Justice Delayed

The sun is shining brightly this early morning and, if the day continues as it has begun, my front lawn will be entirely snow-free for the first time since I returned from California in mid-December.  While my attention has been focused on the snow and the general wintriness of the last several months, under the snow and ice and in the darkest reaches of the woodlands behind me, Spring has been quietly setting about preparing to strike.  The receding snow revealed the first leaves of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths fully an inch or more high, a neighbor has tapped his maples and is hauling in quantities of sweet sap, and I noticed just now that two goldfinches on my feeder have begun to trade in their drab winter brown for their summer yellow. 

My pal Marge has ever-so-gently chid me (chidden?  chided?) about my relatively long blogging hiatus, speculating that some rise in my general happiness might have removed the general irascibility and discontent that makes me cranky enough to write.  Sadly, this is true.  I was intensely down for a while (and blogged copiously), and then, suddenly, about three weeks ago, an immense sense of contentment set in without warning, and for no apparent reason.  I found myself reading and watching a trove of really excellent pay-channel series on TV (Has anyone seen Shameless, the new Showtime series about an Irish American family in the Chicago slums?  It is wildly entertaining, and superbly written and acted).   Then, on top of that, a few things began to happen.  A former classmate – one of the popular girls, for no apparent reason, brought me cookies, soup and a blooming hyacinth plant.  I sent in my taxes, pausing only to mourn the fact that I have thousands of dollars worth of deductions that I can't use and, that because I only had nineteen dollars withheld, I can only get nineteen dollars back. My brother Liam and his wife began a series of local concerts; apparently he also has been recently energized because he has written at least two new songs in the last week or two.  And then I got called for, and was selected for, a jury in a murder case which has received some media attention locally.  Last night, we rendered our verdict.

I have never before served on a jury, and I must say that it is quite an experience.  I was surprised by a few things: the degree to which the 14 of us bonded (there were two alternates empaneled with the other 12 jurors); the seriousness and intelligence that each of the jurors brought to his or her participation; and the number of unresolved questions and nuances of doubt that were raised in what may have looked like an open-and-shut case in the press.  I have read no coverage whatever before, during or since the verdict, so I can’t truly say how this case actually was portrayed, but my sense is that it might have been regarded as a slam-dunk because of those magic letters, DNA. 

I was unprepared for the degree of sadness I would feel for the victim, and the degree I felt that I could imagine the embarrassment and shame the victim might have felt could she have known that strangers would be looking at her splayed out clumsily with her private areas exposed in a way that was decidedly not provocative or anything other than repellent.   I was also unprepared for the empathy I would feel, as did all the other jurors, for the large number of family which showed up, especially for the last day of the five we spent at trial. 

New York, some time ago, reformed its laws regarding juries in a way which I heartily applaud.  In the past, there were a number of automatic, or almost automatic, exclusions, and those not excluded were subject to being called every three years.  The caricature, possibly accurate, that juries were composed of full-time housewives and retirees, who might have little in common with defendants, was widespread.  Nearly anyone could plead the slightest inconvenience and he or she would be excused.   There was a conception – at least for me – that juries were a bunch of folks with nothing better to do, lightly leavened with a few folks who held strong feelings about their civic duty.  The new rules make it relatively difficult to be excused if one is not acquainted with any of the principals or witness or investigators in the case.  The trade-off is that one is not subject to a call to serve more often than every eight years.  I think this is an excellent reform.  As a result, our jury contained three black men, one quite young, one in early middle age and one probably over 60; there were teachers, women who were employed in both blue-collar and white collar jobs, a college student and, yes, some retirees, including yours truly.  One of the black men was an immigrant who had been in the country for about 20 years.  Counting the alternates, there were six women and eight men.  I thought the jury, as well as the many others who were not selected simply because many more people were called to make up our pool than were seated, was very reflective of the county’s population as a whole.  There appeared to be a range in the financial circumstances of the jurors, although none seemed to be nearly as poor as the victim had been. 

The reason (I assume) that there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in this case is that the killing occurred in the early 1970s.  In addition, the crime was particularly disgusting; the victim, who may have been sexually assaulted in her own home, was a mother in her late middle age who was blind.  Basically, an officer – the son of one of the original investigators – was assigned to take a look at some old cases, and in doing so, sent a blanket that had been taken as evidence at the time to the county lab to check for DNA, and two tiny spots of semen on the blanket were determined to have been from one of the ‘persons of interest’ in the original investigation.   Therefore, this seemed to be one of those cases where an unsolved murder from the past was solved through the modern miracle of DNA technology.  In fact, when the assistant DA recited the theory of the case in her opening remarks, this seemed to be exactly the case.  The opening remarks of the defense seemed to be an almost pro forma “wait a minute here” type of pretty unconvincing quibbles. 

And now, because this is a gorgeous late winter (almost spring?) day which is calling to me, I will leave the rest of this story for another day.  And, I promise, I will be around to catch up on all the usual blogging suspects soon, but gee, SUCH a nice day...

