Rest Stop

I make a point of stopping at the Interstate 35 south-bound Story City, Iowa, rest area each time I return from a trip north.  It is not my favorite rest area.  That distinction belongs to the Enterprise rest area, midway between Austin, Minnesota, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin on east-bound Interstate 90.  The Enterprise rest stop is a forest-nestled collage of architectural styles and accents, and features a deck that juts out over a cliff edge, affording a view some quarter of a mile below of tree-surrounded, meadowed valley so eye-addlingly beautiful that it causes a retinal chorus of hallelujahs.  I once tried to throw a stone into the stream that meanders through that valley and succeeded only in throwing out my shoulder.  Son of Adam that I am, I had overreached and, for several days, anyway, was disarmed for my transgression.

The Story City rest area lacks the Enterprise’s dazzling and dizzying spectacle, but it has its distinctive attractions nonetheless.  Its theme is transportation, particularly, the history of transportation in Iowa and the role of Iowa and Iowans in the transportation industry.  When the state undertook a renovation of the original 1960s-constructed rest area, it included an artist on the redesign team.  That artistic influence is apparent: wheel-shaped windows and benches, highway marker-like pylons depicting various modes of transportation, a terrazzo floor displaying the intersection of I 35 and U.S. Highway 30, and text and image blocks displaying Iowa’s transportation history set into the walls.  A tree-lined concrete walkway provides opportunity for a leg-stretching saunter, and, most significantly, for my purposes anyway, there’s a carved-through-the-woods spur leading to the Skunk River Greenbelt, a ten-mile nature trail.

Before rest areas, there were waysides and roadside parks.  Before waysides and roadside parks, there was wherever travelers spotted a likely place to pull over—usually places that eventually became formalized in waysides and roadside parks.  The best rest areas preserve that historical texture.  And, like all manufactured things, they have a functional use and a cultural symbolism.  Rest stops testify to the midcentury sense of an expansive America, one in which the space of travel lengthened to the point where rest areas were necessary, and one in which the means for leisure travel were becoming commonly available. 

But for me, the best thing about rest stops is the opportunity to stop and rest, to get back into my body, to unkink pianowire-tight back and neck and shoulder muscles, to redirect my attention from the concentrated focus of driving interstate speeds, to give myself away for a bit, for a while, to something looser and more loping, something that relinquishes attention only to find it denser, more crystallized .  During my most recent stop, as I was stretching my hamstrings, a car pulled up next to me, and through its open windows I heard the driver say to his wife and two teenage sons, “Hurry up; we’ve got a ways to go and I want to keep on schedule.”  I could only smile at the irony: a rest stop where no resting and virtually no stopping is permitted.

When I stop at the Story City rest area, I always take the spur to the Skunk River Greenbelt and sometimes venture a half a mile or a mile onto the Greenbelt trail itself.  I build that walk into my schedule.  It’s one of the best things I do.  Something happens to me, in me.  Perhaps it’s simply the contrast with the rush of driving; perhaps it’s the solitude, for I have yet to encounter another person on the spur; perhaps it’s the sheer motion through a setting that shouts aloud its greened summer vitality.  I wish I could see through language more than darkly.  I wish I could find the words to adequately express the subjective experience of my waywarding pilgrimage, words to convey the physical stimulation, the sensual satisfaction, of moving through rhythms of sun and shadow and feeling their alternating warmth and coolness, of hearing burbling bird song and wind soughing leaves, of smelling tree resin and wildflower and faintly, oh so faintly, from somewhere away, a whisper of suntoasted ginger.  Something happens: a cherishing.  I think “pleasure,” is as close as I can come to describing the experience of the experience, of what the quality of the sensations add up to, are like.

Something happens.  Time thickens, congeals with the arrowroot of consciousness, no longer swings me from its sweeping hands.  It’s like an aperture narrowing, like a camera shot irising in.  The subjective edges shrink toward the center.  It’s like a focus, an intense focus, that somehow glances at a widening scope, a broader space.  Pure pleasure, purely contextual and fleeting, a refugee moment, I realize, but, who knows: bead enough of these ephemeral moments together, leaven them with habits of the heart, and maybe doing will become being, maybe the unfinished poetics of pleasure will become a ligature-strong narrative of a good life.

Thoreau says that “time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.”  He does not say what he caught.  Perhaps that’s not important.  Perhaps, sitting and waiting for a nibble, pursuing an inner odyssey, self-baited, he caught himself.

Orbital House Painting

Every summer I paint a section of the house, methodically working my way around, until, by the time I arrive at my original starting point, it is ready to be repainted.  Now, you might ask, why not paint the entire house and just be done with it.  Well, for one thing, that stealthy huckster age, who promises wisdom has, instead, steadily fleeced my stamina, intent, seemingly, on gradually turning me into a tattered coat on a stick.  Muscling around and emplacing a 24-foot extension ladder equipped with a stabilizer bar, in sometimes tight and awkward spaces, on sometimes uneven ground, during days when the heat index loiters above 100 degrees, pretty much dwindles what diminished strength I still possess. 

