In case you haven't heard...

The annual list of the 10 most satisfied states and the 10 most dissatisfied states has just been released by the Gallup Poll people.

A new #1--North Dakota, where the average satisfaction--between 0 and 100--is 70.1. Hawaii had been on top for years. I guess all that oil money and the boom in North Dakota's economy means a lot more to people there than warm breezes an the Pacific ocean.

(I once knew a priest in CT who was from North Dakota. Once, when he told someone that at a diocesan meeting somewhere, the other person said {I swear they did!} "Oh, didn't you miss the ocean?" My friend replied, "since we haven't had one for over a billion years we've sort of got used to it." People on the east coast can sometimes be dim--it's like that old New Yorker cover where not much exists west of the Hudson.)

The most dissatisfied state is, for the fifth year running ('drum roll....) West Virginia. I guess 300,000 people not yet knowing whether they can drink their water and Multi-national corporations knocking the top off of your mountains and ruining you valleys can be a bit dissatisfying.

One thing I did notice though--7 of the top 10 are blue states and only one of the bottom 10 is. Just me noticing stuff.

Connecticut must be somewhere in the middle 30, though the full results weren't listed. Besides all that, North Dakota was 70.1 and West Virginia was 60.1, so the other 48 were all within 10 of being the top or bottom. Close, I'd say.

Bummer...

So Bern and I are watching Downton Abbey tonight--loving it all, especially the Americans that are making the whole thing so un-British and messy and the messy stuff about the Prince of Wales and the wondering if Bates killed the man who raped Anna. Typical Downton stuff--great, all the way down.

Then it ends and some Masterpiece voice says it's the end of season Four.

Bummer. Season Four seemed to have just started.

And it takes a  year to ratchet up a whole other season.

I'm bummed. I don't watch a lot of TV but I love Downton Abbey and Sherlock and the Voice.

As I was about to go into a melt-down worthy of the end of Dowton Abbey, Bern said, " do you know what starts tomorrow night?"

And I replied, "if it's The Voice, I won't kill myself',"

She smiled and nodded. Shakira and Usher are back as coaches this year.

All is well, all is well and all manner of thing will be well.....

Xolaire

OK, so my allergies are so bad I blood test enough horrible to receive Xolaire--two injections every two weeks. I've had five now, and if you asked me I'd say I don't feel any different at all. I still have lots of chest congestion going on and cough a lot and spit stuff up.

I go to my Allergist Monday and I want to tell him the truth: that I don't feel any better, 10 weeks into these 2 injections every two weeks.

I want to get better. That is the God's truth. But I'm not feeling it yet and he's going to suggest I stop my evening pill tomorrow, I just know he is.

All Fall and Winter I've felt one dusty room away from needing a round of prednisone. And I don't feel that much better now.

I can walk 40 minutes on the treadmill, reading a book, 4 times a week, but shoveling snow or trying to run upstairs doesn't work.

I get out of breath. Not enough to take a puff of my inhaler, but enough to stop and take deep breaths.

I'm perfectly functional, so I don't have 'bad news' to tell my doctor--Dr. Randolph, who is a gem--but I don't feel any better 10 weeks in and I want to.

What next is what I want to know and what I'll ask Dr. Randolph on Monday.

Glad for Gladys

(OK, I guess I'm going keep posting stuff I find sifting through the writings of my past. This short story, unlike most of the stuff has a date on it though most of the stuff I have only a vague place in time for, this is for sure: July 28, 1974. I would have been living in Alexandria Virginia, driving every day with Sister Jeremy and Brother Roger to a huge mental hospital in Maryland to do Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE was required for Episcopal Seminarians in the summer before their final year and of some Roman Catholics who were working on advance degrees. Jeremy was a Sister of  Mercy and Roger was a Franciscan brother. We were a merry trio that summer, driving up to Spring Grove Mental hospital and pretending we knew how to talk to people with mental illness. My reaction to madness is to be sucked into it and sometimes I would keep my hand on the keys to the locked wards to remind me I would be able to leave. I just saw Jeremy last year in Baltimore when we were visiting Josh and Cathy and the girls. She came to their house and I fixed lunch. Jeremy has done a lot of ministries in her day and is a fierce feminist of a nun, but I'm not sure if she was used to being around three little girls for a meal. I lost track of Roger years ago. I liked and trusted them both emmensely.