My Military Career

Back in those golden days when there were communists behind every bush and people knew what was what, my University made membership in the ROTC mandatory for the first two years of any male undergraduate’s academic career.  The logic of training boys to die young when the ostensible purpose of paying all that tuition argued that they were preparing for a long and richly-lived career escapes me, but being a Catholic institution, NPU drew on 2000 years of practice at illogical actions and at extermination of any sign of independent thought.  Someone somewhere decided that training the undergraduates to march around in lockstep was an excellent idea, and it must have been someone to whom no one dared say nay.  Actually, I think, although I am far from sure of this, that the US government sweetened the cavernous pot of the University’s treasury for taking this decision, and while Holy Mother Church might pause in matters of morals or dogma, there is no such hesitation when the seductive charms of gold lurk in the offing. 

The rule was that the first two years of ROTC were mandatory and universal (universal, since one can hardly count the female students, a contingent that had not even existed for most of the University’s history; the University itself rarely counted females, in keeping with its thoroughly Catholic traditions), and if marching about in neat rows and barking orders were found to be appealing options, male students could take a third and fourth year of ROTC at the end of which they would emerge, with the cost of their education underwritten, as lieutenants in the Air Force.  Viet Nam was, at this time, just a small cloud on the horizon, home of a guerrilla action against which the US was supplying a handful of advisors to ensure that a brazenly corrupt government remained in power.  Fans of the Afghanistan War will instantly recognize the strategy.  The rules for such hapless freshmen as me were that all was fun and games six days of the week, but that on every Thursday we lads were to emerge from our dorms uniformed and spit-polished and ready, if not eager, to salute any upperclassman officer we might encounter.  At a certain hour, all of us would gather on what had in glory days been a football field, in ranks and rows to be inspected, to say, “Yes, sir!” and to be marched to and fro, up and down, left and right, until we understood where we ranked in the order of things, which was dead last.   (Again, I omit to include the standing of the ladies, who in the eyes of Holy Mother Church and the Air Force of those days, was pretty much where that gender today ranks in Pakistan.)  

From the get-go, ROTC was the bane of my existence.  Indeed, had I bothered to read the parts of the welcoming pamphlets which NPU had sent me, which dealt with topics other than location and fraternities and sororities and leafy green campus areas, I might have chosen another school based solely on this military requirement.  I do not thrive in organized activities, be they army, sports, IT departments, churches or gay organizations.  I don’t intend to ask, “why?” but somehow the word always intrudes and the type of person who rises to captain or clergyman or vice president in charge seems to be able to read in my mind the one question that ought never arise.  I don’t even believe in my own ideas, let alone anyone else’s.  Well, that is not quite true; I may believe in them, but never enough to rouse myself from my habitual sloth, and certainly not enough to march about, or hang posters or spend hours on my knees. 

First and foremost, there was that creased trousers and spit-polish thing.  Some of the guys in my dorm actually seemed to enjoy sitting there by the hour, buffing and wetting and polishing their shoes until they reached unearthly levels of gloss.  I was not one of them.  In fact, once I discovered that common Shinola liquid polish (the very brand from which my father often mused that I could not distinguish shit) could create a shine which passed cursory inspection three times out of four, the amount of time spent on my shoes was reduced to seconds per week.  Besides, those damn shoes were made from some kind of cardboard, and early in my inglorious career, before I discovered the beneficent effects of liquid Shinola, I had over-wet one spot on one shoe and it had caused me to rub up a roughened spot on that shoe that nothing ever quite repaired.  So each inspection put me at risk of having that spot discovered, and could a perfect shine do other than highlight this early error?  It is amazing what liquid Shinola could cover up.  If Shinola still exists, and if it still makes the liquid polish, and if it is ever looking for a heartfelt customer endorsement, let it come to me.  I haven’t polished a shoe in years and years, but I can heartily aver that their product is the cat’s meow. 

There was also the question of “brass”.  Brass referred to some metal insigniae that must be pinned to the uniform in exactly the right place at exactly the right angle.  There are two kinds of boy in this world: those whose shirttails remain tucked neatly into their pants all day long and those whose shirttails will not remain so anchored for love or money for longer than the half minute after they are first so tucked.  I can tell you for a fact, that young men of the latter type are incapable of placing, or at least of keeping said brass at said location and angle.  And, need you ask?, I am one of the latter group.  Moreover, nothing so delighted the spit-polish guys as surreptitiously re-pinning their room mates’ brass upside-down the night before Thursday’s torment.  Need I mention that my roommate Bigman, who was class president, who was on basketball scholarship (this was a time when these were given to white guys), who would later become captain of the team and fraternity president, bore the most spit-polished pair of shoes e’er seen at NPU?  The twinkling of his shoe tips in the Washington sunlight when forth he strode from the freshman dorm blinded anyone so unwary as to look directly at them.  In short, he loved to mess with my brass.   And I rarely retained the memory of the last week long enough to be sure to check the next week.