For another thing, I am a serial multitasker: I do a variety of things during a day, devoting several hours to each.  There is laundry to do and carpet to vacuum and grass to mow and books to read and essays to write, and fall classes to prepare and pantry shelves to build and porch floor boards to replace and a breezeway to sheetrock and grandchildren’s ballgames and concerts to attend.  As Ishmael says, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”

But the main thing that confines my painting to a section at a time is that, given the process I follow, the summer does not contain enough days for painting the entire house—unless, as in Joshua 10:13, “the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hasted not to do down.”  Of course, house painting is hardly a holy cause, and the heat, being unbearable, would surely haste me to the house’s air-conditioned interior.  However, as I do not anticipate divine intervention, I follow my painting process, which is not just finicky; it is finicky spiking the ball in the endzone.  It is anal retention’s anal retentiveness.

Having clamored up the ladder, I first inspect the siding for what the experts term “paint adhesion loss.”  Has the paint alligatored, blistered, cracked, flaked, chalked, ghosted, peeled?  Each type of problem indicates some inadequacy in surface preparation or primer/paint application.  Once the problem is assessed, the scraping begins.  I use three different types and sizes of scraper, all carbide edged, each designed for a particular type or area of adhesion loss.  I am a ruthless scraper, dissatisfied with removing just the obvious flakes and peels.  I want the near-flakes, the perhaps or maybe-could-become flakes, too.  The mere possibility of a flake is spur enough to prick the sides of my scraping intent. 

Then comes sanding.  I use my DeWalt finishing sander, fitted with 80 grit sandpaper, to remove rust from the nail heads, to feather out the edges of the scraped sections and to abrade the remaining painted surface, which provides a purchase for the new coat.  I pull popped or loose nails, replacing them with galvanized wood screws, and caulk any gouges or apertures in the clapboard overlap.   The next day I wash away accumulated dust and grime, using a chemical-free dishwashing liquid and a telescoping device originally intended to scour bathtubs.  I hook two buckets of water to each side of the stabilizer bar, one to rinse the scouring pad, the other to load it with detergent.  When that’s completed, I hose it all down, wait a day for it to dry, and then prime the bare spots, employing a kind of Goldilocks procedure: not to thin, not to thick, just right.  A day later, I paint, careful not to miss a spot, concerned with an even application and flowing brush strokes.  The following day, I ratchet down the ladder and begin again, following the same ritual until the section is completed, and I can step back, take it all in, and pronounce it good.

Did I mention I am fastidious, fussy, persnickety, particular, stickling?  Am I obsessive, possibly masochistic, potentially addled?  Have I studied the Puritans too long, too sedulously, such that the unsweetened jelly of their grim Calvinism has injected itself into the very core of my being?  I don’t know.  But I do know this: I enjoy the painting process, enjoy the discipline of it, the unwavering constancy and steadfastness of it, the essence of it, which, as Aristotle suggests about all essences, derives from pursuing excellence in the purpose of it.

Lao Tzu advises us to keep our “mind from its wandering/ and regain first oneness.”  I’m not sure what “first oneness” is like, or how to regain that which I’m uncertain I ever had to lose.  But I do know that as my painting process unfolds, I enter a space within a space, a space wedged deep in the dense now, a space where I do not indiscriminately give myself away, piece by piece.  I am gathered and mustered for the work at hand--though I allow that at times my mind meanders a bit.  Sometimes, gazing at the hairline fissures in the paint I imagine them some kind of hieroglyphic, some deep-time rune that, could I decipher it, would answer the big questions that plague us all: how to create a just society, does life have an overarching purpose, how does one make perfect al dente pasta.  Mostly, though, I am undistracted, fully focused and unfalteringly attentive.  “When,” John Berryman asks in “Song 384,” “will indifference come.”  My answer, at least while engaged in my painting process, is “never.”

I even like the fact that, having worked my way around the house to the origin, the natal section so to speak, of my painting process, I must begin again.  “Permanence,” Emerson says, “is but a word of degrees.”  Every end is a beginning. We are always setting off, seldom settled.  Only as far as we are “unsettled,” Emerson maintains, “is there hope for” us. There is even a kind of poetics in this ongoingness, this refusal of finishedness--a kind of heroic verse epic, a tragicomedy perhaps, in my battle against the elements, against the effect of acid rain, against the nature of paint and wood itself, for in the street fight between paint and weather, paint is always predestinated to suffer a groin kick.  We may call a halt to things, but, hopefully at least, they do not end.  They accrue meaning, become more than a simple chronicle of ever-receding events, become infused with consequence, with significance.  They resonate and endure; we resonate and endure.  And in that resonance and endurance, our selves remain open-ended questions in search of answers, narratives still being written.

So, like a planet circling the sun, like an electron orbiting a nucleus, like clay on a turning potter’s wheel, I work my way around the house, on an errand that is always in progress, always to be carried out.

