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.

Absent From the Present

I am spectacularly ungifted at gifting.  Virtually every present I have presented has staged my incompetence, my utter cluelessness, at gift-giving.  If my gift-giving had mass, it would have the density of a 98 cent furnace filter; if it had volume, it could be measured in picoliters; if it had depth, it would  rival, just barely, a cat’s water dish.  My ineptitude for giftitude is encyclopedic, epic; only a twenty-six volumed Brittanica could encompass its sweep; only a Homer or Virgil could convey its profundity.   I am surprised that I don’t appear in the DSM-V under the heading “Gifting Obtuseness Syndrome.  Gift-giving, for me, is high-wire acrobatics without a net.  I am not just singularly bad at gift-giving, I am plurally bad, thuddingly bad, require a Papal indulgence bad, Shakespearean-tragedy bad, could-uncurl-Elvis’s-lip bad. 

I once gave my best friend his own golf shoes as a birthday present, thinking myself unsurpassingly clever.  He was not amused.  Nor was the colleague to whom, on his 50^th birthday, I gave a bag of prunes and a book on the colon-cleansing virtues of enemas.  Nor was the vegetarian friend to whom I gave a gift card to Carlo’s Steak House.  I once gave my Dad a basket of Sacramento Valley-grown strawberries less than one week after he was diagnosed with diverticulosis.  I once gave my wife Kathy a charm bracelet she exclaimed over with almost-enthusiasm, then deposited lovingly in her jewelry box.  It has since not seen the light if day.  I once gave her a wicker basket she described as “interesting.”  She placed it in a dark corner in an untrafficked area of the living room.  Mysteriously, it has since migrated to the foyer closet. 

I have learned my lesson.  Now, as some gift-giving occasion approaches, I ask her, “What would you like me to surprise you with?”  She buys it, I repay her.  As for all the others in my gift-giving orbit, well, let’s just say that the introduction of gift cards has been, for me, proof-positive that a providential goodness is at work in the world.  It’s all very neat, very algorithmic, wholly pragmatic in an accounting sort of way; still, somehow, I cannot help but feel that something important, something deeper is unaccounted for, something other and more that eludes the self-comforting truthiness of “this way they can get exactly what they want” or “it’s the thought that counts.”  

Perhaps Emerson best expresses the cause of my ungifted giving: “the impediment lies in the choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.”  A matter of judgment, in other words.  My gift-giving has been an aftermath for which I found the before math inscrutably difficult to cipher.  And it is the before math that marks all really gifted gifters. 

They pay attention.  They notice when you make do with something not specifically designed for the task at hand.  They take in-hand the most offhanded revelations of desire; they listen to the  casual “wish-I-hads”, are alert to “I-wouldn’t-mind-one-of-thoses,” take note of “that’s cools.”  They archive those moments of expressed preference and interest, and then, when a gift-giving occasion arises, they activate and orchestrate memory, perception, and imagination.  They take the time.  They factor a dash of creativity with who you are, what you are like, what you like, what you need, what you don’t yet know you need—and from that polynomial they calculate the perfect gift.

My record for gift-giving has been unsullied by success—except for one instance, and the just-what-exactly of this instance is something I feel apprehend but do not comprehend.  In second grade, for the first time in my life, I bought someone a present: Mom, for Mother’s Day.  I thought as long and hard as my seven-year-old brain would allow about what to get her.  I mulled.  Then I remembered Mom commenting on a TV commercial for Ivory soap: “Soap that floats?  What’ll they think of next?”  That settled it.  With money I vandalized from my piggybank, I enlisted my grandmother to help me buy a bar of Ivory and, for good measure, scotchtaped a quarter to it.  When Mom opened it, she began to cry and wrapped me in her arms.  I could feel her hot tears rivulet down my cheeks and neck.  “Jerry,” she said, “this is the perfect gift.  I’m never going to use it.  I’ll always keep it.” 

And she did.  Going through her effects after she died, I found that bar of soap, quarter still attached.

Perhaps at that young age I knew something that Emerson knew, something I have since been unable to recover:  “The only gift is a portion of thyself.”  Perhaps, for one resplendent moment, fifty-seven years ago, I gave a gift that was complete because I was not missing from it. 

On Growing Old

Crystal and I are talking in my office about her paper on rap music.  I tell her I listen to rap, that I like the embattled self-consciousness in Kayne West’s “All Falls Down,” the resolute hope in Common’s “I Have a Dream,” the history lesson in Rage Against the Machine’s “People of the Sun,” and the exquisite pathos of South Park Mexican’s promise to his mother “not to do no more shit no more” in “Drunk Man Talkin’.”  Crystal’s eyes round.  “I guess I thought you’d never listen to rap,” she says.  “Because I’m an English professor?” I ask.  “No,” she says; “I mean, you know, you’re old.”

