Dr. Dolittle and me

It just occurred to me today that since I retired I talk to animals more than anyone than Bern--and perhaps even more than I talk to her. We've been married 43 years come September 5th and have know each other since 1964--that's 49 years, so we can communicate without words much of the time.

Someone once asked me--7 or 8 years ago, when I was still Rector of St. John's in Waterbury, 'what I did." And when I thought about it I realized 'what I did' was "walk around and talk a lot".

I talked to dozens, sometimes hundreds of people a day. That was 'what I did'--I talked to parishioners and folks in the soup kitchen and folks there for 12 step groups and folks passing through and folks using the building and folks inside the building and folks on the street. What I DID was walk around and talk a lot.

Since I retired, I don't talk to people that much. I seldom get calls. I call Bea at the Cluster office a couple of times a week, I talk (not enough) to Josh and Mimi, our children, I talk to clerks in the stores and my clergy group on Tuesday morning and to people at church on Sundays. And to Bern.

But mostly I talk to Bela and Luke and Maggie, our dog, cat and parakeet. I talk to them from the time I get up until I go to bed. They are all good listeners, being creatures. And I mostly praise them for being 'good dog' or 'good cat' or 'good bird'. Maggie used to fly away when I talked to her and cling to the far side of her cage. But now I talk to her and even when she's eating, she doesn't fly away. Granted, most of what I say to her has to do with her singing--which she does constantly and sometimes at such a pitch it is painful to human ears--and about the music she listens to on the public radio station from Sacred Heart University that mostly plays classical music and on weekends modern music. The radio in the kitchen is beside Maggie's cage and always on from when Bern or I get up until the last one of us goes to bed. Maggie loves classical music and I must say. since we tuned into WSHU instead of WNPR (though I still listen to that in my car) the music rather than a day full of talk and news, has made us all calmer and more content. I thank Maggie for that.

My monologues with Bela and Luke go on all day. I tell them things about themselves (Good cat, big boy, buddy, best friend) and about what to do (eat your breakfast/lunch, let's go out, go to the 'big bed', go upstairs, find the woman....stuff like that). And often I simply ponder things with them about politics, philosophy and religion.

They're good listeners. It's a joy to talk with them and I do it all day.

I'm about to go ask Bela if he wants to go pee--which he does, I already know--but it seems polite and right to ask him. And when he does I'll tell him what a big boy he is and when we come back in I'll ask him if he'd like a treat (why ask? But I do and give him one) and not much later, since it's 10:40 p.m., I'll suggest we 'go upstairs' to the 'big bed', and we will. Then I'll talk to him a bit more and kiss Bern good-night if she's still awake or just touch her softly if she's already asleep and Bela and I will settle down for a good night's sleep. I'll even tell him 'good night', though it's probably not necessary.

Talking to creatures is much of my life. And I love that....

Dumb phones

I had a dumb phone until Saturday. All you could do on it was receive calls and make them. (Though I did get a text message from time to time which I had no idea how to return....) Then I tripped over my own feet and it fell out of my pocket and broke in two. The keys still worked but the screen was dead.

My phone  company is Consumer Cellular--which I found in an AARP ad. I'm not sure if anyone under 50 can have Consumer Cellular. But maybe.

I went on line and discovered that Sears carried Consumer Cellular phones so I wouldn't have to have one shipped to me. Since we're leaving Friday for North Carolina, that's an important thing. On Sunday, after church, I went to Sears in Waterbury's mall. I asked two employees about Consumer Cellular and got blank stares. But the third person told me to go to 'electronics' and I did and there were all these Consumer Cellular phones. Apparently you have to have one of their phones to use their service.

So I bought the cheapest of them all--$39.95--plus $5.25 for a two year plan if I break it...which I do a lot...that would give me a new phone for free.

I got it home and charged it Sunday night--at least 6 hours, the book said. And this morning got it activated and got my phone number transferred to this new phone. The woman, India was her name, did all that by typing on a computer. I asked her if she understood how that happened and she, honestly, admitted she had no idea whatsoever...she just hit the keys and my new phone came to life and now contained my voice message from the old phone and I could use it right away.

Here's the problem: how can a phone that costs only $40 have a camera and internet access? Ridiculous. But apparently my phone does. So I now am obligated to learn how to use those two things which I never wanted, not ever.

I didn't think there was a camera or an internet device that cost only $40. Now I have both and a new not-so-dumb phone. It's not a 'smart phone' by any degree since I can't get 'aps' whatever the hell they are. It's sort of an 'average' phone I guess. But it isn't dumb. Which is what I wanted.

Oh my God, a camera and internet on my phone!!!

I've obviously lived too long....

Something Silent, something sweet...