The Graduation Party

My second-oldest grandaughter’s recent high-school graduation party offered me the opportunity to meet and to reconnect with members of the many-corridored factions of my family, near-family, and almost-family.  I got caught up with my ex-wife’s aunts and cousins, whom I had not seen in twenty-five years, with my ex-wife and her new partner and her old partner, and I was introduced to my son’s ex-wife’s mother, grandmother, uncles, and cousins.  My son’s ex-wife’s husband was not in attendance.  He was stewing at home, in a fit of pique, because he was late getting ready and my son’s ex-wife, fearing that guests would arrive at the party with no one to greet them, would not wait for him.  She and my ex-wife and my son had spent the better part of the previous evening decorating the shelter.  He had sat in front of the TV drinking beer.  Thus his tardiness in getting ready.  “What a douce,” my oldest grandson said, and I had to agree.

Typically, I enjoy gatherings of this sort, where most of the attendees pursue walks, runs, hits, and errors of life different from my own academic filter bubble.  I like to chat them up, and I like to listen—well, eavesdrop would be the more correct word.

*     *     *

As I sat outside park shelter where the party was being held, bowered from the 90 degree heat by the embracing shade of a hawthorn, drinking a condensation-beaded Bud-lite that my oldest grandson procured from the ice-chest of one of his uncles, watching the wind quarrel with the treetops, thinking that life seldom offers more satisfying moments, my attention was drawn by the following dialog between my son’s ex-wife’s grandmother and her son Arlen. 

“Mom, we’re gonna go to dinner after the party”

“I don’t want to go to dinner.  I won’t be hungry.”

“Yes, you will.”

“No, I won’t”

“You’re gonna go to dinner.  And we’ll have a drink or two before.”

“I don’t want a drink”

“You’re gonna have a fucking drink!”

“I’m not.  And why are you using the f-word?”

“I always use it.  You just don’t listen.”

She lit a cigarette and glared at him.  He polished off his beer and glared at her.  They scoured each other with their glares.  I felt embarrassed.  Here was a family dynamic that would no doubt have sent Freud running for the exit.  I headed for the entrance to the park shelter.

*     *     *

I discover that the beer my oldest grandson scored for me came from another of my son’s ex-wife’s uncles, Ted.  I thanked him, he said, “No problem.”  I told him I was the father of the father of the graduate, and he asked me what I did. 

“I’m a teacher.”

“Yeah?  Where do you teach?”

“In Lamoni, Iowa.  It’s a small, southern Iowa town near the Missouri border.”

“High school?”

“No, at Graceland University.”

“You’re a college professor?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you teach?”

“English.”

He looked at the man next to him, who had been listening.  He smiled; no, he jeer-smiled.  The other man smile-jeered.  The same thought had evidently occurred to them simultaneously.  Both sang, “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”

Charming.  I felt unfortunate that I did not have an appropriate lyric for a Culligan Water Softener installer.  Ah, well, just another brick in the wall.

*     *     *

My ex-wife’s cousin Mickey is a pipefitter, and a union man.  A gentle, soft-spoken man, he turned into a semi hauling a volatile mix of raging scorn when I mentioned Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s having survived a recall vote for his legislative push to strip the public unions of their bargaining rights.  I attempted to draw him into argument, not because I am anti-union, but because I relish conversation and believe argument is a truth-seeking enterprise, not a zero-sum debate.

“Well, Mickey, you know a lot of people who are hurting economically look at the wages and pensions the public employees get, and think they’re pretty cushy, and because their taxes fund those wages and pensions—well, I can understand how they’d find Walker a kind of standard-bearer.  It’s like he voices their anxiety and discontent.”

“Shit,” Mickey replied.  “Walker’s a stooge in the pocket of the corporations, and the people who support him are stooges, too.  Christ!  How ignorant can people be?”

I understand.  We all need our monsters, if only to feel the strength of our irresistible otherness. And I don’t know, maybe it was the epithet “Christ,” but I wondered what Jesus would have though, or thinks, about unions.  Would Jesus have been a union man or a right-to-work advocate?  He did claim that a camel would have an easier time passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man passing through the gates of heaven.  He did say that “whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for me.”  He did concern himself with common people living common lives, and ate and drank with people of the lower social ranks, violating Roman and Jewish eating rules.  And, in his name, that first-century Norma Rae, Paul, created one of the largest unions ever, one with great benefits if you forego the wages of sin.

*     *     *

At breakfast the next morning my youngest granddaughter was glum.  I attempted to lift her mirthlessness by sending some cheery words her way, but halfway there they collided with the impenetrable force field of her gloom, splintereened, and floated to the floor.  Her cellphone vibrated: a text message.  She read it and ran crying from the table.  I looked at my son who shrugged and followed her.  When he returned, he said she had received a text from her boyfriend, Chad, who told her he no longer wanted anything to do with her.  His words, exactly: he no longer wanted anything to do with her.