Hair was another issue.  I could not afford haircuts, to begin with.  When I was in college, I genuinely functioned without a penny in my pocket or wallet or anywhere else most of the time.  Merely keeping in beer took a superhuman effort and there was simply nothing left over for anything else.  Moreover, I hated short hair.  I recall the awe with which I saw the rise of the Beatles a few short years later; my first thought was how much I would love to let my hair grow so long, my second was that no one would ever dare do so in public.  How little could I foresee.  Boy’s – and men’s – hair, pre-Beatles, mattered very much and it must be very short.  The only longish hair at all was that favored by the “hoods”:  those slightly long, highly greased jelly-rolls that fell over the forehead and met in a 'duck’s ass' in back, but even this hair was meticulously trimmed at the base of the neck, and around the ears.  The length was all in the upswept sides and in the front, and unending care was required (remember Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb?)  Every boy wearing this style carried a comb in his back pocket always.  Part of the ritual of coolness was the constant pulling out of that comb and re-combing of the hair.  The coolest guys had unbelievably cool methods of hair-combing.  I shudder to think of the fate of any boy daring enough to leave his hair ungreased and allowed to fall down over his ears or onto his collar.  My military days were a constant struggle between hair the way I wanted it, and hair the way my flight commander wanted it.

I have a couple of qualities, other than the aforementioned, that render me a poor fit for the military life.  One is that I am never sure I am doing things correctly, no matter what evidence exists that I am perfectly correct.  Another is that I hate, with a passion that surely has roots in some psychological defect that is better left unplumbed, to accord deference to people who do not seem to have earned it – or even to those who have.  I hate acts of self-abnegation, and to me saluting someone who is just another underclassman like myself, is deeply humiliating.  So I hated saluting our ROTC officers, and simultaneously I always felt like I was making some gross blunder when doing so which was imperceptible to me, but blatantly obvious to everyone else.  Wrong hand formation, wrong arm angle, wrong something.  This generalized feeling, that there is some secret known to everyone except myself, has lasted my lifetime.  It was why I never could, during school days, boast of female conquests; I was sure there was something about sex (and the female anatomy) that everybody knew but me, by which my ignorance would betray me as a liar.  The real reason why I almost never lie about important things, and never cheat at games or steal, is that I can think of nothing more awful than getting caught out. I dread it with a physical feeling of dread.  I bragged about something that wasn’t true in first grade once, because I couldn’t stand being the only one who hadn’t had an interesting adventure, and even now, when I recall it, I feel unreasonably ashamed and embarrassed, because although none of the kids knew I was lying, the teacher did and actually offered me several suggestions for alternative versions that would allow me to backtrack and I did not.  It doesn’t matter now, I know, but it matters to me.  

So the upshot of the above is that I would plan my routes from class to class on Thursdays with meticulous care to ensure that I would not pass any kid who was an officer requiring a salute.  I’d go through buildings' basements and up back stairs.  It was an obsession to me whose depth I can recall but which I cannot quite believe now or understand.  Saluting was like a small death.  The only thing as bad as saluting – or nearly as bad – was the marching.  At a certain hour, the entire male population of the freshman and sophomore classes would gather en masse in the athletic field, divided into the various ‘flights’ (which were a group similar to the groupings like ‘platoon’ or ‘squad’ or whatever group other military services have).  We’d be all uniformed and hatted and gloved and one-arm’s length apart and so forth.  And we’d be inspected (usually cursorily enough to miss my Shinola heresy), issued demerits as required, lectured on whatever needed saying that day, and then each flight was marched by his flight leader all about the field.  I was pretty good at staying in step, although that quick half-step, sort of a semi-skip, to get back into step when I had somehow strayed from perfection because I became engrossed in thoughts of things non-military, was not unknown to me. Since I can remember, I have endured boredom by just vanishing into my thoughts, a habit that allowed me to endure a 40-year career in Information Technology, among other things.  Oddly, I can often absorb information in this state, but one thing I cannot do is snap to it and stay in step with perfect ease. 

There was one boy in my flight, however, who was utterly incapable of remaining in step.  This boy, Berny Duck, was unusually tall – one of the very tallest boys in my class - and he possessed red hair of such brilliance – flaming, glowing, incandescent – that his head drew every eye.  Like most tall boys in that era, he was gangly in build and appearance, and his walk was such a loose-limbed lope that he just bobbed up and down like a cork on choppy water.   It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up a rhythm when he marched, it was just that he was always, always bobbing in opposition to everyone else’s rhythm.  Where we marched to ‘One two three four’, he marched invariably to ‘one Two three four’.  He couldn’t help it.  He’d get in step only to fall out of step again within three paces.  And with that great red head, there was no missing the error.  My recollection of marching is inextricably interwoven with the recollection of the chant, “One two three four,  Mister Duck, get in step,  One two three four.”  I know it doesn’t appear to scan when you read it, but it did when the sergeant yelled it, which he did incessantly. 

