Under the Castor Oil Tree

Things I learn walking my dog

2012-02-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

This morning I walked my dog, Bela (who is a bad dog we love ultimately), down on the old Canal Greenway and we were assaulted by the songs of a myriad of birds, more birds than I've heard since September.

Even Bela stopped several times and listened. It was a concerto that sounded to me a lot like Spring.

I hope they didn't come back too soon, for their sakes. I don't want birds whose timing was off to die on a February Connecticut night. But, for my sake, I hope their centuries of DNA told them right and soon all the birds will be back. I've missed them. I lean toward Spring....

Then, at 5:30 or so, when night was coming on hard--though later each day by a few minutes (God bless the tilting of the earth back toward the sun in the Northern Hemisphere)--I walked Bela down on Main Street, hoping he'd do his business somewhere close to the huge house of the bad man who used to live across the street from us and yelled, unmercifully, at his kids. I'd have picked it up, but I don't like that man and like that Bela often poops near his house. (Once, a few years ago, he came out when I was walking Bela and yelled at me. He yelled something like this: "Your dog always urinates and defecates near my house! I want that stopped! My children smell it in their rooms!) Nevermind that I had a plastic grocery bag in my pocket and nevermind that picked up dog defecation and un-picked up dog urination couldn't possibly be smelled on the second floor of his house. And never mind that I heard him yell equally irrational things at his kids when they lived across the street. Never mind all that--who in the hell says "defecates' and 'urinates' when they are angry and yelling???

If he has enough self-restraint to not say "shits and pisses" when he's yelling, why doesn't he have enough self-restraint not to yell at a neighbor or his kids? Go figure....

We walked down toward the Town Hall and three of the Tea Party guys who are there several drive times a week were in front of Town Hall.

They had three signs.

One said, FACE IT, OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST!

Well, I voted for Obama before and will again. I'm a 'yellow dog democrat', but believe you me, our President is not a 'socialist'. I actually wish he was. He's a moderate Democrat, much more moderate than me. I can't for the life of me understand that sign or why someone would write it or hold it.

The second said, EXTREMISM IN THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM IS NO VICE. That's a quote from Barry Goldwater. I was a devotee of Barry Goldwater when I was 17 years old. I was a convinced conservative back then. I even spray painted AUH2O on several public buildings, which meant I could have been arrested for vandalism except my father's two brothers owned most of the little town where I lived and being a Bradley was license to deface.

Then I heard Barry Goldwater promised to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government entity that provided cheap electric power for a vast swath of Appalachia. That he thought a private company would be as generous as the government had been woke me up.

That's when I grew up and became a Liberal.

I didn't mind the Goldwater quote at all. I actually believe it, just not the way the Tea Party guys do.

The last sign said: HONK IF YOU HATE GOVERNMENT

Bela and I stood there for 10 minutes or so, watching the three old guys (all of which, I imagine, haven't sent back their Social Security checks or torn up their Medicare cards!) try to hold three signs and two American flags between them.

It was drive time and Cheshire's two major industries are Garden Centers and traffic--mostly on Route 10--Main Street to natives--so Bela and I waited and watched and listened.

Only 4 cars honked in 10 minutes out of several hundred that passed by. An unscientific poll at best. But it gave me faith.

Then, here's the awful thing. The three guys left, gathering their flags and signs and I watched them go. They had parked in the parking lot of Town Hall!!!!

Wait a frigging minute! If you "hate government" and yet you stand on Town property and park in a Town Hall parking lot, isn't that a bit hypocritical. Do you hate the ground you stand on and the parking lot you use? The Town of Cheshire is, last time I looked, a organ of GOVERNMENT, that hated, reviled thing. When people 'honk' do you want the sidewalk to disappear and your cars to fall into a black hole because both are 'government property'?

Don't ever try to tell me, not ever, never in anyway, that IRONY isn't writ large in the world we live in.....

And I, for one, am glad about that.

Irony makes the world go 'round so far as I can see....

Honk if you love IRONY.....

stacking wood

2012-02-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

Did I tell you I've been stacking wood? Of course I did to impress you that I have physical prowess as well as intelligence and great good looks. (I can also cook....)

So, I stacked a lot more wood today and I feel like what we used to say back home--'homemade s***". Of course, when you ponder if for a bit, absolutely all s*** is 'homemade' in a very direct way. So, what we used to say we felt like when we felt awful really doesn't make much sense since there is, so far as I know, no "store bought s***" around anywhere. Wouldn't find much of a market, I'd imagine....

I hurt all over--well, actually my eyes and ears and head don't hurt, or my teeth and tongue for that matter....but most of the muscle tissue (or what passes for muscle tissue on my body) aches like hell....

I shuffle along like a guy in the nursing home. Sitting down isn't bad, but getting up or going down into a 'sit' is awful.

Back home (boy, I must be in West Virginia in my heart tonight!) we used to joke that even though a girl wasn't very attractive, she could "carry much wood"....Well, it was funny back then to adolescent boys, but now it screams "sexism" like your foot just caught on fire.

So, there's still more wood to stack...we had a tree down, our neighbor's tree fell on our yard and we got the wood from that, and the guys trimmed the old horse chestnut tree so next storm, the limbs don't fall off and go into our neighbor's roof. Lots of wood.

I guess you might say that how I hurt is 'good for the soul', reminding me that I am frail and sinful and, beyond that, out of shape. A momento mori of sorts.

Good for the soul, you might say.

All I can say is "I feel like homemade..." well, you know all that.

learning to fly

2012-02-10T19:22:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Hornbeck, a seminarian I worked with at St. John's in Waterbury, sent me a quote from Patrick Overton that goes like this:

When we walk on the edge
of all the light we have
and step off into the unknown
we must believe
that one of two things will happen:
there will be something solid
for us to stand on
or
we will be taught to fly.

That, for me, is the essence of faith, of trust, of believing, of knowing--beyond all the evidence to the contrary--that God is in charge.

Flying is the ultimate answer to the problems of the world. Just soaring above the endless nonsense that passes for 'political debate' today. Winging above the social issues and the economic issues and trusting in a God who loves us, just as we are.

I was stacking wood today (just to let you know I do manual labor from time to time) from the tree and trimming from October. I got three free pallets and piled up a lot of tulip tree and horse chestnut wood.

"Work", actually physical labor, is a gift.

There is a story in Islamic lore of Jesus walking through the old city of Jerusalem and coming across the corpse of a dog, dead for quite a while, stinking to high heaven, decomposing in the street. All the disciples are disgusted and hurry ahead. But Jesus kneels by the dog, touches it's rapidly rotting body gently and says, "what beautiful teeth this dog had...."

Flying has something to do with recognizing the beauty and the nobility of everything in life. Even the teeth of a dead dog.

There is so much negativity in the public square these days. We need to fly above it and lean into the light, the hope, the beauty, the wonder, the holiness of life.

At least I think so, but what do I know? I don't know anything. I just ponder everything.

Amazing discovery that turns out to be obvious...

2012-02-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

Last night I made an amazing discovery!

That then, after I told my wife about it, turns out to be obvious....

Let me back up a bit.

On our visits to Baltimore and our granddaughters visits with us, Bern has been playing Tic-Tac-Do with the 5 year old twins, Morgan and Emma. I don't play with them because, unlike Bern, I'd never let them win.

Under my laid-back, calm and patient facade is the heart of a person absolutely dedicated to competition and, most of all, WINNING....

But last night I had a little time (actually, I have a LOT of time since I'm retired) and I played Tic-Tac-Do about 25 times with myself. And my Amazing Discovery was that I could never, ever beat myself in the game. I was astonished. What a good player I must be that I could never beat myself!

So I told Bern all about my Amazing Discovery and she looked at me the way she looks at me when I leave the refrigerator door open while making a sandwich or trim my beard and wash the trimmings down the bathroom sink or reach up into my sweater to pull down the cuff of the shirt underneath when I could have merely held the cuff in my fingers while I put on the sweater. (There are lots of other examples about when Bern gives me the look she gave me when I told her, "I can't beat myself at tic-tac-do", but I spare you having to read about them.

Here's what she told me about my Amazing Discovery that I could never beat myself at Tic-Tac-Do, "Of course you can't. That's obvious. You always know what you are going to do."

She didn't say, "you'd have to be a moron AND an idiot to beat yourself at Tic-Tac-Do", but I did hear a faint echo of that though she didn't say it, being compassionate, to a degree, about my idiosyncratic way of being in the world.

Here's what I wonder now: could someone who has multiple personalities have one that could beat another at Tic-Tac-Do?

That's probably a "politically incorrect" question. But I have as much difficulty with that as I have with leaving the refrigerator door open....

Such a misplac'ed springtime afternoon

2012-02-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

Years ago when I was a card carrying Romantic Poet, I wrote a sonnet that began like this:

When thus it comes upon a winter day,
Such a misplac'ed springtime afternoon....

I don't remember the rest of it, mercifully. I was probably 21 or so when I wrote it--lots of winter days and springtime afternoons ago. And at the time, I felt not a twinge of regret of writing "misplaced" as, "misplace'ed".

Historically bad poetry, let's face it, but I still have a soft spot for my Romantic Poet Era and have thought a lot about those words when the February mornings turn into early April afternoons these days.

My grandmother called this kind of weather, "pneumonia winter", because the warm afternoons and chill nights seem like a Pietra Dish (if that's how you spell it) for viruses. I know all sorts of people who have never-ending-colds and stomach flues and coughs. I, myself, don't know if my voice is going to work right when I talk since the weather has caused me to sound like Lauren Bacall after four scotches and a pack of Camels.

I'm sure the rest of my poem was a celebration of unexpected warmth and the juices that boil when that happened. Hey, I said I was a Romantic Poet back then!

I heard today about a dear friend who has decided to die with some grace and dignity and on his own terms rather than filled with tubes with anxious medical professionals crowding around him. Never mind the details, just know that he will almost certainly be dead before the First Sunday of Lent. And it is his choice to end it all this way. He could probably make it to Easter or even to summer dealing with the doctors. But, he told me when we talked on the phone today, he'd rather it be this way.

I feel that feeling in the back of the throat that you feel when tears are near just writing about this. I'm going to see him tomorrow. I'll take him communion. I'll offer to give his the prayers for the dying. I'll anoint him with oil. I'll listen to him and hold his hand too tightly and sit in my car for 10 minutes afterwards crying.

He's an odd old bird, prickly around the edges but soft as butter in August inside. A man of great commitments and 'as good as his word' and he was always even better than what he promised. He's a different generation than me--one of the 'Greatest Generation' while I'm just an early Baby Boomer with all the problems we've caused. There are things about him my coddled, privileged kind can never understand. A depth of soul, perhaps...a wondrous expansiveness that allowed him to live and breathe and have his being in the nexus of Need and Responsibility.

What a joy it was to be a part of his life. How I admire his decision. How I hope I'll have his courage when it comes my time to open that inscrutable door to 'what comes next'. How I both dread and look forward to our time tomorrow.

I learned long ago that it is a humbling and miraculous opportunity to sit by the side of one who will soon shuffle off this mortal coil. I am not unacquainted with death. Being a priest involves you intimately in the ironic blessing of traveling nearly THERE but pulling back with other sisters and brothers.

I learned all this on a February afternoon that might have set a record, it was so much like early spring. Somehow it is appropriate. My friend has chosen Spring over Winter. He moves on, impatiently.

I ponder what all that means. I retreat to my Castor Oil Tree and wonder whether to rail at God for losing yet another friend, or to thank the Holy One for the warmth....

Law-ed

2012-02-04T14:46:00.000-08:00

For some reason, while walking the dog tonight, I thought about my childhood friend, Lloyd. (That's not his real name, but I chose it because I could do the same thing to it as I can do to his real name--pronounce it in Appalachian.) "Law-ed" or, more precisely "Law-ED" because Appalachian folks tend to accent the last syllable and go up on the end of a sentence. My name, for example, was "Gem-E". Like THAT....

Lloyd was a great kid. A bit shy, but not overly. Very smart, when you got him talking. A medium athlete, like most of us. A little smaller than average. But, in the end, he was the All Star, Super Hero kid of the kids I hung around with.

His mother taught third grade. I didn't have her as my teacher, but I knew, from going to Lloyd's house, that she thought the plural of you was 'you-ins'. But then, we all talked like that--Appalachian.

Nobody knew until it happened, but Lloyd's home-life was a nightmare. Apparently, for all his life, Lloyd's father, who was a little fellow like him, physically abused Lloyd. I don't know if there was anything sexual in the abuse, but back then, back there, we wouldn't have known how to speak to each other about so abominable a thing.

Anyhow, Lloyd had a baby sister. Much younger than him--6 or 7 years or so--and Lloyd had warned his father, when we were in high school, if he ever touched Lloyd's sister he would kill him.

Apparently, looking back, the warning didn't take and at some point Lloyd's father abused Lloyd's sister.

So Lloyd took his daddy's shotgun and shot his daddy dead as hell. Just like that.

I was in college when it happened and missed the trial and the verdict. Lloyd spent some time in a prison in West Virginia for manslaughter, but his sister and his mother were liberated from the abuse none of us knew about. I'm sure Lloyd thought it was a good deal--a little time in prison for freeing his family from a monster.

I don't know why I thought of Lloyd as I was walking the dog. I haven't thought of him in years. And the thing is, I grew up in such a calm, loving family that I can't imagine (and don't want to imagine) what Lloyd's childhood was like.

But I know this: Lloyd is one of my real-life heroes and I hope and pray he's alright these days.

Had I been in his shoes and his genes, I hope I'd have had his courage and his outrage. Really. No kidding.

Patterns

2012-02-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

Dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, evening, night--over and over again.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, late night snack. Over and again.

We live within patterns.

I was sitting in the front seat of my son's car with Emma and Morgan, my granddaughters, in the back seat, secure in child seats, while Josh went into Starbucks for an iced-tea on our way to church at the Cathedral of the Incarnation Baltimore last Sunday morning.

We were looking at a strip mall--a very Yuppie strip mall--and I reminded the girls that we had all been at the Italian restaurant just in front of us.

"Remember," I said, "when we were there Tegan" (the 5 year old twins 2 year old sister)"got so upset that the adults had to take turns being outside with her. Remember that?"

Emma said, "So Mommy and Daddy and you and Grandma kept coming out to be with Tegan?"

"Yes," I said, "just like that."

"That was a 'pattern'," she said.

I was astonished that she's said that. "So, what's a 'pattern', Emma?"

"It's when something happens the same way over and over," she told me.

Just then Morgan said, "Did Daddy bring a snack for church?" The Cathedral is very wonderful about children--they eat, color, read, play video games on their parents' smart phones and eat snacks after they come back from Sunday School at the Peace and nobody minds.

"Daddy always forgets to bring the snack," Morgan said.

"He remembered this time," I said, because the snack bag was between my feet.

"So," I said to Emma, "Daddy broke the pattern."

She thought for a moment. "Yes, he did," she said.

Patterns are how we live...the better to break them, I'd say.

Going to Church with Emma and Morgan

2012-01-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

I went to the Cathedral with my son, Josh, and my twin granddaughters, Emma and Morgan, on Sunday.

O.C.S.

2012-01-25T18:32:00.000-08:00

I suffer from OCS. I don't know if it is in the diagnostics of psychologists, but it should be.

Our friend, John Anderson came to dinner tonight and before we ate John and Bern were talking about all the rules they lived under as children when in someone else's house. There were all sorts of restrictions about 'not opening anyone's refrigerator without permission' and 'never entering a bedroom in someone's house'--stuff that sounded like Sanskrit to me because I suffer from OCS,

Both Bern and John have siblings (Bern is the youngest of 3, John the oldest of 4) so life showed up for them a lot differently than it did for me.

People with OCS will not only open strangers' refrigerators, they will open their medicine cabinets and their closets. Sufferers of OCS have no boundaries. Our mantra is "What Mine is Mine and What's Yours is Mine."

Only Child Syndrome is a remarkable affliction. Only Children are all like every other 'only child' but they have little to nothing in common with people who have brothers and sisters. We are not like You, just believe it.

Imagine, unless you are an Only Child, what life would have been like if you never had to fight anyone over a toy or share a room or wear hand-me-downs or see some younger brother wearing your old clothes or never had to scream "leave me alone!" to a sibling or had to fight about where to sit to watch TV or ride in the car or never had an older sibling pinch you or a younger sibling turn you in for pinching and never, ever, not once, had to share things.

Well, I know you can't imagine all that any more than I can imagine pecking orders or 'sharing' or having someone else taking up your space and hogging stuff.

I often, often have to hear people discuss their siblings. Rarely am I jealous or envious. Mostly, I'm just confused. I have always romanticized about having brothers and sisters...until I hear a normal kid, with brothers or sisters or both, talk about what it was like.

The most common question I get from people with siblings is this: "weren't you 'lonely'?"

Here's the thing, if you've never had other siblings that you might from time to time be separated from, "loneliness" has no meaning whatsoever. I truly have no connection with either 'loneliness' or 'boredom'. I know people get what they called 'bored', but I have no intellectual or emotional category equivalent to 'boredom'. For me, it simply doesn't exist. I am perfectly happy to entertain myself because I've always had to and don't know what the option would look like.

As I told you earlier: Only Children Are Not Like You.

Lots of it, realistically--this OCS stuff, is not good. I had to bury my parents alone. No one is there to tell me if my memories of childhood are accurate or wildly mistaken. I'm nobody's Uncle--and I would be a great Uncle, I believe. I have no nieces or nephews to be the crazy Uncle Jim for.

My mother had 4 siblings who lived and 2 who died in childhood. (Ernest and Leon, the two that died, were part of my childhood as well as the uncle and aunts who I grew up with.) My father had 3 brothers and a sister. So I had aunts and uncles aplenty and first cousins forever.

But I never had a brother or a sister. I simply am not equipped to know what that would be like, not in a million years.

We have two children and I never figured out the whole sibling thing. Not for a moment.

OCS has some wondrous ramifications. And some noxious side-effects.

It is what it is.

But Only Children (unless you're one) are Not like you....

Re-remembering

2012-01-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

For reasons beyond my comprehension, I've neglected the Castor Oil Tree of my ponderings. I have been pondering, one of the things I do most and best. I just haven't been writing about them. I'm going to have a January 24th resolution to write more about the things I'm thinking about. (That and pie crust....)

Today I had lunch with a dear friend and was telling her, as we walked the couple of blocks from the restaurant to our cars in the weird 50 degree January weather, that I was reminded of the first line of a poem I once wrote on a day like today. I have no memory of the rest of the poem, but the first line endures:

'When it comes, on a winter day, such a misplaced spring afternoon,'

Not a bad first line except I think, when I wrote it, in my early 20's I wrote "misplac'ed', which, no matter how you read it is more than a tad self-absorbed.

But I was self-absorbed at 22. We all were. We all are, I suspect, but age wears off the edges in a remarkable and forgiving way.

I try to remember that oh-so-young-man I was. I try to remember but I believe I "re-remember".

It's another poem I wrote that caused me to ponder the fact that I often "re-remember". That poem was about an event in my life that happened at a strange conference I went to decades ago where all the participants came as 'characters' they had created. Nobody was their selves. Nobody else knew who anyone else was. It was in the late 60's or early 70's when such conceits seemed de rigour and, actually, 'cool'. (Notice how 'cool' has been reincarnated in our time? And not for the first time. There was the 'cool' of the early jazz life, the 'cool' of the Beat Generation, the 'cool' of the Hippies and now the 'cool' of Gen Xers. The last seminarian I worked with said 'cool' in ways I had no connection with. "Cool" to her, seemed to indicate a kind of acknowledgement or agreement--it wasn't the "Cool" of something really special and unique that I used it as. It was reduced, it seemed to me, to a synonym for "OK". But that's just me talkin', it's probably different for each generation that says, cool....)

Back to Re-remembering: I went to the conference as Jonah--little surprise there since the name of my blog came from the Book of Jonah. I was, at that point, feeling like that minor prophet--dragged, against my will, into 'ministry', for God's sake....Well, exactly...when I wanted to be an American Literature professor in some small liberal arts college and write the Great American Novel. I suddenly found myself a PRIEST--Holy Cow!!!

I was in the Nineveh called The Episcopal Church, against my will. So I went as 'Jonah' to the conference which was called, I still remember (though my memory is more suspect each day) "Discovering the ME in THEE".

The designers obviously thought that coming to the three days as a 'made-up' personality, a 'created being', would free us from the ego of our true selves and give us insight into the 'made up' personalities of those around us. Me in Thee and all that. I get it. Cool....

Anyway, I had this intense flirtation with a woman who came as 'Serena'. We even kissed (and had both signed a release that we were responsible for our own 'emotional attachments'--I swear we did, so the designers must have imagined that if you "weren't yourself", you might give the Self you weren't permission to do things you, as yourself, wouldn't have done.....Lordy, Lordy, isn't that 'cool'?

Obviously, 'ego-less', that's what happened in those three intense days for 'Serena' and 'Jonah'.

I wrote a rather good poem about it and called it "The Nun I Loved". In the poem, Serena was a Sister of Mercy suddenly jarred from her vows to kiss an Episcopal priest. We had a 'crush' on each other.

The poem ends--I'll try to find it and put it on the blog--with me on a plane going home starting to write Serena a letter when I realize I don't know her real name or what convent she's in....And, for her part, she knows nothing of who I really am....

OK, I'm thinking of that poem and that event and I Re-Remember that it wasn't like that at all. There was a Jonah and there was a Serene and we did have a three day 'crush' and we did kiss....but here's the thing, in my Re-Remembrance I re-remembered that Serena wasn't nun at all and that, in fact, her husband, a Congregational Minister, was another participant in the workshop under the name of "Tyler".

So, here's the problem: which memory is true, like TRUE?

Or are they both?

Or is neither?

It was shocking to realize a poem I enjoy that I wrote was a pack of lies....Or was it?

I invite you to 'ponder' memory....And re-remembering....

Take that to your Castor Oil Tree and mull it over....

Harriet's father's shoes

2012-01-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

Today I realized I could no longer wear Harriet's father's shoes.

The heel on the right shoe is damaged so it feels like I'm falling off to the right as I walk. Listing, if you well, to starboard (or port, I'm not a sailor).

When Harriet's father died I got some great sweaters and this remarkable pair of shoes. They were what would once have been called 'chunka boots'--above the ankle and leather and wonderful shoes.

I just wore one of Harriet's father's sweaters the other day. But the shoes can't last any longer.

(Maybe I could take them to the last shoemaker I know of down in Hamden, just before the connector to 91 and get a new heel. Maybe....But who goes to a shoe repair shop anymore? Maybe I should do it just to support shoe repair as an endeavor and a livelihood. Just to show that liberal Democrats support small business in spite of all the nonsense I've heard from the clown show that passes as the Republican Presidential field.)

I don't remember when Harriet's father died. I have these issues with linear time that I've mentioned before. But I've worn his shoes for years and felt, each time I wore them, that I was, literally, 'walking in his moccasins' mile after mile. I even preached at his funeral but couldn't, if you held a gun to my head, tell you what year it was. Years and years ago.

I loved those shoes and loved them even more because they were Harriet's father's shoes.

I loved that a lot.

It's important to walk with the dead. It really is.

Ponder how you 'walk with the dead' from time to time....

ultimate and eternal humiliation....

2012-01-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

I'll be straight with you. I just watched a Justin Bieber (is that how you spell it?) music video in its entirety. And here's the worst part...it wasn't bad at all.

I could claim I was almost tricked into it by watching a video of a guy and his groomsmen at his wedding reception doing a dance to the song and below that was the opportunity to see Justin's video. That's what happened, but I won't admit to being tricked. I watched it willingly, without any force being applied. And here's the worst part...it wasn't all that bad.

As a committed NPR junkie--I need at least a three hour Public Radio 'fix' every day...usually more--I knew who Justin Bieber was (how can you not know who Justin Beiber is...tried another spelling?) but had never heard a song of his. Never. Not once.

And was proud of that fact.

I planned to shuffle off this mortal coil without hearing the young man sing. I'm an NPR snob. I don't experience things like Justin however his last name is spelled. (Nothing I've tried passes the spell check test...maybe I should try "Justin Beaver"...no, don't go there....)

But of my own free will and without any outside or social pressure or a good friend telling me I should (by the way, I have no 'good friends' who would suggest listening to Justin what-ever-his-last name is, not in a million years) I, myself, watched the video from start to finish and thought it wasn't all that bad. He's no Michael Jackson, but there was a dramatic narrative to the song and he has a pleasant voice....

Oh, stop! I'm trying to rationalize doing something I would have put in the same category as voting for Mitt Romney....I did it. I admit it.

I kinda liked it....

Ultimate and eternal humiliation....

mimi

2012-01-12T18:51:00.000-08:00

Her birth certificate name is Jeremy Johanna Bradley. And when she was a baby and would get fussy (as babies do, our son would sing to her, "Jeremy-mimi-mimi". After a while, we did too. So, since she was the most fussy baby ever for the first six months of her life, all that singing named her Mimi. And she is to this day.) At six months, her brain flipped or something, and she became the best child ever. My plan was to call her JJ but that never materialized.

So, I just got home from the Cluster book group at St. James and was mindlessly playing Hearts on the computer when the phone rang. I wanted to finish the hand and got to the phone as it stopped ringing. No message. I dialed *69 and when I heard the number I knew it was Mimi. I hit '1' to call back and got a message from Cox Communications that something or other was keeping my call from going through. OK, I thought, but being flexible, I called her on my cell phone and got her voice mail. I left a message and went back to my Heart's game.

All the time, in the deepest, murkiest recesses of my mind, anxious thoughts were rising into the mist that is my brain. Why couldn't I get her back when she'd just called? She lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan, why would a father worry about his daughter, I ask you?

So, when I went out to smoke a cigarette on the back porch, I called her again. By then I had horrible thoughts racing around my gray matter about what she might be experiencing. I am not a 'worry wort', but when it's Mimi...I worry....

She is my baby girl, my Princess, my shining wonder, my heart.

