important, to be on about.  We chafe at the order of things unfolding in due time, in a while, even, sometimes, in a moment.  We want things no more than a nanosecond from gratification, even though we teach our children that delayed gratification, a form of waiting, is a sign of mature adult behavior.  Our inner child, it seems, will not be placated.  It tantrums and sometimes turns belligerent.  We seek the immediate satisfaction of displacement from the dilatory and dillydallying.  Our tolerance for the dawdling fits in a demitasse cup with room left over for a bowling ball.  Our restive rhythm finds a processional pace unendurably pent, cloistered. We want nothing less than to be whisked, frictionless, though any delay obstructing our must-be-on-the-move sensibility.  We cannot achieve escape velocity fast enough.

Most of the time—for I, too, struggle, sometimes unsuccessfully, to repress my Joslined impatience—I actually do not mind waiting.  I attempt to focus my attention, to align the force of my senses and imagination, on the who and what around me.  I like to observe people and imagine their lives, the rage for order that infuses them, the rumors of sublimity that elevate them, the concepts that animate them, their geometry and texture and smoldering intensities.  I note the way they sit or stand, the magazines they pick up and the way they flip through them, the speed with which they scroll through their smart phones.  I listen to mothers comfort children or wives fidgety husbands.

Or I interrogate the point-of-purchase items surrounding me: Why is a candy bar consisting of peanuts, peanut butter, and caramel called “Payday”?  Did Mr. Wrigley actually chew gum?  Why on earth would anyone buy a pack of eight Bic disposable lighters? What are the cultural implications of two solid rows of breath fresheners?  I look at the headlines of tabloids and, discounting Jimmy Hoffa’s abduction by aliens or the newly discovered predictions of Edward Cayce or the latest scenario of the soon-to-arrive apocalypse, remind myself that the celebrity-culture scandals and breakups and embarrassments their headlines shout with such ill-disguised glee are actually happening to actual people who are experiencing actual emotional repercussions.

And I am an unabashed eavesdropper.  “Are you going to college,” I heard a young man behind me in a checkout line ask another.  “No,” he replied, “what’s the point?  And I like detailing cars.”  In a convenience store I heard a small boy ask his dad if he was mad and got this reply: “Am I mad that your Aunt Carla’s junk-ass dog peed on the living room carpet?  Yeah, I’m a little mad.”  Loitering in a snack food aisle I listened to a twenty-something woman hold forth about the epicurean delights of Jolly Time Crispy White Healthy Pop popcorn.  On a return flight from a conference I heard a man across the aisle telling his seatmate that his paper on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho had “killed.”  At a restaurant a young teen told his laughing friends, “And she was all heaving breast and hyperventilation.”  Small snatches of conversation, surely, but no less significant for that: embedded in a plot and expanded, they could form the stuff of novels.  “A lifetime,” T. S. Eliot reminds us, is “burning in every moment.”

We take waiting to be passive, to be controlled by circumstances, to be an absence of action, but even minimally it can be doing something, if only creating a for-the-nonce queue comraderie with a linemate, or, under more trying circumstances, if only practicing patience and good humor.  More powerfully still, it can provide an oasis for reflection, imagination, and deliberation amid the caravanned trade routes our bustling lives all too often follow.  We need not always be “in such desperate haste,” Thoreau asserts; we need not let “every nutshell and mosquito’s wing” derail us. 

The concluding line of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” resounds with inspiration: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  But why, I wonder, is seeking and finding and fixity of purpose associated with striving only, with huffing our lives down to the filter?  Cannot the wait, the cessation of motion, be just as active, intentional, and revelatory?  Can we not settle on settling in?  Can we refuse to settle for discontent, frustration, and boredom and, instead, settle up to the moment, invite it to linger, attend it, wring from it what it has to offer, and then be on our way?

 

 

Nests

I have been watching a robin in the backyard garden gathering tendrils of dried-out flox for a nest.   It repeatedly jabs its beak like a piston into the tangle, each time extracting a two-to-four inch sprig, until, beak-filled, it flies off.  Using that flox, along with the grass and twigs and mud procured from hundreds of forays, the robin will weave and mortar the nest, shaped it into a bowl by pressing against it with its chest, and line with soft grass.  A wispy smile would play upon the lips of even the most dour Puritan at such industry.