I am three continents away from being a violent man, but at that moment a blinding rage flared in me, a rage so large it cast a shadow before it.   I wanted to confront Chad and cure him of his cruelty.  I wanted to place a hand on his neck, pinion him to a wall, get marine-drill-sergeant in his face, hiss that I did not appreciate his making my granddaughter cry, curse him for his cruelty, and knee him, hard, several times, in the groin. 

This dark capacity in the face of cruelty has visited me before.  Several weeks ago, my step-daughter’s son came running into the house, holding his head and sobbing uncontrollably.  A wasp had stung him while he was out raking leaves from the garden.  My wife cut an onion in half and held the exposed portion against the spot of the sting.  His mother explained that he needed to calm down: his agitation sped the spread of the poison.  That was correct, of course, but not what he needed at the moment.  I gripped his arm and said, “Those wasp stings, they hurt like hell.”  And then I headed outside, determined to slaughter that wasp, any wasp, all wasps, for making my handsome and strapping 14-year-old grandson cry, until my wife called after me and returned me to reason, and the shameful irony that in some uncurated annex of me lay a barely kenneled capacity at odds with the very end I sought.

*     *     *

At my second-oldest grandchild’s graduation party, my grandfatherly pride would have easily filled the Big Room at Carlsbad Cavern: straight-A grades, including every Advanced Placement course her high school offered, a stack of plaques memorializing her scholarly and marching band accomplishments, and a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in the fall to major in Chemical Engineering.  Her curiosity is incandescent; her desire to learn, shoreless.  She is experience-tranced and expectation-imbued and hope-infatuated. 

Unlike most, maybe all, of us in attendance, she is not jacketed by the comforting fit of the familiar; she wants to be surprised rather than flattered, vulnerable to the risk of a different perspective rather than armored in certainty.  She refuses to consider the world necessarily what it is, refuses to occupy it without being much occupied about it.  She wants the world to make sense and make it make sense so it doesn’t break her heart.  I hope it does break her heart, but only in the sense that Mary Oliver describes in her poem “Lead:” “that it break open and never close again/ to the rest of the world.”

The Click Point

Derek settled himself in the chair on the other side of my desk.  This was our second conference about his autobiographical narrative.  At our first meeting he had told me he simply couldn’t think of an event in his life memorable enough, arresting enough, pivotal enough to support a narrative that unspooled toward a moment of  unanticipated meaning or insight.  But if I had listened well, if I had interpreted correctly the shadow language laired beneath Derek’s words, his problem was reticence, a reluctance to reinhabit his past experience.  That past, that experience, was, it seemed, not a burbling stream he wished to go a-fishing in.  To complete the assignment, he needed to be distanced from it.

I had told him that the experience did not necessarily need to be personal; it could be something he had witnessed, something that involved someone else.  The important thing was that it had a “click point,” a small, resonant rupture of emergent meaning; a sudden, perhaps initially inexplicable, sense that what he was seeing, had seen, was somehow revelatory, somehow cargoed with insinuation; that, in some fashion, what he had beheld pointed suggestively beyond its immediate context.  The ladenness of these click points, I explained, their significance, often becomes explicit upon reflection.  I recommended that he trawl his past, recent and distant, for such an experience, consider its potential for containing a click point, and come back to see me in a couple of days.

“Dr. D., I did what you said, and I think I may have something.”

“Terrific; good for you, Derek “

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure though.”

“Okay; tell me about it.”

“Well, I was at this baseball game, watching my little cousin.  He was nine, and it was one of those peewee leagues, you know, before they’re old enough for Little League, the kind where one of the coaches pitches, real slow, so the kids can hit it.  He played shortstop. Well, a batter hits a grounder to him, a pretty hard one, and just before it gets to him it takes a hop and hits him right on the chin.  And he kind of crumples to the ground and curls up and starts to cry.  I mean, really cry.  Sobbing.  His whole body was shaking.

But here’s the thing.  It’s like everything stops; everything comes to a standstill.  It was like one of those things we made back in grade school, a diorama.  The wind stops and the flag in left field stops waving, and the sunlight, it’s like it freezes, and the sounds stop, and nobody moves.  Everybody is just standing there watching him.  The coaches and the other players.  And his mom and dad, they’re in the stands, and they just sit there.  And it dawns on me that they are embarrassed.  They’re embarrassed that their son is laying on the ground crying.

Finally, his dad gets up and walks toward him.  Not fast; just kind of strolls out there.  And he stands over him—doesn’t squat down or touch him or anything.  Just stands there, and says something.  I couldn’t hear what.  Then my cousin stops crying and gets up and follows his dad off the field.  He’s like walking in his dad’s shadow.  And when his dad gets back to the stands, he says something to his mom, and she takes my cousin to the car and they leave.  And his dad goes back to the stands and watches the rest of the game.

What do you think, Dr. D.?  Is this something I could write the essay about?”