So, "Glad for Gladys" was written during that time of my life. Odd to know that and have no idea why I wrote it. But, here it is.)

GLAD FOR GLADYS

Gladys Spinnet is dying. Not that it matters much to anyone, but she's dying and that should be worth something. It should matter--make a difference somehow.

Elsie Flowers told me today--about Gladys dying. Walking down the main road in Conklintown, along Mrs. Flowers' fence, I saw her out in her garden and she hooted me over. She asked if it were hot enough for me and since it was, I told her, "yes, plenty warm, thank you." She brought her hoe over to the fence and wanted to hear all about me and what I was doing. When I told her I was working on my doctorate, she thought I was in Med School. so I explained I wouldn't be that kind of doctor, not the kind that looks down your throat. Then she talked about her cabbages and politics and all sorts of things, and, right in the middle of something else, she said, "O, ya' know don't ya' 'bout how Gladys Spinnet is dyin'?"

I stood there, trying to remember who Gladys Spinnet was and feeling profoundly sad that knowing someone was dying didn't matter much to me, no more than Mrs. Flowers' cabbages or Senator Jennings Randolph, who she found too liberal.

She leaned on her hoe, as if to make it final, and said, "she is....Really....Dying."

A thin necklace of dirt ringed Mrs. Flowers' neck. Her garden and her sweat gave her a necklace like kids get playing ball on a hot dusty day. It reminded me of Julia, a little black girl I'd seen that morning wearing a necklace of the pop-tops from soda cans. I took her picture and asked if the tops ever cut her neck. "Jist sometimes," she said, "but I don't mind much."

I wanted a picture of Mrs. Flowers with the necklace of dirt around her neck, thinking how it would look beside Julia's picture. Julia had been leaning on her bike and Mrs. Flowers was leaning on her hoe. I imagined the photos, in identical black frames, stark against the white of my study's walls. I was on the verge of asking to take her picture when Mrs. Flowers said, "Cancer, rite here," pointing to the beads of wet dirt on her neck. "Too late to 'ketch it and she'll be dead 'for winter. It'll eat up to that little part of the brain with the long name. Jason tol' me what that's called, but I forgit. Anyways, when it does, Gladys'll  die, quick like."

I almost said, "You can't 'catch' cancer," since I thought she meant 'catching it' like the measles or a bad cold. Luckily, I paused long enough to realize she meant, "it can't be treated." Then I caught myself about to say that the part of the brain she meant was the medulla oblongata, but with Gladys Spinnet dying, that didn't seem important enough to mention. Suddenly, all I could think of was that the next time there were cabbages in Mrs. Flowers garden or a Senatorial election so she could vote for the Republican, there wouldn't be Gladys Spinnet.

And as hard as I tried, I couldn't make it matter.

"Gladys Spinnet," Mrs. Flowers told me, "went to Charlottesville las' month." Going to Charlottesville--to the University of Virginia Hospital--was the kiss of death where I grew up. You only 'went to Charlottesville' when no one in southern West Virginia had any answers. And Charlottesville didn't have answers either. In Charlottesville they did research on things without answers.

Mrs. Flowers rambled on about how her niece worked at the University of Virginia Hospital and what a good job it was and how beautiful the mountains were there in fall, "there bein' lots more maple trees there and maple turnin' bright red." While she talked, I thought about Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, about the big calendar clock that covers a wall of that house, keeping perfect time after all these years, counting out the moments of Gladys Spinnet's life.

When I got away from Mrs. Flowers, carrying three Big-boy tomatoes in a brown paper sack for my Uncle, I stopped at a road side grocery to buy a Dr. Pepper from a fat women whose name I couldn't remember just then. Her name is Mrs. Goins, or Mrs. Cones, or something like that, ans she asked me about her bursitis, since I was studying to be a doctor.

I stood in the middle of the store, drinking my soda, when Sam came in, his hands greasy black from working on cars, to buy some Lucky Strikes. Sam is my age--a little league teammate who dropped out of the high school where I excelled.  He asked where I'd been and what I was doing and how I came to be visiting 'home', and then he told me, matter of factly, like everything else he had said, "ain't it sumthin' 'bout Gladys Spinnit dyin'?"

For Sam, she was already dead. There's something about cancer, something about how much we fear it, something about how some people--Sam, for one--call it 'the Big C", that makes the diagnosis final, a death warrant.

"The big C'll get you, Richie," Sam told me, solemnly, "never fear. Never fear."