She answered. "I just got home, Daddy, and I'm eating dinner," she said. I knew she was because she was chewing a mouthful as she spoke. "Can I call you tomorrow?"

"Of course," I said, breathing a sigh of great relief. "Love you."

Then, after that, I walked around the house looking at the pictures of Mimi: as a little girl, running down the hill in my father's yard, intent and wondrous; as a teen on our front porch; almost identical photos of the four of us at her graduation from Bennington College and Josh's law school graduation; with our twin granddaughters, both of them looking at her and talking and her listening; as a baby on the beach in North Carolina; her high-school yearbook photos; Bern and Mimi both inside the huge rain coat I still wear, laughing that they both are inside it; a series of photos of her with Tim, her 'long time companion'--I've decided to stop calling him her 'boyfriend' since they've lived together for years in what I see as a comfortable bliss (I love, adore Tim).

I wouldn't want her to know and hope she doesn't read this blog about how much I love her and how when I can't contact her, I worry. She is a remarkable young woman who doesn't need my worry and fretting. And I don't either.

From time to time you'll find me wandering through our home, staring at the pictures of Josh and Mimi, almost feeling the moment 'in the moment', remembering and pondering and almost welling up with tears for the love of them.

I never imagined it would be like this--back when I was a young father. I was 28 when Josh was born and 31 when Mimi was born. It all seems, not a long time ago, but another lifetime, another existence. Lordy, young children focus you in a way that makes it impossible to imagine they won't always be young.

But they grow up. And they go away. And it is impossible and, I think, wrong, to want to remain the part of their lives that I was for what seems like forever and was really a heart-beat.

So, I, from time to time, wander around our house, staring at pictures that capture moments long gone that are, when I see them, present and real and right now.

Mimi is my Princess, Josh is my Bonnie Bobby Shaftoe. I stare into the past as I look at those photographs. And the Past become alive. I do that more than I'm comfortable telling you.

I never believed the elders who told me how it would be.

And they spoke Truth.

Normal

2012-01-11T16:50:00.000-08:00

OK, for a few days I've been pondering how 'normal' my life is--how calm, non-reactive, smooth sailing, like that.

I grew up with parents that loved me profoundly...oh, there were issues: I was the only child of two people who (unlike today) didn't think they'd have a baby. Mom was 39 and Dad was 41. Today people do that, but in 1947, it didn't happen. So I had issues of 'smothering' and being raised in a bubble and stuff like that. But they never hit me (unless you count the time my father threw a piece of kindling at me...I used that for months whenever I wanted something....)

I was spoiled rotten, if the truth be known, not only by my parents but by aunts and uncles and a mess of cousins (youngest of 15 on my mother's side, much youngest of 5 on my father's side) and most of the people around me in our little town of Anawalt (pop. 350) because I was Virgil and Cleo's son.

I also look back at my life and think that nothing much bad ever happened to me. I feel very, very normal.

But then there is this: I changed urologists a year or so ago and when I went to my first appointment with the new doctor, I had this long form to fill out. One question was about "surgeries" and since he was my urologist now I put down my prostatectomy (spell check gives me no reasonable replacement for that so that's what you get--they jerked out my prostate gland and I had 6 weeks of radiation in 2004 or so).

Since it was warm and I had short sleeves on, the doctor pointed to the two foot long scars on my left forearm and said, "what was that about?"

"Oh, I forgot," I told him, "I broke both bones in three pieces each in a car accident."

"That might be considered 'surgery'", he said. "Anything else you forgot about surgeries?"

"Ah..." I said, "well I did have surgery on my elbow and a hernia repaired and, well, there was that emergency appendectomy at the Millennium (I missed a great party!) and, gosh, both eyes have had cataracts removed...."

He looked at me like Kurt Vonnegut might have looked at me--my urologist is a dead ringer for Kurt Vonnegut--and said, "all that, because of my medical training, I might consider surgery."

Today I heard a show on NPR about the virtue of forgetting. How being able to forget useless stuff gives you more space in your brain for useful stuff and how being able to forget bad, traumatic stuff is good for mental health.

So, my being 'normal' is a function of my ability to forget bad things.

Imagine that.

Maybe my cousins sexually abused me and my uncles beat me and my grandmother locked me in a closet, but I simply forgot and think about my childhood as idyllic and 'normal'.

And maybe not.

Maybe I've just blessed as hell (or heaven) and my life has been pretty much more normal than I expected or deserved and I'm simply blessed ('lucky' in non-religious language). Maybe so.

But, because I think of myself as so 'normal', I tend to think of everyone I encounter as 'normal' too. I used to, when I was Rector of St. John's, run into a lot of abnormal, strange and crazy people from the street. But, when I talked to them, they seemed 'normal' to me.

It's not a bad affliction--assuming everyone is 'normal'...and makes for some fascinating conversation.

Ponder how 'normal' you are. See how that turns out....

(A weird side-effect of being 'normal' is to assume you are also 'the norm'. So my extremely progressive, left-wing religious and political opinions, for me, seem 'normal'. I'm genuinely astonished when anyone disagrees with me. I almost never get defensive or mad...I'm just amused to find out anyone could disagree with 'the Norm' that I am....)

putting my friends away

2012-01-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

I took all the ornaments off the two Christmas trees today. We'll leave the trees up, the white pine with lights, the spruce bare, for a while longer.

Putting away the ornaments and the decorations is a time of reminiscence for me.

We still have half a dozen or so of the ornaments that hung on my childhood trees. They are remarkably 'dated' but I love them all.

We have the ornament I bought in Georgetown with raggedy Ann and raggedy Andy on it (though it is more tape now than ornament) and sent in the Bern where she was getting her hair cut to let her know the rabbit had died (I don't know if a rabbit died or not, but the pregnancy test was positive with Josh). This was around Christmas in 1974 and after I dropped her off at the hair stylist, I found a pay phone and called for the results of the test. (No cell phones in 1974, Virginia.) Then I went to a bar and had shots and beers. Bern didn't get the message and came tearing out to the waiting room, one half her hair nearly to her waist, the other half almost gone with the stylist on her heels, to find out what it meant. I thought it was obvious, but she didn't. I started to tell her the good news but I was one shot and one beer too far over the line. Finally she understood. She drove home to Alexandria and I had a nap.

There are carved olive wood ornaments I brought back from Israel in the 90's.

There are lots of homemade ornaments and crocheted snow flakes. Lots of Lions and Santa's and religious stuff. Plus some very kitchy things.

One tree each year is devoted to things that fly--birds and angels and the inexplicable flying elephant we got somewhere and the wondrous Hindu looking goddess with wings and fairies and other things. Most of the birds are very fragile so I wrap each one in paper before putting it in the box.

We even keep old ornaments that can't be hung anymore that are meaningful. Most of all, the little lame balloon man like in the e.e.cummings poem.

They really are friends I seen a week or so a year. I handle them with care and love them mightily.

I also have human friends I don't see much. I hope I handle them with the same care and love.

Why M.D.'s are not like you and me....

2012-01-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in the smallest house on the best block in St. Paul, Minnesota. One of his most quoted lines is, "The rich are not like you and me...."

I'd say the same about Medical Doctors.

In the seven years since my prostate cancer surgery and radiation, my PSA (which theoretically should be zero since it takes a prostate to make PSA) slowly crept up. My surgeon had me have body scans and bone scans and all sorts of blood work. When the results were in he told me, with a long face and disappointment in his voice, "I don't know how to proceed since the cancer hasn't settled anywhere...."

I stared at him in utter astonishment. "Well, that could be a good think, don't you think?"

He thought a moment. "Well, for you...."

Having something diagnosable to treat was what he wanted. What I wanted was for the cancer cells to not have settled anywhere!

Just recently, I've been to a dermatologist about a nasty eruption of dermatitis I've had sever times on my forearms and the back of my hands. Really nasty--weeping blisters and...well, you don't need to know all that.

My blood tests, a biopsy and finally a 24 hour urine test. I kid you not.

I went to the lab and they gave me a container that for all the world was like one of those red, plastic things people us to get gas for their lawnmowers in. Except it was orange. And it wasn't for gasoline.

For 24 hours every time I 'made water' I had to do it in this container. (isn't it amazing how many different ways we have to refer to releasing urine: pee, piss, tinkle, water my lizard, relieve myself, empty my bladder come to mind all at once, along with 'making water' which is what I think I grew up saying--all processes of elimination have lots of names...i.e. puke, vomit, ralph, throw up, hurl, etc.)

One of the humbling things was to learn what volume of water I made in a day. I almost filled that container, which was in milliliters and liters so I have no idea what it was in pints since I didn't pay much attention to any of the metric stuff--or, more likely, was never asked to.

I once freaked a good friend out by asking 'do you realize how dark it is inside us?'

He thought I was weird beyond all imagining to think about that. But it's just that the colorful plates that show us what's inside of us are in brilliant colors thought the truth is, there's no light in there. Perpetual darkness dwells within. And all this miraculous stuff goes on each day inside our bodies and our heads without benefit of illumination.

I don't know about you, but I sometimes imagine these little creatures inside me doing the bodily functions things. In the dark! And the guys on urine control are very efficient. (Maybe they have little miner's helmets with lights on them....But then, how do they breathe?...but I digress.

The test was negative--they didn't find the nasty stuff in my day of pee that would have in some way explained these awful skin eruptions.

The nurse called to tell me it was negative. "Doctor wants you to come in as soon as you have another episode so she can take another biopsy. Call us right away."

"But I don't want another episode," I told her. "I really don't."

"But we need a diagnosis," she told me, reasoning with me.

"If it never happens again," I said, "then it doesn't matter if it is 'diagnosed'..."

I heard her thinking over the phone. "Well," she said, "there is that...."

There Is That, indeed....

Happy 4.2666% New Year

2011-12-31T14:40:00.000-08:00

I've just spent some of the waning minutes of 2011 watching people celebrating an event that hasn't occurred on the East Coast of the United States yet--New Year's.

Over in the South Pacific, it has been 2012 for hours already--it's afternoon of January 1. It's already hit Asia, the Middle East and Europe...and it's still 2011 where I sit typing.

Every hour, 4.2666% (or so) of the earth enters a new year. I haven't figured it out exactly, but we'll be roughly 2/3 of the way through the night. So 66% of the world will beat us to the new year.

Somoa moved east recently over the international date line. So it's been 2012 in Somoa for half a day or so.

But how do you get to decide to move across the International Date line? Did the island actually relocate? Do people just on the other side of the IDL resent Samoa for being 23 hours ahead of them? How does all this stuff work? And who said so to begin with?

Anyway, it's foggy as hell here in the Shire. Maybe it's too foggy to see the new year when it arrives.

Can Cheshire decide to change time zones? I so, I choose to be in the same zone as Ireland.

Happy New Year a couple of hours ago....

As promised

2011-12-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

If you look back a day or two, you'll hear the tale of my being the editor of the SPIRIT magazine at West Virginia University in the spring of that wondrous year 1969.

I promised I'd type out the short story of mine that was in the magazine. Well, here it is. I did correct some grammar and punctuation but mostly left it as it was.

I was 21 years old when I wrote this. Who was that young man? Am I who he became? I guess so.

Hope you like it.

Once Softly, October

THE FATHER: My father was tall and thin and smoked cigars. He was also a Republican and a Yankee fan and always smoked cigars when he talked politics or watched baseball on television. My mother always wanted him to smoke a pipe.

“They look so nice, Vern,” my mother always told him. “They really do. And smell so much better, so manly.”

“But they take patience,” my father always replied. “Patience is what you need to smoke a pipe and you know I don't have any patience. They go out too much.”

My father was impatient and bossed section on the hoot-owl shift at French # 2 mine and voted straight Republican in every election. Somehow it all went well together in my father: the cigars and Republicans and Yankees and bossing section—went well much as the meeting of bat and ball went will with a soft, October afternoon and the taste of peanuts. There is a certain repressed dignity in voting for Eisenhower and wanting Mickey Mantle to hit a home run—a faith, perhaps, in a power just out of our control.

THE GAME: Whitey Ford was my father's hero—along with Richard Nixon. Whitey Ford was the only one who could stop the Pirates and Richard Nixon was the only one who could stop the Communists and the Catholics and they all, according to my father, had to be stopped. But that day, in the seventh game of all games, it was Bob Turley who had to top the Pirates and he had to do it that day and no other, because, as I was putting on my sneakers to go to the filling station, I heard Linsey Nelson say: “This is it, Law against Turley. There is no tomorrow for these teams.”

There had always been no tomorrow for the Yankees—every year the day came when there was no tomorrow—and most of the time, to my father's delight, the Yankees had no need for a tomorrow, much less a next week. But this time, I thought, putting on my tennis shoes, it may be different because it wasn't Whitey Ford or even Ralph Terry who would try to stop the Pirates, but Bob Turley, who looked overweight as he warmed up.

THE CAR: The car was a 1959 black Ford with a Richard Nixon sticker on the right side of the back bumper. All the sticker said was NIXON/LODGE in red, white and blue. It was covered by a film of coal dust from being on the bumper of a car that sat by the portal of French #2 mine every night from 11:45 until 8:15 the next morning. The ash tray was full of cigar ashes and though the car was less than a year old, the smell of cigar smoke had soaked into the upholstery. With the windows up, the smell almost made my mother sick, so I was going to the filling station for her to get a spruce scented pine tree to hang from the rear view mirror.

“Winter's coming and I can't ride in that car with the windows up, Vern,” my mother had said. “I'll have Richie get one of the air fresheners I saw at Poppy's.”

Mel Allen was telling how Bobby Richardson was breaking all the records for hitting in a World Series and my father just nodded to my mother. I had finished tying my shoes and was looking at the hole in my left sneaker, right where the sole met the canvas in front, about where my third toe was when my mother said,

“Come here, Richard,”

and gave me two quarters and a penny to get the air freshener.

I dropped the money in my pocket and walked to the door.

“And don't get one with a girl on it,” she said. “I saw those and I don't want one in our car.”

I nodded and turned the knob.

“Don't be too long,” she said. As I left, the Star Spangled Banner was playing.

THE PLAY: ACT ONE: French, West Virginia, where I have lived all of my thirteen years, is a coal mining camp in a valley of the Appalachians near the Virginia border. All the mountains around French, my father once told me, have thick veins of coal running through them. Mr. Krolling, our next door neighbor, who runs a machine on the second shift at French #2, laughed when I told him our science book said coal used to be ferns and palm trees that were buried for millions of years and turned to carbon. He said coal was coal and God put it there and that was that. At any rate, whether ferns or God put it there, the coal was all around French.

From our front yard, I could see three strip mines high up on the mountains around French. Herbie Lowman and I would climb up to them on summer Saturdays to look for fossils and throw rocks. From the strip mines French looked like a toy village with its two rows of houses, all painted the same shade of pale yellow U.S. Steel used to paint all the houses in all the coal camps and all covered with a thin layer of coal dust. The coal cars behind the houses on our side of the street and the people in their yards looked small enough to reach down and pick up—small enough to move from place to place and make them do whatever you wanted.

“That doesn't make any sense,” Herbie said when I told him how I felt I could reach down and move the coal cars and people around. We squatted near the edge of the leveled mountain top and he twisted his face into a frown. “It looks just the same to me.”

“When you're up here, don't you feel like you're bigger than all that—bigger than French and the houses and the people?” I asked. “Just look how small they are.”

Herbie stared down for a while. “They aren't small,” he said, “they just look small.”

“But can't you forget that for a minute and pretend that they're really that small?”

I waited for him to answer, but he just squinted his eyes and stared silently into the valley.

The day of the seventh game was clear and soft with just a hint of coming cold. Tonight, I thought, will be crisp and very October. I looked at our grass, that was already turning brown and turned the words over in my mind.

“Tonight will be crisp and very October,” I said aloud.

“What's that?” Mr. Krolling said. He was leaning on the fence between our yards. I hadn't noticed him there and when I looked over he smiled.

“What did you say, Rich?”

“I said it might be cold tonight.”

He shook his head slowly and his glasses slipped down on his nose. He was short and fat and his thin nose seemed out of place on his face.

“Yep,” he said, chuckling, “might just be.”

“Going to watch the game?”

“Yessir, soon as I get back from Poppy's.”

“Should be a very game.”

“Yessir.”

I opened the gate walked past his house. He was still chuckling.

ACT ONE, SCENE TWO: The Lowmans lived four houses down, so I stopped on the way to Poppy's and watched the first four innings of the game with Herbie. Mrs. Lowman gave me a cup of hot chocolate and I was still waiting for it to cool when Rocky Nelson hit a home run for Pittsburgh. As I watched him run around the bases, I wondered what my father had said. He always got very angry when something bad happened to the Yankees and he couldn't help but say, “God-damn!” My mother disliked that more than anything—more than the cigar smoke and the ashes on the rug. When he said, “God-damn!” she would get a hurt look on her face and lower her head and he'd have to put down his King Edward to kiss her on the cheek and apologize. I guess they both know that the very next time Rocky Nelson or somebody hit a home run against the Yankees he'd say it again, but they went through the whole thing just the same.

“Listen,” Herbie whispered in the third inning while his mother went out to the kitchen, “there's something I've got to tell you later.”

Vern Law looked like he was going to be hard to beat and Herbie kept saying he had something to tell me later, so when the Pirates were ahead 4-0, we left. He was silent until we came to the Lodge Hall half-way between his house and Poppy's and then he took my jacket sleeve and led me up on the porch.

“Listen,” he whispered looking around nervously, “you've got to hurry back here.”

“Why?”

“They're going to show us,” he said, glancing around nervously.

“What are you talking about?”

“Jeri and Donna are going to show us.”

I looked at him, wondering what he was talking about.

“Jeri and Donna...they're going to meet us here in a few minutes. I told them to come after the fifth inning. They said so yesterday after school. I wanted to tell you last....”

“But, Herbie....”

“Listen now, they leave the back door of the Lodge unlocked and they're going to meet us inside. It's all planned.” He narrowed his eyes into slits and watched me carefully. “You're not scared...are you?”

I shook my head mechanically and turned to go.

“Hurry,” he said.

I didn't.

THE STATION: Poppy's Esso station always smelled of coal-dust and chewing tobacco. Poppy kept a fire in the uncovered stove in the middle of the station and their were usually a few men sitting on upturned pop crates watching television and talking. They were old men on miner's pensions and young men with families on their way to work or home and they talked about whatever happened to be on television at the time and about the mines.

When I got there Moose Skowron had hit a home run for the Yankees and the score was 4-1. I sat down on a Coke crate that was on its end and watched a Gillette commercial. You could get a World Series book with a razor for a limited time but one of the men said the book was no good.

“I didn't even need the damn razor, but I wanted to see the book. It ain't worth a damn.” He was a man in clean work clothes. He was chewing Red Man and spitting at the stove. When he hit it on the side there was a loud hiss.

“Why the hell you got a fire in that thing, Poppy?” he asked. “It's not cold outside yet.”

“Like to have a fire all the time,” Poppy said. He was sitting behind a cluttered desk near the back of the station beside the Coke machine. “I like it nice and warm.”

The only other person in the station besides the young man in work clothes and Poppy and me was Sam, an old crippled Negro who was sitting on a Coke crate beside me. “Warm!” Sam said, picking up his home-made cane and looking around at Poppy. “Why it's hot as hell in here! Man might suffocate smelling himself sweat.”

The young man—I think he was one of Dane Spencer's boys—laughed and then the four of us sat in silence and listened to the Gillette jingle: “to look sharp and to be sharp too....”

The Pirates were out in no time and between innings I squeezed through two piles of old tires and went into Poppy's tiny bathroom. The dark green wall paint was peeling off and the whole room smelled of stale urine and motor oil. I looked at the writing on the wall and the dim light that illuminated the windowless room and wondered why I had come in there. I turned to leave and saw someone had scrawled on the door in pencil--”Stop! Have you washed your Cock?”

I sat on the Coke crate and watched Yogi Berra hit a home run and before the inning was over the Yankees had gone ahead 5-4. After the Pirates batted in the sixth I got up and walked over to the place where the air fresheners were. There were five pine trees and two girls in red bathing suits left. The girls were lemon scented and had a tag around their legs that said: MADE IN THE USA.

“I want one of these, Poppy,” I said.

He straightened his dirty plastic rain hat with a VFW Buddy Poppy in the band and got up. “Which kind?” he said, walking over to me.

“He wants one of them girls,” Sam said, smiling and winking at the young Spencer boy.

“No, I want a tree,” I said quickly.

“Hell, boy,” Same said, “take a girl. Look nice in your old man's Ford.”

The young man spit at the stove and made it hissed. I looked at the air fresheners and felt the cellophane that covered one of the trees. “Sure boy,” Rand Spencer said (in that moment I remembered his name), “get the girl.”

Poppy smiled and showed his gold capped front tooth. I handed him the fifty-one cents. “Which one?” he asked.

“The girl.”

He tore it off and handed it to me. “Take good care of her now,” he said. I held the cellophane bag in my hand and could smell the lemon plainly as I left the station. The three men were smiling at me.

THE PLAY, ACT TWO: French # 2 was one long street that intersected the main road to Welch right in front of Poppy's station. The houses on one side were right next to the creek that was black from the waste from the tipple and behind the houses on the other side, the side our house was on, were four parallel railroad tracks with long lines of coal cars, half empty and half full. From the Esso station I could see straight down the street to the end where our car was parked. It was too far away to see the Nixon sticker and it would have been covered with coal dust if it could be seen, but I knew it was there. I put the air freshener in my jacket pocket and walked up the main road to where the tracks crossed it on the way to the # 2 tipple. I scuffed the cinders as I walked between the tracks and the houses.

The houses were on my right and the yellow paint was even dirtier from the back than it was in front. The coal cars were always parked there for as soon as some left—for Pittsburgh where steel was made and Whitey Ford would not pitch that day—more were put in their place. I had counted seventy nine, four deep, by the time I came to the back of the Masonic Lodge and saw the back door was standing about half open.

I squeezed through without touching the door and walked through the Lodge kitchen into the main room where the Masons met every Thursday. The venetian blinds over the windows were half closed and the October sun creased the floor with small strips of light. Herbie was standing on the elevated platform where the officers must have sat at the meetings. He was sitting in one of the seven chairs arranged in a semi-circle there. They looked like kitchen chairs from seven different kitchens, almost as if those who sat in them brought their own chair from home. When I came in Herbie got up slowly and waked behind the speaker's stand that stared out at the empty folding chairs a level below him.

“They said they'd come,” he said nervously, wrinkling his forehead and clinching his lips together tightly. “I don't know what happened. They promised they'd come.”

The folding chairs before him were in neat rows—five rows of seven each with a break between the fourth and fifth chair of each row for an aisle. I wondered where my father sat. He had to wear his work clothes to the meeting when he worked hoot-owl. I tried to picture him there but the chairs were too neatly arranged and the venetian blinds made the room too dark.

“Do you want to wait?” Herbie asked, glancing over at me from the speaker's platform. “I mean, if you want to go watch the rest of the game we could tell them...when we see them...that we waited a long time.”

The air freshener was making me smell like lemons so I sat down on one of the folding chairs near the kitchen door and put the girl on the chair beside me.

“I don't care,” I said.

Herbie leaned on the speaker's podium and we waited in silence. I found myself humming the Gillette jingle and looking at the podium Herbie was leaning on. On the side of the podium there was a small sign with three letters on it—JFK. I thought about his mysterious little half-smile in all the picture I had seen of him and of the coal dust on NIXON/LODGE on our Ford's bumper. “If Kennedy gets elected,” I had heard my father tell Mr. Krolling, “he'll freeze holy water and make Pope-cicles.”

“You know will happen if Kennedy gets elected, Herbie?”

Herbie paced back and forth slowly in front of the seven chairs. “I don't know why they didn't come.”

“Maybe they were scared,” I said. “Maybe we were.”

He stopped and stared at me. His face was in a hard frown. “I wasn't scared. I wanted to see them. I wanted to feel what they have between their legs.”

I thought for a long time about what Jeri and Donna had between their legs. I knew what I imagined was there was probably wrong and I really couldn't decide if I wanted to see or not.

Herbie walked over to the window nearest me and peeked out the venetian blind. “You can see a strip mine from here.”

“You can see a strip mind from anywhere.”

He stood silently looking out the windows and my nostrils were beginning to burn from the smell of lemons.

{THE BOY: For some reason, despite the constant smell of cigar smoke and the sight of all those coal cars, seven days a week, every day, and the men who st in the station and spit at the stove—despite all that, and despite the hiss when the men's aim was right, the boy always thought of himself as a poet. He had known nothing in his life but French, West Virginia and he had never written a poem until that day. He had walked the mountains in Springtime but couldn't forget that the flowers—yellow and pink and purple and red—were growing from the coal deep down inside.

“Once you get that coal dust in your blood,” his father once told him as they drove across the mountain in the 1957 black Ford they had before they got the new one, “once it gets there, there's no getting it out—and I don't want you to get it in your blood.”

But his father was too late—it was already there. For all the boy knew it had always been there. He could not remember a time when the coal wasn't in his mind and his heart and under his nails unless it was when he stood on the strip mine and looked down. He had never been inside a mine—perhaps he never would be, but he couldn't get rid of the coal dust and he couldn't remember it not being there.

Across the snow he raced, leaving tracks behind—he was no more than four and it was the earliest thing he could remember. When he dug down the snow was white—clean and white—but across the top where it had been exposed for a few hours, there was a thin, almost imperceptible layer of coal dust. The coal was a pale yellow on top—not yet gray—but it wasn't white and he couldn't forget it.

When that October day ended, after the game and after the smell of lemon was gone and after his sure knowledge that Nixon would lose—after that long day he would climb the stairs to his room, close the window and sit at his desk to write a poem. It was his first poem—he always thought of himself as a poet—but it was not until that October night at thirteen, in the circle of light from his desk lamp, that he wrote his first poem.

I am afraid of winter

The snow is yellow in my

dreams,

I have not yet known it

but it is ahead, forbidding.

Just once before the cold

once before the yellow

snow

once for strength

once for hope

be soft, oh world!

Before November and December

once softly,

October.