What did I think?  I thought it was a cluster bomb of a story, a detonation of horror and cruelty and crushing sadness.  I thought it spoke of an inability to love hard enough, or enough, or even at all.  I thought of a self-regard so hermetic that it induced emotional anesthesia. I thought of America’s storied pastime hidden behind a carapace of mockery, the fabled diamond a broken space, a scoured terrain.  I didn’t say this, though; Derek needed to make his own meaning.

“This is definitely something to write the essay about.  Now, what’s the click point for you?  What’s the big-picture insight it afforded you, the realization you came to because of it?  What’s its emotional temperature, its moreness?  What’s it telling you about?”

“Well, for me it’s saying something about how parents forget kids are kids, even if they are playing a grownup’s game.  About how kids cry when they hurt because they’re not old enough yet to have learned not to.  And how getting all protective about our image doesn’t leave any room for feeling what others feel.  You think that’s kinda getting at it?

“Derek, I think you’ve written the essay.  Go put it on paper.”

Derek gets up, heads to the door, then stops.  With his back to me, he says, “Dr. D., I did fudge that story a little.”

“How so?”

He turns to face me.  “That little boy.  That was me.”

And then he was gone.  I wanted to call him back.  I wanted to run after him.  I wanted more.  But I knew that, for Derek, there is a benediction in the shadowed, a blessing in some things only glanced at.

Mass Changes

I am old enough to remember when, as a consequence of Vatican II reforms in the 1960’s, the Catholic Mass transitioned from being said in Latin to being said in vernacular English.  I preferred Latin.  Even as a young boy I felt the elevated and solemn beauty of a language that would remain incorruptibly sequestered on an island time, and I somehow understood—and was enchanted by—the way Latin connected me to an incomprehensibly deep and mysterious history.  Even today, Latin, for me, is indissociable from golden patens and jeweled chalices and incense and light shafting through stain-glass windows and words and music rising up to and resounding in dusky high-vaulted ceilings. 

So, it was with no small interest that I read  that on Sunday, November 27, 2011, at the beginning of the Advent season and the official start of the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgical year, churchgoers participated in a different Mass than they had the previous Sunday.  On that day a new translation of the Roman Missal, the Latin book of prayers upon which the Mass is based, went into effect.  The new translation traditionalizes Catholicism’s most significant ritual by cleaving much more closely to the Latin original.  The often-repeated congregant response, for instance, to the priest’s “The Lord be with you,”—“And also with you”—has been altered to “And with your spirit” because it is both a literal rendition of the Latin “Et cum spiritu tuo” and it acknowledges that the priest is about to perform an action reserved only to those who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders.  In effect, the Church intends the new translation to darn with the formal stitch of its official language a community gathered under God’s authority to hear His word and witness the spirit of Christ channeled through His ordained representative on Earth.

Of even more interest, however, were the reactions of some of those in the pews.  Despite the changes not being an immaculate inception—churchgoers were advised well in advance, and “cheat sheets” containing the altered prayers and responses were available—they were not pleased.  Like the last Incan emperor Atahuallpa, who cast away the Catholic breviary because it would not speak to him as it did the priest, they disowned what they did not understand.  “I am furious with the Church,” one congregant declared.  I am so tired of being told exactly what I have to say, exactly what I have to pray.  The changes are so meaningless.”  Such a view articulates, precisely and with unconscious irony, one motivating reason for the changes: a sense of worship-style entitlement that fits well with an ethic of individuality, but not with the Church’s view of a gathered, worshipping community.

Another, “distraught” by changes that seem “ridiculous” and “stupid” in their trivial concern with “semantics,” refused to “learn the damn prayers.”  Who, he asked, wants “to go to church and be confused.”   A third, also semantically-challenged, wondered about the change in the Nicean Creed from Jesus being described as “one in being with the Father” to “consubstantial with the Father”: “Consubstantial?  What is that word?”  Quite a bit, as it turns out, for its temporal arc reaches back to the Arian Heresy, a 4^th-century controversy in Church history that involved nothing less than the nature of Jesus Christ and the mystery of the Trinity.  Arius, a priest from Alexandrine, Egypt, claimed that the Father and Son were of like being but not like substance: the Son came after the Father and was created by Him.  Such a position contravened the officially endorsed teaching that the Son was of the same substance as the Father and co-existent with Him.  The Council of Nicea in 325 settled the matter in favor of the traditional position: the Father and Son were of like substance, consubstantial.  Arius was declared a heretic. The change to “consubstantiation,” then, purposefully anneals the semantics of here-and-now with the there-and-then, reestablishing a doctrinal matrix of meaning that the more vernacular and less literal “one in being” does not express.

I cannot help but wonder, though, if the stiff-spined resistance to the Mass changes mask a deeper issue for which the aggrieved denunciations are a surface token.  Could it be, I wonder, change itself, that atomizing centrifuge within which we spin with what seems ever-increasing speed, that beleaguering sense of Rocky Horror time-warping discontinuity, that has provoked the outcry?  In the abstract, as a word merely, or as an observed but safely-distanced phenomenon, change presents us with few problems.  It is not hard.  Making it, however, is.