I, like Private Duck, had an insuperable problem when it came to marching.  I could not, and cannot to this day, tell my left from my right.  I can, actually, but I have to think about it.  And the time it takes to do that thinking is the time during which every other airman left-faced or right-faced as I walked straight forward into the nearest one of them.  For a time, my fate was to draw the ire of whoever was calling the cadence, but fairly early on in my career there came a day when we were to be reviewed by someone from the Pentagon.   Since NPU was in Washington, there was always some dignitary or other available to come and do this sort of thing, and such occasions caused those upperclassmen officers, so different from me, to swell with pride and to vow to themselves (and for all I know, to each other) that never in the history of marching would any flights of men march so sharply, so perfectly aligned, so filled with martial ardor as would ours when reviewed by the lesser gods of the Pentagon.  In pursuit of this lofty goal, there was only one solution to the Shaughnessy problem.  Oddly, I am totally blank when I try to recall whether or not the Duck problem was similarly handled.   I was reassigned to a desk job. 

The ROTC at NPU published a newspaper for some reason or other.  I don’t recall the name of this journalistic endeavor – probably the Rifle or the F-15 or something suitably fierce and as unlike the actual content offered as possible.  Most of the content was as drab s one may imagine, but since the staff or the powers in control actually yearned for people to read the damn thing, I somehow persuaded the editor to allow me to create and write an advice column.  This was most unoriginally entitled Dear Sophie and it soon became quite a must-read on the NPU campus.  Although I endeavored to be humorous, and to actually have the nouns agree with the verbs in person and number and so forth, the real reason people flocked to read Dear Sophie was that the requests for advice which I made up referred to real relationships of real people on campus.  It is hard to remember in these jaded days, but colleges – especially smallish religious ones – were, in those halcyon days, far more like today’s high schools or even junior high schools.  Susie cutting in on Mary and Johnnie’s romance was the stuff of our conversation.  We did not gossip about who was sleeping with whom – probably very few were sleeping with anyone there and then - or who had got the clap or whatever is the currency of today’s campuses.  People talked about who was going with whom.  Or whether a girl would or wouldn’t get pinned by her fraternity boyfriend – ‘pinned’ having no sexual connotation (and, usually, no privileges) whatever - it merely meant he gave her his frat pin as a pledge to eventually give her a diamond.  A lot of these girls were saving themselves for marriage, goddamit, and in those pre-pill days, a pregnancy meant shame and expulsion, no less in college than in high school - so most of the pinning was done at shoulder level. 

I seem to have some quality which results in people telling me things.  I also enjoy knowing everyone in any environment in which I function.  A lot of people like to know the president or vice president of their group, but I find everybody else just as interesting.  I want to know the janitor and the nurse and the guy who only comes in on Wednesday.  People are surprisingly interesting if you let them be.  I remember once walking through the downtown area of al-Jubail with my supervisor when I was working in Saudi and all the coin sellers and restaurant guys and street sellers and passing people from all different nationalities were calling out to say hello, and my boss said, “You know everybody here!”  It was always that way for me.  I don’t talk to people to be nice or to feel good about myself or because I felt some moral obligation; I do it because they are almost always interesting (OK, maybe feeling good about myself enters in).  At one of our class reunions, a girl like said to me, “You were friends with everyone, even the most outcast.”  But I didn’t always realize that someone was an outcast.  And I couldn’t stand to see people sad or picked on.  I always felt as if, somehow just by witnessing cruelty, I was both complicit in the cruelty of the aggressor and shared in the shame of the victim.  This is not a virtue, or a considered plan of action, it is how I cannot help feeling.  I feel ashamed – a genuine slightly nauseated feeling – when I see someone being picked on.  It is why I do not enjoy the early audition rounds of American Idol; I can’t stand seeing vulnerable people hurt.  It is not funny to me that people are odd-looking or delusional.  I think it is more a weakness in me than anything else; I always feel like I have some quality worse than that other guy’s which will become apparent if I speak out.  I think I dread humiliation beyond all other things, and seeing someone else suffer it is as painful to me as if it were me.  I have actually flicked to other channels when some of the more egregious contestants have embarrassed themselves.  I feel sorry for them.  Whatever is the cause of this sort of pathological empathy, the result seems to be that people tend to tell me things. 

Using the information I was getting from everybody, I was able to construct fake letters for my column that hinted at real situations.  I never exposed anyone, but I always conveyed I knew things, and people used to read half afraid they’d show up in Dear Sophie.  I am not sure this column made any significant military contribution, but it sure contributed to my quality of life. 

There was one boy who, from another context which I explained long ago, was called First-of-all.  This lad was one of those folks whom life itself wanted to pick on.  He was an odd mix of goody-goody and ineptitude.  First-of-all loved ROTC.  No one polished his shoes or aligned his brass more assiduously than he.  And of course he drew the attention of all those like my roommate who delighted in jokes, often rather cruel ones.  One day, after we knew he’d spent his usual solid hour of pre-Thursday shoe polishing, Bigman and another guy on the basketball team hoisted me through the transom of First-of-all’s room with a jar of Vaseline in my hand from which I gouged two huge gobs of salve and placed one inside the toe of each shoe.  We all went snickering back to our own rooms.  But, of course, I began thinking about First-of-all’s approaching humiliation, and I began to feel sorry for him and ashamed of myself.  Had our target been someone like Bigman himself, or the other basketball player, I would have continued to enjoy the joke, but there was something peculiarly vulnerable about First-of-all.  For him, ROTC seemed to be bringing some weird validation that he was unable to find elsewhere.  I just knew that it would be more painful than funny when he put on his military shoes Thursday morning.  