I was on the verge of saying that 'fear' seemed an appropriate reaction toward cancer and death and about to tell Sam that I couldn't remember the last time I was around someone who smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes when, without warning, a picture of Gladys Spinnet jumped into my mind.

I saw her, clear as day, running down the main road in winter, ignoring the icy patches on the pavement and the snow piled up almost as high as mail boxes on the shoulders. She was running like mad, in my unexpected memory, coat-less--running to her retarded brother, Casdy, who was sitting in the middle of the road, playing with something he'd found there: a small animal, a chipmunk or something, dead.

I remembered Gladys' face then. It was a soft, round, mountain face--like my mother's, like mine beneath my beard--with small eyes and thick brows, full lips and a weak chin. Sam's face...and Mrs. Goins' face, Mrs. Flowers' face, and Julia's--though her face was Black. Gladys Spinnet's face lept into my memory, as if out of the mirror in my uncle's house's bathroom.

Someone once told me that Gladys changed Casdy's diapers even though he was almost fifty and weighed over 250 pounds. I also remember hearing that Gladys' other two brothers--one not much brighter than Casdy and the other a jack-legged preacher of some kind--wouldn't lift a finger to help. And the father and mother were both long dead--Able Spinnit climbed out on the roof of his porch and died, gossip had it, in a rainstorm. So Gladys Spinnit changed Casdy's diapers and took the dead things he collected out of his pockets each night.

I remember Casdy Spinnit the way you remember a bad dream. He was so large and so retarded, drooling a lot, that he frightened the wits out of me as a child. I even remembered the dead things he carried around in his pockets. Dead things are usually frightening to little kids...or fascinating. I don't remember which it was. Or, maybe it was both at once.

Standing there, talking to Sam, I remembered how Casdy wasn't afraid of dead mice or frogs at all. Casdy would take dead things out of his pockets to show you like he was showing you something glowing, or a shiny quarter he had to buy some gum.

My 'killing time' at home with Uncle George, back where I grew up, suddenly seemed pointless. I wanted a few weeks away from my apartment and my thesis, a few weeks to try out my new camera and sleep late and walk the mountain roads without thinking or reading or writing. Instead, I happened onto the drama of Gladys Spinnet's death--a drama that depressed me because it didn't seem to matter much.

I'm going back to Princeton tomorrow. I've decided I actually want to be near the library. There are several things I need to know about Stephen Crane before I can finish what I've been working on. I won't find out those things here. All I can find out here is more about how Gladys Spinnit is dying. I realize there is nothing I can do to prevent that, or even make it matter much to me.

Gladys' dying may matter to Casdy. Someone else, after all--probably someone less gentle and loving--will have to change his diapers. But he'll most likely think of Gladys as one more dead thing he found and wish he could put her in his pocket.

I'd like to write Gladys a note, but it would be maudlin and vain and she wouldn't remember me or understand. I'd like to tell her, somehow, if I only could--"O God, Gladys, I am sorry." But for all my good intentions, it still wouldn't matter much.

What would matter is if I could tell her something hopeful, joyous, wondrous, glorious.

Like I was glad for her.

Glad.

baseball...after pondering it...

When I read the post I published today about baseball, I realized how different it is to be 13 than it is to be 66.

Today I would have done things all differently. I would have told my father why I was quitting Little League. I would have told my teammates. I would have told Benny Graham's mother and she would have told all the parents of kids on the Comet's and Jimmy Newsome would have been removed as manager of our team and we would have gone on to play in the play-offs under someone else's guidance and still lost to Gary in the championship game.

But what I realize now is that at 13 I was more concerned about causing my father pain and my teammates confusion than I would be now.

Jimmy Newsome should not have been given such intimate contact with children he did not respect. Someone should have brought him to justice, brought him down. I would do that today without hesitation. I would have probably done it at 20 or 30 and all the years since.

But I was 13 and my understanding of abuse and injustice was not finely honed.

Instead I didn't want my father and my teammates to know what I knew and live with that reality.

I wanted to protect them and live with it alone.

No wonder it is hard for children to call adults into account for their misdeeds.

I understand that now.

Ice cycles

Ice cycles for those of you who live in the Northeast (or most anywhere this winter) form when snow and ice are melting in nearly freezing conditions.