GW and Eleanor were part of my life for only two years. Members of St. James in Higganum and part of the Transfiguration community that is part of the Cluster of three churches, I came to know them well. And now they are moving to Costa Rica for the interim, forever.

So, I wrote them a poem that I think captures our relationship...and several relationships I have had. The touching of 'souls', not people so much.

Something silent, something sweet

When souls meet, something silent passes by.

Not like when 'people' meet.

People ask questions,

seek to find connections,

disagree,

fall in love,

battle with each other,

reunite or part in anger and regret.

When souls meet, none of that matters.

When souls meet, something silent passes by

and they travel together—side by side--

or one behind the other, or the other way around--

until they part.

And when souls part, something sweet passes by.

Gratitude, people might call it,

or even Joy.

But it is sweet to travel on

apart.

Silence and sweetness:

what could be better?

What could be more right?

JGB/8-16-2013

This gentle weather

I once wrote two very bad lines of an equally bad poem that went like this:

   "When comes a misplac'ed Spring afternoon
      on such a Winter's day, so out of tune...."

Mercifully, I've forgotten the rest of the poem though it may be lurking to haunt me in the boxes full of long ago written things I've not gone through for decades.

It's the (') to insure your pronounce it mis-place-ED rather that 'misplaced' that makes the line so regrettable.

I had a bishop once who always began the service in ordinary time with, "Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

I've always said that "Bless-ED" be God and so forth.

I've always thought that God should be 'Bless-ED' rather than merely 'blessed'. I've always thought that 'blessed' was an adjective about God rather than a verb about God.

Which brings me to the gentle weather we've had for a couple of weeks now in Connecticut. After a record-breaking heat wave in July, August has been gentle and warm and even cool at night. We haven't turned on an air-conditioner or even a fan for over a week.

We have been 'blessed' by such weather. But the weather itself, I would suggest, has been 'bless-ED'. "So out of tune with the expected heat..." I still think in iambic pentameter.

But the recent August weather has been both unexpected and bless-ED.

I stand by that pronunciation though 'misplace-ED' is a mistake....

Sleep well this wondrous cool night....

Threes...

"Good things come in threes," Lina Manona Sadler Jones, my grandmother, used to say.

...Well, actually what she used to say was "deaths come in threes..." Not quite so optimistic.

But there is the Trinity, after all, to hint that threes are a good thing.

So, in the past month, I've seen 3 of the funniest movies I've ever seen and read three of the best novels I've ever read.

I don't do reviews here, but I do want to share my bounty with you.

Movies: The Heat (course, I've always loved Sandra Bullock); Red 2 (which has a cast you could only dream of and is the only 'comic book' movie that was really like a comic book) and RIPD (panned by most critics and already pretty much out of theatres but I've always loved Jeff Bridges and I thought it was hilarious, with  some hysterical special effects). An unusual 'buddy' movie, a strange 'action' movie and an unconventional 'sci-fi' movie. I'd see any of them a couple of more times.

Books: three times in a month I've had to rearrange my Top 10 novels of all time.

The Hunger Angel by German writer, Herta Muller (the u needs one of those two dot diacritical marks over it that my keyboard cannot make). It is a troubling read, about a ethnic German living in Romania who is sent to a forced labor camp after WW II. While I was reading it, I heard an interview with a historian who has written a book about all the removals and displacements that took place in Europe after the second World War, which made the story even more moving and troubling. A hard read but well worth it (I think I read at least two murder mysteries, my genre of choice, while slogging through The Hunger Angel, but the slog was well worth it.

The Uninvited by Liz Jenson, a British novelist. It is also disturbing but compelling. It is a distopian novel that you never saw coming. The most troubling total eclipse of  'life as we know it' I've ever read. Beautifully written. The narrator has Asbergerer's Syndrome and besides being a fascinating 'teller of the tale' helped me finally have some rational understanding of that disorder. Don't read this to you young children.

Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, who is one of my favorite mystery writers (Case Histories--now a made-for-TV movie and Left Early, Took my Dog, which I just read again after Life after Life reminded me how good she is. LaL, if I might abbreviate (and why not?) is, if I can spell it, one of the tour de forces of modern literature. I wouldn't dare spoil it for you by telling you anything about what it is about. But it is about something I've never (and I bet you've never) imagined. But once the author makes you imagine it, you can't stop imagining it. The main character, Ursala, "little bear", her father calls her, is the recipient of 'life' after 'life'. 'Nough said.

Atkinson writes the best dialog (and inner dialog) I've ever read. Anywhere. And this story is haunting and lovely and in ways I can't (and couldn't!) explain, so life affirming and hopeful and breathtakingly wondrous that this novel is now up there edging even Moby Dick and The Tale of Two Cities at the top, the very top, of novels I've read.