Finally I slunk down the corridor and found a couple of fairly husky friends whom I persuaded to hoist me back through First-of-all’s transom.  I brought some tissues and cleaned out the inside of the shoes and never let anyone know. 

A number of the boys who marched on that field with me in those days later died in Viet Nam.  As I have recounted earlier, I inadvertently dodged the draft and never found myself in that awful place, for which I am profoundly grateful.  I would have been a complete casualty, one way or another, whether I lived or died.  I know there would have come a time when I came face-to-face with an enemy.  There I would have been, armed to the teeth with inadequately polished shoes, brass awry and hair longer than his.  I would have been terrified.  And when I looked at him, I bet I would see, or imagine, that he was terrified, too.

And I would have felt sorry for him.

What They Should Do

Has anyone but me noticed that the people who seem most distressed over the possibility that the religious element will insert itself into the future government of Egypt are the very same ones most determined to insert religion into our own government?  I’m just asking.  For people who do not subscribe to any of the various creeds or sects or cults, there isn’t a hap’orth of difference between the rule of one and the rule of another. 

If what is happening in Egypt were happening here, what a different attitude would be found among us!  There are people who are quite fervent in their support of the mob’s dictum that Mubarak must go who will look back to the events of Kent  State in the ‘70s, for instance, and believe that those children who were killed by the Guard had it coming.  It IS a mob there; the term ‘mob’ does not apply only to those with whom we disagree.  I personally believe the Egyptian mob is on the right side of the issues for the most part, and I believe that Mubarak has been running an increasingly repressive and tyrannical government.  I also believe that we in America have been very glad to have him there, and have had him take care of a tremendous amount of dirty work that we don’t wish to be seen doing ourselves.  We have been rather like Pontius Pilate in this, turning over troublemakers to someone else to handle, knowing full well that we are, in fact, sentencing them to death or torture. 

I am somewhat of an admirer of Pilate, actually.  He was an adept politician who knew better than to embroil himself in local issues whose outcome either way could do him no good.  At some point in life, everyone of any intelligence asks Pilate’s famous question, “What is truth?”  And I suspect that the majority does not want in the least to actually know the answer unless it is framed in a way that supports its pre-existing beliefs.  The thing about truth is that, by its nature, it is the same no matter who is asking.   

In this sense, the same is true of human or constitutional rights.  If they don’t apply to everyone, then they aren’t really rights.  It is not unreasonable to argue that one thing or another is not a right, but if one declares something a right, then it applies to everyone.  

Nothing is easier than to feel that something which does not apply to me is less important or urgent or real than something that does.  How often does one hear, or think, “They ought to do something about that,” when some injustice or need is mentioned.  If THEY should, then I am pretty sure you and I should.  There is no virtue whatever in sitting on one’s ass feeling indignant about things, although I hasten to add that I do it all the time.  How easy it is to feel good because one’s heart is in the right place, even when one’s hands are not.  So many people’s heart is in the right place in so many situations so much of the time that one is tempted to question the theory that an object can only occupy one space at on point in time.  Our hearts must be expert multi-taskers!  How fashionable we all must be!

Nutritious Slothfulness

I cannot think of any more boring vice than sloth.  However, when it comes to the seven deadly sins, this is the one in which I find myself firmly entrenched.  A hardened sinner, and to such little profit.  Lust just seems too strenuous nowadays, although I can and do lust in my heart from time to time.  But pursuit of the objects of my lust – well, it is just too much effort for me with too little likelihood of success.  Imagine if one had to mush from Nome, Alaska to, say, Fairbanks to purchase a lottery ticket, and one can pretty well make a fair equation for  the proportion of effort to reward.

I have never been a huge glutton – unless liking beer a whole lot falls under that heading.  And I let that little sinlet go on my fortieth birthday, if not for good, then at least for the last 28 years.  I do like certain foods, and I do occasionally overeat, but I am more likely to forget to eat until four or five in the afternoon than I am to spend the day eating.  As to avarice – well, I am not really clear on all that falls under that heading.   I am certainly no miser, and if I do say so myself, I occasionally overdo on gifts for others, while being a bit ungenerous in a day to day sense.  On the other hand, I really like having two of everything, and the more expensive and useless the better.  Still, I couldn’t say that avarice is my sin of choice.  I think I have faults in the avarice arena, but I would guess they are more faults of lacking empathy or imagination or – even more likely - laziness, which gets us back to sloth.

Pride is also a bit difficult to get a handle on.  I know I can be all about myself sometimes, and I know that I occasionally – maybe more than occasionally – indulge in what can be termed ‘stubborn pride’.  I am not sure, though, that pride in the seven-deadly-sins sense is the same thing as the quality that is commonly referred to as pride.  It seems that pride in common parlance means too stubborn or too aware of one’s dignity to accept charity.  I don’t see how that can be a sin – it would seem more like a virtue to me.   To tell the truth, I don’t see how one could spend a lifetime with pride as its centerpiece.  I mean, what would one be doing in a day-to-day sense, if one’s central vice were overweening pride?  It would pretty much mean sitting around glorifying oneself, and that seems way more like sloth to me.  Does it mean that one puts oneself above God?  Well, of course, I do have the issue that I think that I am real and that He is imaginary, but then imaginary beings nearly all seem to be better than I am.  There’s Superman, for instance, or King Arthur, or Lassie: all much superior to me.  Even Goldilocks seemed to have a great deal more intellectual curiosity and ‘git-up-and-go’ than I do nowadays.