*     *     *

The Roman poet Virgil says, “The best days are the first to flee.”  Tom Stoppard says, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”  Edgar, in King Lear, says, “A man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither.  Ripeness is all.”  Brigitte Bardot may have had Edgar in mind when she said, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”  Yeats described himself as “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Kerouac may have had Yeats in mind when he described “the forlorn rags of growing old.” William Faulkner defines time as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.”  Martin Amis may have had Faulkner in mind when he describes time going “about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”  The Beatles, worried about sustenance, physical and emotional, wondered “will you still need me, will you still feed me” when they turned sixty-four. Emerson asserts, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”  Thoreau declares, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”  Longfellow believes that “Age is opportunity, no less/ Than youth, though in another dress.”  So does Oliver Wendell Holmes: “To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than being forty years old.”  But a party-pooping Philip Roth character maintains that “Old age isn’t a battle; it’s a massacre.”

*     *     *

Autumn of our years, evening of our lives, the remains of the day, the Geritol generation, the empty-nesters, senior citizens, the leisure years, the twilight years, the sunset years, the golden years—what metaphor for being old that isn’t words hollowed out, grinning gourds, encandled to dispel the rueful nearness of kingdom come they only imperfectly conceal?

*     *     *

My dad said, “It’s OK to be old; it’s not OK to be an anachronism.  You can’t stop getting old, but that doesn’t mean you should stop learning.”  Dad had little patience for metaphors. 

*     *     *

The life cycle of a rose begins with a compacted and sheathed green bud stage, followed by the partially-open bud phase, which tantalizingly reveals the petals’ color.  In the full-bud stage, the color is completely visible, though the petals are not yet fully exposed.  The petals fully unfurl in the open rose stage.  The rose has bloomed.  When the petals fall off, the rose enters the rose hip phase.  A nutrient-strong bud remains, which is harvested to cultivate other roses and to regenerate a new rose from the old. 

Which of the five phases is the essence of the rose?  Each, in its own moment; all, in their progressive unfolding.  A becoming and a consummation.  The life cycle of a rose, of any plant, of any being, is a plotted narrative, coherent and continuous, whose theme is the what it is.

*     *     *

 From the perspective of the long duration, we are all, no matter how many times we have witnessed this whirling planet’s yearly pilgrimage around the sun, incomparably old, stretching back though veiled eons to the point of our emergence.  We are time’s chronicler. It records itself in us, on us.  We are fossils. We are still emerging.

*     *     *

I sometimes wonder if going gentle into that good night is preferable to raging against the dying of the light.  Seems like it could be a waste of good rage. 

*     *     *

I did not attend my 45^th high school class reunion.  I haven’t attended a reunion since the twentieth in 1986, where I found, two decades out, that too many of my classmates had never really graduated from high school. 

*     *     *

Getting old is reaching the point where one’s sense of self, one’s interiority, one measure of worth, no longer seeks validation in others, is no longer performative, no longer ritualized and staged to solicit social recognition.  The who we are, the what we are, is objectively established through long experience.  We have learned what to pay attention to and what to winnow from attention; what needs to be chosen, rejected, overcome, changed.  We have witnessed connections, disconnections, transformations.  We do not need a self granted and affirmed by others.  We are selved, and still selving.

*     *     *

My Dad told me a story when I was a kid about a young boy, the son of a farmer, whose father gave him the present of a newly born calf to raise.  Every day the boy lifted the calf in his arms.  By the time he was a teenager, Dad said, he was lifting a full-grown cow.

 

When I turned forty-five, I decided that each year, on my birthday, I would add an eight of a mile to my daily runs.  At fifty-five, the dull throb of aching ankles, knees, and hips—a persistent and discomforting body language, a grammar of pain—forced me to cut back.  At sixty, I stopped running and bought a treadmill.  As they say in the technology business, the power scaling stopped.  Still, I walk, briskly.

*     *     *

I sometimes miss my young body, its agility and strength, its loping looseness, its seemingly inexhaustible energy.  Decline is hard.  Our bodies betray us, or seem to.  They age chronologically but our minds do not.  In our minds, the carnival of youth still clamors.  Our minds loiter in the past, in the what-I-could-do, and, with resistless seduction, whisper the should-still-be-able-to. That whisper is a high-proof intoxicant and offers a spiky buzz, but its hangover is disappointment.  The body, however, knows this and will not be seduced.  It is one acquainted with the night.  It knows things and does not speak in a whisper.

In Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” we are told the fighter “carries the reminders/of ev’ry glove that laid him down/or cut him till he cried out/In his anger and his shame/”I am leaving, I am leaving”/but the fighter still remains.”  We carry the reminders of hurts and guilts and cruelties, the anger and the shame, but we also carry the joys and pleasures, the curiosities and achievements, the loves and the friendships.  Beautiful things are still beautiful.  We are limited beings, and that is humbling, but it is also ennobling because it dignifies our striving.  So we remain, the almost-turned page, until we leave.   I’d like to think I’ll be grateful.  I’d like to hope I was unpercentiled and did not give myself away, piece by piece, until I was a silhouette of the man I was.  I’d like to hope that I honored the past but was not eclipsed by a longing for it.  I’d like to hope that I’ll have the grace to let go of what I held so closely.  Then, I’d be gone.