We are creatures of habit, remarkably adept, as Thoreau notes, at “easily and insensibly” falling “into a particular route.”  Routine beckons, the customary solidifies, and revolutions in behavior, as Thomas Paine knew, are tumultuous: “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” raising, as a result, “a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”   The habitual is unrecognized decision making; routine is unacknowledged choice, insensible because it has become so heavily muscled over time that we think it a natural fact, just the way it is, the way things are.  History, context, explanation, contingency all are swept away, and we find ourselves contentedly housed on a cul-de-sac of time.  We cohere, our lives emplotted in a narrative, seamless and durable, whose theme is the who we are.  “Our notions pass for true,” as William James observed.

But change confronts us with the rupturing awareness of time’s hissing passage.  It threatens, reminding us that we are not left handed or right handed, but minute- and second-handed.   Tempus fugit, as Latin has it, and we don’t like the fugiting, don’t like the curled lip of time that mocks us with our smallness, that unsettles all we have settled, and reminds us, with a kick-drum thud, of the inevitable event horizon of our days and ways.  My father-in-law once told me he considered computers stupid contrivances.  “I don’t know how to work one,” he said, “and I don’t want to learn.”  But underneath that curmudeonly bravado, that defiant individuality, lay a fear that he couldn’t learn; that it eclipsed his capability; that “behind the times” was indelibly calligraphied across his forehead; that he was antiquated, obsolescent, time’s relic, carelessly discarded by a culture careening relentlessly forward; that he had been abandoned in a wilderness, beyond the orienting needle of even the most sensitive compass, bereft of rock and refuge and harbor and keep.  What my father-in-law was saying, really, was “I’m afraid.”

“Change,” the poet Wendy Videlock writes, is “the new,/ improved/ word for god.”  And in an oblique sense at least, that is the end for which the Mass changes were designed.  But as Videlock also says, while change is “mighty enough/. . .to shelter” and “ bring together,” it can also “estrange us.”  We experience that estrangement, that unfamiliarity, that unbelongingness, most forcibly from ourselves, with ourselves, to ourselves.

Surprise!

In Wendell Berry’s novel Andy Catlett, young Andy says “I had begun to be surprised by the extent to which life consists of surprises.  I don’t know, but what it consists of is mostly surprises.”  Marcus Aurelius says “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.”  One wonders if, as Andy grows older, he will, like David Copperfield, come to channel that flinty Roman Stoic: “I know enough of the world now,” David says, “to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything.”

*     *     *

Surprise measures abnormality, an incongruity between expectation and outcome, the gap between a coherence we infer and an incoherence we experience.  We can’t help being surprised.  It springs from part of our brain’s standard equipment, an automatic, unconscious, and corner-cuttingly quick use of perception, intuitive thinking, and knowledge of the world to make connections, to fit parts together into cohesive wholes.  Should a burly Hell’s Angel on a Harley hog say, in a Boston Brahmin accent, “I do so enjoy tatting lace,” we almost instantaneously register an associative discrepancy.  Which is to say, we have a surprise response.

*     *     *

I like language that surprises me, that traduces the rules governing how words are aligned, grouped and related; that in pushing against and beyond the parameters of linguistic structure pushes us out of the deep-channeled groove of thought and into mindful experiencing.  This, for example, from e. e. cummings’s “Cambridge Ladies”: “. . . sometimes in its box of/sky lavender and cornerless, the/moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.”  Or this, from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/Trail with daisies and barley/Down the rivers of the windfall light.”  Or this, from Gary Lutz’s short story “Divorcer”: “These were quelled girls with queering glowers, older young women unpetted and inexpert in dress, sideburned boys who were uglifiers of their one good feature . . .”  Who can read these words without an embodied jolt, without being startled into the well-appointed but constricted souls of the Cambridge ladies, the innocent wonder of childhood, the abjection of postmodern youth

*     *     *

When she was four-years-old, my granddaughter overheard me make a snide and dismissive comment about the Disney princess phenomenon.  She came and stood right before me.  “Grandpa Jerry,” she said, “don’t step on my dreams.”  I was surprised by the precocious sentiment, and I was stung into shame.  Can a heart throb with self-abjection?  Can a heart break with self-recriminatory sadness?  Can it fracture, shatter?  Can it be smithereened,  be big-banged into pieces?  Mine did, and was.

*     *     *

In Poe’s story “The Cask of Amantillado,” the narrator,  Montressor (“my treasure”), an aristocrat  who no longer commands wealth or respect, the last of his line—an aristocrat whose only remaining treasure is his aristocracy—devises a meticulously planned act of vengeance against the wealthy arriviste Fortunato (“the lucky one”) for his having “ventured upon insult.”  He lures an inebriated Fortunato to the catacombed cellar of his palazzo and walls him alive in a crypt’s recess.  Fortunato quickly sobers up.  “For the love of God, Montressor,” Fortunato begs.  “Yes,” Montressor mockingly replies as he mortars the last stone in place, “for the love of God.”