After he wrote it he folded it carefully and placed it under the newspaper lining his mother kept on the bottom of his sock drawer. He wondered if it meant anything and knew somehow that he would have to find a shoe box to hold all the poems he would write before the Spring.}

THE PLAY, ACT THREE: As I walked slowly home from the Lodge, I saw Mr. Krolling in his yard. He smiled as I passed.

“Tied up again,” he said, “nine to nine.”

I nodded and walked up our walk.

He moved over to the fence and leaned over it. “It's going to be very October, Richard, don't you think,” he said and began to chuckle.

I glanced back and fumbled with the door knob. As I walked into the house my eyes stung and I could hear Mel Allen's voice.

“Terry's first pitch. Ball, high outside.”

“He's got to keep the ball low,” my father said, chewing on his cigar.

I stared blankly at the television set. Terry stared down at Elston Howard. My mother looked up from where she was sitting on the couch and asked if I'd gotten the air freshener.

“Yes,” I said, watching Terry wind up, “I got the girl.”

My mother made a little gasp and my father glanced over at us just as Mazeroski hit the ball.

“That one is gone!” Mel Allen said, excitedly, futilely.

His words drew all eyes to the screen. Yogi Berra, inexplicably playing left field, waddled back a few steps and watched the ball disappear over the scoreboard. Pittsburgh, where the coal went, exploded.

“Why did you get the.....” my mother began.

“God-damn it! God-damn it!” my father muttered, slouching back in his chair, biting his cigar.

“Vern....” my mother said, looking hurt.

“I can't help it.”

“Vern,” my mother said sadly, “please don't say that.”

He put down his cigar, got up slowly and walked over to kiss her softly on the cheek. The election was less than a month away. Kennedy would win. My father had one good 'God-damn' left.

Chistmas with Daddy

2011-12-28T14:37:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about my father this Christmastide. I'm not sure why. Maybe, just maybe, even though my ideas about death are pretty vague and formless, maybe he's thinking of me.

Just today I told at least three stories about him.

I told Dean, who has work horses, about how my father talked about his childhood draft horses until he became senile. He used to take the mail from Waiteville to Gap Mills, across a mountain, on the back of a draft horse in every weather imaginable. His family had the government contract to take the mail from that tiny place in a isolated valley to the nearest real post office. Once, he told me, he got disoriented in a snow storm and got the horse to lie down and nestled against him for warmth until the storm lessened. Now that's a story. Once when Daddy was in the nursing home and I never knew who he thought I was, I came in and he asked me about the team of horses his family had owned. I'm sorry to say, I can't remember the horses names, but one was a bay and one was dappled. I remember that. Dean loves his horses and so I told him about my father's horse love.

I also told Peter, my friend, a story about my father. And one to Bea, who works with me. I only realized a few minutes ago that I've been talking about my father all day and thinking about him too.

One of the stories I told was how my father was in the Army Engineers in WW II. It was his job, along with a lot of other engineers, to build the bridges across the rivers across France and Germany so Patten could drive the tanks across. Then my father and his friends would blow the bridge up.

I dream about him from time to time. Always something soft and lovely that I can't remember the details about....

I never dream of my mother, though she dominated my childhood. Mom was a school teacher, college educated, Master's degree to boot, all earned in night classes and summers while she was already teaching first grade. My father went away to school for 8th grade--Waiteville only went to 7th--and lasted a semester before he came home to work on the farm. He always deferred to my mother because she was so much more educated. I was a dreamy, bookish kid so my mother and I seemed to share much more than I did with my father. I couldn't even help him do the manual labor because I was then, as I am now, remarkably clumsy and all thumbs.

But as I age, it is my father that I think of more and more.

Two Christmas memories: I was 6 or 7, a sickly child, asthmatic and skinny (who'd believe that these days?!) and when I came down the hall and saw the Christmas tree and all the presents, I swooned and fainted dead away. (People don't 'swoon' nearly enough these days, it seems to me. "Swooning' had a certain romanticism that 'passing out' can't match. But 'swooning' has gone the way of 'having the vapors'. More the loss. Alas.)

I woke up in my father's arms, bathed in his tears. He was crying to beat the band, holding me gently in his strong, farmer/soldier arms. The lights from the tree were reflected in the dampness on his face. I remember that moment.

When I was 13 or so, he promised me a new TV for Christmas. Of course, I expected a color TV--this would have been 1960, somewhere around there--and color TV actually sucked big time and we could only get three channels anyway. But on Christmas morning it was a Black and White TV. I went into a sulk so monumental that my father called Adrian Vance who owned the appliance store and went on Christmas morning to exchange the TV for a color one.

I was such a s*** that I never thanked him for that astonishing act of generosity and love.

I'd like to do that now.

Thank you, Daddy, for loving me enough to let me be a total asshole and ungrateful s*** to you and still being generous beyond belief and loving beyond all measure.

I only hope I was a little bit to my children the way my father was to me....

Living in a Christmas Card

2011-12-23T17:13:00.000-08:00

We live in the "Historic District" of Cheshire.

Our house was built in 1851 and is somewhere in the middle of dates of houses on our street.

And everyone--except our neighbor Bernie and us (and Bernie's Jewish and in Florida this time of year) does a lot of decorations.

It's all in very good taste (this is the Historic District of Cheshire, after all) just lights in all the windows and some spot lights on wreathes and things and Christmas trees on the porch. Stuff like that. Antique sleighs are ok--any illuminated Christmas figure (snowman, Santa, etc.) is too crass. So it is all understated and elegant and I was standing out on the deck last night looking at three neighbors houses with lights in every window and one with a spotlight on an outbuilding that has wreathes and garland. Looming above them was the steeple of the Congregation Church all alight.

I told Bern, "We live in a Christmas Card, in a place that is the imagined 'perfect New England Christmas scene'...."

I expected her to share my utter amazement and troubled soul to live in such a place.

"It's nice," she said.

As left wing as I am, Bern makes me look like a member of the Tea Party! So if she thinks it's 'nice' to live in a New England Christmas Card, I guess it is.

Nice.

1969 revisited

2011-12-21T15:08:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving, after I almost cut my finger off, I was up in my little office and happened across what is probably the only existing copy of Spirit magazine, the literary magazine of West Virginia University from the Spring of 1969 (God bless that year...that decade.)

I was the editor of that magazine. It cost 50 cents and caused a broo-ha-ha on the campus. At the Phi Beta Kappa dinner (yes, beloved, I am Phi Beta Kappa) the president of the University shook my hand and said, "Our Mr. Bradley. You won't be doing any more magazines now, I'm pleased to say..."

What caused such a furor is hard, from 2011 to imagine. There was an article on poverty by John D. Rockefeller III, who was President of West Virginia Wesleyan at the time and went on to be Governor and, to this day, the Senior Senator from West Virginia.

There was the "Spirit Salutes" three page list, based on Esquire Magazine's year end "Dubious Achievement Awards" article where we ridiculed and made fun of most everything on campus.

Here is the breathless prose, written by me, that introduced the Spirit Salutes article:

"Human imperfection is so prevalent among us that it all to often goes practically unnoticed. The SPIRIT (as the conscience of the campus) can no longer turn its head to the atrocities constantly being committed. We've let you get away with a lot of things--no more, baby. We herewith declare war with the forces of evil and ignorance that surround us and our first campaign is to expose and salute those who in the past year have helped to prove that man is in no way a rational, admirable creature. Once done--once you know you neighbors (and yourselves)--then perhaps you'll get together to reevaluate and correct--but we're betting you won't: we're betting all our best efforts will go unrewarded, all our warnings will go unheeded, the world will surely go to hell despite us. Alas!"

Sounds like me right? A heavy dose of irony and skepticism and a bit of tongue in cheekness. And I love to say/write/think "Alas!"

There was the interview with two very scarey looking Black students who were leaders of the Black Power movement on the campus (such as it was....) Some objectionable language, but shouldn't there have been from young black men--one a Viet Nam vet--in 1969.

Most of the rest of the magazine was student writing (pretentious, ironic and overinflated) and poetry and an article by the head of the Classics Department called "White is Beautiful" (more tongue in cheek and irony).

Maybe it was all just too ironic.....Oh, there were the nude photos, very artsy, but nude to below the navel. It was the photographer's wife for goodness sake and she was lovely....truly lovely.

I'm betting it was the glass of red wine balanced on her perfectly flat belly and her lovely, if I might say so, breasts. That might have been the President's problem.

I wrote a short story in that magazine. I'll type it into a blog this week--or next, it is almost Christmas, after all--just to see how it stands up to four decades and more.....

walking with ghosts

2011-12-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged for a long time, I know. My fingers have failed me. A Thanksgiving accident resulted in 13 stitches in my right index finger and now, almost a month later, I'm still wearing a sleeve on it and it's full of fluid. Alas, for me.

Walking the old Farmington Canal with my dog has me walking with ghosts.

They are Arlene, Gary, Tim, Jack, Shirley and Jennifer. We walk by 6 benches each day and each is a memorial to one of the ones above. So, as we walk, we walk with them.

Each bench has a plaque to the person it is a memorial for and the inscriptions go from the sublime to the banal to bad theology.

Arlene was a Lion Club member and her bench was given by the Lions and acknowledges her commitment to the club. Fine enough.

Gary was a Chief of Police and probably lots of people contributed to his memorial bench. It quotes the great song by saying, "he helped a lot of people but the good they die young". He wasn't Abraham, Martin or John, but he was, for all I've heard, a good man who dropped dead of a heart attack in his early 50's.

Tim was only 20 or so and his bench reminds those who pass that he was 'an angel to us all'. And, for all I know, he was.

Jack's bench is next and I can't even remember what it says about him: something about a good son, father, husband friend. I just imagine that was true.

Shirley's is my favorite. It must have been given by her friends--she was an older woman and undoubtedly walked the canal with friends because it says, at the end, "she still walks with us...." Lovely, I think.

Jennifer's is the last on our walk. She was just short of 11 when she dies. This is the 'bad theology' bench though I think of her and hold her in my heart most of all. Such a tragic age to die. No longer a child and not even an adolescent. Jennifer walks with me, holding my hand once in a while, skipping ahead, running full speed for a bit, staring at the ducks and wishing she had something to feed them.

Her plaque says, I remember every word, "God broke our heart to show us He only takes the best."

Christ on a bike, follow that theology to it's conclusion and try to face the morning....!

The good die young is bad enough, since it isn't true. But living with a God that takes 'the best' and breaks our heart....I can't abide it.

Which is why I want to walk with Jennifer most of all....to let her know that I think her death was tragic, unspeakable, awful, unfair and that God didn't take her to break her parents' hearts, she just died, tragically, unfairly and God loved her, not because God 'took her' but because she lived. And that God's heart broke that she died before she could grow up and learn and grow and fuck up and grow from that and be who she might have been....had children, been a grandmother, voted, had a drink, changed the world, mourned and gloried....Stuff like that.

The Puli seems to see these people as we pass. He stops at every bench and sniffs them, but never pees on them. Just checking in on Arlene, Gary, Tim, Jack, Shirley and Jennifer as we walk with them.

toc tpig

2011-11-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

That's what "touch typing" looks like when your right index finger is in a splint. The letters you can't touch type are j, u, y, h, m and n. And I realize that someone who has touch typed for over 40 years, like me, doesn't know where the keys are located--my fingers know, but my brain doesn't. And you left hand doesn't function well if you are hunting and pecking the right hand's letters....

Well, back to the beginning--just starting to put the food out yesterday for Mimi, Tim, our friends Hanne and John and us, when I grabbed a knob to open a drawer and get a spoon to fold in the pumpkin seeds into the cranberry and clementine sauce I made when the knob, which was made of glass, shattered and cut a huge gash in my finger. When half a dozen band aids and about 2 feet of gauze wouldn't staunch the bleeding, the consensus was that John and Mimi would take me to the ER while Tim and Bern put stuff in a warm oven and Hanne fretted about my finger.

This could be an ad for Midstate Hospital in Meriden. Everyone in the ER was full of holiday warmth and good cheer. I had about 7 helpful, charming medical staff work with me while engaging John and Mimi in banter. Mimi took pictures with her phone and emailed them to Tim throughout the whole bloody process.

About an hour, lots of cleaning, Xrays to look for glass and 13 stitches later we were on our way home. I think Mimi emailed Tim a picture of the parking lot to let the folks at home know we were on our way. Food was ready and all were hungry and it was a great meal--you know how stuff sometimes tastes better the next day? Even a couple of hours seemed to add pleasure.

The problem is I have a splint to keep me from bumping the finger (a smart thing for someone as clumsy as me) and I'm reminded about every 20 seconds of how completely 'right handed' I am....it's not just to7cy t6pigg that's difficult, most every thing is....

Happy Thanksgiving....

Norman makes 5

2011-11-21T19:08:00.000-08:00

Norman was in his late 50's when I was in my early 30's--maybe he was already 60.

We used to play a lot of tennis. I was much younger and more athletic and he beat me like a drum.

Once he asked me how I missed easy shots but got lots of difficult shots.

I told him, and it was true--not only in my tennis playing but in my life--"first, you have to be out of position most of them time. Then you learn to get those shots...."

Norman died this morning. In the past few months Reed and Kay and Bill and Susan have died. I preached at all there memorial services. Someone has to find who's doing this and stop them!

Norman was a gentle, humorous, lovely, urbane, sophisticated man. Mostly things I'm not (except for the humorous part). He was a member of St. Paul's in New Haven when I was the Rector there. He supported me beyond what was deserved. I loved him greatly.

A month or more ago, we went to his 90th birthday party. Jeanne, his long time companion was there and most of his family. He'd been through a bad--no, horrible--heath situation and came out on the other side.

It was quick and merciful, as he would have wanted, his dying, I mean.

I'm just tired of people dying. There must be a better way. It just pisses me off. Big time.

Only nasty rotten people should die. Dear ones like these five should go on and on.

When People Die, a friend of mine once wrote for a mutual friend who did die, It's like a bird flying into a window on a chill day....

Just that awful. Just that bad.

Hold on to the ones you love who live on....Hold on tight....

is uniformity too much to ask for?

2011-11-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

Credit card gizmos is what comes up most often for me.

Would it be too much to ask that they all be alike? Sometimes I slide my card and feel like I'm lost in the Sahara Desert. I have no idea what to do. I have to ask the clerk for help.

I know I'm getting older and feeble minded, but it would be simpler if all credit card swipe machines were alike. Is that too much to ask?

There's not enough uniformity--and this is from a left-wing nut (normally a supporter of freedom and diversity and the human option to be different)--in our culture.

I went looking for a new pair of sneakers the other day. I went to two stores and there were simply too many choices. I froze up and couldn't do anything but pick up weird looking shoes and stare at them. I really need a new pair of shoes for walking on the canal and at the Y. But I am overwhelmed by the selection. I don't want that many choices. I just don't.

Same thing applies to dental floss. Have you noticed lately that the choices in dental floss have become overwhelming? I went to CVS, Rite Aid and Stop and Shop and in all three cases, I simply couldn't choose between dozens of options. I want one tape dental floss and one string like dental floss. I don't care if they are flavored or not.

Back to shoes--there should be like three styles of loafers, four styles of sneakers, five styles of dress shoes and three styles of winter shoes. That would be enough, thank you, and wouldn't make me crazy and unable to buy shoes. I have a pair of winter shoes I got from Harriet's father after he died, a pair of loafers that must be ten years old and I hate (bought, doubtlessly because I had too many choices, two pairs of sneakers--both worn out and irreplaceable because I have too many choices, a pair of Berkenstock sandals that are like the last three pairs I've had (each lasting a couple of years) and a pair of 'dress' Crocks--black, no holes. Unless things get more uniform and simple, I'm stuck with that footware.

Couldn't things get simple and uniform? Am I just crazy?....don't answer that....

ok, so t his is a rant....

2011-11-14T16:36:00.000-08:00

I am, by admission, a National Public Radio junkie. I love NPR. I want my NPR.

One of the things I love about NPR is all the stuff they do about science. Amazing stuff. My mind boggles, my heart races, I am confounded and inspired. Even a confirmed Humanities nerd like me is fascinated by, enhanced by, challenged and hooked by Science.

The constant refrain of all the Physicists, Earth Scientists, Chemists and even more esoteric segments of science and math I encounter on NPR is this: The US has to begin competing again in Science and Math.

My quandary is simple: how do we propose to do that when all the candidates for one of major party's nomination for President are still embroiled in denying evolution and global warming. How can that party--which can, by the way, block any legislation whatsoever--help us regain our leadership in Science and Math? How can anything happen when one of the major parties has wrapped themselves in a 19th century anti-intellectualism? Or, make that 14th century....Never has the time been riper for burning scientists at the stake since then....

And, until we allow teachers to 'teach' rather than 'test', how can we even imagine a turn-around in the steady drop among nations of the world of the US's standing in Science and Math?

Tell me that?

And if you disagree with me I'll probably just yell at you....

Sad news

2011-11-09T15:11:00.000-08:00

Bob Ruthman, 92, died yesterday. Probably no one but his family and friends would have known that if it weren't for the fact that he was Andy Rooney's college roommate at Colgate in the '30's and Andy's life long friend.

He died at Andy's memorial service.

I know that is sad news, but I can't help thinking that by now Andy Rooney must have an office and a desk in the Kingdom of God and must be doing commentaries for the Heavenly Host.

I can just see him now, behind his desk, looking into the camera.

"Don't you just hate it when someone dies at your funeral?" He would say.

"Don't you think there are a few things left that are 'just for you'? Shouldn't that be true?"

Then he'd hold up his death certificate and say, "dying is a private thing. No one should horn in on your death by dying at your memorial service.

"Besides Bob and I shared a lot of things. It just doesn't seem right we'd have to share death as well. Bob deserved to die in a way that didn't get all over the internet. Thank God, and I mean that literally, we don't have internet here...."

Good-bye, Andy, I will sorely miss thee and the irony you brought to my world. And good-bye, Bob as well. Sorry you couldn't have a more private departure from this lovely sod.

Unfair

2011-11-08T18:06:00.000-08:00

Poor Herman Cain, everyone's on his for alleged sexual abuse.

Heck, one of the women admitted that Cain asked, after he stuck his hand up her skirt and she objected, "You want a job don't you?"

Herman's was just trying to put Americans back to work....

Cut him some slack.

And my man, Mitt Romney. Everyone complains he has come down on both sides of every issue.

Heck, he's just proof that there is a parallel universe and he's stuck in this one.

Then there's Rick and Michele--ah, hell they're so down in the polls it isn't even fun to make fun of them.

****
My friend told me this joke.

Job is calling out to God about all the things he's had to endure though he's really done nothing to deserve the punishment.

"Oh God," Job says, "why me?"

"I don't know Job," God replies, "there's just something about you that pisses me off...."

Calendar issues (again)

2011-11-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

I dutifully keep a calendar on my desk and transfer it a week at a time to the sticky note feature on my computer screen. But, from time to time, what I put on my calendar is either so vague or badly abbreviated that I have no idea what it means....

I've got one for Friday, November 18th. I just can't read my writing. From 10-12 I have something to do in some unknown location that is either 'beyond bass' or 'behind base' or 'behind bar' or 'behind bars'.

So, either I'm going fishing for exotic fish ('beyond Bass' or trout or normal things) or I'm supposed to umpire some sort of ball game or I'm meeting someone behind the Dew Drop Inn.
Or, more frightening, I'm supposed to surrender to authorities and serve time for some forgotten offense.

I've stared at the words for so long they seem to transfer themselves around. I suppose the first word could be 'Beyonce' but why would I have her on my calendar.

I flummoxed. (Something I am more often that I'd like to admit.)

The last time this happened, someone reading my blog emailed me and translated it. It was easy when I was working at St. John's because Harriet and Sue had become more able to read my writing than I am and could usually decipher my appointment.

Now, I'm mostly on my own in trying to figure out what my writing means. I'll just hang out around home and see if anyone calls me angry on the 18th....

The storm we missed

2011-11-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. We drove by Newark Airport in a white out situation. A big plane suddenly dropped out of the sky just above us. Usually you see them coming for a while. Pretty amazing....

Lots of wrecks on the Jersey Turnpike. One guy in a big, double cab truck, had slid into the median fence and was talking on his cell phone outside his truck, right in traffic on slippery roads.

Another guy had tried to exit at Molly Prichard and slid down into a gully. He was fine but wasn't driving out of that.

An accident going north had backed up traffic for 10 miles.

But we hit Maryland and the snow eased off. And we spent a great 3 days with our grand-daughters.

My friend Fred called and told me power was out in Cheshire. He went to our house and got in, since we leave the back door open, like fools, but he took our two parakeets to his house where there was a generator making warmth.

Saved their lives--Rainy and Maggie--God bless Fred and his generator.

But when we got home on Tuesday afternoon, we had power and Thursday afternoon the phones and TV and internet came back via cable. God bless Cox cable....

So we suffered not and not having email from Saturday to Tuesday makes me wonder why I have it at all. TV too, but I'd miss Masterpiece and football games....

So I could go to a sports bar and drink, eat chicken wings and watch football....if they had WVU on, that would work....

I feel like I'm in Mount Washington, NH

2011-10-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

Someone told me today, "I feel like I'm in Seattle...." because of all the rain.

Well, I was in Seattle for a week this year and it didn't rain once. It was in June and it was even hotter than it was in CT.

So, I decided to look up the average rain fall for the US to figure out this image of Seattle as always raining. There is a TV mystery show called "The Killing" that takes place in Seattle and there hasn't been a scene in it yet when it was raining or threatening rain. Very Noir.

So, here's what I found out via the mystery and wonder of the internet:

*Seattle has 38.60 inches of rain a year and it rains, on average, at some time, on 158 days.

*However, Bridgeport, CT has 41.56 annual inches of rain but it only rains on 117 days. All Bridgeport needs is a bunch of coffee shops and a big-ass mountain to become Seattle-East.

*Charleston, West Virginia, where both our children were born, has 42.43 inches--almost 4 more than Seattle and only 7 fewer days at 151. And Charleston already has big-ass mountains, none like Rainer, I grant you, but a bunch of them. And Charleston is at least as hilly as Seattle.

*But, here's the killer: do you know where it rains the most inches and most days in the US? Mount Washington, NH. A whopping 89.92 inches, more than twice Seattle's total, and 209 days a year. And it is a big-ass mountain.

Go figure.

Next time it rains a lot, say, "I feel like I'm in Bridgeport/Charleston/Mount Washington" anything but Seattle.

Seattle has pulled the wet wool over our eyes and convinced us it's always soggy there. They've got a long way to go to beat Mount Washington....

(I do wish it would stop raining. My dog hates the rain and he really needs to poop.....)

Three and out ('so far, so strange')

2011-10-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

My daughter is in Oman or Dubai (she's going both places, I just don't remember which is first.)

She sent me a cryptic email: "Arrived. So far, so strange."

I've felt that way over the past year or so. I've done the funerals of three people who were not only my dear friends but my profound mentors. Ginny, Reed and Kay all played a remarkable role in the forming of my ministry and my life over the past 25 years. And now they are dead, each of them, all of them.

Ginny was the head of the Council of Churches in Waterbury when I arrived in Waterbury in 1989. She was an Episcopalian and sometimes came to St. John's though she was a member of a suburban parish. She was tough and nails and funny as hell. Ginny loved to work and she loved to play and she taught me a lot about how to navigate the weird, unpredictable waters of ecumenical relations.

Reed was, at the same time, the director of a non-profit called Green Community Services (not because it was near the Waterbury Green but because the Rector of St. John's, the Pastor of First Congregational and the Minister of First Baptist had a green file box they passed around, taking a month at a time to try to meet the needs of the urban poor and weed out the urban con-men. He was a member of St. John's and one of the most outspoken Liberal voices I've ever heard. He taught me how to treat people who disagreed profoundly with you with the kind of respect and kindness that made them at least 'listen' to what you had to say. And he liked nothing more than to laugh.

Kay was a long-time member of St. John's who was a political activist and mover and shaker. She was no nonsense but compassionate, dedicated but deeply humorous.

(As I write this, I realize that I admired each of them for their ministry and commitment AND because each had a great sense of humor. My wife decides who she likes by 'how smart' they are and that matters to me as well. But my first priority for a dear friend is 'how funny' they are. If we aren't having fun we should find something else to do.)

I only had notes for Ginny's funeral sermon and can't find them. But I have the text for Reed's and Kay's. I thought I'd share them. What I said in those sermons will tell you a bit about why I loved them so much and why I'm declaring a moratorium on the death of mentors. Anyone else 20 years or so older than me who taught me much must remain alive, for my sake. I'm three and out in the past year. I can't lose anymore people like these from my life.

So far, so strange....

Memorial for Reed Smith

“Then the Righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prision and visited you?'

And the King will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least o these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'” Mt. 25.37-40

So here is something I saw one day, years ago, looking out the window of my office that was above the Close of St. John's in Waterbury and gave me a view of the whole Green and much of downtown.

I saw Reed crossing the street between St. John's and the little store owned and run by some folks from India where I went, often, to get coffee. School had just let out and the kids from the high school next to St. John's on Church Street were waiting in front of the little Indian store for the next bus.

The high school beside of St. John's was the school of “last resort” for the kids who when there. They'd been kicked out of one of the three high schools in the city for something or another—certainly untowardly—and they were going to school there because no other school could contain them. There were about 20 of those kids standing on the street where Reed was headed. They were goofing around and smoking and being generally unruly. And here comes Reed.

Reed was dressed, I swear to you, in navy blue knickers (I never knew anyone besides Reed who wore honest to God knickers), blue and yellow argyle knee socks, dress shoes, a blindingly white dress shirt, a red bow tie, a seersucker jacket and a straw hat.

“This will be good,” I said to myself, watching Reed approach 20 or more high school students who were jacked up on teen-aged hormones and God knows what else, and these where teens who had somehow fallen through the cracks of our society. “Bad kids” in the estimation of most people.