We had some enormous ones lately since we've had periods of melting between the snow storms. All have fallen from our house (one fell off the roof above our back porch roof and glanced down to knock over our trash can, but nothing was in the trash can and I don't have to drag it out to the road before next Tuesday) except one bigger than me on the roof over the side of our semi-wrap around front porch. It could fall tomorrow or the next day and crash through the roof and shatter my bicycle that is out there, except that there's several feet of ice on the roof and the Jim-sized ice cycle will probably glance off and fall harmlessly on our side walk (unless I'm taking out the trash and it crushes me!)

The other still existing ice-cycle is outside the east facing window of our bedroom. I could open the window and break off that 6 foot long, but not broad enough to be Jim-sized, ice-cycle but it might fall on my car in the driveway below. If it drops of it's own volition it will go straight down and not hit the car.

A four foot ice-cycle on the back and west facing side of the house dropped just as our Puli dog was going down the stairs to the snow covered back yard and missed him by 6 inches or so. Bern and I saw it fall and rushed across the deck to see if it impaled Bela. He just looked over his shoulder at it and then licked it and then peed in the poop patch.

Puli's, it seems, don't consider the danger of falling ice like humans do.

baseball

(looking through these old writings is making me aware of how bad my memory is. This piece--"Baseball"--was written before my father died in 1988 and I don't remember writing it. But I will share it with you here.....)


My father played baseball as a young man in a rag-tag country league that covered three or four counties of southeastern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. Actually it is a misnomer to call what my father played in a 'league', even a 'rag-tag' one. It was more like a network of young men from scattered farm communities who knew each other from logging jobs, county fairs and cattle sales. Each of those young men would go back to their community and fire up enough enthusiasm to schedule a two Sunday double-header, home and away, during the summers. They  would play on rough hewn ball fields beside local schools or on the makeshift diamonds in the middle of some one's cow field. They would assemble early, strutting their farm grown stuff, the 1930's equivalent of "macho", drinking lots of half-fermented homemade moonshine, playing a little baseball that would end in a fight.

The next Sunday they'd do it all again on the other team's field.

I knew the names of the places these rough farm boys grew up. There were place like Waitville (my father's home), Paint Branch, Sweet Springs, Gap Mills, Union, Laural Branch, Rock Camp, Peterstown, Greenville and Wayside: names I knew from my father and because, in my boyhood, I had been there. And in all those places, according to my father, there were raw, rough, harsh, sunburned farm boys itching for sunny weekends, home brew and baseball. Not to mention it was a good way to meet the girls from other towns.

The girls would come in their home-made dresses or summer things from Montgomery Ward, full of freckles and giggles, hiding their faces behind their hands, but their eyes were sharp, focused, sizing up farm boys that weren't boringly familiar. The girls would sit in the shade of the school house or under trees on the edges of the pasture, always shaded, remote from the action but fully involved. Dreaming dreams, I imagine, that farm girls have always dreamed.

I have disappointed my father in many ways, but now two as profound as not playing baseball, beyond backyards and two years of Little League and by not being a Republican. All the other disappointments and betrayals pale beside those two. And now, in the last of the ninth of his life, with Nixon in the White House, who even confounded my father in the last months before the intricacies and failures of his own body and mind began to be his only confusion, it was my not playing baseball that causes me the most guilt.

He has never understood my not playing baseball after 13. I was 'promising'. I played first base with a grace and effortlessness that still surprises me when I pass ball with my son and daughter. I was, in the language of the game, a 'glove'. And in batting practice or in softball, I scattered hits to all fields and showed occasional power to right-center. But when the game began, when Ray Smith was on the mound for Gary and I was at the plate, people went for sodas. "All field, no bat" was my scouting report when I was 12 and 13. But everyone thought I would 'come around'. People who had seen me in practice knew it was just a matter of time and timing and all those sharply hit liners just outside first base would be landing in the alley and I'd be standing on second before anyone knew what happened. I had one year of Little League to go and people in Anawalt were counting on me to 'develop' into a hitter. I'd back second, right behind Danny Taylor, who led the league in hitting and was a constant threat to steal a base, even with the strict, no leading off rules. Danny would get on base more than half the time and the worried pitcher would serve me up some fat ones. Danny would score from first on all those doubles to right center. The Anawalt Comets would, at long last, be winners.

Then, with one game left in the 1960 season and the Comets securely in second place behind Gary, preparing for the play-offs, I quit. I walked off the field after turning a brilliant unassisted double-play that ended a 16-3 rout of the Elbert Aces in which even I had two hits, and, never explaining, turned in my uniform.