I am pretty certain that I don’t practice envy to a mortally sinful extent.  My understanding of envy is that it is more than coveting what one’s neighbor has; it also means wishing ill-fortune to the neighbor for having it.  I don’t think that is one of my failings.  I willingly confess to a touch of schadenfreud when someone who seems to me to be particularly undeserving or obnoxious, but gifted with goods or worldly honors, slips on a moral banana peel, but I wouldn’t say that I am envious in a truly hell-worthy sense.  I can’t imagine myself working to bring down someone just because he or she had something that I wish were mine. 

Let’s see: what is left?  Oh (I actually had to Google to find the remaining sin) wrath!  Well, I DO get pissed off.  And the annoying entry in Wikipedia for ‘seven deadly sins’ points out that being ‘capital’ means they are the root sins that lead to all others (‘capital’ refers to the Latin word for ‘head’), and that one can be guilty in either a venial or mortal sense, and still be guilty of a capital sin; this certainly appeals to my old Catholic upbringing where you pretty much found yourself innocent of one sin when you were overly busy committing another.  Well, there goes that.  I guess I am guilt of all of them then.  I don’t know if that is a relief (I am balanced) or cause for further self-recrimination.  Either way, I do believe my really morally disfiguring sin is sloth.

Because I am slothful, while still desirous of being minimally healthy, I have found a number of ways to keep myself fed without raising too much of a sweat in food preparation.  I do like things to taste good, if possible, and to be more healthy than not when it is just as easy either way.  My sole use of sugar, other than the very rare times I try baking a cake (five times in my life by actual count!) is to throw in a tablespoonful or two when I make pasta sauce or chili or anything requiring massive amounts of cooked tomato in order to cut the acidity.  My brother Rob has been going through my supply of sugar much faster than I have done merely by coming to the Breakfast Club on Sundays and using sugar in his coffee, of which he drinks copious amounts. 

In the interests of public service for all the lazy folks out there, I will give a brief résumé of lessons I have learned in having the best possible food for the least possible effort.  To begin with, none of these ideas is of any use if one has to run to the store, or prepare every meal from scratch.  Therefore there are a number of things to keep on hand at all times – things which keep for a goodish length of time.  

These are:

One of those huge bags of frozen chicken parts that one can find at the ‘big box’ stores.  I prefer skinless boneless thighs (I hate skin, and if cooking chicken bone-in is easy, eating it is not.  Let’s look at the big picture here.)  Breasts (in chickens) are too darn bland for me. 

Again from the big box emporia, I like to keep on hand those pork cutlets – you know, those thickly cut slices (nearly an inch thick) that look like pork chops without the bone and come about ten to the package – that is ten meals right there.

A bottle of some kind of marinade.

A BIG bottle or jar of that pre-chopped garlic.

A number of cans of crushed tomatoes, as well as a couple of cans of diced tomatoes.  Pasta sauce or chili are always better with a can of the chunkier cut stuff thrown in.

A bag of onions.

A big bag of frozen peas – you can add a handful of these to anything. 

A big bag of those small pre-peeled ‘baby’ carrots- - these keep forever.

A big bag of broccoli florets, or crowns – these will last two to three weeks, and are worth their weight in gold for the degree of virtue one feels in adding some of them to everything. 

A dozen boiled eggs. 

A bell pepper or two.

Every kind of spice you can imagine.  Spices are god’s way of saying, “Relax: you can cover up everything one way or another."   Although spices lose flavor over time, it is a good idea to slowly work out which ones you commonly use and get those in the larger sizes.  The last thing you ever want is to start something and find you are out of a key spice.   I make sure to have a lot of black pepper, chili powder, garlic powder, cumin and coriander.  It is good to keep turmeric on hand.  I throw it in most things – not so much for taste, but it is supposed to be amazingly healthy and it also makes things look golden and lovely.   

Also, it is good to keep on hand bottles of Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce and balsamic vinegar.  The whole point of all these sauces and spices is that you can keep making the same things over and over but have them taste different every time.

Olive oil – the BIG jars of a gallon or so.  Also yellow mustard and mayonnaise

Several jars of pre made pasta sauce.  The trick is to doctor these if you must (here comes that broccoli again!) without going thru the mess of actual ‘from scratch’ preparation.  Pre-made alfredo sauces - even the store brands - are really good - and you can add a bit of the tomato sauce for variety.  Also I keep a pre-made jar of pesto sauce - a spoonful added to almost anything is pretty darn yummy.  OK, don't add it to desserts.  