As Reed approached, the kids (who didn't give in to anybody) parted like the Red Sea and let him pass. He tipped his straw hat to them and they watched him, silent and staring, as he walked two blocks, greeting homeless people, a police officer and several people in serious suits on the way. Once he was out of sight, having turned a corner, the kids remained subdued, didn't revert to the nonsense they'd been up to before Reed appeared. They seemed to be pondering something until the buses they were waiting for arrived.

They had been “Reed-ed”. Reed Smith had crossed their paths, shared their journeys for a moment and I believe, I truly believe, some few of them will remember that encounter years from now. I truly believe that.

When Reed crossed your path, something shifted, something changed, life as you knew it was somehow subtlety transformed.

Reed was like that. When you encountered him, something shifted, altered, changed. You were 'Reed-ed' in a way that mattered and made a difference.

No one could possibly challenge his commitment to justice, to empowering the powerless, to serving the poor and marginalized of society. Reed's life was spent, as his daughter Pam called it, “saving the world every day”. And he did it with total integrity and utter authenticity. Every Day.

I remember watching him load a bus with people from Waterbury—people on welfare, the working poor, the neglected and forgotten of the city. The bus was parked in front of First Congregational Church so I crossed the street and asked him where they were going.

“An excursion to Hartford,” Reed said, smiling that little crooked smile he smiled and his eyes twinkling, “to have a little talk with their elected representatives....”

Reed had no compunction about walking into the halls of government to advocate for the poor—but he went beyond that: he empowered the poor to advocate for themselves.

It reminds me of a quote from Mother Teresa (though Reed, I'm sure, would object to his being worthy to be spoke of in her company). A cynical journalist asked Mother Teresa how she could possibly imagine she could save the poor and dying of Calcutta.

“One at a time,” she replied, smiling HER crooked smile, her eyes twinkling.

“One at a time” is how Reed entranced us all. His devotion to 'the least of these' was only equaled by his devotion to his family and friends. “His lady” Marty, his children, his friends. To be in his presence was to feel you had his total attention, his interest, his love.

One of the most conservative members of St. John's, the parish's long time Treasurer, would wax eloquent about Reed. Though they agreed on....well, 'nothing'...Ed always knew he was friends with a man of authenticity and integrity. Just that—being authentic and having integrity and being able to love those who don't agree with you—is devoutly to be wished by any of us.

If welcome to the Kingdom does rely on serving 'the least of these', then Reed has been welcomed with laurels. And I'm sure he accepted his welcome with humility and good humor and walked immediately into the Nearer Presence of God and said, “I've been waiting to meet with you. There are a few things back on earth we need to straighten out....”

I've often heard it said that a successful life would entail leaving the world a better place than you found it. Reed went beyond that. He made every person he encountered a 'better person' than they were before meeting him.

Since you're here today, I know you've been 'Reed-ed' in some significant way. And I'm sure he's glad to see you. His eyes are twinkling, he's smiling that little crooked smile and he's tipping his straw hat to each of us and all of us—most of all to Marti....

Let us thank God that we got to walk a little road with Reed.

And let us thank God—profoundly, joyfully, always and everywhere for him.....Amen.

Sermon for Kay

I saw Sandy at the nursing home the day that Kay started slipping away from life.

“I think she just decided to die and get it over with,” Sandy told me. “Just like Kay, still making up the rules.”

That got me started thinking about “KAY'S RULES”.

Kay's Rules would be demanding and passionate. Kay's Rules would be rigorous and committed. Kay's Rules would be full of dedication to justice, to fairness, to compassion and to action.

There would be a Rule in Kay's Rules that required standing with and advocating for those who were oppressed by our society because of poverty, gender, sexuality or race. Kay's Rules would fight against discrimination in whatever guise it raised it's ugly head. Kay's Rules would not let us rest until Justice was done.

There would be a Rule in Kay's Rules that demanded a passionate commitment to education and learning. Kay's Rules would give everyone access to Knowledge and the Power that knowledge brings.

There would be a Rule in Kay's Rules that would not tolerate 'unfairness' in any part of our society—in access to health care, in economics, in equal pay, in government services.

There would be a Rule in Kay's Rules that would insist that we 'get involved' and 'stay involved' in politics. Kay's Rules would hold us accountable for being a part of the forming and reforming of our political system.

There would be Rules in Kay's Rules that would deal with friendship, with loyalty, with personal integrity, with devotion, with responsibility. All in all, the world would be a much better place if we all played by Kay's Rules—just as the world and our lives have been made richer, fuller, more challenging, more complete, more compassionate by having known and loved Kay Bergin.

We are better off—each of us and all of us—that she lived in our midst and touched our lives. Truly. That is profoundly True.

The only Rule in Kay's Rules that I would object to is that there would probably be a rule about having to play golf.

I once played in a foursome in the Hastings Open that included Kay and Fran. I don't play golf but I'm reasonably good at anything that requires hitting a ball with a stick of some sort. Mostly I was comic relief for the real golfers.

Kay and Fran amazed me. I could hit the ball much farther than they could, but almost always to the left or right of the fairway. Kay and Fran always hit the ball straight down the fairway. Not to far but always on target, always straight ahead.

That is a metaphor for those two remarkable human beings. They always advanced things straight ahead and with consistency and with passion and with commitment.

Often, when I was Rector here, I would notice Kay going back to the Columbarium after the Eucharist and sitting with Fran for a while. Sometimes she brought some flowers in a vase. And she would just be with him for a spell.

And now she is with him again.

“When people die,” a friend of mine wrote in a poem for a mutual friend who died in Viet Nam, “When people die, it's like a bird flying into a window on a chill day.”

With Kay's death, the bird flew into the window again.

And we are here today to remember her, to mourn her death and to proclaim the promise of God in the midst of death and loss.

Memory is one of God's greatest gifts. All of us fear 'losing our memory' more than we fear death. Memory reminds us of 'who we are' and 'whose we are'. Memory is the anchor that keeps our small boat stable and safe in the storms of life.

So, we remember Kay today and thank God for the gift of her to each of us and all of us. And in our memory, our stories, our recollections, Kay lives with us.

So, we mourn Kay today and comfort each other in our loss. Grief shared is easier to bear. A touch, a hug, just 'being together' helps us endure the pain.

And, we gather to proclaim the promise of God that death is not the 'last word'. It is certainly the 'next to last word', but the last word is hope and life and resurrection. A priest wears white for a funeral—not the black of mourning but the white of Easter, of life, of hope.

In today's gospel Thomas says to Jesus as he announces his leaving them, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

Amen, Thomas. The land on the other side of the door of Death is not a place we 'know'. But I do know this, St. Francis of Assissi once wrote, “Death is not a door that closes, but a door that opens and we enter in all new....”

I do not 'know the way', but I do know the promise of God. And that promise is this: that in ways we do not imagine and perhaps 'cannot imagine', Death's door opened for Kay and she entered into the nearer presence of the One who loved her best of all, and she was made 'all new'....

We will miss you my dear friend, Kay, and we will mourn you. And we will also remember you and the rules you gave us to live by. And we will celebrate your life and the privilege it was to share some of the road with you as we journey to the Lover of Souls.

Amen.

occupy everywhere

2011-10-18T17:21:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm on the verge of packing my medicines and heading to Wall Street.

Not since the late 60's have I felt so energized and affirmed. I've lived through Presidents abundant and have favored some more than others. I won't bother naming them (though, for my money, Jimmy Carter was the best of the bunch) and now, as I approach 65, something is happening that makes my heart swell and my mind race.

I'm tired of hearing Media people keep asking, "What does Occupy Wall Street want?"

They want, and I want, that everyone to look around and see how deeply in the mire 'the American Dream" has sunk.

Here's what I want:

*that 'money' not run everything but people run stuff

*that the poor be cared for and enabled to not be poor

*that the rich be taxed and taxed and feel good that being taxed mean they are doing 'good'

*that every alien that enters this country be given a clear path to becoming a citizen of this country whether they entered legally or not

*that everyone who lives within our borders have health care

*that education be based on who is able, not who can pay and that even Harvard and Yale be tuition free (those two could afford it, sitting on billions of endowments)

*that everyone in the United States start thinking of "we" not 'me'

*that Environmental Protection be seen as a glorious necessity and not a 'problem'

*that Muslim-Americans be seen as "Americans", not "Muslims" (same for any hyphenated Americans of whatever prefix)

*that Kindness would replace Authority everywhere

*that the people we elect would 'serve' us rather than be seduced and disempowered by ideology

*that all of us might acknowledge that 'being an American' is a remarkable and privileged thing to be that calls each of us and all of us to be part of the greatest Tribe ever and forget what divides us

*that marriage be seen as something two people who love each other have a right to no matter what their gender

*that all of us agree that "getting there" will mean we ALL get there or none of us do

That's all I want. I may "occupy Cheshire"...."Occupy" wherever you are and lean into a dream and vision that leaves nobody out and makes us all a part of each other....Really.....

Ponder that.

Being Luke

2011-10-17T15:03:00.001-07:00

The last few days I've been watching our cat, Luke, with more interest than usual. He's a really interesting cat.

He was one of four not that long ago, but the other three died over the last couple of years. Luke has really taken to being an 'only cat'. I may have mentioned this before, but Lukie has always been our 'puppy cat'--he comes when you call him (unlike our Puli dog), he rolls over and shows you his belly when you walk by him, he begs for food along with the dog Bela when we're eating. And whenever one of us comes home, he comes running to greet us.

Yet, there are things about Luke that confound me. He has several sleeping places during the day: on top of the piano, in an upstairs window, in our bed (he's not allowed in the room at night because he walks on your face and wakes you up at 5 a.m. or so....but during the day he is on the bed a lot. And there is some place he sleeps that I don't know and can't find because sometimes I go looking for him and he seems to have evaporated from the house. But at 3 p.m., wherever he is, he comes down to the kitchen to be fed. If all our clocks were suddenly taken away, Luke would tell us when it is 3 p.m. so we'd know that hour, at least, every day.

He often sits on the table that is beside the desk where I sit and type this. He will sometimes lay on the table and put his head on my desk and look at me with those yellow eyes like he's saying 'here I am....I'd let you pet me now.' Luke keeps me neat because if I don't keep that table orderly, he knocks stuff on the floor beside me or down the back steps into the downstairs.

I also have been noticing his different speeds. Sometimes he just moves slowly, languidly, as if he had no where to go but was just going somewhere. Other times he races through the room and away, like something important is happening somewhere else that he needs to get to. And he has different approaches to the dog: carefully, as if stalking or being stalked; thoughtlessly, as if he knows what Bela will do; surreptitiously, not really sneaking up but more like testing the waters. I sometimes find them together in mid-day, sleeping on our bed in perfect peace and contentment. Sometimes, mostly when food is at issue, Bela will jump him and drive him away.

I have no idea what Luke thinks. He seems to have a schedule and routine that has nothing to do with me. He's always sticking his paw under our bedroom door as soon and he hears Bern or me stirring--it's an 1850 house, there are spaces under the doors.

But much of the day he operates on a rhythm incomprehensible to me. Disappearing, re-appearing, always there at 3 p.m., sometimes MIA all day. Bela is easy. He is seldom, except for his mid-day nap with Luke on our bed, more than a few feet from either Bern or me. His schedule is our schedule, whatever that is on a given day. Not Luke--his drummer is not my drummer but a different one.

It would be interesting but not surprising, I imagine, to be in Bela's brain. Dogs are pretty predictable, after all--"love me, love me, feed me, feed me, take me out, take me out"...stuff like that.

I would resist being Luke. It might be a labyrinth of a mind from which I could not extricate myself, a place from which I could not return.

Dogs are comfort and caring and need and consistency. Cats are finally Mystery embodied.

I wouldn't risk being Luke.

With sincere apologies...

2011-10-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

For two quarters today, West Virginia University's football team played nice with U Conn.

10-9 at the half.

Granted UConn won last year's game in overtime--I was regretfully there--after WVU fumbled about 321 times.

In the last 7 and a half minutes of the third quarter, West Virginia scored 23 points--three touchdowns and a safety. Mountain hospitality wore thin and UConn was swept away.

I don't mean to bring this up to rub it in--but to say that I'm sorry the trip to Morgantown was so unpleasant. West Virginian's usually treat guests more kindly.

43-16, was that it?

When Amish folks go bad

2011-10-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

So, I read and watched this astonishing report today about some rogue Amish in Ohio.

It seems one 'tribe' of Amish have been invading the homes of other Amish and cutting the women's hair and the men's beards.

Somehow, from the Bible, the Amish people have discerned that women should never cut their hair and men must have a beard. So this terrorist Amish activity takes away all their authenticity and pride along with a lot of hair.

If I'd read this on April 1, I would have known it was an April Fool's joke--I mean, really, Amish amok, give me a break. It's like a Baptist bar or a Jewish pork chop. Stuff like this doesn't happen, does it?

I guess it does. God help us when the Amish start being violent. What's next--Hindu's killing cows, Muslims drunk and disorderly, Episcopalians eating salad with their shrimp fork?

Where does it all end, I ask you--Michelle Bachman supporting pro-choice and gay marriage....vegans opening a steak house...

When the Amish get out of control what chance do we have to be rational?

I must be becoming a contemplative

2011-10-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

OK, Ted told me today I hadn't blogged lately. So I will.

It started last night. While I was studying a website about the square mileage and population density of the states--don't ask, it's too long a story--I got this sudden message on my computer about a 'critical error'. The message stacked up message after message like a deck of cards. In just a moment I lost the internet. Then I noted that lots of my little icons had taken leave as well. I still had Solitaire and Hearts so I played awhile, imagining that somehow the Lord or Bill Gates would miraculously heal my computer.

Then I turned it off and turned it back on to realize all that was left was solitaire and hearts and the 'start' icon. So I played solitaire and went to watch the Yankee game, imagining that by some good fortune, all would be well with my computer in the morning.

When I turned it on today, my rotating screen saver of remarkable vistas of beautiful places was gone and my 'sticky notes' with a rough 'to do' list was all that was left besides hearts and solitaire and the 'start' icon.

So I played hearts--it pains me to admit that my addictive personality is focused on playing hearts these days.

Bern was going to talk with our friend John, who is my personal IT guy, the one who built my computer for me, so I told her to tell him I was down to games and 'start' and sticky notes.

He came up at 6 and started fooling with things that are as far from my ken as brain surgery and the string theory of physics and speaking Bulgarian. He allowed that it seemed pretty simple and he did computer magic for a ten minutes or so and then we had dinner while the computer (I guess) talked to itself and did things I neither understand or want to understand.

Then I went up to my office to watch the computer talk to itself and tell me in terse terms what it was talking to itself about while John and Bern stayed downstairs and talked. John is very smart and very funny. Bern prefers the company of smart people and I prefer the company of funny people so it is little wonder John is our good friend.

Finally, the computer finished its internal conversation and started windows. I got on line, I checked out the other things I use and John was about to leave when I clicked on my "libraries" icon and found it empty.

So he came back up and worked for 45 minutes or so restoring all the stuff in my libraries--photos, music, documents.

I watched him for a while and then did some other stuff and came back and watched him some more. He told me several times that he'd 'never seen anything like this before' and that he wasn't sure how, or if, he could fix it.

Here's what was MIA:

*family photos I'd stored...not a lot but some I love.

*a little music--I listen to NPR instead of music, so there wasn't much there either.

*My novel "The Igloo Factory", my fantasy novel "The Princess and the Sailor", my murder mystery "Murder on the Block".

*about 400 sermons and sermon outlines.

*notes for my novel "The Bananaman" which once was written but then lost and I've been trying to reconstruct.

*all my poetry

*all the stuff I've written for Bern for Christmas (She gives me some graphic art each year--collages, paintings, etc, she creates and I write her poems and stories...that's what we give each other for Christmas.

*all the letters I've written that I've saved.

*my folder about the Middlesex Cluster and my hours and mileage log

*my folder and class outlines for the courses I teach at U.Conn in Waterbury

Granted, lots of that stuff is in hard copy and wouldn't have been lost. But a significant amount of it--all the sermons and poems and Middlesex stuff and U.Conn stuff and the letters would be lost forever.

The good news is, John recovered all of it through clicks and key strokes I'll never understand.

The better news is, in the midst of all that stuff being lost, I was, as best as I can describe it, 'eerily calm', like I was watching something happening that had nothing to do with me, like I was detached and safe when a whole bunch of stuff that means a great deal to me was gone from this universe.

I even remember thinking, during the Lost time, "I should be upset and anxious and distracted". Instead, what I really felt was, "all will be well". Maybe it was my faith in John to recover all that stuff, maybe.

But maybe, after all this time, I am becoming a contemplative---fiercely 'involved' with the world and simultaneously 'detached' emotionally.

Something to ponder. Recently I have found myself able to be 'present' in important ways to what was going on around me, but to, at the same time, be able to have 'distance' from it all emotionally.

It's what I've always sought to be in my ministry and my life--"a non-anxious presence".

It seems to be coming naturally these days.

Ponder, I will. Reflect, I must. (As Yoda would say....)

eyebrow crap

2011-09-30T19:03:00.001-07:00

I always forget, but each year when the weather starts to change the the high and low temperature gets 20+ degrees apart, I get crap in my eyebrows.

I have rather full eyebrows and what happens is that a scaly mess starts to form on the inside of each eyebrow and inexplicably spreads across the bridge of my nose.

Some years I've scratched it with the dirtiest part of the body--my fingernails--and it's gotten infected and I have to have topical and oral antibiotics. What a pain that is, a runny, pus filled bridge of my nose isn't a way to make people love and adore you.

I've experimented over the years and hope I can keep it from getting viral this year. (Maybe I should wear rubber gloves so I don't scratch it too bad.)

Even when I rub it, it's like the snow in those snow globes. Maybe I should put a reindeer and Santa on my nose and people would think the crap was part of a theme face.

Who knows.

Somewhere under the rainbow....

2011-09-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

So it happened like this: I was on my way to a meeting in Portland and as I drove down Rt. 10 I saw an enormous double rainbow that seemed to stretch from Hamden to Southington. I even pulled into a strip mall to look at it. About a dozen people were in the parking lot taking pictures with their cell phones. (I don't have a cell phone that takes pictures, but if I did I would have taken one.)

It was a perfect bow. We could see it from one end to the other. The lower bow was bright and radiant. The upper bow was pale, almost opaque.

Simply astonishing.

I kept driving and when I turned onto I 691, I realized I was going to drive under the two rainbows. Lord knows how I didn't wreck, staring up as I tried to drive. In fact, there should have been multi-car pileups on both sides of the Interstate. Everyone, I'm sure, was craning their necks to see the bows when they passed beneath.

It was simply one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Jaw-dropping wondrous.

I'm not one who traffics in misty-eyed emotionalism about God. An associate Rector I worked with me used to say, wisely, "God is not a feeling." And God isn't.

But those double rainbows touched me deeply (and probably almost got me killed looking up at them driving 75 mph!)

I won't stand by this and will deny I ever said it in the future. And, those rainbows, for just a moment made me imagine that all this stuff I talk about all the time about God might, maybe, perhaps, be True.

obsession

2011-09-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

My son and I both love fantasy fiction. I tend to like 'soft' fantasy--Ursela LaQuinn, Harry Potter, stuff like that. Josh tends toward the hard stuff. Gene Wolf and Donaldson, stuff like that. We agree on the Toilken and CS Lewis, but not much else.

So for years, Josh has been urging me to read George R. R. Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" series. I resisted mightily, imagining it would be too weird for me.

Then the first book of that Series, A Game of Thrones, was made into an HBO series. Last time they were here, Josh set up his I-Pad and made me watch the first episode of the TV show.

Lordy, Lordy, I was hooked.

I borrowed the first book from him a few weeks later when we were in Baltimore. Then I bought the next three. There's only one next--Dances with Dragons--that is only in hard cover and will cost $30 probably, but I finished book four today and am already in withdrawal. I need those books! Each of them is over 800 pages, so I've read 3200 pages of the series and wish there were 3200 pages more.

I'll drive up to Waterbury tomorrow and buy the book and don't know what on earth I'll read tonight since I don't have Martin to read. And then, what a horrible thought, when I've read the 5th and final book, what will I do with my life then?

Maybe I should read a page a day for 800 days--over 2 years--just to satisfy my obsession but to drag it out.

Maybe I need "Song of Fire and Ice" rehab. "My name is Jim and I'm a Martinholic". I guess I could start at the beginning again, but there are other things I want to read and should read...but I need George R. R. Martin, do you understand? I've got to have it....I'm not sure I can live without it.....

Maybe the HBO series will do all 5 books, that could be a placebo of sorts, I suppose.

Have I made myself clear? These books are addicting.

Maybe I need an intervention and to read romance novels for a while....

strange bedfellows

2011-09-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

OK, I know I'm too avid about sports. I could probably know a lot more about science, world affairs and French literature (not to mention opera) if my head weren't so full of sports junk. But it is. So it goes.

I am in the uncomfortable position the next two nights to root against the baseball team I love--the Yankees, of course--until I know Boston is losing to Baltimore. Boston and Tampa Bay are tied for the American League wild-card. The Yankees are in Tampa Bay for the last two games of the year, while Boston is in Baltimore. If Baltimore gets ahead, I can cheer for the Yanks since if both Tampa Bay and Boston lose they're still tied. But let the Red Sox get ahead and I become a Tampa Bay Rays fan. (They used to be the Tampa Bay 'Devil' Rays until idiot Christians complained so much. There are even people who think the Duke Blue Devils should change their name. Go figure.)

That's how much I hate the Red Sox. I'd hope the Yankees would lose two games if it kept Boston out of the playoffs. The Rex Sox are the AntiChrist so far as I can tell....

Last Saturday college football caused me to have another strange bedfellow: Notre Dame.

Normally when someone asks me who my favorite college team is, I tell them "West Virginia University and whoever is playing Notre Dame."

But I'm so mad at Syracuse and Pitt leaving the Big East that I was pulling for the Irish against Pitt.

What a tangled web gets woven when you get too emotionally involved with sports....

Bern Retired from Church

2011-09-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

When I retired as Rector of St. John's in Waterbury, CT, Bern (my wife) retired from church.

The people in the Cluster Ministry I serve as Interim Missioner are all, understandably, curious about my wife. They keep dropping hints about how they'd like to meet her or ask, innocently enough, 'when is she coming to church?'

And I always tell them, "Bern's retired from church."

They don't know the whole story. For over 30 years, Bern went to church because she supported me, not because she wanted to. She was never a proper 'priest's wife' in the traditional sense. She didn't join the altar guild or the choir (though she sings beautifully). She did what she did and did it beautifully. Bern was an actress, so she always read lessons--read them so well that some people wanted to get off the rota to hear her read. And she would train readers if I asked her to, and she did that with passion and patience. She would, from time to time, direct some drama I was always coming up with for worship. And, at St. John's, she organized the nursery because by that time she was the Coordinator of a co-operative pre-school in New Haven and knew about kids in a way few people do.

And for years upon years, she hosted our New Year's Day Open House for anyone in the parish to come to our home.

When I retired as a full-time priest, she told me she was retiring from church. She had it coming.

What people don't know is that I promised her, when she agreed to marry me, that I'd never be ordained. I'd been to Harvard Divinity School and earned an M.T.S. but I had no intention of being a priest. I wanted to be a Professor of American Literature in some Mid-Atlantic states liberal arts college. Like William and Mary or Mary Washington or Washington and Lee--something like that.

So, I lied to her--it was an honest lie but a lie nonetheless--and when I was ordained she stuck with me and became a remarkable support to my parish ministry and never bowed to the expectations of a clergy wife, which made her the best clergy wife ever!

For over 30 years she not only 'played a role', but played it in an odd way. Luckily for her--and for me--the three parishes I served were 'on the edge' and not really typical. So they didn't object to Bern's claiming her space. God bless them all.

And I actually agree with her about church attendance. Sometimes when people want to know why I became a priest, I tell them "so I'd go to church." Left to my own devices, I'd read the NY Times Sunday edition and drink coffee and eat bagels on Sunday morning and watch all the Sunday morning News Shows.

I love the 'community' of church. That's most of all what I love about church. But if I weren't a priest my attachment to the 'community' would be Christmas and Easter and about 12 Sundays a year. I wouldn't be a good lay person. I would never serve on a vestry or any committee. I'm come to suck out 'community' about ever 4th Sunday and that would satisfy me.

But I am a priest. And I thank God I am. I love to be totally immersed in 'community' and the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry gives me a group of communities to consume my need for community. And I'm a priest so I do it every week.

Bern is retired from that.I support her absolutely in her retirement. And, from time to time, I envy her freedom on Sunday morning.

I can see myself in the bed with the NY Times, a bagel with flavored cream cheese, a cup of Bern's hardy coffee and my dog and cat in bed with me as well about 10 a.m.

What could be wrong with that?

So, Jim, why did you become a priest?

So I'd go to church.

(Obviously there is more to it than that. But that is bottom line....)

something happens and then we talk about it....

2011-09-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of the distinctions in the Making a Difference Workshop that I help lead is the distinction between the domain of 'presence' and the domain of 'representation'.

The easiest way to make the distinction is to remind people that 'something happens' and then we 'talk about it'. On the most basic level, most anyone would agree that of course, what we say about something that happened is different--distinct--from 'what happened'.

Think again, beloved. The reality is that we collapse the two domains and live in the collapse. For example, take the current political climate in our country--some event happens...the unemployment rate goes up, let's say: what Barack Obama says about that will have something to do with raising taxes on the wealthy and providing a stimulus plan. John Boener will say government spending and regulations need to be curbed back. And both of them will be convinced that 'what they say about what happened' is TRULY 'what happened'!

Also, consider how, if four people witness a car accident, you will get four different stories about 'what happened' and each will be convinced their story is True and the others not....

Or take what happened to me this morning while walking the dog on the Canal. As Bela was sniffing around, an older man passed us. I spoke to him and he didn't reply so I said to myself he was an odd person. After he was 20 feet or so ahead of us, he stopped in his tracks in the middle of the canal path. He didn't move when a girl on a bicycle came perilously close to him. Instead he stood stock still and stared. By now I have said to myself that his oddness may be dangerous. He seemed unhinged, deranged. I considered not approaching him. I almost told a woman pushing a baby carriage to watch out for him.