There was one out and a runner on first--one of the Subrick boys, I think, and Leo Kroll, the only decent hitter Elbert had was batting. He hit left-handed and I was guarding the bag, holding the runner on. Arnold Butler was pitching, which showed the disgust in which we held the Aces--Arnold only pitched against Elbert, allowing us to save Danny Taylor or Bobby LaFon to pitch against first place Gary. Leo dried his hands, spit into them, dried them again. We were ahead by 13 runs and most of the parents were anxious to go home to TV. Benny Graham's mother started hooting at Leo Kroll, questioning his manhood (or at least his boyhood). Benny Graham scraped the dirt around third base with his foot, hanging his head as he always did when his mother embarrassed him, which was often. Leo stepped in and hit Arnold's pitiful fastball about a foot off the ground six feet to the left of first base.

I don't remember thinking what to do. Obviously, I didn't think at all but threw my body to the right, leaving my feet as I had done so many time playing catch with my uncle Del in my uncle Russel's yard, and caught the ball in the air. The runner was already half-way to second base and not looking back. Nevertheless, I pulled myself to my knees and dived back to first, slapping my Ferris Fain mitt on the base for the game ending double play.

The crowd, whether delighted by my fielding or merely glad to be able to go home (or a little of both) cheered and cheered. Someone picked me up and suddenly the arms of my friends were lifting me up on Benny Graham's and Arnold Butler's shoulders. I was carried off the field for the first and last time in my life. They put me down into the waiting arms of my Daddy and he carried me, all 110 pounds of me, almost to the car. Half-way home down the winding mountain roads, I told him I was quitting.

There was no noise save the whizzing of the tires on the cooling pavement and the cracking of my father's heart. He said nothing. We rode in silence. When I got home, neither of us told my mother about my two Texas League singles, my run scored, my miraculous double play. My father went to the coal house, where he kept his liquor, for a shot of bourbon and I folded my uniform, #7, just like Mickey Mantle, for the last time.

(I never told  my father why I quit Little League a day and a year before I had too. I never told him because it was because of our manager, Jimmy Newsome, who my father admired greatly. Before the game, when we were taking infield, Jimmy {long dead now, I imagine, since he was 20 years older than us back then} was standing in the first base coaching box talking to one of this drinking buddies. He was commenting on the members of the team. He told his friend about me ['all glove, no bat'] but then he moved to Billy Bridgeman at second base and called him 'a good player but a f*cking thug'. Danny Taylor was at short and Jimmy Newsome praised his athletic ability but said he had 's*it for brains'. Jimmy called Benny Goodman's mother 'a foul mouth whore' and said Arnold Butler 'wouldn't know where to put his d*ck except in the assh*ole of a dog'. The worst was for Mousy Macroski, the catcher. "That little Pollock," our manager said of Mousy, "can catch, but he's a bastard and smells like a Pollock."

This was a man I looked up to, admired, wanted to emulate. And as 12 and 13 year old boys were taking grounders and throwing to me at first base, he was defaming and abusing us in coarse language and without an ounce of respect. We, on the other hand, were wanting to win the game to make Coach Newsome praise us. We looked up to him like a minor deity. I don't know what was the worse conclusion: that he didn't think I could hear what he was saying or didn't care if I did.

I knew I could never play again for him, not after that night. All the naivete of childhood was over for me. Since that evening when we beat Elbert 16-3 and I had my first and only glory on a playing field, I've never trusted authority. I drove teachers and scout leaders and professors and bishops wild by making them prove beyond doubt that they could be trusted. Never again did I willingly accept that the person in 'authority' was worthy of respect and obedience.

I never told any of my team mates why I quit even though they resented me for it. I didn't want to rip the admiration and adoration of Jimmy Newsome from their hearts and mind. I became, on that night, folding up my Little League uniform for the last time, an 'outsider', immune from slavishly accepting 'the way things were' and became, for always, a skeptic and a rebel. Jimmy Newsome broke my heart and gave me the identity I have to this day.

On one level I resent him mightily for robbing me of my innocence. On a deeper level I appreciate that he gave me, early on, a bull-sh*t detector that seldom fails me.

I started once to tell my father in the nursing home this story. But he wouldn't have known what I was talking about and why would I put that on him in the bottom of the ninth of his life....?)