To the 8th ring of hell...

I wanted to write about all this yesterday, when it happened, but I knew I had to calm my nerves and steel myself to face a keyboard. I didn't have even a single glass of wine last night, knowing any alcohol at all would send me spinning into memories and thoughts I didn't want to revisit or have.

No, I'm not talking about the elections nationwide--that was only the 4th ring of hell (being a liberal, I actually feel more comfortable when I know I'm in the minority and that the Conservatives have to bumble around pretending to govern and will look goofy by the 2012 elections....)

Yesterday morning, I was eating breakfast, licking my Tea Party inflicted wounds, when Bern innocently asked, "what do you have planned for this morning?"

I actually had nothing planned, preferring to mope around and feel sorry for myself in a world where John Bayner is Speaker of the House. So I told her I was free.

"Good," she said, "I want to go to Ikea...."

My blood pressure plummeted and I dropped my cereal spoon in the remaining milk. I felt cold fingers pressing on my temples and spine. Oh No, Not Ikea!

I know lots of people love, simply love Ikea. But I fear it like the Plague. The store in New Haven is huge--I can't even picture how huge it is because of the way they've made both floors into Labyrinths worthy of Greek mythology. But I know a store that has walk ways called things like "Short Cut to Lighting" is enormous.

But as large as it is, and as tasteful, I feel claustrophobic inside it, as if I'm locked in a bright, well designed closet or an attractive, well-lit coffin. I've tried to analyse my reaction to Ikea to no avail. In fact, if each department were in a separate building--like lots of small shops in a large strip mall--I would objectively like it. I like the stuff, marvel at its ingenuity and how cheaply the Swedes can make quality stuff. But put together in a building about the size of the Sistine Chapel, with too many walls and walkways and maps that are impossible to make sense of and 'short cut to bedding' signs, I can't cope.

We went to buy a bed and mattress for one of the guest rooms that was an old bed left to me by my Uncle Russell with three futon pads piled one on top of the other rather than a real mattress. And, being from the 1940's or 50's, you sleep a yard or so above the floor. I believe you could get nosebleed being in that bed. Short people need to take a run to get onto it. So the need was real and serious, but why not Sears, why oh why Ikea, building of anxiety and nightmares.

I'm sure many of you (4 or 5 of the dozen or so people who read this--why don't you tell all your friends about it?) have been to Ikea. It is, after all, an icon of our culture. And, even I, Ikea-phobic as I am, must admit the stuff is neat and...well, cheap. But you have to wander around endlessly to find what your looking for--the maps are a waste of time though there are maps everywhere, along with huge yellow bags and 'shopping lists' with golf pencils. Then, when you find the department you want you have about a gazillion choices of the same item. There were at least 50 different bed frames and even more styles of mattresses. Then you have to write down the name of the item, the price, the Bin and row #'s and a 15 character 'item number' on your shopping list. Then it takes what seems like hours to find the place where you get a huge cart and gather your stuff from the bins and rows. Then you have to check out and I've never been there when there were enough lanes open. Even the self-serve lane gets backed up because most people can't figure out how to use the little bar code reader. (Most instructions in Ikea are literal translations, it seems to me, of what it would be in Swedish and Swedish, it seems to me, has a much different syntax that English. So you get instructions that are the equivalent of "Throw Papa, down the stairs, his hat" kind of syntax.)

When we finally got to the check out I realized one of the boxes of bed didn't have a bar code and had to retrace my anxious steps to find the proper bin and row again (to give you a taste of the scale of the Ikea store, the bins and aisles of compulsively neat merchandise takes up as much space as your normal Wall Mart, just the Bins and Rows, never mind the tastefully displayed areas of merchandise with short cuts to other tastefully displayed areas of merchandise) and get another box of bed parts. While looking for the bar code in the first place, back up in the check out line, I hit my head on a shelf that had about 50 Christmas Ornaments (unbreakable at that) for $8.99. How do they sell stuff so cheaply?

I was shaking and wishing for psycho-therapeutic drugs by the time we got home. It had only been a couple of hours but I felt I had made a three day trek through various small, enclosed spaces and spent some time in a Chilean mine (though a tasteful, well-lit mine, full of interesting and attractive stuff if it hadn't been in a mine....)