When I drew near, being cautious, ready to loose the dog on him or run if his twisted mind caused him to attack me.

About 5 feet away, I noticed he had hearing aids the size of outboard motors on. He turned to me, smiled, and said "Ducks."

So, what happened is this: the man passed me without speaking and then stopped to watch the ducks. And I had 'talked about what happened' in my head to such an extent that I had him a potential mass murderer.

We always live in the collapse between 'what happened' and 'what we said about it'--the challenge is to 'notice' when it happens and try to make the distinction between the two domains: the event and our evaluation, judgement, story, explanation, etc.

My deranged killer was, instead, hard of hearing and enamored of ducks.

Something to ponder in your life beneath your own Castor Oil Tree....

Irony update

2011-09-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

I heard today that hundreds of Chinese citizens were protesting that the air in their village was being polluted by a factory manufacturing solar panels.

Go ponder that.

Paul Ryan (Republican budget guru) today announced he would oppose the President's position to have millionaires pay the same tax rates as their secretaries. In the same breath, he said the Congress should let the payroll tax reduction expire--raising the taxes of people making under $106,000 a year. He said it was for the good of the Middle Class.

Go ponder that.

400th Post

2011-09-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

I just realized this is my 400th post on Under the Castor Oil Tree. I'm too intimidated to go back and read the first one. Jeter got hit 3000 and Mo got save 600 a few days ago. Now I've got blog 400. Who knew?

Since I waxed semi-eloquent on the weather in West Virginia, I decided I'd do the 400th blog with my favorite West Virginia joke.

A Washington lobbyist grew tired of the fast lane and retired to a cabin in the mountains of West Virginia. He couldn't see another house from where he lived and he was delighted with his new life. He read and wrote and ate simply. He couldn't have been happier.

But on the very day he began to feel lonely for the first time, about three months into his wilderness retreat, there was a knock at his door.

When he opened the door he was confronted by a huge, hairy mountain man.

"Hey there," the man said, "I'm your nearest neighbor. I live over the ridge of that second mountain out there to the west and I've come to invite you to a party."

The city man thought that might just be the best thing to cure his newly arrived loneliness--a party in the mountains.

"I'd love to come," he said to the Mountaineer.

"I hav' to warn you," the native said, "there'll be some drinkin'."

"I like a drink from time to time," the city guy replied.

"And there'll prob'ly be some fightin'," his guest told him.

"Well alcohol will do that," said the man from Washington.

"And, last but not least," the West Virginian told him, "there will most likely be some sex."

The city guy wasn't ready for that but he knew he was a stranger in a strange land, so he agreed and said, "well, I understand that might happen."

The mountain man gave him directions to his house, just a mountain or two over.

"Well," the DC guy said, trying to fit in to the culture, "what should I wear?"

"Dudn't matter much," the huge Hill-Billie told him, "it'll jist be you and me...."

fall fell

2011-09-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

Was it just me but did we lose 35 degrees or so overnight between Wednesday and Thursday?

I'm writing this with a tee shirt, a long sleeve shirt and a West Virginia University sweatshirt on. It is chilly. Relatively from a few days ago.

I grew up in Anawalt, West Virginia in the southern most county of the state--the free state of McDowell. One of the things I've come to realize having lived in New England and Alexandria, Virginia is that southern West Virginia has arguably the best weather in the US.

Anawalt is further south than Richmond and Lexington. And the elevation is about 2700 feet above sea level. The highest spot in WV is Spruce Knob which is 4200 feet a.s.l.

Because Anawalt was so far south and so high up, surrounded by mountains about 1000 feet higher, the climate was remarkable. We had four months of Spring and four months of Autumn with about 2 months of Winter and Summer. Spring and Autumn were cool at night and warm in the daytime. Summer was sunny but not that hot. A town 30 miles away called Bluefield (nicknamed "Nature's Air-Conditioned City") gave away lemonade any time the temperature got to 90. In the 18 years of my early life, I don't remember more than a few days that free lemonade flowed.

It rained a lot and snowed a lot. But the snow seldom stayed around for more than a few days. Even in winter, the temperature would creep up into the 50's a lot, so the snow would melt.

I actually think McDowell County could be a really ideal retirement place--amazing weather, mountains, friendly people. But then there is this: of all the counties in the contiguous 48 states, McDowell County has the earliest death rate AND the oldest average age.

Ponder that for a moment. People die sooner there than anywhere in the US and yet the average age is the highest. Huh...no young people at all. When I grew up there 50 years or so ago, the county had 12 high schools--6 white and 6 black (McDowell County has about a 50/50 racial divide, the highest outside the deep South, though in the whole state there are only about 5 % black population....go figure that!) Now, to my knowledge, there are only 3 high schools.

The population of McDowell County, when I was growing up there, was about 60,000. Now, bear in mind that the county is about the size of Rd. Island, so we're talking a really rural place. Now, if I'm not mistaken, the population is around 30,000 or less. Go figure. Well, deep coal mining lost out to cutting the tops off of mountains. All the young people left.

Don't tell me there isn't something called Irony: the place in the country with the greatest weather ever is poverty stricken, practically deserted, full of old people who die early and so isolated that even if you wanted to retire there there is almost no easy way to get there.

Ponder that.

What a shame....

the dangers of childhood

2011-09-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

I just heard an interview with a New York Magazine writer who did a story about the death of a four year old child who was under the supervision of the Child Protection division of social services. The caseworker and his supervisor were forced to resign after the incident and have subsequently been arrested by the Brooklyn police to stand trial for negligent homicide.

The child's mother is accused of murder and the child's grandmother of manslaughter and now, two social workers are also under arrest.

It was a chilling story, but the author was not unsympathetic toward the supervisor and case worker. Interviewing others in the office she discovered that the two accused social services workers were considered two of the best in the division. Case notes were missing from the computer but other workers admitted they were all weeks behind in entering the notes because of the volume of their case loads. In fact, the conclusions of the writer was that it was a systemic rather than personal failure. The supervisor was alone in a unit that previously had two supervisors and spent much of her days in meetings that all the workers agree are meaningless. The social worker had visited the home five times in the month before the child's death but hadn't had time to transcribe his case notes.

Hundreds of social service workers have protested at the Brooklyn prosecutor's office but the charges have not been dropped.

And a child is dead--betrayed by the system that was designed to keep her safe.

I was a child protection specialist for two years between my studies at Harvard Divinity School and my decision to return to seminary and be ordained. I too lost a child to an inefficient and strained system. This was in the early 70's when the epidemic of child abuse was not so widely known. I was the person who removed children from their homes if I felt they were in eminent danger.

I removed a 4 year old boy and a 3 year old girl from the home of a professional couple. They were doing well in foster care and their burns and bruises were healing. The boy had suffered two broken bones in the previous two years but the hospital hadn't reported it. This was before the days of 'mandated reporters'--people who, by law, must report suspected abuse and neglect. Priest and ministers are 'mandated reporters', for example, along with school teachers and medical professionals.

The children's parents were well off and hired a top flight lawyer. The children's rights were protected by an assistant district attorney for the county. Child abuse cases were not what the assistant d.a. wanted to do and he was lackluster in the best of times. However, up against a tough lawyer, he caved in remarkably and the judge had no choice but to return the children.

I stayed in touch with the family though they sought a restraining order against the Department of Welfare. I went to the d.a.'s office for another order to remove the children and was turned down since that office had been embarrassed in the first hearing.

Two months later, the little boy drowned in the bathtub and I did get his sister out. The mother was tried for manslaughter rather than murder and spent one year in the county jail.

I left to go back to seminary before she was released. After losing Martin, much of the zeal and commitment had drained out of me. I know I did everything I could to protect him, but he was still dead, a victim of the system that was suppose to protect him.

I've never forgotten the experience and how impotent and guilty I felt. I'll carry Martin's memory with me always. Hearing the report from Brooklyn today just brought it crashing back on me.

A nation that doesn't protect its children from the ones who should be protecting them is a blight on the land. When will we ever learn how precious the lives of children are...and how precarious and dangerous the world can be to them?

Momento mori

2011-09-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Our microwave died yesterday. RIP.

It served us well. Between us, Bern and I realized it was somewhere around 23 years old. We brought it with us from Everitt Street in New Haven when we moved to Cheshire in 1989.

One minute it was with us--warming up the dog's dinner (Yes, Virginia, we warm the dog's dinner since Bern cooks it and it is refrigerator cool)--and the next minute (or about 20 seconds), it was gone.

I've sat by more death beds than I care to recall and it is often like that: one moment, the beloved is breathing, living, their microwave of a heart still beating. And the next moment, nothing....

People often ask, "Is he gone?" or "Is she dead now?"

I never answer but ring the 'call' button and wait for the medical folks to come, though I know it is still and done for the person in the bed.

Being a priest keeps you always close to that Good Door that leads from 'here' to whatever comes next.

I don't like most of the cliches we deal out at death. "He's in a better place," implies that being with the ones who love him is a 'worse' place. "She's at rest," simply begs the question of 'what happens next' to which I have no answer. Most of the stuff people say when someone dies is rather trite an cowardly. What matters is the pain of those by the bed, not the final disposition of the person who has DIED (I almost wrote 'passed', but that's another one of those cliches I dislike. Dead is Dead, not 'passed'.

So, our faithful microwave is dead now, out on our deck while we figure out what is the proper way to dispose of it. (Is there something in a microwave that shouldn't go in a landfill? Anyone out there know? Email me....)

Would that each of us should enter that wondrous and frightening door to 'whatever comes next' with the dignity and the integrity of our microwave oven. It never let us down or disappointed us or betrayed us in any way. A good life, I'd say, now over.

(I'm a great disappointment to people who want to know 'what happens' after we die. I simply don't know. I imagine that 'something' happens, so long as 'nothing' is part of the definition of 'something'. But to the people by the bed, I am the best person to have around. I don't lie or make up stuff. I don't try to 'soften the blow'. Death is dramatically important and should not be soft peddled. I usually say nothing besides, "I'm so sorry," and I hold them near for as long as they want or need to be held near. Just that.)

Are you still there...?

2011-09-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

I've been away quite a while. I've been on vacation and haven't read emails and haven't blogged and haven't watched much TV. I even lost touch with the American League East pennant race for a while but the Yankees are inexplicably 4 games ahead, so what could be wrong with that?

I've been catching up on the Republicans since I got back. Could the last sensible person leaving Texas please bring the American flag? Am I wrong, or didn't Rick Perry suggest, not so long ago, that it might not be a bad idea for Texas to secede from the Union? And now he wants to be President of the nation he wanted to leave? And his campaign promise about making the federal government 'irrelevant' in our lives--isn't that a bit like saying "make me Pope and I'll get Christianity out of your lives"? Maybe I've lived too long but Rick Perry makes Barry Goldwater look like a liberal.

We vacation on Oak Island, NC. There are three beaches on Oak Island--Yaupon Beach, Fort Caswell Beach and Long Beach. We go to Long Beach. I've tried to figure out how many times we've gone to Long Beach. Some 20 years in a row from the mid-70's to the mid-90's and perhaps 7 years since then. A long time, anyway. Five years ago our daughter Mimi called to find out where it was we dragged her most of her life until she graduated from High School. She and Tim, her boyfriend we love, went that year and then she suggested we go each year. We go in September since Long Beach is virtually empty after Labor Day, being a family beach. Our friend, John has gone with us the last 4 years and our friend Sherry went last year.

The biggest decision facing me each day at Long Beach is whether to walk East or West on my morning 'beach walk'. Long Beach faces South so the sun comes up on the left and sets on the right.

We eat and read and read and eat and Mimi and Tim go in the water, then there is reading and eating and this year ping-pong because the house had a table and then some reading and eating and sleeping. Naps are optional but often taken. If it rains, which it hasn't much the last four years, we go to a movie just off the island. No movie this year--just endless sunshine, 20+ mph winds off the ocean, and the ocean breathing its remarkable breath.

(There is, when you sit staring at the ocean and listening to its roar, a moment every once in a while when the waves break almost simultaneously and a deep Silence descends. It only happens once in a while on a beach that is almost seven miles long (LONG Beach isn't a misnomer!) but when it does it is magical, wondrous, spiritual, contemplative. Deep Silence is the gift of being by the ocean. The roar and whisper of the Ocean's breath is wondrous, but more wondrous by far are those rare moments when the Ocean inhales and there is Deep Silence. It happens about once every five minutes--and it is glorious....)

Fredricksburg, Virginia is about half-way to Long Beach. So we stay there on the way down and the way back. Mimi and Tim fly from NYC to Raleigh and rent a car. Bern and John and I are above 60. We deserve to make the 760 mile trip a two day thing. And staying in the Hampton Inn in Fredricksburg is a joy. We drive about 7 hours a day--always that or less from Fredricksburg to Long Beach--all Interstate until the last 30 miles and little traffic. From Cheshire to Fredricksburg and back is an adventure since we go through DC and Baltimore and NYC. Could be 6 1/2 hours (as it was coming back this year) or 9 hours if the GW Bridge and the Washington Beltway are uncooperative....

But that's what we do. And we've put the house on hold for next year--the same great house with the best kitchen equipment ever and 6 bed rooms and a ping pong table. What could be better?

Someday I'd like to go to Oak Island with my grandchildren, since we were there so much with our own children. It is a place of great beauty and great simplicity. Not a bad combination.

(Rick Perry makes Michelle Bachman look sane.....) But then I'm a 'tax and spend' liberal from way back....

Good to be back.

the Mystery Gifts

2011-08-25T17:39:00.001-07:00

So, we got back from Baltimore, helping with the granddaughters, last night. (A 4 hour and 45 minute trip--a new Personal Best, amazing! Driving 70 or more from the Baltimore Beltway exits off 95 through Delaware and New Jersey and across the GW Bridge in exactly 3 hours--slowing up for the toll booth only because we needed to, not because any cars were in front of us.)

When we got home (our friend John had picked up Bela-dog from the Puppy Motel and left him at our house about 3:30) we couldn't wait to greet Bela and let him out for a while. But on our porch were two mysterious boxes and a wondrous black case. I took them inside. The boxes were wrapped in white paper with black bows. It was an incredible assortment of gifts.

Two towels that said "The Best" on them. A red tie (though I never wear a tie I might have to since it is so great) and some cedar planks you use on a grill to cook fish. The other package had a vegetable bowl to use on a Weber grill. And the black box was a Cuisinart set of grill tools--an amazing assortment. All told, the gifts, I estimate, were several hundred dollars.

Here's the mystery. We have no idea who they were from or why. No card. No name. Nothing but the gifts.

I'll ask my neighbors if they had some special occasion on Wednesday that might have prompted such a gift. Maybe they were left on our porch by mistake.

If anyone reading this left them there, let me know so I can thank you and ask you why....

Mammaw Jones, once more...

2011-08-25T17:21:00.000-07:00

My Mammaw Jones used to say, "you have to be bigger than the weather...."

How true. How true.

Over my 30+ years in Connecticut, I have come to wonder if CT is in New England at all. I think of New England folks as saying 'posh' to the weather and soldiering on no matter what. Maybe in VT and NH and Maine, but not here in southern New England. We're, for the most part, real wooses about weather. People in CT seem to react like people in Atlanta to snow and rain and high winds. Troubling in the least....

People have been calling the Cluster and sending me emails about whether to cancel church on Sunday. It's 'Thursday', for goodness sake, Sunday is like a decade away in the way life passes for me. And I happen to trust people enough to believe they will wake up Sunday morning and look out the window and say, "it looks fine" or "it's not a fit day out for man nor beast" and decide whether 'church' is on the agenda as hurricane Irene bears down on us.

When I lived in Charleston, WV back in the late 70's, Governor Jay Rockefeller, now a Senator from the Mountain State, declared an emergency regarding the snow storm of the century bearing down on all us Mountaineers. People emptied stores of water, batteries, canned goods and made a run on liquor stores like hadn't happened since the end of prohibition. Chaos reined. Life as we knew it ended. Every event in the state was canceled in anticipation of the storm that would end the world, perhaps.

Some low pressure system caused the storm to hope over WV and blast Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northern Virginia instead.

We all had water and batteries and canned goods for the next few years.

I told Bea, the Cluster's Administrator, today how when I was 17 years old, I'd put the chains on my father's big old Ford LTD and go across a mountain that was 5 miles up and 6 miles down to see a movie in Bluefield, 29 miles away, in the middle of a snow storm. Mountain people give a fig about the weather. Life goes on. We're simply bigger than what nature throws at us.

People in CT don't go to church when it's raining hard. Give me a break....

Weather happens every day. Every day there is weather. And we are expected to be bigger than the weather. So, on a perfectly wondrous June day when the temperature is 70, the sun is shining and the wind is out of the southwest, we need to be 'bigger than that weather."

No different that hurricane, flood, earthquake and blizzard and the apocalypse.

We all need to have common sense, know our limitations and 'be bigger than the weather' for goodness sake....

nobody asked me, but....

2011-08-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Back when I worked for a living, every Friday was 'movie day'. In any given year I'd go to 40+ movies, mostly Friday matinees because Friday was my day off and I honored it by turning off my cell phone and going to a movie.

Since I retired, even though I do lots of things and actually get paid by the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry for being their interim missioner (frankly, since 1975 I've been rather shocked that a three churches and now a Cluster actually paid me to be who I am! What a toot!) I have lost the routine of going to movies. I've been to a dozen or so movies in the past year. But in the last two weeks I've reinvented 'movie day'. I think I have it down. I can have a day off even though I'm retired and what I'll do to honor that is turn off my cell phone and go to a movie.

The first two movies I've seen--last week and this week--make me want to tell you about them. Nobody asked me to, but I'm going to. If you are a movie person at all these are 2 'don't miss' movies.

The first is RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Now, if you weren't into the original string of 'planet of the apes' movies (and they got progressively worse--like the novels of American suspense writers like Patricia Cornwall) you probably want to pass of this. But if you can still see that final scene of the original movie where Charlton Heston approaches the nearly buried Statue of Liberty (which was actually shot on a beach near Malabo) and screams "you blew it up!"...then you're going to love this prequel. This movie tells the story of 'what happened' to earth. It is remarkable and speaks to a much more contemporary fear than the 1968 fear of nuclear destruction. Franco and Pinto--the male and female love interest--are rather vacuous, even though in the plot they are both remarkable scientists. John Franco raises the chimp who is named Caesar by Franco's father, John Lithgow (who is amazing) as a man suffering from Alzheimer's . The actor who plays Caesar as an adult is remarkable. I forget his name. The technology is so advanced from 1968, but remember, Heston and the others had been on a 2000 year trip that aged them only 18 months when they landed on the Planet of the Apes. (By the way, if you remember, we all figured out it was earth long before Charlton did....) The special effects are riveting and the plot is tomorrow on steroids. The world as we know it, we find out from RISE, ended not with a bang but with a whimper.

Must see for Sci-Fi fans and people who were alive and going to movies in 1968.

This week's movie was THE HELP. I read some reviews, which were mixed, but I think it was a remarkable achievement. Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer should all be considered for Oscars. I went because I wanted to have a good laugh at the stupidity of white people in Mississippi in 1963. I got that, but what I didn't expect was the undercurrent of real danger and possible death in the Jim Crow South. Bryce Dallas Howard (maybe she should change her name) deserves award consideration for doing something that is incredibly hard to do: play an utterly charming and totally evil character. Not since Hannibal Lector has a screen presence made me to anxious as hers. This is, in the end, a woman's movie (not a 'chick-flic) but a movie about the dignity, integrity, strength and tenacity of women in a world turned against them. (Remember, in the south in those days, the only person less respected than a Black man was a Black woman.) There's not a single male character (except the quirky newspaper editor who can really dance) worth the oxygen that keeps them alive. And many of the women aren't worth much more--but the ones that are are heroines, remarkable creatures, the best that human beings can be.

Go see it. Even men, if they're anything like me, will come away feeling better about being human (and regretting how awful humans can be....)

Naming of parts...

2011-08-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

Human beings, it seems to me, are naturally thrown to 'name' things--to categorize, catalogue, separate out, group, sort, look for patterns, file, put things in geniuses and species. We, as a species ourselves, tacitly and subconsciously believe there is an 'order to things', that the universe is ultimately understandable. Whether or not that is true is worth pondering but not what I want to talk about now.

One of the things we name and label and distinguish between are other people. Some of that sorting out is quite simplistic.

My Grandmother Jones, for example, divided all people into two categories: "church people" and everyone else. "They may be a bit odd," she once said about a nearby family, "but at least they're church people." There wasn't a lot of subtlety in her categories and very little judgement. I never heard her imply that 'church people' were morally superior to 'non church people'. It was simply her way of making sense of things. All Gaul is divided into three parts and all people, for Lina Manona Jones, were divided into two groups.

Young children, it seems to me, tend to divide all people into two groups as well: good guys and bad guys. That was obvious when I played cowboys and Indians or Natzis and Americans, or cops and robbers as a boy. My twin grand-daughter often ask, about someone they don't understand, "are they good?" Small Children and Santa Claus are always sorting out naughty and nice.

When I was in college, those I knew divided humankind into hippies and squares. Actually, that's not quite accurate since the people I knew weren't real hippies--we were 'pretend hippies', weekend hippies. So the real categories were hippies, wannabe hippies and squares. We only worried about sorting out people under 30. Everyone over 30, of course, couldn't be trusted.

"Pretend hippies" reminded me of the conversation I never tire telling people about that I had with my granddaughter Morgan once. "Grampie," she said while drawing strange lines on a piece of paper, "are you a Dr. too?" Her other grandfather is a big deal at John Hopkin's Hospital--a thoracic surgeon.

Remembering my Doctor of the Ministry degree earned at Hartford Seminary, I replied. "Actually, I am, Morgan. But I'm not a medical Doctor." She thought for a minute and said, "Oh, you're a pretend doctor." "Actually, Morgan," I said, "I am....".

Note how St. Paul automatically categorized people: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. This irresistible urge to name and label has, of course, been the sword the powerful have always held over the powerless. The powerful 'name', the powerless 'get named'. The most obvious example is the 'Black is Beautiful' movement when Black people named themselves and shrugged off the label of 'negro', or worse.

All this is prelude to what my current operating categories of human beings is: the world is divided, for me right now, into Fundamentalists and people who aren't.

It's a distinction that is obviously flawed but functions pretty well. Fundamentalists of whatever ilk are much more alike than they are like non-Fundamentalists. This is obvious in religion. It's a helpful distinction. But there are 'fundamentalists' of other genres. Anybody who divides the world into those who are Right/Saved/Pure and those who are wrong/lost/tainted--is a fundamentalist in my book. Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists share a lot of characteristics even though, by definition, both groups abhor the other. There is 'one way' for both of them and anyone who isn't following that 'one way' is lost and not worth saving. There can be no compromise with 'the other'. And, within the fundamentalist world view, anyone who disagrees should be shunned (if not killed).

When I was the part-time chaplain to West Virginia State College as part of my first clerical job, I would meet with students as part of the required freshman seminars. Many of the young people were very conservative Christians and I was a Liberal Fundamentalist at the time and convinced it was my job to show them the error of their ways. (Like I said, fundamentalists come in all hues!)

So, I would talk with them about 'salvation'. I suggested that for some people 'salvation' was a thing certain, like, for example, Cleveland. You're either in Cleveland or not. The suburbs are not Cleveland and Toledo certainly isn't Cleveland. So the 'saved' knew they were in Cleveland. My ploy was to argue with convincing logic that another way of seeing 'salvation' was to 'be on the Way to Cleveland' and that there was lots and lots of ways to get from Institute, West Virginia to Cleveland. Brilliant, I thought, though the truth was that I was as big a fundamentalist about 'being of the Way' being right as they were about being in Cleveland.

Then one day, when I thought I'd about perfected my argument, having done it 10 or so times, one student in the back raised his hand. "Who says Cleveland is where we should be going?" he asked.

My days as a fundamentalist ended then. "Being on the Road" is how I seek to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling and not a little good humor. But may way is certainly not 'The Way'.

(I was going to close this by pointing out how fundamentalism--on both sides but mostly, honestly, on the Right of the political spectrum--had thrown a monkey wrench into the cogs of our constitutional government. But, as I think of it, the point is obvious....)

We'd all be better off to ponder how to strip away labels and names and judgmental thoughts and try to figure out how to work together somehow....

Milestones

2011-08-14T19:54:00.000-07:00

My son is 36 today. God bless him. He is a joy and wonder to me. A man from my loins. And a good and remarkable man. I love him so.

My daughter turned 33 last month. "As old as Jesus," I told her. She was not impressed. And she is a joy and wonder to me. A lovely and gifted woman. I love her so.

When I was 33, in 1980, I had just become the Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven. We lived in an astonishing rectory, Bern and Josh and Mimi and I.

Trudy M. told me, when she met me, "my priest and my gynaecologist are both younger than me".

Trudy was only 35--a couple of years older than Mimi is now and a year younger than Josh is now.

Bern and I had been married 10 years in 1980. Hard time were coming and we didn't know they were and somehow, beyond all comprehension, we survived them.

On Josh's 36th birthday, we've been married nigh on 41 years. September 5--Labor Day this year--will be our 41st anniversary. 41 years is a long, long time. No kidding. And, as I often estimate, we've been 'truly married' at least 35 of those years. The good news is, the last 20 or so are part of that total.

Milestones are remarkable.

Who knew we'd be married this long--given that I was the first 'sager' to marry into her extended Italian/Hungarian, so Roman Catholic family and I was the second member of my so, so Anglo-Saxon Protestant family to marry a Roman Catholic. The first was my cousin, Marlin, whose marriage to his Italian/RC bride barely survived the reception! So no one gave this union a chance in hell of succeeding.

Nearly 41 years later, we have 'given the lie' to what everyone thought would happen.

It is raining and raining. I love rain. But our dog 'hates' rain. He needs, I know and he knows, to go out and have a bowel movement. But he's hiding from me because he can still hear the rain though inside the house. I'll try to drag him out in a bit. It would be best if he had a #2, best for him and for me.

Sometimes a milestone is a poop in the rain.