I suspect Fortunato was surprised.  I would be.  But that surprise enfolds a horror, for Poe ambiguates what we think we know: the difference between sanity and insanity.  If Montressor is sane, he has directed a highly rational intelligence toward a hideously deranged purpose.  If he is insane, insanity is not babbling idiocy but, rather, wears the mask of cool, calculating reason.  And precisely there is the horror: how can we tell what self-animating purpose harbors itself in those among whom we move?  Do you think that, in Poe’s day, a neighbor of someone who has committed some heinous act, stood before a reporter and, stupefied by surprise, said, “But he was such a nice guy.”

*     *     *

In the half-light of a dawn this past summer, as I waited for the Mr. Coffee machine to deliver enough bracing brew to begin my day, I looked out the kitchen window and was surprised to see a fully antlered deer nibbling on the Pauls Glory hostas in the garden.  As I stood there, he suddenly stopped and looked right at me.  I raised my hand, palm outward, and said “hi.”  It was all I could think to do.

One winter afternoon I watched two sparrows standing in the snow, facing each other.  One would puff itself up, take a step forward, and utter such a harsh chirp that the other hopped backwards.  Then it puffed itself up, stepped forward, and blared a chirp that sent the other skipping backward.  They repeated this display of avian machismo for five minutes before flying off in separate directions.  Alpha-maled stalemate, I suppose; Passeridae gridlock.

*     *     *

I dislike surprises that disrupt my routines.  Now, I realize that routine is routinely denounced, habitually vilified, and uniformly maligned.  Emotional anesthesia!  Spiritual quarantine!  A perpendicular fall from the intellectual firmament!  That Yankee scold Thoreau says, “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. . . . How worn and dusty, . . . how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”  For Thoreau, routine is essentially passive, a half-life: we “insensibly” “fall” into it.

I wonder, though.  Routine can be sensible and active.  Routine is how my classes get prepared and tests get written and papers get graded; it is how books and articles and blog posts get read and essays get written; it is how grass gets mowed and the house gets painted and snow gets shoveled; it is how meals get prepared and clothes get laundered and carpets vacuumed.  There is much to be said for spontaneity, but routine is the conduct by which I conduct my life.  Routine makes time.

The world besets us with its clamor and clangor, its clatter and claptrap.  It musses and messes us up.  It grates and abrades with the blistering friction of the here-and-now.  We are beleaguered by its 4G-ed haste, frayed by its unsparing demands on our attention; impinged upon, continually, by its helter-skelteredness.  Routine tames that world, patterns and familiarizes it, slows it down, domesticates it; it enabling us to exert some control over it, to dwell in it, to write our lives in it.

*     *     *

I especially dislike being the featured guest at a surprise birthday party.  The deer-in-the-headlights stare of initial incomprehension; the dope duped feel; the stuttering struggle to say something equal to the occasion, to be coolly glib and buccaneeringly witty, and managing only a feeble “Wow, what a surprise;” the mildewed comments about age and its debilities; the forced performance of it all; the perplexed and implacable self-consciousness of it all; the contrived responsiveness of it all.  Surprise party?  More like surprise attack. 

Still, someone cared enough about me to arrange that party.  That’s pretty surprising.

*     *     *

But birthdays themselves, I do not mind.  As the anniversaries of my initial appearance on the planet, they remind me of the most surprising thing of all: my natality.  I was born.  And while I occupy but a moment’s moment in the 13.7 billion history of the universe, while I comprise but a minor hieroglyph in the story of humankind, I am, and that small conjunction of subject and verb is so huge I am compelled to predicate it with nouns and adjectives that corral it and make it, if not fully understood, at least partially comprehensible.  Birthdays are ambassadors from a far, far country, bringing the news that the earth has once again spun its way around the sun, and I am here to observe it.

High School Darwinism

Natural selection and adaptability. Survival of the fittest. Unaccountable mutations. Characteristics suitable to an ecological niche. Contention over limited resources. Am I rehearsing the Darwinian principles of evolution? Nope. I am describing my day-to-day experience, and the experience of young men like me, who attended an all-boys Catholic high school, a Galapagos of buccaneering energies and churning impulse, a mad clamor of distilled testosterone, an image-addled hothouse of carefully stage-managed signifying practice, an ambit of status-seeking gambits, all governed by one overarching principle: do not stand in opposition to the group. To do so would be, well, maladaptive. One quickly learned the weather vaned lesson of pointing in the direction of the prevailing wind, and that wind inevitably blew one into the sometimes good-natured but always abrasive friction burn of adolescent competition.