All that, at least, took my mind off the debacle of the election....

the meaning of humility

Ok, all of yesterday and today, I've been rearranging and changing my office. My office is an L-shaped landing at the top of the back stairs that looks like this:

_______________________________
l
l
l
l
l
l
l
----------------
l
l
l
l
l stairs



-----------------------------------------------
Maybe 10 x 14 with a staircase taking up a piece of it all.

I've worked, probably 14 hours. It's now finished. I like it a lot.

I would have never done this if bern hadn't told me a few weeks ago: "If you'd let me, I would rearrange your office....."

By blood ran cold. I started sweating. My blood pressure plummeted (stress makes my blood pressure go down) and I felt both faint and disembodied.

CHANGE MY OFFICE!!! CHANGE MY SPACE!!! CHANGE ANYTHING!!!

(ok, I know I've built my life--my career and personal life--around being the most flexible and change-friendly person you could find. AND I AM....Until it comes to MY OFFICE! MY SPACE! MY LIFE!)

Bern moves and rearranges things endlessly. The table my computer rests on has been in three rooms in our house. There are chairs and end tables and bookshelves that have been in four or five rooms--and we only have eight rooms! Our bed is a futon and it has been in three rooms and once it became our bed it has been in three different places in that room. When I used to go to work and leave bern at home I would steel myself for what changes might greet me when I returned. Now I'm mostly here and when I see that "I want to move s*** around" look on her face--I know that look intimately--I go to the library or the grocery store or a movie and steel myself.....

So, to stop her moving my stuff around, I did it.

I made a list with 17 items that laid out my plan. It involved moving a bookcase within the office, moving a bookcase from outside the office to the office, cleaning out a file cabinet and throwing that away, putting together a table stashed under a guest room bed, moving my computer's printer, restructuring the use of the printer piece of furniture, getting rid of a small desk and a bamboo table that hid the office's air conditioner, moving the air conditioner until next summer, taking down two built in shelves and moving some stuff on the walls.

It sounds like a lot, but this is a 120 square foot area with a stairway taking up 20 square feet of that. How hard could that be???

Friggin' Hard--that's how hard. 14 hours of work hard.

And every step of the way I was reminded how inept I am at anything requiring manual dexterity, the use of tools and brute strength.

Humbling. For 14 hours I was humbled.

(Perhaps that is good for the Soul--but it's a bitch on the Ego.)

Fourteen hours later, after moving some papers and boxes and stuff at least a dozen times just to make room to work in such a small space, after an hour long trip to Hines Hardware store to find the right missing hardware for the table I was assembling (looking through an immensity of little drawers with screws and bolts and a dozen things I don't have names for), after several vacuumings of floor that hasn't seen the light of day because stuff was on it for the last two decades plus (I could move into a furnished apartment and never move the furniture for as long as I was there--I've known Bern to move furniture in a Motel room we'd be in one night...go figure how we've been married 40 years....), after taking books out and putting them back and moving them again, after what seemed like the 6th ring of hell for 14 hours because of my previously mentioned (and humility inspiring) ineptitude for any of what I did for 14 hours, it was finished.

And I love it. I have the table for my computer and a larger table in an L where I can read and do other things without moving my keyboard. And I have two huge bookcases and a small storage case on wheels and stuff on the wall in places it should be and I am a happy camper.

(I had to ask Bern to help me with manual things more than I hoped--like screwing things and assembling things, MANly things I'm no good at). But when I thanked her for helping me, she had the good sense and the knowledge of the depths of my humiliation to say, "I didn't help that much...." Bless her. Maybe it's not amazing we've been married 40 years, as different as we are...)

{I just looked around for a minute or two. My space is more usable and seems larger. Maybe 14 hours isn't as long as it seemed to me. Maybe humiliation is good for the Soul....and the Ego, in an odd way, as well.}

I look upon my work (with Bern's help) and can say: "It is Good".

[Maybe I need a little more humility since I'm quoting Yahweh's observation about Creation....]

reclaiming Halloween

I went to church today--a great service, good music, friendly folk--but not one mention that it was Halloween...the very Day!

I take that back, UNICEF boxes were available to collect money while trick or treating.

The church needs to reclaim Halloween (All Hallows Eve) and celebrate it liturgically like the Christian Holiday it truly is.

Perhaps we used to go over the top at St. John's--bloody foot prints up the altar steps, huge spiders above the pulpit, the celebrant wearing a witches hat, people (not just kids) in costume, acting out the Witch of Endor story--once with a smoke machine for the ghost....Maybe a little much for lots of folks. (We even had a solo of "Werewolves of London" at 8 o'clock!)