Lots of pasta.  To cover the health angle, make these whole grain pastas where possible.  For whole grain pasta, you want to get the shapes of pasta that hold the most sauce: rotelli is ideal.  The more sauce the less you taste the difference between the good stuff and the healthy stuff.   The worst pasta for whole grain is the thinner spaghetti forms, especially angel hair.  On the other hand angel hair is the best for the lazy cook, because it cooks in just about three minutes.   One place whole grain spaghetti is superior is in any stir-fry version of chow mein.  I actually prefer whole grain in chow mein type dishes.  If you are a fan of stir fry, one mixed spice that is absolutely wonderful is Emeril Legasse’s Asian Essence. 

I do not tend to keep hamburger on hand because the taste goes off fairly quickly if you do not use it or freeze it, and if you freeze it, it is a hassle to either pre-form it into patties or usable quantities, or to get it unfrozen quickly when you want it.  Thawing a huge chunk in a microwave also seems to cook the exterior of the stuff – so I have gotten away from keeping hamburger meat on hand.  Anyway beef isn’t all that good for you, although it does have the virtue that, unlike chicken, no matter how bad it seems to have gone ‘off’ it is still pretty safe to eat. 

To make preparation easier, it is always good to keep a shallow pan or bowl with some chicken parts or pork cutlets defrosting in a pool of marinade.  It is nice to throw a tablespoon of chopped garlic into the marinade for extra taste. 

Chicken or pork can be cooked in the oven while you work on your computer – the rule for me is when I can smell it, it is usually done.    

Keep a steamer for vegetables.  Once the water comes to a boil, you can put a bunch of the baby carrots in for 3-4 minutes (set the timer, so you can putter around doing other things.)  Broccoli should not steam more than two minutes.   So you can put the water on to boil, watch TV until it is boiling, then throw the broccoli in, once it boils at the beginning of a TV commercial break and it is steamed before the commercial break is over.  Easy or what?  And you get to miss the commercial without missing the program.   

I recently bought a package of whole wheat ‘wraps’.  I found that I could cut up one cooked cutlet of the marinaded pork (or some chicken), chop up a handful of broccoli and steam it, mix the two with some mayonnaise, dill, dried mustard or curry powder, and whatever spice seems to be my preference for the day.  And the result was really, REALLY good.  It is all about having stuff on hand, re-thawed and pre-marinaded, getting a feel for spices and mixing the same few things differently over and over.   

If one wishes to use steamed broccoli as a side dish, it is really good with a small spot of yellow mustard dotted here and there amongst the florets.  Then one can put any other sauce over it – or even none. 

This sounds like a blog on gluttony, but believe me, it is all about sloth – once I got in the habit of keeping things on hand, I had to spend no more than half an hour in the kitchen per day – for all the meals I needed.   And that can’t be a bad thing.  

Wilt Thou...?

I am actually seated at my computer a little earlier today than usual.  I have fallen into the habit of watching Morning Joe which seems less polemic and a bit more even-handed than other cable shows which deal with politics.  I cannot stand bumptious rhetoric whether or not I agree with the speaker.  I want to hear right wing pundits who will admit that Obama does some things well, and left wing pundits who admit that there is merit in the argument that there are some beneficial programs that we cannot afford, or that conservatives are not just a bunch of crazy people.  I usually complete my morning TV viewing with a bit of the Live show with Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa – or more than a bit of it, if the guests look like people I want to hear from.  But this morning, there was a guest host in Regis’ place and after a bit of badinage, we were forced to see a video of this man’s marriage proposal.

This trend toward choreographed and over-the-top marriage proposals is one more sign to me of the trivialization of marriage, and of pretty much everything else.  Whenever I see a public wedding proposal, I always know that the lady to whom it is aimed would be wise to respond with a resounding, “NO!”  A public proposal is manipulative and the men who make them are precisely the kind of man who can and will manipulate friends and family of a woman who is fleeing an abusive situation into disclosing her whereabouts because he is SO sorry and loves her SO much and will never, ever do it again.  These women are being placed in a position where saying anything except a happy and thrilled, “Oh, yes!”  will publicly humiliate the would-be groom.  Despite this being exactly what he deserves for placing her in this position, one assumes that she feels some affection for the poor jerk and doesn’t want to add humiliation to an already hurtful response, if her wish is to refuse or to request more time as a dating couple.  These proposals are acts of aggression and I think the smart woman will recognize that.   It might ease the lady’s conscience were she to reflect that in these situations, she is not the focus, HE is.  In these self-absorbed times, this alone should be enough to give her pause: "What?  This is not all about me?". 

A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle during the 70s whom I liked very much named Charles McCabe once wrote that those who can write great love letters are not capable of great love.  I have often thought about this, and I am inclined to agree, although I suppose there could be exceptions.  A truly great love letter in my mind would not be one which trumpeted great sentiments in beautiful language, but a simple one which spoke in words that meant a great deal only to the recipient.   Similarly, is there someone in your circle who constantly takes pictures of every event to which he or she is invited?  Regardless of how valued these pictures may be later, isn’t it also true that this person is never really participating in these events, but is far more consumed with recording them?   One reason I have much valued and long-lasting friends of whom I now have not a single photograph is that I just cannot step outside happy moments and record them on a camera, and I confess a frisson of irritation passes through me toward those who do so.  It makes everything seem not real for that moment, but just a performance.  Although I own a camera, I rarely take any pictures with it, and on my three or four week trip to my niece’s wedding on the train, a trip that seguéed into Thanksgiving with my best friend, I took exactly two photos, both of a lake that the train passed by in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (which I took mostly because the some announcer on the train suggested we passengers might like to do so) and I have never looked at these photographs since, nor do believe I ever will bother to do so.  If I do see them again, they will mean nothing to me at all. 