I'll read it again in a month or so--if I can get on the 'hold list' at the Cheshire Library.

All three are wondrous and making havoc in my Top Ten Of All Time--but Life after Life is something beyond explaining....

Bonny Bobby Shafto

Tomorrow is my son, Joshua Dylan (for Bob not Thomas) Bradley's 38th birthday.

We used to croon to him a nursery rhyme that goes like this:

Bobby Safto's gone to sea,
Silver buckle's on his knee
He'll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shafto'
Bobby Shafto's bright and fair,
Panning out his yellow hair,
He's my love forevermore,
Bonny Bobby Shafto.

And he was a toe-head, though you'd never guess it now as his brown hair, like mine, has hints of grey in it and his beard even moreso.

My beard was grey by 40 and I colored it for several years then gave into time.

I was 28 when he was born. Which makes me 66 now.

When I was 38, my father was 78, having been 40 when I was born. (Stuff like that has come to matter to me as I grow older.)

Our daughter, Jeremy Johanna (forever Mimi) turned 35 last month. I was 31 when she was born. The math doesn't change--I'm still 66.

People told us when we were much younger, that time would fly and to enjoy our children while we could. It would go away faster than we could imagine.

I thought those people were fools. Josh and Mimi's childhood seemed endless and stressful and wondrous at the same time.

But those people were right.

My 'princess' is 35. My Bonny Bobby Shafto is 38 tomorrow.

How in hell did that happen?

They are both amazing people. Mimi and Tim will come with us to an island off the coast of North Carolina in what?--10 days from now. We've been doing it for several years. It's the island we took Josh and Mimi too for much of their pre-adult lives. Mimi renewed it after she and Tim went there one year, reliving childhood or something. I keep hoping we can get Josh and Cathy and the girls down some year soon, before I'm in my dotage. Shortly after we get back we'll go to Baltimore and be with Josh and Cathy and Morgan and Emma and Tegan for a bit.

Sumi--Cathy's pit bull that was then Josh's pit bull and the Morgan and Emma and Tegan's pit bull--and through much of that, Bern and my pit bull, won't be there. At a great age, Sumi died last week. The last 6 months she had to be carried downstairs to go to the bathroom. And she was the sweetest dog I've ever known. Even in her dotage, when she saw Bern and me she would be terribly animated and young again for a while.

We loved her deeply and mourn her greatly.

Which is not just an aside, but the glue of a family relationship. You become attached to your children's pets just as you become attached to your children's mates and your children's children.

I sometimes wonder: how can Josh and Mimi be that old? Which causes me to ponder 'how can I be this old?'



Time flies when you're having fun....

The Flora and Fauna of it all...

Our yards are viral with life these days.

Bern admitted to me today, after she had spent hours extracting a mock orange bush from the side yard, that she had too many plants.

"I never thought I'd say it," she said, her voice full of wonder and amusement. We are so surrounded by living things that I am sometimes washed over by life.

When I gaze at the panoply of plant life that surrounds us, I find it had to imagine that in 4 or 5 months it will all be covered by two feet of snow. But it will...I know that, having lived in New England now for over half of my life. It is that remarkable ying and yang that makes me not want to live anywhere else, ever.

My friends, GW and Eleanor, are moving to Costa Rica in a week or so. They are going to a land of constant late June. I give them traveling blessings but know I couldn't survive in a climate like that. I need the withering and dying of Autumn and the chill and death of Winter. That I need the resurrection of Spring and the lushness of Summer go without saying. But living always in late June--temperature 70-80 during the day and 60-70 at night might sound inviting in the depths of February, but there is no April without February. I love the turn of the seasons.

But nature is 'red in tooth and claw...and vines...."

We have a vine on our back deck that lives inside in the winter that has, amazingly, reached out to ensnare a limb of a Hemlock tree and the leaves of a Rhodendrum. I don't stand too close to it because it weirds me out and I imagine it wrapping around my throat and choking the life out of me. It also has the most incredible blossoms--blood red and seductive in their beauty--and it attracts hummingbirds, so what could be wrong with that except it could strangle me if I stood too close for too long.

A morning glory vine in the front yard wrestled down a yard long Lilly stalk to the ground. I imagined Bern's plants were turning on each other in some apocalyptic kind of endgame. I told Bern about it and this afternoon she freed the Lilly by unwinding the vine. The Lilly is standing up again, but I don't trust plants as much as I used to before I was so surrounded by them.

But this I know and know fair well, they will wither in the Fall and be covered by a couple of feet of snow in the Winter--only to return in Spring again. I like the life-cycle-ness of plants. That would never happen in Costa Rica. Plants live year round there.

That would make me very anxious since I don't completely trust them....