But it is the Eve of All Saints Day--a major Feast--we do Easter eve, Christmas Eve...why not for All Saints?

The belief was in certain people (especially the Celts) that on the Eve of All Hallows things were very "thin". The veil between this world and the next was so thin you could pass through. So the saints (meaning all dead Christians, not just the well-known) came to visit and needed to be welcomed and given hospitality. Not to do so would insult the Dead.

It should be an opportunity to remind ourselves that 'the saints' are around us always and deserve hospitality. Remember the advice from the Bible about welcoming strangers lest we entertain angels unawares.

It's too great a day to leave to the culture to commercialize and ruin.

TAKE BACK HALLOWEEN!!!

places that aren't 'anywhere'

We went to Providence today to be with some of Bern's family--her uncle, three first cousins, her brother and a second cousin. We had a great time that canceled out the horrible time we had last night at the WVU/UCONN football game. Don't even mention it, OK? WVU's coach has to go...just has too....He's apparently a great human being but I don't want a great human being (as rare as they are...) I want a mean, nasty, megalomaniac who's only purpose in his otherwise meaningless life is to win football games....


But to get from Cheshire to Providence required going down Route 9--one of the most rural places in CT. From Middletown to Old Lyme you don't see anything from Route 9. It's like driving in West Virginia most anywhere.


The difference is that in most of New England town lines are on top of each other. Cheshire begins where Hamden ends. Waterbury begins where Cheshire ends. Middlebury begins where Waterbury ends....you get the point.


Going down Rt 9 all these tiny places begin where the previous tiny place ends. Like there is 'nowhere' that is nowhere.


In most of the rest of the east coast states, geography is divided into 'incorporated' areas and 'unincorporated' areas. So, there are lots of places--most places, in fact--that aren't 'anywhere', they're 'between' Somewhere and Somewhere Else.

Where my friend Jo-Jo lived was 'between Anawalt and Spencer's Curve', as an example. Nothing in Connecticut is 'between' something and something else. Every acre of land exists within one town or another. It's odd to me to live in a place where there aren't places that aren't anywhere. People from New England would probably be equally troubled by a place where most places aren't anywhere except between two other places.

Region 'character' might be formed by something like that.

Something to ponder while, if you live in New England, you are comforted to know that wherever you are you are 'Somewhere'.

I just miss the places that aren't anywhere.....

Credo

Have I shared this before? If so, sorry....

CREDO

I believe in the edges of God.
Truly, that is my limit on the whole question of Creed.

I don't believe in God storming out of the clouds
and smiting my to smithereens if I am bad.
I don't believe in a God who would wake me up,
pin me to my bed and give me bleeding sores
on my palms and the top of my feet,
much less my side.
I don't believe in a god would would instruct me
to slay infidels or displace peaceful people
so I can have a motherland.
I don't believe in a God who has nothing to do
besides visit bedrooms around the globe
uncovering (literally!) illicit love.
I don't believe in a God who frets
about who wins the next election.
I don't believe in a God who believes in 'abomination'.

I believe in the edges of God--
the soft parts, the tender parts--
the feathers and fur of God.

I do believe in the ears of God
which stick out--cartoon like--on the edges of God's Being.
I listen and listen and listen
and then listen some more
for the Still, Small Voice.
I believe in God's nose--pronounced and distinctively
Jewish in my belief--
I smell trouble from time to time
and imagine God sniffs it out too.
The toenails and the fingernails of God--
there's some protein I can hold on to,
if only tentatively.

Hair, there's something to believe in as well.
God's hair--full, luxurious, without need of jell or conditioner,
filling up the Temple, heaven, the whole universe.
I can believe in God's hair.

God's edges shine and blink and reflect color.
God's edges are like the little brook
flowing out of the woods beyond the tire swing
in what used to be my grandmother's land.
God's edges are like the voices of old friends,
old lovers, people long gone but not forgotten.
God's edges are not sharp or angled.
The edges of God are well worn by practice
and prayer and forgotten possibilities
about to be remembered.
God's edges are the wrists of someone
you don't quite recall but can't ever remove from your mind.

God's edges are rimmed and circled
with bracelets of paradox and happenstance
and accidents with meaning.

God is edged with sunshine,
rainbows,
over-ripe, fallen apples crushed beneath your feet
and the bees hovering around them.