Every year a robin builds a nest on my house, either in the angle of one of the decorative brackets under the roof eaves or atop the front porch support pillars.  No doubt my house is on some Turdus migratorious AAA guidebook.  A five-star avian roost.  And each time a robin chooses my dwelling for a dwelling, each time my house is tenanted by this herald of spring, I feel somehow honored, elected, as if  I was examined and judged and found a hospitable host worthy of trust.

*     *     *

Quite early on the morning of my younger brother’s wedding I sat in my folks’ kitchen drinking coffee.  My mom soon joined me.

“You know,” she said, “I had the strangest dream.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.  I dreamed we had a goldfish bowl with two goldfish in the family room.  One morning I noticed that one of the goldfish was missing.  I was going to ask you if you knew anything about it, but you weren’t in your bed.  I woke your father, but he said you hadn’t been in that bed for a long time.  And then, another morning I saw that the other goldfish was gone.  Isn’t that strange?”

“Well, mom, I think you should seek psychological counseling without delay.  I’m kidding.  Actually, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to interpret that dream.  I’d say it means you’re feeling some anxiety about empty nest syndrome.  First me, and now Dennis, and that means no more children at home.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I think.”

Empty Nest Syndrome, despite its prevalence as a common cultural metaphor for the  apprehension, distress, even depression parents sometimes experience when children leave home, is not a recognized psychological disorder.  It does not appear in the DSM-V, so it goes without saying that neither does mom’s metaphorical spinoff, empty goldfish bowl syndrome.  Still, mom and dad did rent out the bedroom my brother and I shared to two college girls the first year after my brother’s wedding.  After that, they bought a cat, a Siamese, for which my mom, four nights a week, warmed liver in the oven, and my dad built a perching shelf in front of the living room window.  “She likes the liver warm,” mom explained.  “She likes to see what’s going on outside,” dad explained.

 *     *     *

I am a nester.  A homebody.  A hibernator, my wife Kathy says, though, in my defense, that is only in the winter and only because I have no tolerance for cold.  I do not suffer from agoraphobia.  I enjoy being outside, and besides, nine months of the year I venture out five days a week to teach at Graceland University, so I suffer from neither didskaleinophobia, the fear of school, nor enochlophobia, the fear of crowds.  I savor a meander through forests and other natural settings, on paths beaten and unbeaten, so I am not beleaguered by hylophobia.  I travel, so I am not beset by hodophobia, though I will, under no circumstances, board an airplane.  I’d sooner grab a shark’s dorsal fin and hitch a ride, and I’m not too keen on sharks, selachophobia having set in thanks to Steven Spielberg.   So, OK, I have aviophobia, but I’m in good company: Aretha Franklin, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Colin Farrell, Ben Affleck, Whoopi Goldberg, John Madden, and Martin Scorsese do, too.

My nesterdom is a preference, not a phobia.  I prefer surroundings where I feel most at ease, most comfortable, where I experience a fitted-into-ness, a settled-into-ness; I prefer the familiar.  Most people do, I suspect.  I see no problem with that as long as one is willing to expand one’s area of familiarity.  It’s a matter of overcoming the fear of the initial fear of making a strange place familiar.  I have been able to, but, I admit, with reluctance.  Still, I prefer the woven twigs and grasses of home.  They are stitched with settledness, mortared with security.

*     *     *

When I was a kid, the term “birdbrain” was an insult.  It’s an inaccurate insult, however, because it mistakes size for capacity.  Despite brains that contain, on average, 100 million neurons (dogs, average 600 million; humans 85 billion), and despite lacking a neocortex, birds form concepts; understand the mental states of other birds; create and use tools; possess memory, though not a particularly deep one; learn vocalizations from other birds, a form of cultural, not genetic, transmission; know thousands of sound combinations; and communicate specific meanings to convey specific intentions.