Competition was fiercest over the resource in least supply: regard, admiring notice, enviable attention. Success in sports, of course, proved a time tested and honored means of garnering regard. But so was the kinesthetic presence involved in being cool, owning something cool, or being associated with someone or something cool. Who owned the coolest car, wore the coolest blazer to the fall dance, combed their hair the coolest, talked and walked the coolest, smoked cigarettes the coolest, never ever slipped on the icy school entrance steps? Who assumed the detachment of a Zen master under even the most stressful circumstances? Whose dad had the coolest job? Who had the most attractive girlfriend, the most girlfriends? Who managed to pass through the lunch line the most times before being caught by the lunch-room monitor? Who played in a rock and roll band, had access to Playboy magazine, had a compliant older brother who purchased beer for our parties? Who triumphed in the periodic after-school fistfights? Who practiced a brazen nonchalance toward the teachers, passed tests while loudly proclaiming they had not deigned to open the book, had total command of sports statistics, could tell an unending supply of dirty jokes? Yes, competition for the tribute of recognition was ferocious, except, of course, for academic accomplishment, but at least there were multiple ways by which it could be won.



Had you any hope at all of being a person of significance on the formidability index, you adapted, and quickly, to the high school culture’s jockeying and jostling for hierarchical status. Participation was virtually an existential requirement. Winning insured your prime-time visibility. Playing well but less successfully imparted a fringe-time standing, a sort of vestibule to the glamor and prominence of prime-time. Lose often enough or refuse to participate and you were “caspared,” mausoleumed in 3a.m. off-network syndication and ShamWow infomercials, a silhouette of a silhouette. I was a fringe-timer.



* * *



During the winter months I played intramural volleyball. Being short, stocky, and unblessed with both speed and a vertical leap exceeding 6 inches, I was assigned the position of setter. The intramural teams were coached by one of the Christian Brothers who formed the bulk of the high school’s teaching corps. The Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious community dedicated to educating youth, operated my high school. My team’s coach was Brother Barry, a buzz-cut, jut-jawed ex-Marine who was now, evidently, a soldier for Christ. Brother Barry whole-heartedly and full-throatedly advocated the competitive ethos that catalyzed the student body. For Brother Barry, volleyball was not a wholesome and healthy recreational activity, nor was it a pleasant diversion for passing time on long Wisconsin winter evenings. It was a battle to be won, a battle that, as Brother Barry frequently reminded us, would, like the Marines, make us men.



One evening after a game, as I sat head-hung before my locker, dismayed by the particularly robust pastiche of ineptitude I had displayed, beleaguered by the thought that I had caused our team’s loss, I heard Brother Barry’s voice, anger-infused and stiletto-sharp, from three rows of lockers away: “We should’ve never lost that game. We’d have won if that fat-ass DeNuccio had got into position quicker.” I stared into the empty locker across from me, then at the fading imprint on the concrete floor of wet feet passing down the aisle. I dressed quickly and walked home quickly. I walked very quickly.



The next morning, at the end of his World History class, Brother Barry called me aside. “Last night I said some things I shouldn’t have,” he told me. “I just wanted you to know I apologize.” Just like that. Not contrite. Not sorry. Not sincere. Not seeking forgiveness. A simple statement of fact, crisp, neat. And probably a matter of damage control, for I found out later than someone had told him I had overheard his remark. He had compacted his cruelty into a small candleflame of regret, then hurriedly snuffed it into a thin vine of smoke. “Oh, it’s OK, Brother,” I said. What else could I say? I was a kid, my jingle-jangly nerve endings close to the skin’s surface. What he said was hurtful, and I was hurt. “It’s OK, Brother.” But it was not OK. It was not even in OK’s zip code. I expected more from an adult. I expected more from a Christian Brother.



And when I became an adult, I expected more from myself, for, despite my best intentions, I found that competition can alter character without deepening it, forgot that we were made for cooperation as well as competition, found that I failed, that I thwarted my better self, that I could be mean-spirited and unkind, get angry and frustrated, cause hurt and humiliation, disrespect the inner lives of others. I tried not to, but I did. It is a good thing, I think, that we are always destination-bound rather than destination-arrived. So long as there is an around the next bend, an over the hill, a down the road, so long can we expect to be better, broaden our emotional imagination, resolve that the radius of our actions will extend beyond the raw moment, the cubicled experience. Perhaps Brother Barry came to the same conclusion. I hope he did.



* * *



And yet, strangely, surprisingly, for I anticipated otherwise, my rather flat-lined pulse on the student regard meter spiked. Though I spoke to no one about it, my Brother Barry experience sped rapidly through the students’ high-speed, word-of-mouth, distributed communication network. Suddenly, I was bolded typeface in the fine print of my classmates’ consciousnesses. How did I know? Ron Rutella, an impeccably credentialed prime-timer, cool’s cool, strolled up to my locker one morning and said, “Don’t sweat Brother Barry. He’s a prick. You just had a bad game. It happens. I know. You gave it your best shot, didn’t you?” “Yeah,” I said. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it,” and then he ambled on down the hall. I knew my time of sunsplashed attention would be short-lived. I knew I was still a fringe timer, always would be. But I also knew that schoolboy justice, so frequently merciless, can sometimes deliver a moment of grace.