God's edges hold storm clouds too--
the storm of the century coming fast,
tsunamis and tornadoes, spinning out of control.

Blood from God's hands--now there's an edge of God
to ponder, reach for, then snatch your hand away.
God bleeding is an astonishing thought.
God bleeding can help my unbelief.

And most, most of all,
the edges of God are God's tears.

Tears of frustration, longing, loss, deep pain,
profound joy, wonder and astonishment--
tears that heal and relieve and comfort...
and disturb the Cosmos.

That's what I believe in:
God's tears.

JGB

Pondering 101

I was having lunch today with a dear friend who agreed to read my as yet orphan novel (three rejection letters from agents and counting....) and she asked if I needed it back soon.

Then she said, "I like to ponder as I read...."

My heart lept up! I hadn't heard someone use the word "ponder", besides me, for ever so long. What a gift she gave me. I want people to 'ponder'. "Pondering" is becoming a lost art in the day of 'instant access' and the internet and such. I just finished a novel called "Roadside Crosses" that was about the horrendous fallout of on-line postings. It was about more, but it was about that in a big way--how people write things on line that they would never 'say' face to face. About internet 'bullying'. About how the anonymity of the Internet is both a shield and a lie (the murderer finds people from their email addresses and kills them). About how we write before we think. About how 'pondering' stuff might make life better in both the long run and short run.

I know first hand about that.

I have offended and gotten in trouble with three or four bishops 'o mine by sitting down at my computer and writing what I thought at the time were reasoned and reasonable e-mails. In fact they were insulting and incendiary. (My Lord, I knew how to spell 'incendiary'!!!)

Somehow, most things we type on a computer about just about anything bypasses the Pondering Point.

Here's what 'pondering' requires:
*the ability to doubt your own strongest held beliefs and opinions
*the willingness to be patient and thoughtful and self-critical
*the courage the acknowledge that what you think may not be THE TRUTH
*the ego strength to allow for the possibility that what you think might, in fact, be full of shit and sawdust


Stuff like that. And this is only the introductory course to Pondering.

I need to take Pondering 101, this I know.

How about you?


I actually realize that what I label "the ponderings" of an aging white man who happens to be an Episcopal priest....or however I put that in my explanation of Under the Castor Oil Tree"...is, sometimes, more often than I want to acknowledge, "just Jim talkin'".

So, I take a vow that I will 'ponder' more in these posts.

And I ask that you 'ponder' what I write and let me know when I'm full of s and s (that's 'shit and sawdust' for those who weren't paying attention....

early halloween....

So, the dog got in the Halloween candy. I don't think he ate many, but who knows. I was out on the deck and wondering why he wasn't complaining to join me. When I came back in he was near the chairs in the little kitchen sitting room and ran up the back stairs. I came on up to play hearts (I really am addicted to hearts on the computer...I must apologize to everyone I ever looked askance at for playing computer games) and instead of staying in the office area he went down the upstairs hall--odd for him.

Shortly I heard bern in the kitchen. "Who got in the candy and left some on the floor?"

"Not me," I said, though if I had known it was there I would have--but not leaving evidence on the floor.

She comes up and grabs Bela by the ears and smells his breath.

"Chocolate breath", she said.

He ate wrappers and all so we've been watching for the evidence--besides the breathalyzer test--of his pilfering. (If you own a dog you know where you find such evidence...nuf said....) No wrappers yet so maybe, if we're lucky, he only ate one or two....But he was restless last night and kept me awake for several hours moving, scratching nests on the floor, jumping on the bed and laying on my head, panting, stuff like that....

The other Puli we owned, back when we were childless and clueless, had a terrible sweet tooth. When we lived in Alexandria, VA and I was going to seminary, he would find ways to snatch sweet stuff from surfaces he shouldn't have been able to access.

Once he got a bear claw--you know, one of those pastries about the size of your head--off a side table and when I came in he plunged into a corner and ate it as fast--actually 'faster'--than you can imagine.

That night he jumped on the bed and threw up on my head.

When we called the dog trainer for Bela's home visit and subsequent lessons (none of which took!) he asked, "What kind of dog do you have?"

I said, "a Puli...."

After a moment, he replied, "Why?"

He did tell the other dog folks in the obedience class that "there's more dog in this Puli than in all the other dogs here."

At the time I took it as praise lavished on Bela's head. No more....