Ponder that and tell me life isn't strange....

9/11 looms

2011-08-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

I got an email from the deacon who is working with us for a while in the Cluster about whether we'd planned anything for the four congregations on September 11--the 10th anniversary.

I hadn't because I'll be traveling that Sunday. And her question made me ponder some things.

First of all, I returned to that fateful day. Bern had gone out and I had watched the second plane hit the second tower on live TV, brushing my teeth, stunned, flabbergasted, almost unconscious with the impossibility of what I was watching.

The cognitive dissonance of it all had caused me to be unable to remember that both our children were in New York City at the moment I was watching on TV. Bern's truck screamed back into the driveway and she took the steps two at a time until she was beside me.

"The kids," she said, having heard about what was happened on her truck's radio, "We've got to reach the kids...."

Eventually we did. Our son was safe in Brooklyn but his girlfriend, Cathy, now our daughter-in-law had been on one of the last trains out of Brooklyn. She'd been taken off the subway and herded, along with hundreds other people, into Chinatown. Hours later, she walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, back to Josh.

Our daughter was beginning her first day of work at the American Ballet Company. She came up out of a subway close enough to the end of the island to see the first tower in flames. She, with thousands of others, walked back home in the midst of total confusion and chaos.

So, I have very personal connections to 9/11. I have a friend who lost 7 of the 11 guests she had at a dinner party a week or so before. One of my parishioners watched the people jump from the top of the towers and isn't over that experience yet. How could she be?

I've been trying to remember what we did at St. John's the Sunday after 9/11. I believe it was either a healing service or the Ash Wednesday Service. Either makes sense to me. Either we needed oil and hands upon us or to confess our sins. Not that our sins caused 9/11, not in any way: but because the enormous chasm between September 10, 2001 and September 12 made it impossible for us to continue to ignore our brokenness.

We were horribly broken on that day. Those young me who took over and flew those planes 'broke' us and shattered us totally. All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put us back together again after that lush September morning. (Odd, isn't it, that I remember what a perfect and lovely day September 11, 2001 was. Glorious in every way save one. And that one way made all the difference.)

Here's something I ponder, those terrorists who were striking against the 'Great Satan" of the United States, have, in remarkable ways, done enormous and possibly irreparable damage to us, much more than the loss of life and property of that day could have foretold.

First of all, they took away our innocence. No one alive that day remembered the last time an act of war had taken life on our soil. All the combatants in the Civil War were decades dead. The wars since then we've fought on someone else's soil. All the loss of life and hope we've endured was across some ocean or another. But 9/11 ensured that 'it can't happen here' would disappear forever from our vocabulary. Suddenly, in a matter of minutes, we realized we were part of the planet, not some idyllic oasis where truly bad things didn't happen.

They also took away our sense of safety. We've never been 'safe' in any real sense. Life is always out there ready to commit mayhem. But 'we thought we were' safe. For almost a decade now we've been living with a new-found anxiety, and, unlike most of the people on the planet, we're newcomers to that kind of fear and it has infected us at every level. We're more afraid of everything now than we were on 9/10/01--more afraid of strangers, aliens, emigrants, terror, people different from ourselves. We're more afraid of all those than we've been for a century or so. And we don't believe 'everything will be alright' any more. We doubt the Future in a way Americans haven't ever doubted what was coming. Being a young, naive nation, we always believed the 'future' would bring progress and hope and better days. We don't believe that anymore. 9/11 stole that from us.

9/11 also plunged us into to seemingly endless wars that have sapped our strength and killed our next generation and plundered our wealth. This is the ultimate assault that those terrorists made upon us. All our debt problems (and the debt problems of Europe to some extent since 'when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold') were planted on 9/11. Please remember, as few people seem able to, that Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus when he took office. A SURPLUS...how soon we forget. He would have frittered it away to some extent by tax breaks for the wealthy but if we hadn't been in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had to attack someone after 9/11, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis and debt problem that spawned the Tea Party and the absolute gridlock in Washington.

Without 9/11, I suggest, 'rational people' would still be directing the government and we would be, as a nation, investing in education, research and infra-structure rather than having almost bankrupted our nation in two unwin-able and seemingly unending wars that have cost us trillions of dollars while the gap between rich and poor has widened and the middle class has shrunk.

So those Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist, as I ponder it, have done what they meant to do almost 10 years ago. They have brought the Great Satan--the United States--to our knees.

That's really something to ponder and wonder about as the 10th anniversary approaches, looming ahead for a day I'll be driving from North Carolina back to New England.

Take a deep breath and ponder all that.

Involved, not 'attached'

2011-08-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

I haven't been blogging much because I've been so involved and attached to the endless and senseless debate in Congress about the debt limit.

So, I've been serializing my mystery novel "Murder on the Block".

(Here's an aside: It was a real exercise in vulnerability to put my fiction in my blog. And I've heard nothing about it from anyone. It was a risk I took and I'd like some response. I've checked my blog for comments---Nada. If you've read the work, I'd like to hear from you. I don't care if you liked it, loved it, didn't like it, hated it. I'd just like to know. Don't comment on my blog. That's a real pain to look at. Send me an email at Padrejgb@aol.com with your thoughts about the mystery. Again, I don't much care if you thoughts are negative or positive. I just want to hear some. Thanks.)

So, tonight I reminded myself of how to be Involved and not Attached.

I have a demonstration of that. Take a paperback book and put a piece of paper--a piece of typing paper, a napkin, your phone bill--in the book. Then fold the book.

"Involved" means, literally, "in the 'volutions'" or, more understandably, "in the folds".

Then, unfold the book and remove the paper you put in it. That piece of paper is "involved", but not "attached" as the pages of the book are.

That is, it seems to me, the way we--you and I need to BE in life. We need to be 'involved' but not 'attached' to the ebb and flow of history, the give and take of events. We need to be inside of them and a part of what is happening, but for our souls' sake, we need to be detached, able to step back from the day to day and live "from" another place.

I was just out on the deck. The bird traffic, which is enormous, across our back yard, has died down as darkness begins to descend. But the evening bird songs continue.

I was reminded that the birds of the air don't care about the Dow Jones Average, or the Tea Party or the debt crisis in Europe. They live on, detached from what seems so vital and consuming to me.

Let the birds' songs inspire us to be fiercely 'involved' in what is happening around us, yet 'detached' from all that is political, social, cultural, theological, so that we might view it from a bit of distance and 'come from' that 'safe place' back into our world.

Jesus always retreated to lonely places to pray after a time of activity. He was deeply 'involved' and yet 'detached' from the crowds and the world that swirled around him. Not a bad model. Not a bad way to "BE" in the world. Coming from 'who we BE', rather than being attached to the storm and drung of life and be defined by our attachment to all that.

I thank the birds for reminding me.

I can 'come from' a place of detachment and peace and emptiness and power rather than trying to 'get to' a place of peace.

Good advice from the creatures of the air....

last 2 chapters of Murder on the Block

2011-08-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

VII.

Tuesday, October 28, 1 p.m.

Richard slept until almost 10 a.m. on Tuesday—nearly 14 hours, interrupted only by a 7 a.m. need both he and Cecelia had to relieve their bladders. While the dog squatted in the parking lot and spent several minutes snuffling around the property, distinguishing scents and storing them, in a way humans could never imagine, Richard peed and let her back in and they both slept for three more hours.

When they finally got up, he fed the dog and ate half a piece of toast without much interest, Richard was content to sit on the couch, watching morning TV shows, until Dante and Mara arrived at one p.m. with bagels, cream cheese, wine and most of the whole story.

“The Jamaicans knew you went out with the dog every morning, Padre,” Dante explained, smoking as fast as he could. “And we now know who told them about that. So one of them would come by while you were out—you were punctual each day—and check to box to see if there was a message de jure. That is, until you became their new best friend and they’d come by to ‘pray’.”

“But Spencer and Johnson,” Richard asked, “how did anyone think they were mixed up in anything?”

“Besides a romantic interlude on a rock?” Dante shook his head. “Star-crossed lovers, those two….It happened back on the mainland. Malo Miano, the late, great Stevenson’s partner in crime, is a very cautious man.”

Richard’s headache was almost gone and his stomach was full of two bagels and his headache was medicated by good red wine Dante had found at the only Block Island package store, but his understanding was still lagging behind. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Dante looked at him the way one would look at a dull fourth grader or at a goofy Lab/Retriever mix.

“Miano had a source at the ferry landing in Point Judith,” Mara said, taking up the tale. For once she was the one pacing. It seemed that once things fell into place, Dante became calmer and Mara’s nervous energy kicked in. “He took down license plate numbers of suspicious cars that might belong to, oh, I don’t know, undercover cops. The Lexus fit the bill and Miano had a mole in the Providence Police Department who would run the plates.”

“You aren’t the only one who had a daily constitutional, Fr. Lucas,” Dante took over. Richard thought they moved back and forth like tag-team wrestlers or a ball at a tennis match. “The soon to be much mourned Stevenson Matthews, walked by the public beach phone every morning at 8 a.m. sharp. If the phone rang, he’s pick it up. If not, he’d enjoy a walk on the beach. The morning after Spencer and Johnson arrived on the Block….”

“My God, Dante, you’ve become an islander!” Mara said, pacing through the living room.

He gave her a poison look before continuing. “Our lovebirds, Spencer and Johnson, were doubtless still in their bed at the White House when Stevenson happened by to leave a message and some sodium penathol and a couple of syringes for Eli and Jonas. He was probably here before 8:30.”

“So the couple came over on Monday….” Richard began.

“The earliest ferry,” Mara chirped in from the kitchen.

“And on Tuesday….” Richard tried again.

“On Tuesday while you were out for your jaunt with your faithful canine friend….” Dante interrupted.

“Her name is Cecelia,” Mara added, back at the front door: pacing, pacing….

“I know that,” Dante said impatiently. “And, as I was saying, Stevenson left the message, Eli, I think it was picked up the sodium penathol and the note, probably eating the note, totally getting rid of it, since the only note we’ve found was the one in the house out of the dozens, hundreds there had been. All this while you were eating breakfast and reading the New York Times while your dog…excuse me, Sergeant, while ‘Cecelia’ was waiting outside.”

“I ate outside that morning,” Richard offered, “so she was with….”

Mara laughed, back in the kitchen, and Dante fumed. “I’m up to here with these interruptions!”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Richard raised his hand and Mara, halfway back from the front door to the kitchen again, laughed once more.

“Shit!” Dante said. “I call on the priest now….”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Richard said, guilty that he was about to laugh when discussing the death of two human being, “but Eli and Jonas somehow kidnapped them?”

Dante breathed deeply. “Yes. As they tell it, now that our inadvertent murderers are telling anyone who will listen anything and everything, hoping for a reduced sentence…it was a clean snatch. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Mara, quit pacing!”

“How can I help it when you say things like ‘a clean snatch’ with a straight face?” she responded. Then she took a chair across from Richard at the kitchen table and took over the story. “Getting them was easy. Johnson and Spencer were accountants, not agents, not trained. They had parked up at Mohegan Bluffs and went down that endless staircase for a romantic walk on the deserted beach. It’s sad, really…they left the Lexus unlocked and when they came back our bad guys were waiting for them. They made Spencer drive back up to the rental Miano had for them.”

“This Milo Miano rented the house?” Richard asked.

“Not directly. It was some offshore account that wired the money to the realtor. But Flash and the FBI have the realtor’s computer. They’ll trace it back eventually….” Mara stopped and lowered her head onto her hands like a grade school kid taking a nap.

Dante put his hand on Mara’s shoulder. It was a tender touch, Richard would remember, a touch of respect and love between good friends. Dante seemed to know what Mara was thinking.

“Nothing could justify those poor people’s death,” he said, massaging his assistant’s arm gently. “They were, just like all of us, looking for a little tenderness in a crazy world. But one thing that gives meaning to their murders is that we will finally, one way or another, get Milo Miano and many others of his ilk.” He moved away and stretched. “It will take years of litigation with state and federal prosecutors having pissing matches over jurisdiction, bleeding money into numerous court houses, but Milo Miano, miscreant malefactor is going down! Love doesn’t conquer all, obviously. But it has given us the hooks to put into one very, very bad man and his minions. I’m sure, for Johnson and Spencer, their little bite of love wasn’t sufficient—they wanted more. But from their deaths, something good will come.”

He smiled, first at Mara, who had raised her head, and then at Richard.

“Jesus, Dante,” she said, her eyes wet with tears, “you’re boarding on noble…crazy, but noble.”

“I think I’m going fishing,” Dante said, turning toward the door.

Richard looked him over, tailored and immaculate as always. “Dressed like that?”

The detective turned back toward them at the table.

“Just kidding,” he said. “I simply need some air.”

At the door, he stopped again, lighting a cigarette. “By the way, I called Miriam and filled her in on all the details since you haven’t found time to do that.” Richard started to speak, but Dante blocked him with a gesture, a hand held up meaning ‘stop’—the sign of crossing guards, cops, red road signs. “She said to tell you that Christmas in St. Louis for will be just what you need to ‘recover’ from all this.

“Do you think, Father,” Dante asked, not giving Richard time to respond, “the dog might come with me?”

In that moment, Richard could have almost sobbed…or shouted. “Just call her name,” he said, gently.

Dante inhaled deeply on his smoke. “Cecelia,” he said, “want to go for a walk?”

The dog climbed down off the couch, did that little stretch that dogs do, the one that looks like a bow, and trotted over to Dante and the door. Lt. Caggiano bowed from the waist, returning the salute, smiled back at Mara and Richard like a child on Christmas morning, not sure what to do about the presents under the tree, opened the door for Cecelia and they left.

Neither of them spoke for a minute or two after Dante and the dog had gone. Then Mara finished up the details that still confused Richard. She told him it was possible that originally Stevenson did try sodium penathol for his grief. Dr. Weinstein, who she’d interviewed a few hours before, though he had no business giving Stevenson the prescription, certainly believed that was true.

“Or maybe he got it for this eventuality,” Richard said, grieving himself, “for when things fell apart….But why would he give it to those two idiots?”

Mara told him Jonas Christian was a certified practical nurse who had worked for years in nursing homes in Jamaica and was perfectly qualified to administer drugs, though he probably had no idea how ‘truth serum’ worked, if it worked at all. And when both their victims died, Jonas, most likely drunk as a skunk, decided to stage a drowning.

“They had a bucket of ocean water where they kept minnows for bait when they really fished—not what they did ‘down there’.” She moved her head toward the front door and the rocky beach a quarter of a mile beyond. “He didn’t want to use all the salt water and lose the bait—he was very drunk, remember—so he switched to bottled water.”

Certainly, she said, it was the most botched faked drowning, which isn’t common, in all of history since they left two drowned people in a car and turned it over on a street they knew well because of all the late night walks down to swim out with money and return with drugs.

“I’m not sure how much Eli really knew,” she continued. “He was out hiding the Lexus while Jonas was supposed to get the ‘truth’ from Spencer and Johnson. Had Eli known about the water Jonas siphoned down their dead gullets, he most likely would have dumped them off the bluffs into the ocean instead of leaving them in the car. Eli was truly astonished to find out what all Jonas had done. He’s a lot smarter than his buddy.”

Richard found new confusion. “Eli and Jonas had fishing gear with them Monday night, when they were arrested and you beat the shit out of me with your gun. So what was the gear we found on the beach and that Malcolm found down the way? What was that about?”

Mara, smiled at him. “Trace evidence,” she said.

“What?”

“Our murderers must have watched as much ‘cop TV’ as you, out here on this island—hardly as lively as the island of Jamaica, you must admit.” She paused to let that set into Richard’s mind. “So they bought another set—Miriam and I found out where, but not ‘who’ last Saturday. Eli, who tried to clean up the mess, told Dante he threw it away because it had been in the Lexus and he was afraid we’d find ‘trace evidence’ on it.”

“And you would have?”

“We did,” she said proudly. “The Rhode Island forensic folks put that slicker and those waders in the Lexus. No ‘bout a doubt it.”

Richard almost laughed. “I haven’t heard that expression for years.”

She shook her head. “I’m from the Midwest where ‘years ago’ is ‘today’.”

Between what Stevenson had confessed—“may his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace”, Richard found himself saying in his head—and what the detectives had told him, the picture was coming whole for Richard at last.

“But the whole thing is really so profoundly stupid, from start to finish,” Richard said, staring unaccountably at the imperfection on her bottom lip and not her North Atlantic eyes.

“Episcopalians make terrible criminals,” she said, sliding her hand across the table to touch his arm. “They have no real sense or appreciation of evil.”

Richard thought about that for a while. Then he asked, “this Milo Miano fellow, he’s a really evil man?”

She nodded. “The worst,” she said, softly. And softer still she added, “but Stevenson was evil too….”

“When will it all come out, about Stevenson, I mean?” he asked.

She pursed her lips before speaking. “Not for a while. A week. A month. Who knows—Christmas. And depending on how the lawyers want to spin it, maybe never. We’re keeping it out of the media so the FBI and the State Police can gather evidence against Miano. But, as Dante believes, the Feds will get all the credit and still screw this up.”

He was still avoiding her eyes, not wanting to be drawn into their crashing surf and dark evenings. “So I can bury him out back—his ashes in the church yard—and people won’t yet know his part in this whole stupid mess? He can have a hero’s funeral?”

“I guess so,” she slowly answered. “Who knows when it will all come out? And another thing you don’t know is about the ‘will’.”

He was startled. “Stevenson’s will?”

“His last and the testament to boot,” she replied. “Oh, the Feds will find a way to get the cash—drug money after all. But the House goes to the Nature Conservatory and the porcelains go to St. Anne’s.”

“What will St. Anne’s do with statues and bowls?” he asked.

“You really are naïve, Richard,” Mara’s low voice was sweet, almost adoring. “Dante only got a little look at them when we were there and he thinks they’re worth four or five million.”

Richard was speechless, so Mara continued, “the 20 people or so who come to this church on a regular basis could start a museum or build a cathedral or help some people who really need it with all that money.”

Now he looked into her eyes and was swept away on the stormy seas, dangerous and deadly. She stared back at his brown eyes—the color of earth, soil, humus.

“Why does Stevenson’s ‘memory’ mean so much to you?” Mara finally asked.

“Stevenson was a ‘good man’ too,” he began, not knowing where he was going, but knowing he wanted to go there. “He was generous and kind and loyal. He’s been good to me, to me and my family, for almost 20 years. I can’t let him be ‘evil’, I’m not prepared to let that be.”

Mara watched him for a long moment and sighed. “Two innocent people are dead. In my book, that’s ‘evil’.”

Richard got up, went to the kitchen and came back with another bottle of the fine Merlot Dante had brought. When he had poured them both large portions, he sat back down.

“This Milo Miano,” he began, avoiding her eyes, staring at the “No Smoking” sign on the wall behind her that Dante hadn’t heeded for a moment, “does he have a family.”

“Richard…,” she began.

“No, just tell me.”

Deep breath and then she said, “yes, of course. He has a daughter and two sons, just like you, about your children’s ages if I’ve got that right from Miriam. The sons, Rocco and Milo, Jr. are as deep in it all as their old man. Marylynn is married to a computer programmer. She’s outside it all, but it’s Milo’s money they live on—drug money, prostitution money, ugly, dirty money all laundered and folded and smelling of fabric softener.”

“And grandchildren?” he asked, thinking of Susan holding their grandchild before she died.

She closed her eyes, as if seeing something in her mind. “Five or six, at least,” she said. “He’s under constant surveillance and, yes, we have video of their Thanksgivings and Christmases, of them on the way to Mass, of Milo with his grandchildren playing in the yard. Real Normal Rockwell stuff, just your average American mobster, drug-dealing, murdering family at play.”

This time he reached across the table and touched her arm. She looked at him and took a long drink of her wine.

“Just like the Godfather movies,” he said.

“I know what you’re going to say….”

“Maybe you can’t see the good in even the worst people….”

“And maybe you,” she answered after a moment, staring straight into his eyes, disarming him completely, “maybe you are just another Episcopalian, unwilling or unable to appreciate evil enough.”

Richard leaned back, deep in his almost forgotten theology, wrestling, as theology always does, always must, with the nature of Evil. The truth was, Richard did have difficulty with Evil when he tried to puzzle it out. The best he could do, usually, was affirm his belief in the overwhelming goodness and grace of God and describe Evil as a ‘metaphysical default’. Just as light needed darkness to be distinguished, good needed evil. He realized, not for the first time, how insufficient such a calm, theological approach was in the face of murder, death, violence and pain. So he decided to keep his thoughts to himself.

So they sat, quietly, simply in each other’s presence, for a half-hour or so, until Dante and Cecelia came back.

Dante threw open the door and the dog bounded into the room, “we’re home!” Dante called. Both Mara and Richard got up to welcome them.

*****

That moment sent Richard into a reverie that would come and go for days, for weeks, if the truth be known, until he packed his things and his dog into his wheezing Volvo and left Block Island. And the reverie, the wondering, the entangling question for him was this—“where is HOME?”

By the time he left ‘the Block’ he knew that island was not his home. And he knew that Worthington, Connecticut would not be his home again, except for as long as it took him to sell his house—about four days for $789,000, just a tad above Dante’s estimate, but it was a seller’s market. He and Cecelia house sat for a member of the parish who wintered in Florida, for reasons Richard never understood, having only been to Florida twice and hating it more the second time than the first. But it was a place to live while he said his ‘good-byes’ to his parish and met with his bishop and decided where ‘home’ would be next.

“Home”, he knew from the old and trustworthy aphorism, “is where the heart is.” So he considered where his children lived: New Haven and Boston and St. Louis and even considered living in a place in between, on some coordinates of those locations, but that ended up being Paducah, Kentucky, as best he could chart it and that seemed to make no sense.

But he knew, somehow subliminally, that when Dante and Cecelia arrived back at the Rectory after their walk that October night, Dante’s saying “we’re home” was right and true. Somehow, Richard began to imagine, “home” is not so much a place as a state of mind, a hopefulness, a belonging, a possibility.

One night he next week, Dante and Mara back in Providence, after the funeral for Stevenson which was so large it had to be held in the Baptist church and still several hundred people spilled out on the grass and the little square near the statue, he knew, somehow in an inexplicable, unexplainable, paradoxical, painful and joyful and real way, that there would be a ‘home’ for him..

And he, on that night and on a night two month’s later when he was at a dinner in his honor at St. Peter’s in Worthington, he had next to no idea where that home would be.

But he had regained Hope, a little Faith and he was thinking about praying again by that time.

Mara and Dante left at about two p.m. to write reports and have one more go at Eli and Jonas before they were flown off the island by the F.B.I. and escaped their inquiries for good. They took Richard’s car without asking. After a 20 minute nap, his head still a little out of sorts, Richard and his dog went down to the sea for a long while.

When he came back at 4:30, his car was in the parking lot and Mara was sitting in it, leaned back and dozing. He knocked on the window on the way by and she followed him to the house. But she stopped, just inside the door.

“There is more to say,” Mara told Richard, who was obviously, to both of them, agitated by her presence.

“Everything wrapped up now,” he asked, “all the paperwork done?”

“Dante is finishing it,” she said, coming inside to the kitchen table. “Sit down, Richard, we have to talk.”

He obeyed, like a timid school child and took his seat opposite her.

“We have to talk—just you and me—no Dante and no Stevenson, obviously. It’s just what we need to finish up because it ‘matters’, it really ‘matters’, whether you know that or not.”

Richard knew, really ‘knew’, that what was about to happen ‘mattered’. So he nodded, waiting for Mara to speak.

She held his gaze with her eyes and said, “whatever you are feeling, what you did was for the greater good.”

“The greater good,” he said, feeling suddenly angry, “betraying a friend of 20 years? Is something bigger than a friendship of two decades? And to be drawn into this by Dante…and you…you most of all.”

“I tried say this earlier, but obviously didn’t do it well enough,” she said. He’d never heard her voice so hard and clear, almost without the smokiness and whispering quality of her speech. “I could tell you I argued with Dante and told him it was a terrible idea to involve you in any way. I did do that, and I tried to tell you that. I could say all that and it would be ‘true’. But there is another ‘truth’, if you’ll allow multiple truths, Dante was right. He was right as rain. What you knew that you didn’t know, or however that Italian ass-hole put it, that was what broke this case wide open, Richard. That was what got the bad guys caught. That was what—beyond that, way beyond that, beyond those dupes from Jamaica—will bring down Milo Miano. What a toot. Who knew this crazy case would result in handing cops what they’ve been wanting for twenty years—as long as you knew Stevenson—something solid to nail the whole Miano mob.

“You and I were simply pawns in that. Unwillingly, both of us, I hope you believe I was as unwilling as you—but we were the pawns that moved first and broke open the chess board for bigger moves.”

“But you’d have gotten Eli and Jonas anyway, somehow. You were already thinking about them.” Richard sounded desperate to Mara, so she spoke softly, gently.

“Yes. You are right. But we had nothing to tie them to it all. We’ve had gotten them for the murders but not the drug drops. It was you who tied them to the church, to their connection, to Stevenson, to the pick up and drop off place. We were running blind and had no probable cause until your sermon.”

There was a long pause. Finally, Richard said, “Don’t think you can appeal to my vanity by quoting my sermon….”

“Preachers are ‘vain’,” Mara said, smiling as best she could. “Who knew?”

After a while, he smiled in return.

“But all the other stuff,” he said, “all the, God I hate the word, ‘flirting’, showing me your gun, spending all that time with me…just to solve a crime?”

“If that had been the only reason,” she began, feeling like she was flying in a dream above artic oceans, “and it was Dante’s plan…one I reluctantly took on but ‘took on’ nonetheless—if that had been the only reason, I would still say it was worth it.”

“The end justifies the means?” he asked, acid in his voice.

“It often does. And in this case it does surely, I think.”

He was tired of sitting so he stood up and walked around behind her. She scooted her chair around to face him.

“But it wasn’t the only reason. Is that what you said?”

She took a deep breath, trying to clear her mind, searching for the words she wanted. Richard waited. Albert, the agitated gull, was making a terrible fuss. Richard wanted to make a fuss as well—he wanted to squawk and complain that Mara was taking too long to replay. Instead, he waited.