It’s likely, however, that birds have no psychological sense of self, no sense of agency in which they experience themselves acting and causing events as distinguished from events that happen beyond their control.  My nest-building robin felt no maternal devotion animating her four-chambered heart; none of its 570 beats per minute skipped at the thought of hatching her nestlings.  In building her nest, she applied no architectural knowledge, brought no geometry to bear.  The architecture and geometry are built in; she simply follows a genetically-ordained script.  She requires nothing of herself.  She does what she has to do.

It’s interesting that, in human beings, doing what has to be done is extolled as noteworthy, even, at times, heroic, while in my robin it is dismissed  as a mindless series of preprogrammed mental subroutines.  The difference is that humans can choose not to do what needs to be done.  Unlike my robin, we can swerve and stray, we can harden our hearts and close minds, we can tumble into furrows of intolerance and mistrust, be romanced by selfishness, by cruelty, by injustice.  And yet we mostly don’t.  And that is our glory.  My robin can be nothing more than what it is.  We can be less, and not being less makes us more.

 

 

Mix and Mingle

The foods I eat on a more or less daily basis are the result of years of tinkered blending.  To call what I eat for breakfast every day “oatmeal” is to feloniously assault the word.  Sure, there’s oatmeal, but I add a half cup of Fiber One cereal (you know, to, uh, make my insides happy), a scoop of Jillian Michael’s Vanilla Crème whey protein powder (vegetarians tend to not get enough protein; as for Jillian’s brand, it’s an unlit mystery but I yield myself to it), peanut butter powder (what can I say; I really like peanut butter), three packets of Truvia, and a generous dollop of Polaner’s Sugar-Free blackberry jam.  That’s cortex-tasering oatmeal!  That’s oatmeal on stilts!  That’s oatmeal with trumpets sounding and pennants waving! 

I mix Maxwell House Gourmet Roast coffee with Gevalia’s House blend because I like coffee robust enough to sidle up to the border of bitter without crossing over.  Sometimes, well, oftentimes, actually, I sprinkle in some chocolate velvet-flavored MillStone (what can I say; I really like chocolate).  The distilled spirit of that strange brew keeps me at snappy-salute attention all morning long. My favorite beverage combines Crystal Lite’s peach and mango powder mix with its cherry and pomegranate mix, then top it off with Mountain Dew (which did, after all, begin life as a bar mixer).  My wife Kathy quotes Huck Finn: “It don’t seem natural.”  I say it sets my taste buds stomp dancing.

And dinners?  Well, I combine asiago, romano, velveeta, and cheddar cheese with a refried bean and lentil mix for burritos.  I top veggies burgers, which I make from chick peas, oatmeal, onion, garlic, romano cheese, and salsa, with a condiment concocted from mayonnaise, sandwich spread, ketchup, and Dijon mustard.  Somehow, through it all, so far, anyway, I remain stubbornly impervious to heart burn, though, truth be told, I do keep a small packet of Prilosec discretely at hand.

Obviously, I like blended things.  I like mixtures and admixtures, minglements and amalgamations, suffusions and infusions of all kinds.  I like the motlied, the variegated, the hybridized. There is something about them that is emergent and synergistic, something more so than the simple sum of their parts.  Those who know me, or are even passingly acquainted with me, know that my favorite candy bar is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, an inextinguishably delectable compound of chocolate and peanut butter.  It is delectable’s delectability.  Now, I grant that, on their own, chocolate and peanut butter are sacramental. Together, however, they beatify taste; together, they are a liturgy of grace; together, they call for a full-throated benediction, a psalm of celebration.  It is, I am convinced, impious to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup too fast.  Only a thoroughgoing apostate would do so.

