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.