“This is terrifying for me to say,” she began at last, “but I do care for you in a way that has become important—no ‘dear’—to me. The bad news is,” she began at last, “that it may be something like the Stockholm Syndrome—not exactly, but something like that.”

“Like Patti Hearst?”

She smiled. “Before my time…but, yes. Something like that. Here we are, you and I thrown together in some unexpected and somewhat ‘dangerous’ situation where you become, in some ways, my captive. Except it all breaks down there because, for me, it’s me identifying with you in your captive state. So, I begin to sympathize, then empathize and then begin to ‘care’ in a way the situation wasn’t meant to create.”

She paused and he thought for a moment. “That whole suggestion might be to give me a way out, a kind of ‘failsafe’…I know, that too is before your time…but, nevertheless, the ‘bad news’ applies mostly to me. I feel in danger. I identify with the object of my danger—you. I begin to rely on you, trust you, believe in you….On and on, like that…is that a possibility?”

She nodded. “But remember,” she said, as solemn as a Sanctus bell, “I’m enmeshed in this too. It’s a shared syndrome. So we both have an out if we need one.”

“When I came down to give Stevenson last rites, I hated you,” he told her, quietly. “But it doesn’t stick. Already the hatred is gone. Could that just be reverting to the Amsterdam Syndrome?”

“Stockholm,” she corrected, “and yes, that could be the case.”

“Want some coffee?”

Over coffee at the Rectory table, in their usual places, Richard began again: “If there is ‘bad news’ there must be ‘good news’. That’s what’s known as a metaphysical default….So, what’s the ‘good news’?”

Her hand reached out and touched his. “Tell me, Richard, is this where Susan usually sat when you were here?”

He glanced down and nodded. She took her hand away and pushed back from the table. Standing, she moved to the chair at the head of the table and sat back down.

“The ‘good news’ is this—for my part at any rate—being with you these few days has awakened something in me I thought was pretty much dead. I’d given up on Prince Charming. I’d resigned myself to being a detective and being Dante’s ‘girl Friday’. I don’t ‘date’ anymore. I have sex from time to time but it’s just instinctual and isn’t going anywhere. No man I’d want more than that from likes to have a romantic evening interrupted by my running off to look at the next dead body. So resignation is my modus operandi, my way of being in the world….

“So, whatever this is,” she waved her hand back and forth between them as if shooing away gnats or dispersing smoke, “I’ve realized I have some feeling left, some emotions hanging around….And that is your gift to me.”

He finished his coffee and wished he had one of Dante’s cigarettes though he hadn’t smoked since Jonah was born.

“Thank you for being sensitive enough to change seats,” he said, avoiding her eyes, wanting to speak clearly and not be drawn into the undercurrents of those gray seas. “The same goes for me—the feeling and emotion parts and even ‘longing’. I haven’t ‘longed’ for anything since Susan died except for her not to be dead.

“Resignation is an interesting way to be. I had a professor in seminary who believed ‘resignation’ was that sin against the Holy Spirit Jesus talked about and we’ve wondered about ever since. To be ‘resigned’ is to resist the Spirit’s power and purpose. No hope. No possibility….And I’ve been ‘resigned’ to being the mourning widower—that and nothing else.”

“And now?” she asked, again touching his hand.

Finally he looked up into her eyes. He noticed a tear running down her cheek—a single, perfectly pearl-shaped tear, almost even with her lips.

He smiled at her and said, reaching up to wipe the tear away, “that, Sgt Mara Coles, is your gift to me….”

They simply sat at the table, not moving, their hands no longer touching, for nearly ten minutes, until Mara looked at her watch and jumped a little in her chair.

“O my God, I’ve got to take Dante to the airport. He’s flying back to Westerly in half an hour.”

She got up quickly and put on her leather jacket that she’d tossed on the couch. Cecelia, who all this time had been dozing on the living room floor came immediately to life, expecting a walk.

“Do you want to come with me?” Mara asked. “I’ve got to pick him up at the Spring House in a few minutes?”

“He’s not coming to say ‘good-bye’?”

She smirked and rolled her eyes. “Dante’s no good at ‘good-byes’. Want to come?”

“No, I’ll take Cecelia for a walk and think about dinner.”

She shifted back and forth from foot to foot, like a small child with something difficult to ask.

“What is it?” he inquired.

She looked embarrassed. “May I take your car?”

He laughed. “Sure. The keys are in it…like always….”

She turned to go then turned back slowly. “May I come back for dinner? I’m not leaving until the early ferry tomorrow.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You’re expected. After all, we need to say ‘good-bye’.”

She nodded several times, smiling broadly. Then she left.

Richard let the dog out and then searched the kitchen for dinner. Without his car, he had to make do with what he had. There were eggs and cheese and a can of artichoke hearts and a few sausage links left over from Miriam’s visit. That and the Boston lettuce, still fresh, were enough.

He dutifully called each of his children in order of birth. Each of them was astonished at Stevenson’s involvement though Jeremy said “I always thought there was something a little ‘off-center’ about that guy. And the way the justice system works, he’ll probably not be involved at all, The Feds will find someway to exonerate him.” Jonah offered and Ivy League, mini-psychoanalysis and Miriam simply said, over and over, “holy shit, Daddy, holy shit,” to each and every revelation he provided. He assured them all that he was ‘fine’ and all would be well. He also let them know a Christmas in St. Louis sounded absolutely right, just perfect.

His parental duty done, he turned on public radio and was listening to Mozart when Mara knocked timidly at the door.

Cecelia ran to greet her, just ahead of Richard.

She looked both uncertain and nervous, two emotions he’d never seen in her before, she was holding a bouquet of bayberry branches and rosehips. “I picked these for you,” she said, holding them out.

“Is this really OK?” she asked after he opened the door and took the plants and before she came in, hugging the dog’s head.

He nodded, standing away. “Perfectly alright, if you don’t mind an omelet and what’s left of Dante’s wine for dinner.”

She touched his arm and engulfed him with her eyes. “I just want it to be alright,” she said in a whisper.

Richard discovered that Mara truly ‘didn’t cook”. She wasn’t sure how omelets were made or quite how to assemble a salad from lettuce and tomatoes and olives and dressing.

“How do you survive?” he asked her, genuinely concerned for her well-being.

“Lot’s of delivery take-out in Providence,” she said. “We’re a ‘real city’ in that respect.”

They ate in unaccustomed silence—Richard in his usual place and Mara at her new seat at the head of the table. Her simple offering was on the table in a vase he took from the church. Both of them were famished and exhausted.

After dinner and cleaning up, the two of them were sitting on the remarkably uncomfortable bench that ran around the deck at St. Anne’s in the dim light of a 40 watt bulb. It was a soft and unexpectedly warm October evening. They had missed that strange island twilight—all clear and stark and clean—was edging in from the east as the sun set behind the western hill, outlining the houses scattered on the crest in blue and orange. Darkness on Block Island, Richard had always thought, didn’t ‘fall’ so much as it rose up from the ground until it swallowed the light.

Mara was tired (“detecting wears you out,” he remembered her saying at some point) and her head was leaning back on the railing of the deck. Her eyes were closed and her legs stretched out in front of her. She was wearing a leather jacket, unbuttoned, and her simple white blouse didn’t quite meet the top of her jeans. There was the thinnest line of skin showing but Richard wasn’t looking at that. He was staring at her neck—long and vulnerable—and the barely perceptible pulse there.

He tried to remember if other necks in other times had left him quite so weak and breathless, if he’d ever watched blood pumping beneath the skin before.

“You know,” he said, so softly it startled him and he wondered if she heard him. The sleepless, irascible gull on the neighboring roof chose just that exact moment to fuss loudly at some perceived or imagined intrusion by another bird.

Mara took a deep breath and Richard imagined she was asleep. But then she spoke: “I know what?”

Words and phrases were suddenly rattling around in his head like three dozen marbles shaken and thrown into a bowl. He knew he had to say something and knew he probably shouldn’t but opened his mouth anyway.

“You know, I think,” it all began, “how powerfully I’m attracted to you. How I am coming to ‘care’ for you, for whatever psychological reason we can invent.”

He almost pictured the words above his head in one of those cartoon balloons. They were spoken and almost visible and there was no taking them back.

He watched her placid face and closed eyes and began to sputter. “This whole thing…this time we’ve spent together…all the craziness…the getting shot at….”

She sat up suddenly, smiling widely. “Almost getting shot at, remember that distinction….”

He laughed, noticing for the first time how shallow his breath had become, how he felt inside—cold and heavy around the heart but his mind racing and his hands growing warm in the gathering darkness.

Absently, almost without meaning to, he reached a hand toward her and she, surprisingly to him, took it in hers. Mara’s hand was almost exactly the same size as Richard’s, but younger looking, without the weird little brown spots he’d developed while he wasn’t noticing, softer in spite of who she was. A cop with tender hands, Richard thought, as if he was capable of logical thought at that moment, almost gasping for breath, his head about to explode from within, his heart racing.

She was staring at him and he dared not look away. Summer storm clouds of gray rolled across her eyes. Her voice, always like a whisper, was softer still. “I know,” she said, “I have feelings too.”

“For me?” Richard thought he thought, but he must have said it out loud because she answered, “of course for you….”

Nothing much happened for a long time—at least what seemed like a long time to Richard, though it might have been only a minute or so—he couldn’t tell because his fingers and Mara’s were moving and intertwined and he lifted her hand to his lips and then she lifted his to her lips and time stood still.

{The next morning, Richard would remember that and think: “just holding hands, that’s all it was, and it was as if she had reached inside me and drawn me out, my essence, my soul and touched it to her lips.” Though he was not a poet, Richard would try to write a poem about holding hands to send to her, but it wasn’t right, didn’t turn out and he folded the paper carefully half-a-dozen times, until it was a tiny thing, before throwing it into the trash.

Later, after the first boat left the Block with Mara on it and he hadn’t rushed to stop her, he fished the poem out of the trash and carefully pressed it out, thinking he might someday decide to mail it.

Hand in hand in hand,

until the hands were two no longer.

They formed something new, those hands.

Salt on the tongue, just a taste, a hint

of sweat, a scent of sea and something more.

Hope, perhaps, like a mid-wife calling forth

new life from an old life’s womb,

birthing something new and unexpected,

undeserved, unknown.

A kiss of fear on a finger tip, but more,

fear’s constant friend and greatest enemy:

something new—love’s first touch.

Almost every morning for two weeks after that, until he had buried Stevenson’s ashes and left Block Island for good, Richard read his pitiful poem a dozen times while eating breakfast. He knew enough to know how bad it was, how sentimental and personal. Nevertheless, he kept it in his wallet, well worn around the folds, just in case.}

His face was close to hers, he thought of kissing her and didn’t. They just held hands. Both of them stared, transfixed, at their hands.

“I thought I’d name the elephant in the room,” he said, almost giddy with the smell of her, so near to him.

She raised her eyes from their hands and looked at him. “Know what you get when you name the elephant in the room?”

He thought about it and thought of nothing. “No.”

She bit her lip the way that made him dizzy and then smiled, “An elephant with a name.”

They sat that way, holding hands, the darkness all around them, Richard thinking how good it was to have a hand to hold.

Just as he was thinking that Mara disentangled her hand, stood up and stretched, yawning.

“Time to go to the White House?” he asked. “I can drive you.”

She smiled at him. In nothing but the light of a 40 watt bulb beside the door to the Rectory, he could see her eyes—gray as the evening, as the stormy sea, as something else he didn’t quite understand.

“I checked out this afternoon,” she said, reaching for his hand and leading him into the house. She shut the door before Cecelia could come in.

“There’s just one thing you must do for me before I leave. I hope you will,” she said in a whisper. Richard nodded, though he didn’t understand, and followed her through the Rectory’s living room and down the hall to where he slept. Mara, without letting go of his hand, somehow found the lamp beside the bed and turned it on.

Whispering still, more than just her natural voice, whispering into his ear, she said, calmly, he thought: “you must lay down with me and see what you’re doing.” Only then did her hand leave his and she took off her jacket and dropped it on the floor. She kicked off her sneakers and climbed onto the bed, she looked back at him, nervously, as if she expected him to bolt and run.

Richard lay beside her and took her face in his hands. Slowly, with more patience and wonder than he imagined he had within him, he cupped Mara’s face in his hands and kissed her softly. He had long expected to feel the scar on her lips on his own, but he didn’t. What he did feel was her tongue touching his. Cecelia was barking outside.

They both laughed in mid-kiss.

“Let her go catch a deer,” Mara said.

“Be quite a mess in the morning if she does,” Richard responded, already kissing her again so she missed the last few words.

Over the course of half-an-hour Richard unbuttoned the five buttons of Mara’s blouse while kissing every part of her face and neck and ears and even her short, blonde hair, blinding to him in the harsh light of the bedside lamp.

“Should I turn off the light?” he asked, shyly, at some point.

“Not yet….” She said, soft as smoke.

He parted her blouse and continued kissing her, surprised that she was wearing a bra instead of her gun. He reached behind her in an almost instinctive way, to unclasp the black and lacy bra. In an awkward moment, Mara rose on an elbow to shed her shirt and bra. Richard looked at her, almost gasping and said, from a place he did not know, “I lay down with you, turn over for me.”

She looked at him, her face collapsing into shyness, and then she slowly turned her back to him and waited.

Richard put his right arm under Mara’s side and wrapped her in his left. His hands touched her breasts, tentatively at first, rolling her nipples with his fingers as he kissed her back. He cupped her, adored her, stroked her. After a great, long while, his left hand moved down her stomach and began, with painful slowness, to unbutton her jeans.

“Richard!” she said, anxiously.

His hand withdrew, gently across her belly.

“What?” he said, as best he could.

“I just thought you’d stopped breathing….”

He laughed. “I had,” he said, “thank you….”

Laughing she took his left hand in both hers and drew it to her mouth. He ached as she languidly, as if there were nothing at all in the world but time, took each of his fingers into her mouth and slowly withdrew them.

“Now…”, is all she said.

Richard opened the fly to her jeans and touched her, lifting her panties with his finger tips, moving under, marveling at the warmth and dampness, touching her, trying to remember to breathe.

After Mara shuttered, she took his hand again and gently, slowly, as before, tasted herself on his fingers. Then, before he knew what was happening, she turned to him and deftly reached across to the bedside light.

“Now…”, is all she whispered, plunging them into darkness.

VIII.

Wednesday, October 29—7:15 a.m.

When Richard woke up, she was gone and Cecelia was beside him in the pre-dawn. At sometime in the night, he remembered, laying still, not moving, that Mara had gone down the hall naked to let the dog in. When she returned to bed, shivering a bit, she needed to be held closely under the covers. Richard did that. They feel asleep that way with Cecelia settling in at the foot of the bed.

When he got up, he left the dog sleeping and made coffee. As the coffee maker steamed and whined, he found a pen and a piece of paper. He knew Mara would be on the first Ferry from Old Harbor. He had time to go and stop her or go and sail with her or simply go and say “goodbye.” He did none of those things. Instead he sat, eating Uncle Sam cereal and rye toast with butter and ginger preserves and tried to write a poem.

It began:

Hand in hand in hand,

until the hands were two no longer….

(From the Providence,Rhode Island Journal—12/12/03)

FEDERAL WEB ENSNARSES PROVIDENCE MOB FAMILY

A Federal grand jury in Boston has handed down over 140 separate indictments today against reputed Providence mob boss, Milo Miano, his two sons and twenty associates. The sweeping indictments on a host of RICO violations, resulted from the joint investigations, over several months, of the FBI, Homeland Security and the DEA.

Federal agents swept through Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, making multiple arrests last night and this morning. Officials at the Department of Justice refused to comment until after arraignments later today in Providence, Boston and Hartford.

Unnamed federal officials gave credit to the late Stevenson Matthews of Block Island for providing information leading to the investigation. “We couldn’t have reached this point without Mr. Matthews’ cooperation and help,” an unidentified member of the Justice Department commented.

There is a state grand jury in Providence still hearing evidence on many of the crimes covered by the federal….

Lt. Dante Caggiano of the Rhode Island State Police dropped his newspaper on the table of the far booth of a Providence shop named WE ‘R COFFEE, and lit a cigarette.

“You’ve read this crap?” he asked his partner, an almost beautiful woman, who was sipping a latte.

“You know you can’t smoke in here,” she responded, dryly.

He shook his head of short, curly, extremely black hair, kept from graying by an expensive hair stylist named Armando. “You tell me that every morning.”

“I’m sworn to uphold the laws of Rhode Island,” she responded in a voice like a foggy whisper, picking at a banana nut muffin.

He stared at her for a long moment. She had been looking even better than ever for a few weeks and he’d only just noticed it. Her blonde to white hair was cut short and still a bit damp from a morning shower. It sparkled, Dante noticed. So did Mara. And that, though he was a detective, he hadn’t noticed.

Embarrassed by how inattentive he had been recently to Sgt. Coles, he said, exhaling illegal smoke, “perhaps you should call your friend on Block Island and let him know what a prophet I was….How I knew the Feds would take all the credit and get it right by getting it wrong….”

She looked up from her breakfast. Her eyes, swirling gray below black eyebrows, engulfed him and drew him out to sea.

“My friend, as you put it, already knows,” she said. “And he’s been off ‘the Block’ for over a month.”

Dante glanced down, pulling the right sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit down a quarter of an inch so the fabric of the suit was just touching the one-of-a-kind porcelain cuff link (17^th century France) that held together the glaring white cuff of his shirt.

“You’ve heard from him and didn’t tell me?”

Sgt. Coles nodded, not averting her eyes for a moment, not even blinking. They sat that way, doing one of their renowned staring contests known throughout the Rhode Island State Police until Dante finally lowered his eyes. She seldom won but this time she did. Maybe, out of some deep seated goodness, he let her.

“And what are you doing for Christmas, Sgt. Coles?” Dante asked, dropping his cigarette butt into an almost empty cappuccino cup.

She leaned back into the booth and stretched a bit. “I might be flying to St. Louis.”

“You mean Iowa or Ohio or whatever backwater state you’re from.”

She pursed his lips and shook her head. “No,” she said, “I mean St. Louis.”

“Well,” he said, beginning to grin, “as Ricky Ricardo often said, ‘Lu-Cee, you have some splainin’ to do’.”

They both laughed—her laugh an octave lower than his. And the laughter was so loud that everyone in WE R COFFEE turned to stare.

since I mentioned mysteries

2011-07-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

Here's the penultimate chapter of Murder on the Block

VI.

Monday, October 27, 2003—6:11 a.m.

Mara was alone with Richard and Cecelia in the ‘big bedroom’ where whatever priest was serving St. Anne’s slept. She sat on the chair Stevenson had brought in from the kitchen for his night’s vigil. The parting between the detective and the Sr. Warden had been, understandably awkward. On one hand, Stevenson had kept vigil over Richard through the night. On the other hand, she had deep suspicions that Stevenson knew something more than was imaginable about the whole deal—the murders and the drugs. Mara realized there was no way to tie him to it yet; however, his gentle kiss on her cheek and his caring report on how Richard had passed the night was hard for her to accept. She was glad when he was gone.

Richard stirred about 7 o’clock. He opened his eyes and he and Mara gazed at each other for a long while. She put her hand to his forehead and held it there. He looked at her without smiling. They sat like that for another space of time, just looking at each other.

“I am so sorry…,” she began.

“Don’t worry about it….I should have never been here, and never let the dog out and never come running out there….”

“But I am so sorry I hurt you.”

“It was Eli and Jonas, wasn’t it?” he asked, knowing the answer.

She nodded.

“They were the bad guys?”

Another nod.

“For sure?”

“For sure,” she said in a voice that he would have thought ‘breathless’ but didn’t because he was accustomed to her voice.

Oh, Lord, Richard thought, ‘I’ve become accustomed to her voice’. When will I escape movies and TV?

Mara told him he needed to eat. Then she left him to go to the kitchen to scramble eggs and burn toast and make coffee for him. When she returned she brought the dog’s bowl full of kibbles and eggs. Cecelia finally dropped from the bed, enticed by eating as Mara fed Richard eggs on a spoon and heavily buttered toast from her hand.

She helped him sit up to drink the cooling coffee—milk and Splenda, just like the wanted it—and was about to ask him about Stevenson when the dog started to whine.

“She needs to go out,” Richard said, half-holding the cup and half-holding Mara’s hand.

While she was gone, letting Cecelia out, Richard gathered the pillows on his bed and laid back, knowing what he knew and wishing he could tell her, knowing he wouldn’t, not now, not yet.

When she came back she didn’t sit on the chair. She laid behind him on the bed and held him softly in her arms.

“I have something to tell you,” she said, caressing him from behind, “something you don’t want to hear…I think Stevenson knows more than he’s telling….”

He was torn with conflicting emotions. He tried to call up LWS time and realized, for the first time since she died, he couldn’t immediately count out the months and weeks and days, much less the minutes. Mara was leaning against him and he suddenly realized that she was trying to get close to him in all this debacle to ‘use’ him to solve her crime. It wasn’t his crime—he was an innocent bystander. Mara was using her guile and her body and her sensuality to ‘entrap’ him. He’d seen enough TV Cop Shows to understand why she was doing it, but it shocked him to realize how susceptible he was to her trap. And all this time he had began to imagine there was ‘something’ between them. But now she was about to violate his soul, his loyalty, his absolute commitments….How dare she?

His head was throbbing. He needed more Advil. He needed her not to feel so soft and inviting behind him. He needed to “come to himself” and shake her off—her and all her deceit and all her flirting. He was about to shrug her away when her cell phone rang.

She sat up and answered. It was Dante as she knew it would be.

“Any luck with the Padre?” he asked after she said ‘hello’.

“No.”

“He must be there with you? Right?”

“Yes.”

“Guess who got off a plane just now?”

She didn’t answer, aware of Richard so near her.

“Well, I’ll tell you, since you asked, James Tennant.”

Mara listened and did not speak.

“Just in case you don’t know, he’s an up and coming junior partner in the law firm of ‘Duwey, Cheetam and Howe…..”

Again, Mara was silent.

“How close are you, darlin’? In bed with him?”

“Affirmative,” she finally answered.

“Well, actually, Jimbo Tennant is part of the law firm of Craft, Newsome and Collins, the very same law firm that represents, guess who? Our old friend, Milo Miano. Flash is wetting his pants, the net is closing and some very big fish may be entrapped.”

Mara turned off her phone, knowing full well she would catch hell from Dante. She knew she had to go back to the little Police Office to be there when James Tennant, Esquire, who would inadvertently tie all this nonsense back to the mainland and hopefully to a very nasty mob connection, got there to represent Eli and Jonas.

She also imagined as she sat on the edge of the bed where Fr. Lucas was laying, that he thought she had done all this out of duty. She knew he would have a hard time believing that she was conflicted about ‘using’ him to solve her crime. Will he ever trust me again? she wondered, afraid to ask him outright. Can he ever believe how conflicted I’ve felt all the way through?

She re-insinuated herself next to him. But his body was hard, rigid, rejecting of her closeness.

“Richard,” she said, as truthfully as she had ever spoken, “I’m sorry.”

“My head doesn’t hurt that much,” he replied.

She truly embraced him for the first time and pressed her body against his back, seeking something, some response, not for ‘the case’ but for herself.

“That’s not what I meant,” she offered.

After a long moment he shifted away from her in the bed. “I know,” he gave back.

Slowly she rose from the bed. “Do you need anything?” she asked, kindly.

“My life back,” he responded, harshly.

She did not answer. Weighed down she walked down the hall and was opening the door when he spoke from behind her.

“When you come back, you’ll have what you need,” is what he said.

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she left, taking his car without asking.

James Tennant was good, she had to give him that. He had rehearsed both hung-over Jonas and vibrant Eli to refuse to answer any questions. And refuse to answer they did.

Dante offered everyone in the room, including the prisoners, a cigarette from his golden case. When they all refused, he lit up and blew smoke from four inhales before he asked: “Does either of you know who was paying you?”

Tennant trained, there was no answer.

“How did you get your instructions?” Dante asked into silence.

“I think it was from notes like this one,” he said, showing the note in a plastic bag they had found in the Jamaicans’ house. “But in a box in the church.” He put the communion set box on the desk and opened it with the key he’d taken from Eli’s neck.

“Do you know who left you the notes and the money to exchange on this buoy,” he put the buoy that the FBI frogmen had detached from the anchor that held it on the table, “for the drugs on this buoy that you then put back in the box in the church?”

Eli was shaking his head. He too wondered who the ‘connection’ was. But he didn’t know and his lawyer of last resort had told him not to talk.

“Let me mention some names,” Dante said, “and you tell me if you recognize them. James Tennant? Stevenson Matthews? Dante Caggiano? Milo Miano?”

Though he paused for half a minute or so between each name and the lawyer flinched involuntarily at the mention of Milo Miano, Eli and Jonas’ response was the same. Silence.

“OK,” Flash Gordon said, after the last silence, “I am going to take this conversation away from the Rhode Island State Police in about an hour. I am Agent Gordon of the FBI. In an hour, you will be answering questions from the FBI, which I assure you is an entirely different ordeal. You’re going back to your cell and you may talk with your lawyer….Just know this, you are ‘small fish’ in this fish fry. You can take the heat all by yourselves or give us something else to look forward to eating….”

After Officer Alt had taken the two men away, Jimmy Tennant trailing in their wake, Dante observed: “I liked the fish fry image greatly, Agent Gordon. Does it imply you are hungry?”

It was just past 11 a.m. when Mara and Dante and Flash slid into booths in the Mohegan Restaurant. They weren’t quite open but badges and Flash’s ID got them in. They sat for half-an-hour drinking water with lemon in it before they could order from the lunch menu and have drinks. FBI power only goes so far….

They all had bloody Mary’s though their lack of sleep and the general disposition of the case would mitigate against it.

“To unconventional ‘cops’,” Dante toasted them.

So they ate fried seafood and consumed several glasses of vodka and tomato juice, knowing the ‘missing link’ was still missing.