I like the improvisational freshness, the snazziness (snappy + jazziness), of blended words:  pixel (picture + element), frenemy (friend + enemy), sexting (sex + texting), chexting (cheating + texting), netizen (network + citizen), trashion (trash + fashion—clothing that combines old or recycled elements), smirt (smoking + flirting—done by those forced to the pavement outside a building to smoke), Brangelina (no explanation necessary).  Anyone who has flown is undoubtedly familiar with flightmare (flight + nightmare) and baggravation (bag + aggravation).  Those of us over fifty are indisputably quintastic (quint [50] + fantastic), though we worry about anecdotage (anecdote + dotage—the seeming impossibility to refrain from telling stories of the good old days) and, to combat its onslaught, we take up funkinetics (funk + kinetics—a vigorous form of exercise set to funk and soul music). 

I like the linguistic acrobatics of Spanglish, the colloquial code switching mingle of Spanish and English, whether it espanoles English words (chilleando—chilling out, sanguiche—sandwich) or mixes Spanish and English together in a sentence—Quieres que te cocine [Do you want me to cook you] some rice en la Hitachi [steam cooker], or should I just get you some confley con leche [cornflakes with milk].  It’s lively, and, well, pienso it’s cool, esto es todo.

I like a writing style animated by an occasional infusion of the whole wheat colloquial into white-bread Standard English, as this from Ishamel in Moby Dick: “What of it, if some old hunks of a sea captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? . . . Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, . . . however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing . . . that everybody else is served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical way that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder blades, and be content.”  In this collage of jostling linguistic registers, Melville not only fosters a rapport with his readers, but also perfectly expresses the roughhewn democratic metaphysics of a universal ethic of mutual care in response to a universally shared indignity.

And I like the invigorating contradiction of the oxymoron, as this from Romeo and Juliet: “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.”  Or Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, laboring mightily to express the inexpressibly “glorious majesty” of God: “majestic meekness” and “awful sweetness.”  Or John Donne’s “O miserable abundance, O beggardly riches.”  Or G. K. Chesterton defining a yawn as a “silent yell.”  Or Melville’s Ahab as an “ungoldly, god-like man.”  Or George Carlin: “How is it possible to have a civil war?”

I like the dialectic and trialectic energies of movies cross-fertilized by blended genres.  Inglourious Basterds fuses action/adventure, comedy, and film noir; Forrest Gump, comedy, romance, and action/adventure; Cowboys & Aliens, science fiction and the western; No Country for Old Men, the western, action/adventure, and the thriller.    I find this fluid interplay of genre convention suspends me between expectation and surprise, pinwheels me with an enticing disorientation, confects a narrative parfait that pushes me to interpret rather than describe, question rather than explain.  However, I do not like horror comedies like Shaun of the Dead or Scream, nor do I like horror romance like the Twilight series.  I prefer my horror straight and shudderingly visceral, a wall-like wave of fright breaking over me.

Mostly, though, I like people who are multiple and pluralled; people who are not carnival barkers for single-storied cant and do not indulge their pet beliefs with far too much Beneful; people who are passionate and keep their cool; people who are sophisticated and can get down with it; people with forensic minds and ambling imaginations, logical acumen and philandering thoughts, the gravitas of maturity, the wonder of childhood, and never, not once, not ever, lose their sense of the silly; people who can embrace and hold at arms’ length; people who are confident but never deceive themselves as being deeper, more perceptive, more defiantly original than they actually are; people who can read Shakespeare and watch a monster truck show with equal relish; people who bear witness to what they know and what they do not, cannot, will in all likelihood never understand;  people who are fully present and substantial and not silhouettes or silted currents of personality.

In the physics of personhood, such people are quantum rather than classical.  They are possibilities and potentialities precisely because they blend qualities; precisely because they pester genres, straddle apparent contradiction, combine savors and flavors; precisely because they know that the eye which rounds what they see can be repositioned, can see elsewhere, can see otherwise.

By Any Other Name

According to Family Education magazine, the top ten boy’s first names in 2012 were, in order, Jacob, Mason, William, Jayden, Noah, Michael, Ethan, Alexander, Aiden, and Daniel.  My first name, either as the formal “Jerome” or informal “Jerry,” appears nowhere in even the top 100 names, though the somewhat similar Jeremiah ranks 51^st.   How, I wonder, does it happen that Jerome, the name of the saint who translated the Bible into the Latin still used today as the official language of the Catholic Church, the saint whose name means “bearer of the holy word,” cannot crack the top 100, while Jeremiah, the name of the scolding Old Testament prophet, stands at 51.  The fate of the study-bound scholar, I suppose—that, and the undeniable public relations value of a charismatically condemnatory prophet calling the people to renounce their backsliding ways, repent their sins, and renew their spiritual commitment. 

Those denunciatory prophets!  They get all the attention, all the glory.  Cable TV miniseries are made about them, while the Jeromes languish in a twilit pocket of history.  Perhaps, could I gather and convince enough modern-day Jeromes to leaven their conversations with upbraid, to periodically reproach with declarations that  "Cursed are those who trust in mortals, who depend on flesh for their strength and whose hearts turn away from the Lord," the name Jerome would debut  the name chart and ascend with a bullet.

Actually, at an early period in my life, I did not like my name.  My dad had the same name.  I was a junior. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood I was referred to as “Jerry Junior.”   I resented the necessary inquiry if someone phoned asking for Jerry, “Jerry Senior or Jerry Junior?” though I took some small comfort in the question’s trochaic meter. Of course, I know now that, in my dad’s generation, naming a son after the father was unremarkable.  I know now that, at some level, those junioring seniors engage in a kind of magical thinking, seeking to extend themselves into a future they will not witness.  I know now that, in bestowing his name upon me, dad was ceremonially announcing to the world his pride in his dadship and my sonship, a kind of “This is my son, in whom I expect to be well pleased.”  I know now it was his way of throwing the grappling hook of tradition across the generations to draw them closer.

But I did not know that then.

Then, I felt somehow obscured, cloaked, as if my individuality had been commandeered and hidden behind a veil.  I wanted to stand forth uncurtained, unobscured, in the morning-crisped landscape of my own inexorable self.  I felt etcetera-ed. I did not want to be a remastered version of the original; I wanted to be my own melody. I did not want to a chipped shard from the old block; I wanted to be my own blazoned block.  I wanted to be the apple that rolled far from the tree; I wanted to be my own tree.  I wanted staccato, not legato.  I felt like a diminished thing, a permanent minor, exiled from the possibility of adulthood.  I longed for a rhetoric of discontinuity.

And then one day I didn’t.

One day I realized the name of someone is not the thingness of someone; realized that considering myself a replica was a fatalism of sorts, a shackling essentialism; realized that I could choose my own posture of being, my own orientation to the world, that all along Dad had actually been seeking to cultivate that posture, that orientation.  Suddenly, it seemed, I understood that even if we are immersed in a tradition, even if it leaves its imprint, we are not manacled by it, that it can be, must be, adapted, recontextualized, extended—a starting point from which we stray to find our own way.  I understood, finally, that I was responsible for my own architecture of character and personality, my own structure of desire, my own grammar of intent and motivation.  I understood that, sometimes, self-awareness involves running up a white flag and surrendering self-awareness.

The senior-junior relationship is, it seems to me, freighted with paradox, but, paradoxically, one that clarifies. Being a junior identified me, but it was not my identity.  Dad and I shared a name.  We shared certain interests, attitudes, physical features, mannerisms.  We shared, it seemed, a capacity to cause my mother unending frustration.  We were the same, but we were not the same.  We were complements, but we were not complementary; entangled, but not.  I imitated him, but I was not his duplicate.  As Heraclitus observed some 1500 years ago, you do “not step twice in the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." No word on whether there was a Heraclitus Sr.

The fact is, Dad and I were men of different generations, different social and cultural contexts, different values and virtues. Different contingencies of history converged in us, of which we were different expressions.  And somehow, in a way I do not fully comprehend, from that sameness and difference my specificity, my singularity as a person in my on right emerged.  And Dad’s.  He too had, was having, a life; he too embodied particularity.  Who knew?  For too long, for far too long, I didn’t.