Finally, over bad coffee, Mara told them that Richard had promised that they would have what they needed. Flash paid and walked back up the hill to Block Island’s representation of a ‘jail’. Dante and Mara had some cheese cake for dessert, just to give Richard time for what he was doing, and then drove his car back up Spring Street to the church.

Richard was prone on the couch listening to a cassette of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks on the little tape recorder he sometimes used to record his sermons, an ice bag on his head, several ibeprophins in his stomach and the bottle on the coffee table along with a bottle of Diet Coke. He had slept after Mara fed him breakfast, after he began to think he was being ‘used’. When he woke up at a bit after 10 he had taken Advil and called Stevenson to ask him if he could come over. He remembered Mara telling him how Stevenson had spent the night with him and would be back soon and listened to Mara’s apologies and seen her sad eyes fill with tears three or four times.

Richard was torn between them—his old friend and this woman who had insinuated herself into his life further than was safe for him. He was torn between loyalty and discovering the truth, between old ties and justice.

“Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,

blowing down the backroads headin’ south.

Idiot wind, blowing everytime you move your teeth,

You’re an idiot, babe,

It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe….”

He heard a car pull up in the gravel and Cecelia rose, tail wagging to greet Stevenson as he came and opened the door. So proprietary, Richard thought, just like always….but I never really noticed.

The Senior Warden was dressed as if going to court—a pale gray suit with tiny black pinstripes, a blindingly white starched shirt and a Yale tie. But he wore waterproof, ankle high duck boots. How incongruous, Richard realized, always enough misdirection with Stevenson to keep you from coming to opinions, from seeing through the guise…but I never really noticed.

“Richard,” Stevenson said, a mixture of sympathy and cheerfulness in his voice, “how’s your head? I hear you were a hero….”

“Hardly,” Richard laughed, making his head hurt. “More like the anti-hero, or non-hero….”

Stevenson smiled, showing his perfect teeth. “But you were there for the ‘shoot-out’….”

Richard pulled himself off the couch. It felt like his right eye was about to come out of his left ear, but he made it to his feet, staggered a bit, waved Stevenson away when he tried to help him and said, “or the ‘anti-shoot-out’ or ‘non-shoot-out’.”

This time Stevenson laughed and Richard forced himself to laugh in return. He spent the night watching over me, Richard reminded himself, already regretting what he was about to do.

Making his way around the coffee table toward the bookshelf where the tape player was. “Let me turn this off,” he said. Dylan was singing “You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars after losin’ every battle…. After pushing “Stop”, he pressed “Record”, as quietly as possible, moving the volume to high. Turning toward Stevenson he said, “Drink?”

The elegant man looked at his watch. “A little early,” he said, “but if you’re imbibing, so will I. Scotch maybe. Neat.”

Richard poured the drinks—a full two fingers of scotch for Stevenson and a dribble on the rocks with lots of water for himself. His mind was racing—how do I do this? Mara and Dante would know. And what about my loyalty to this man—all he’s done for me, 20 years of friendship? And yet…yet…if I’m right he is a drug dealer and a murderer, after the fact, but a murderer all the same.

Richard took a deep breath, trying to remember every interview with a suspect he’d ever seen on Law and Order or read about in the mystery books he used to devour. Then he whispered what might have been the first ‘real’ prayer he’d prayed in over a year—“help me”.

“Cheers,” Stevenson said, raising his glass.

“Salutations,” Richard replied, and they drank. Richard noticed that his friend’s hand shook, almost imperceptibly as he lifted his glass to his mouth. He also noticed Stevenson almost drained the drink in one gulp. Maybe this will work, God, Richard thought.

“About this whole mess,” Richard began, his head pounding, suddenly thinking scotch might have been good for him as well, “I have a few questions I need to ask you.”

Stevenson’s eyes bored into Richard’s. He finished off his drink and pointed to his glass. Richard went to the kitchen and brought the whole bottle to the coffee table. After replenishing his drink—2 and a half fingers, Richard noticed, Stevenson finally responded: “Questions?” was all he said.

“Well,” Richard began, his concussion suddenly releasing a whole panoply of symptoms—light too bright, dull pain, mild nausea—“I just think you might know a lot more than you’re saying….” After Stevenson took a healthy drink and stared at the ceiling, Richard added, “It’s just something I think.”

“And your evidence is?” Stevenson asked, filling his glass again. Richard was emboldened by the quantity of scotch the old man was drinking and at such speed.

“I’ve seen the note that Eli and Jonas got from their contact. And I know the handwriting.”

Stevenson, in mid-sip, started to speak, spilling Scotch on his tie and shirt. Bingo, Richard thought, holding up his hand to stop the Senior Warden from responding.

“And I know about the box—the box in the sacristy…. You wouldn’t have left the porcelain set there. With it in the box there was no room for the money you left and the drugs you picked up. But you brought it back sometime before the search.” Suddenly Richard had a revelation. “You brought it back in your Bean bag with the chicken soup, just to show it was there. And I know where the Jamaicans got the sodium penathol.” Richard watched Stevenson’s countenance fall. He had always thought that was just a line from the Psalms, but now he saw it happen. All the confidence and hubris and sophistication of Stevenson Matthew’s demeanor melted away. He was no longer a ‘mover and shaker’, friend of presidents, wealthy New England scion of law and banking—instead, he was only an abandoned boy from a dying town in Pennsylvania.

“I hate doing this, Stevenson,” Richard almost whispered, almost in the tone of Mara’s natural voice, “but I have to know. I just have to know….”

Stevenson regained some of his regal bearing. He finished off another glass of liquor and poured yet another slowly.

“And how much of all you know,” Stevenson asked, a bit of his childhood accent slipping in from fear and alcohol, “have you told your new friends from Providence?”

Richard realized it might be the last time in the conversation he could tell the truth. So many times in his obsession with TV and movies he had felt a twinge of doubt when interrogators intentionally lied to the suspects. That wasn’t fair, he always thought. But now, in that moment, his friend of 20 years held in the balance, he realized that lying is sometimes necessary, sometimes lying is the way to Truth.

“I’ve told them nothing,” he said, truthfully.

Stevenson sighed audibly. When he spoke his voice was so slurred that Richard knew he hadn’t started drinking just a few minutes ago.

“I suppose I need to tell the truth,” he said, softly. Then he added, a little drunken edge to his voice, “and you would tell me, doubtless, that the Truth will set me Free?”

Richard leaned back into his chair across the coffee table from his old friend. He’d never had any illusions that Stevenson was a pious man—but now, in this moment, knowing what he knew, imagining what he didn’t yet know—Richard ached. Loyalty was always his highest virtue. And, in spite of whatever else, he was loyal to this man.

“You’ve done so much for me, Stevenson,” he began….

Drink had turned Stevenson a bit manic. He stood up and started pacing around the room, glass in hand, a lot like Dante did, but without the same gracefulness.

“Damn right, I have,” Stevenson said, anger edging into his voice. “And now I need to know what you are going to tell those fucking detectives you’ve become so fucking bonded with…in more ways than one….”

The look Stevenson gave him turned him into “bad cop” in his amateur role in all this. That look was lascivious, the only word Richard could find for it. And he realized Stevenson had already imagined what he, himself, had imagined—Richard and Mara locked in an embrace, rolling on the bed, showering together.

“Didn’t take so long to forget your precious Susan, your dead and precious Susan, did it?” Stevenson was staggering in the middle of the room, his eyebrows arched, his eyes wet with drink and imagining. “You called out for the beautiful detective last night. She cold-cocked you and yet you were whimpering her name…’Mara….Mara….show me your gun, Mara….” And then, drunk as he was, he slowly moved his crotch in and out, swinging his hips. He took a drink and laughed.

Richard suddenly remembered all the ways Stevenson had looked at Susan, through all the years, all the innuendos he had spoken, all the overly long embraces at 19 arrivals and departures from the Block. The Truth, he suddenly realized, the Truth will set you free…but first it will piss you off….

“It’s your life we’re talking about here, not mine” Richard said, hoping Stevenson was too drunk to notice the blinking light on the tape player that said “recording”.

Then Richard lied—bald faced and boldly. “I’ll never tell them what I know,” he began, stepping out into virgin territory for him, “but if I am to remain ‘loyal’ to you, I must know. I must know, my old friend.”

For three-quarters of an hour, after Stevenson, exhausted by too much morning scotch and too much guilt, had collapsed back into his chair, the man talked. He was deflated and, Richard believed, knew the priest would tell on him.

It was then that Stevenson recounted his lonely, painful childhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, abandoned by his father and raised to greatness by his house-cleaning mother who worked herself to death, literally, for him. He had recreated himself as a scholarship student at Yale, married into money, made tons of money himself, become a man ‘to be reckoned’ with, lost his wife’s fortune on bad investments and been drawn into a scheme by one of his less than savory clients, who was a silent partner to the Mianos, to smuggle drugs to the mainland via Block Island.

“I needed the money,” he said, weeping now, a pitiful sinner and drunk, “to BE who I had become….”

He laid out the whole plot to Richard, much of which he had guessed already.

Richard spoke very little, hoping the tape was long enough and wouldn’t click off at some point, exposing his blatant lies. But he did interrupt Stevenson’s confession from time to time.

“The two people in the Lexus,” he asked, “did you order them killed?”

“No, of course not,” the old man, looking older by the minute, answered. “I just provided the sodium penathol. And I warned them about using too much….”

“The truth serum you got from Dr. Weinstein?” Richard said softly, “because you convinced him it could help you deal with your wife’s death?”

“How did you figure that out?” Stevenson asked, seeming genuinely curious.

“The internet,” Richard said, kindly. “A Time Magazine article from 1958 when some doctor had decided sodium penathol would help people deal with trauma in controlled doses.”

Stevenson laughed. It was a real laugh, not the laugh of someone drunk. “The internet! That’s where I found it too,” he said. “How about that.”

“Kismet,” Richard replied, a little harsher than he meant to be. Then he asked, softer again, “did you ‘warn’ them in person? Did you tell them face-to-face how much was safe?”

Stevenson looked confused—drunk and bewildered. “I never met the two gentlemen,” he said. “I’m not stupid. It all started in Providence. They were ‘sent’ here to do this. I mailed them a key to the box and communicated only by notes…notes they were supposed to destroy.”

“And they did,” Richard commented, “except for that last one you must have pushed under the door to their house.”

The old man shrugged and Richard’s guilt at betraying him grew. But the plunged on: “I have to ‘know’ the whole story, Stevenson….”

So Stevenson laid the whole thing out—how he had turned in the Jamaicans with an anonymous call to Homeland Security and DEA. How he and the contact he had in Providence had decided to set them up with a false ‘delivery’. How he thought it would be all over—no connection to him—and, most damning, how they could start again in the spring with new runners, new swimmers, new middle men.

“There are powerful people involved in this,” he told the priest, “people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who crossed them….” He paused for a long moment. “You, for example. Your children. Your grandchild. They are very powerful.”

Richard took it as the threat it was. Stevenson realistically couldn’t depend on Richard’s ‘loyalty’. Stevenson needed to cause fear in Richard’s heart. But that heart was too full of new life, of coming alive again, that the threat made him angry.

“Do you think they’re more powerful than God?” he asked.

Stevenson shook his head, amused. “God doesn’t hold a candle to them,” he said.

Shortly after that, it was over.

Richard walked him to the porch when it was finally all told and recorded over Bob Dylan. Stevenson, always the gentleman, offered his hand to Richard and Richard, always loyal, took it. But before letting go, he had one more question, one that shouldn’t be on tape.

“Cynthia’s death,” the priest asked, “was that really an accident?”

Once more, as it had when they began, Stevenson’s face collapsed.

“Oh, God, Richard, you don’t think I could have killed her?” he asked, suddenly sober.

“You’d lost all her money,” Richard replied, leaving that to hang in the Autumn air of an October afternoon on and island in the Atlantic.

“None of that mattered,” Stevenson whimpered. “She knew. I told her I’d practice some law, get on some paying Boards, even sell my collection. She said it didn’t matter, it was just money. She had just forgiven me when I let go of the tiller on the sailboat to hug her and a wave turned us over. It was a mistake even a rookie sailor wouldn’t make. But I did. She forgave me and in return, she drowned.”

“That’s what really happened?” Richard asked, growing less skeptical. “So why didn’t you follow through with your promise to her?”

Stevenson staggered a bit and Richard kept him from tumbling down the steps from the deck to the parking lot.

The old man took a deep breath. His alcohol dampened eyes were now full of real tears.

“I got greedy after she died…and needy. You must know how that is, you of all people. But Cynthia’s death was a tragic accident…one of my own making, I must grant you that. But I loved her. That…that, you must believe, my friend. And forgive me,” he whispered.

Inexplicably, totally out of character, Richard raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross over Stevenson.

“In the name of God,” he said, prayerfully (his second ‘real’ prayer since Susan died), “you are forgiven.”

Stevenson embraced him, stinking of scotch and guilty sweat. Then he climbed in his Jeep and turned around awkwardly in the parking lot.

He lowered the passenger side’s window and called to Richard.

“Tell them I won’t run,” he said. “I’ll be home when they need me….”

Then he drove off, wobbling on the dirt road from side to side.

Dante and Mara found Richard drinking the rest of the bottle of scotch that Stevenson had left. He had told himself getting stinking drunk would help the pain in his head and his heart. But he knew it wouldn’t—he was just lying to himself.

“Drunk again,” Dante said, “and the crime not yet solved. Some detective you are….” Then he noticed the look of distain Richard gave him and stopped talking. He glanced at Mara who was behind him.

She sat on the coffee table and, leaning forward, asked, “what is it, Richard?”

He looked at the glass in his hand and sat it down beside her. Her eyes were soft gray in the afternoon light and Richard felt them pulling him in, disarming him. But he resisted and stared unspeaking at her. His heart was breaking in three pieces—one for the life he had known that was over, one for Stevenson and loyalty and one for her.

“Richard…?” she said. He thought he heard real concern in her voice, but how could he trust it now?

“I have your pound of flesh,” he said, so pained he didn’t even chide himself for the literary allusion.

The two detectives stared at him in mutual confusion. He almost smiled to see them so dissembled.

With more energy than he could have imagined he had, he got up with Mara’s help and went to rewind the tape on his machine.

“Listen,” he said.

Dylan’s voice came roaring out of the machine since Richard hadn’t turned the volume back down. “I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that, sweet lady….”

“Bob Dylan? I don’t understand.” Dante said, standing as still as a statue.

Richard fast forwarded the tape just a little. He knew the song by heart. “Listen,” he said, his voice breaking as he spoke.

And they did.

When Stevenson’s voice stopped, there was the sound of a door shutting and then muffled voices. Richard realized it was he and Stevenson on the deck talking. Then the machine clicked off and everyone in the room involuntarily jumped a little. They sat for a while, no one speaking.

Then Dante slowly took out his cell phone and punched in numbers. “Flash is still on this rock, probably at a bar somewhere,” Dante said, listening to the tinny ringing.

“Dante,” Richard said.

The detective held up his hand. “Flash, it’s the Brahmin—right, Stevenson. We have him on tape with the Padre, full confession….” Dante listened. “We’ll meet you at his house. He isn’t running….No, it’s a sure thing, a damn sure thing. The only detective around here wears a collar.”

Dante waved to Mara. “Get the tape, let’s go….”

“Dante,” Richard said again.

“Richard, thank you so much for this,” he said when Mara handed him the cassette. “We’ll talk when….”

“Dante!” This time Richard used ‘the voice’ he always used with the generations of dogs who had shared his life when they misbehaved.

Just like the dogs, Dante and Mara stopped in their tracks. Dante had the door half-open and held it there. Mara stared, shocked. Even Cecelia, hearing ‘the voice’, sat and looked expectantly at Richard.

Richard took a breath and said, softly, “he’s a good man, Dante.”

Dante responded in a measured, quiet voice. “He’s also a drug smuggler and an accomplice to murder. Is he really a ‘good man’?

Richard glanced at Mara. She seemed to understand a bit of what he was saying.

“And his wife’s ‘accident’, Padre, that might have been….”

“Don’t even go there, Dante. Don’t even start,” Richard said, realizing in the moment that he had ‘gone there’ with Stevenson himself. A barely perceptible groan escaped him. “It’s your job to see ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, Dante. But it’s my job to find the ‘good’ in even ‘badness’….What Stevenson did was indefensible, but I can defend him as a man. He kept this tiny church going and gave me his support. Maybe even his love. So he’s a ‘good guy’ in my heart, no matter what he did.”

Dante, Mara and Cecelia remained still, waiting to be released.

“Just remember that, OK?” Richard sat back down, drained by drink and emotion.

Dante nodded. “I’ll remember,” he said. So Richard waved them away.

After a few moments, Cecelia came over to rest her snout on Richard’s knee. He rubbed her gently.

“And he’ll be dead when you get there,” he said to the departed detectives.

While drinking the first of what needed to be several cups of coffee, Richard wandered into the church’s sacristy to get a vial of holy oil, a white stole and a Prayerbook. When he came back to refill his cup, the phone rang, as he knew it would. It was Mara.

“Flash is coming to get you, Richard,” she said. “I think you know what you’ll need.”

“I’ll be waiting,” he said. He would take the last rites of his church to Stevenson, anoint his cooling head and pray the solemn prayers. It was an ironic act of loyalty, he thought, the least he could do—all he could do.

*****

It was dark when Richard heard his own car pull onto the gravel of the parking lot. Dante had commandeered it, just like a cop in a movie, for the last day. The detective had obvious long ago dropped the guise of ‘not being on the island’, but his car wasn’t. It was back in Providence in the garage of Dante’s townhouse.

He had been sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the light of the muted TV as people and events and television shows paraded before his eyes with no sound. He still remembered the warm clay-like feel of Stevenson’s forehead against his thumb as he smeared the oil and whispered the ancient words of relief and release in the ear of his dead friend:

“Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world;

In the name of God the Father Almighty who created you;

In the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you;

In the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.

May your rest be this day in peace,

and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.”

The ‘congregation’ had been Mara, Dante, Flash, Stevenson’s sobbing Cuban house keeper and the two EMT’s on the island—Virgil, a part-time fisherman and Stella, a secretary at the tiny Block Island high school. Both of them were weeping. They had known Stevenson for most of their lives and genuinely mourned his passing. Richard, as soon as he arrived, had dispatched the law-enforcement types on duties: to find a wine glass and plate that matched, to find wine and some sort of bread—crackers would be nice, and to locate a small table that could be placed near the exquisite red leather couch Stevenson’s body was lying on. He had, obviously to everyone but the EMTs, chosen this spot to die. The syringe and vial of sodium penathol was still beside the kitchen sink. Stevenson had been well enough acquainted with his addiction to truth serum to know he’d have time to reach the couch and assume a proper position before the drug stopped his heart.

Dr. Weinstein had come and gone. He’d declared the patient dead and been questioned about the drug by Mara, who was gentle and kind in her inquiries. Richard was both angry with the 90 year old doctor’s complicity in all that had happened—addiction, murder, the ripping of the fabric of the small year-round society of the island—and in admiration of Dr. Weinstein’s loyalty to an old friend. And, since he was gone, one of the few Jews on ‘the Block’, though he’d not been to Shabbat services in several decades, it seemed only appropriate to the priest in Richard to celebrate a funeral mass in the presence of Stevenson’s cooling body.

Mara had found a half-empty package of cracked-pepper crackers. Dante returned with a bottle of Port worth several hundred dollars and Flash brought in an antique table—probably Louis XIV vintage. And together that odd assortment of worshippers shared, Richard believed if no one else did, in the very Body and Blood of Christ after he had said the proper words and broken the crackers.

No one dared not receive this odd and curious sacrament. Even Dante took a piece of cracker from Richard’s hand on his tongue and sipped—though not as deeply as he would have wished—from the fragrant, thick wine. At the last, Richard took a tiny piece of cracker, dipped it in the wine and reached over to the haunting oval of Stevenson’s mouth to place it on his dead tongue.

Dante shivered and was about to tell the priest not to touch the body again, certainly not to put foreign objects, like a wine soaked piece of cracker, in the body’s mouth. But Mara touched him lightly on the sleeve.

“He needs to do this,” she whispered, “we’ll explain to the M.E.”

So Dante held his tongue, still very much alive, while Stevenson’s tongue, dead almost an hour, held the Body and the soaked in Blood of Christ.

Dante did not need to worry. Dr. Anthony Jay, the Rhode Island State Police Medical Examiner would never see Stevenson’s body. It was flown off the island on a FBI helicopter Flash had summoned and delivered to a morgue in Quantico, Virginia. Cause of death was, as at least four of the people at that odd mass knew, “sodium poisoning.” However, the autopsy would also reveal a benign but growing brain tumor and a severely compromised liver. Stevenson Matthews had become a ‘dead man walking’ long before the truth serum set him free.

After the body and Flash Gordon were gone, Mara and Dante did a half-hearted search of obvious places in Stevenson’s house. They found note paper that matched the note they’d found at the Jamaicans’ house and a pen that contained ink identical to the ink on that note. They bagged them as evidence along with the syringe and vial that were easily matched to the syringes and vials from the house above the bluffs already in evidence bags.

They emptied Stevenson’s desk, a brilliant reproduction of the desk JFK had in the Oval Office of all it’s paper—carefully filed phone bills, bank statements and a damning personal calendar enclosed in an expensive leather binder—and placed them carefully, hands covered in RISP issued rubber gloves, into an empty box that once held 12 bottles of vintage Merlot. They went through all of the 17 rooms of the house, gathering whatever they though needed gathered and meticulously storing it for use in the grand jury case they were sure would occur.

All that time, Richard sat on the couch where Stevenson had chosen to die and tried to sort out hid emotions and thoughts. The housekeeper had long before gone to a neighbor’s house to make calls and plans to leave the island.

At some point, Mara drove him back to the rectory while Dante either gathered more evidence or admired the collection of porcelains Stevenson had accumulated over the years.

He still had mild symptoms of his concussion, but the symptoms that most obsessed him concerned his broken heart. Mara drove skillfully and carefully back down to the town and out to the church. In the beginnings of dusk, they said not a word to each other in the ten minutes that drive required. They both got out of the car and climbed the three steps up to the deck and the door of the house. Cecelia, ever predictable, greeted them with groans of joy and movements born of the natural grace of her species.

Still, the two humans did not speak, except to say the dog’s name and appreciate her greeting. Richard suddenly turned and opened the door. Cecelia flew through it and he followed. And Mara followed him.

The dog was already 25 yards ahead of them, running toward the sea. Mara drew even with Richard, both behind the dog, and they walked in silence.

It took a great dose of courage and a jolt of genuine fear that she was about to lose something she wasn’t even sure she wanted for Mara to speak.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” she said.

“Of course you could have,” he answered tersely.

“It must have taken all your courage to make that tape.”

“Or all my manipulation or all my disloyalty….”

His voice was so tinged with anger that she walked for perhaps two minutes before she replied.

“Ok, it started as a ‘job’, my ‘role’ in getting the bad guys. That’s what I do, Richard, I get the bad guys.” She paused, hoping and praying he would respond. But when he didn’t, she continued: “and it became something else. I don’t know what and I don’t know when…but something very different. I came to admire you and appreciate you and then, I don’t know quite how to say it, to ‘care for you’. And tomorrow you and Dante and I will talk about the whole story and try to see if we can in any way understand what happened here on this island.

“But you need to know this. I wish we had met somewhere else, somehow else. And I know you think I’ve messed with you, somehow, someway. And I need you—really need you—to know that was part of it but not all of it….not all of it at all. Not at all.”

By that time, Sgt. Coles was weeping, something she didn’t do often, hardly at all. And she was feeling the need to get away from him, to give him space and give herself space. So she grabbed his arm and lifted her hands to his face and kissed him angrily on his lips. Then she turned and walked back to the house and his car, which she would drive back to complete whatever interrogation was possible with Eli and Jonas. Let him follow his dog into the sea. Let him disappear from her life. That would be much better. Let him live his life without knowing how she knew the courage it took for him to break the case wide open, like an egg in a frying pan. Let him live his life without knowing that what began for her as a ‘job’ became something altogether different.

Richard stood in the field and watched her walk away. He knew that whatever happened from this moment on he would never forget her gait, how she walked, the unselfconsciousness of it all, how he could know her from afar by that walk, that gate, lovely beyond graceful.

He let Cecelia wear herself out with running, pretended to eat some dinner, drank three glasses of water with four Advils and went to bed, knowing he was alone until morning. His sleep was long and dark and without dreams.

The Norway Tragedy

2011-07-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

What happened last week in Norway is astonishingly horrible. It is a small country, just under 5 million, only a million more than CT. The impact of what happened is, proportionately, more horrific than 9/11 was for the U.S.

And everyone seems shocked, appalled and asking 'how could this happen there?'

I've been reading lots of Scandinavian mystery novels the last few years. The Steigh Larson trilogy everyone has read and lots of Henning Markell and Anne Holt and Karin Alvtegen among others.

Mystery novels, it seems to me, are mirrors of a society, stories of the darkness of a culture. And those novels are full of characters like the mass murderer--white supremacists, neo-Natzis, serial killers, anti-immigration extremists. There is a dark underbelly to the low unemployment, high (and free) education, great health care image of the Scandinavian countries. I knew that through Mystery Novels. The writers of mysteries in that part of the world are not surprised by what happened last week.

The Laws of Nature (and Washington)

2011-07-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me this morning that what is going on in the nation's capitol may just be confirmation of the Laws of Nature. For example:

A. "What goes up must come down." Every time the President invites Congressional Republicans up to the White House to negotiate, they walk out and head back down Pennsylvania Avenue.

B. "Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction." Whenever the Democrats off a 'deal' (even the one with the deepest cuts anyone has suggested or the most recent one that gave the Republicans everything they said they wanted at the beginning of this mess) the House reacts by saying that's not at all what they wanted.

C. "A body at rest tends to stay at rest." The Republicans won't budge.

D. "A body in motion tends to stay in motion." The Tea Party is driving us all deep into a tragic mistake.

All this time I've thought the problem was because of partisan politics. In actuality, Issac Newton predicted this long ago....