The percentage of juniors has declined steadily since the 1960s, as parents bestow  more distinctive names on their baby boys; names more intransitive than the transitive junioring previously in fashion; names, it is thought, that will catalyze the child’s individuality.  This is wishful thinking, however; tatting lace while wearing chain-mail gloves would have a likelier prospect for success.  Only the most superficial kind of individuality is conferred by a name. Individuality will happen, if it happens, as it did with me.  A page turns, a moment unfastens, a bud blooms, a dusty landscape clears, and it emerges.  Until then, even if the abbreviation “Jr.” does not trail our name, we are all juniors.  Until we are not.  Until we become seniors.

The Anti-Writer

Before the first week had ended, I knew that Richard, a student in one of my freshman composition classes, would likely be, not a hard nut to crack, but an uncrackable nut altogether.  Before the first week had ended, I knew Richard’s truculence was so sharp it could corkscrew through granite.

On the first day of class, amid the faces bright with hope or settled into placidity, his was fixed into a scowl that periodically morphed into petulance that periodically smudged into disdain.  He would have me know, even as I handed out the course syllabus and explained the requirements, that he felt not the feeblest flame of interest, that he was, in fact, thuddingly bored by the prospective enterprise, that he would be, at best, a disinterested tourist in my class.

At the second class meeting, as I returned to the front of the class after handing out a short assignment, he called out, “Yo! Bro.”  I turned and replied, “I am not your bro.  Please address me as either Mr. DeNuccio or Dr. DeNuccio.”  Richard said, “Yeah, whatever.  Okay, Jerry.” 

It represented, I knew, a blustering challenge to and ostentatious scorn for any authority but his own inexorable self.  He sought to provoke a recoiling response, a fractioning spark; sought to impressario our classroom encounter into a street theater drama by commandeering and volleying my anger.  But I would not surrender it.  I knew this game, knew that its combativeness could escalate to no good end, knew that I needed to be actively passive.  I remained expressionless, shrugged slightly, smiled faintly, and returned to the front of the room to explain the assignment.  That first-week skirmish set the tone for the semester:  Richard’s small thrusts, my defusing parries.

Richard’s work on that assignment, as on all subsequent assignments, displayed a studied indifference to its requirements and lacked even a modest garnish of effort or thought.  It was done only to be done, to be gotten rid of, tossed off then tossed back to me.  It was lavishly vapid, sumptuously empty, devoid of voice, absent a presence.  It was indolent and uncurated writing, glancing drive-by writing, intellectually unengaged, offering only opinions, unsullied by explanation and undisturbed by their opposites or alternatives.  Only in some parallel universe antithetical to our own could what Richard did be considered writing.  It was a mutant shard of writing, writing without a center or animating purpose, writing disengaged from the very act of writing.  It was anti-writing, what writing would look like if an author willfully excluded himself or herself from it.

I continued to comment extensively on his writing, as I do on all student papers.  He disregarded my suggestions for improvement and ignored my offers of tutorial sessions.  Toward the end of the semester, however, Richard stopped by my office to tell me he needed at least a C; otherwise, he could not play football.  I told him a D was the best he could hope for.  “But I turned in every assignment,” he said, as if his work were separate from its workmanship; as if the virtue of it consisted of the labor only and not its excellence, or at least its satisfactory competence.  Perhaps Richard suffered from a strange optimism that his inadequacies would, finally, magically, prove adequate.  Perhaps he wanted, needed, to see himself positively, needed to swing from the trapeze of self-esteem and, thus, removed academic achievement from the pragmatics of his university life.  Perhaps he thought that wanting something is indistinguishable from doing what the wanted something requires.  Perhaps he relied on my sympathy for his plight.  Perhaps he was simply oblivious.  “Can’t you cut me some slack,” he asked.  “I am,” I said, “by giving you a D.”

And then he leaned forward in his chair and said, “How many friends do you have on Facebook.”  I was startled by this seemingly abrupt detour in our conversation. “I don’t know,” I answered; “maybe 40 or so.”  “Well,” he said, “I have 872.”  And he stood up, nodded once, and left my office.  872.  It lingered.  Richard.  Who will not read between the lines of himself.  A needle without a compass.  A broken trill, a half-strummed chord, a fragmented rhythm, an echo of an echo.