I am, as usual, straying from my point, which is, insofar as I have a point, that we are moving toward aggrandizing events and rituals at the expense of actually experiencing the human transaction that is taking place.  Call me a Romantic, but I think that when two people love each other enough to marry, it should almost go without saying that the marriage will take place.  I don’t recall Tumwell and me talking about IF we’d move in together, but only where we’d move (we each had room mates) and how soon we could do it.   Now that marriage seems to be just a phase in a life of serial monogamy, or a right to be demanded or defended, all the little rituals seem to have metastasized.  It is so often all bark and no bite, smoke without fire.

I have never placed any value on someone making any special effort – or even noticing the date – for St. Valentine’s Day.  (Does anyone even acknowledge that it is the feast day of a Catholic saint – one who is probably as fictional as most of them?)  And I have cherished forever those little impulsive gifts or gestures that come now and then just because someone has seen something and thought of me.   I think that part of any pre-nuptial agreement should be a clause specifying who will get the wedding album.   My suggestion is that it go to the one who doesn’t get custody of the kids; this will accord nicely with the current feel-good sentiment in children’s competitions that the loser should also get a trophy.   This is a great concept when we are speaking of the Special Olympics – but the benefit of everyone getting a trophy is doubtful when the people involved are not “special” in the sense implied by the term 'Special Olympics'.  People of average intelligence or better know when they have lost, however much we pretend otherwise – and they should.  It is called “learning” – a concept that has long since departed from anything that we currently term “Education.”

In general people do not think to insist they are telling the truth if, in fact, they are, because it doesn’t occur to people stating a fact that this fact is in question.  I have never felt any pressure to make an official show of love toward those whom I actually love, because I am pretty sure we both know it.  I need no public demonstration or concrete proofs from those who love me.  If I doubt anyone’s sincerity, a public performance will not do anything but increase my doubt.  When someone says, “I’ll be perfectly honest with you,” my one sure belief is that he won’t be. 

While I am on the topic of overdone and relatively insincere ritualization of life’s little ups and down, I wish to ask the question, why is a wedding day so often referred to as “her day” or “her special day”?  Isn’t the event supposed to be a union of two people?  Just thought I’d ask.  

OK, now I am done.

At Home in the Jungle

I thought I would check out the premier of a new TV series last night because it was ten o’clock and I still didn’t feel like going to bed; because it had an actor whose character I loved on Friday Night Lights and I was curious to see how much it was the actor I liked and how much it had been the character; and because it was set in the jungle, my concept of which has intrigued me since the first time I heard of it.  I am talking of the series Off The Map, about three young doctors recruited to work in a jungle clinic in a poor country.  Whether I will become a regular viewer of this show is still a question, because as a rule I avoid “doctor” shows and it isn’t clear whether this is more a doctor show or a jungle show.  I fear the former.  I have an almost pathological revulsion to seeing opened-up people, or to seeing skin pierced.  I have never watched the doctor insert a needle into me for blood tests or any other purpose.  I squinch my eyes when a film shows an addict shooting up.  I don’t at all mind the sight of blood, and I don’t mind receiving shots at all, not even novocaine in the gums.  Well OK, I mind novocaine a little, but only to a normal degree.  Some of the bloggers I follow have mentioned liking – or loving – the series Bones, but I rarely watch it and I have never watched the NCIS series or CSI, and I have never seen a single episode of E. R.  I will almost drive into a wall rather than run over an animal that is already dead – it even revolts me to squash one of the larger bugs.  I am not a Buddhist, nor am I one of those folks who revere life in all its forms (last year I killed seven squirrels); I just cannot stomach the sight of broken bones exposed, or internal organs, or the act of skin being pierced.  When I was in high school I was actually excused, in biology class, from the frog dissection (on condition that I learn all the parts from colored overlays in the textbook – I got the highest mark in the class on the subsequent test) .  I simply cannot do it.  I buy my chicken already cut up. 

I am not here to talk about my psychoses or neuroses (they leak out in everything I write, anyway) but something completely different.  There was, early in the show, a scene where the actor I mentioned – I don’t even know his name – goes to an open area where there are a bunch of huts and people doing jungly things to meet a boy who will guide him to a distant patient who needs help.  I can’t really describe the scene nor put my finger on what, exactly, was the specific thing I saw or heard that did it, but something sent a thrill through my mind and the thought, “Oh God, how I wish that were me in that place.”  It was the thrill of possibility, of starting out on the best vacation or job ever. 

This morning I was watching something and I switched over to another channel which was at a point in an ad for a cruise line that showed a group of passengers approaching the ship and I felt nothing, except that this scene from last night’s show flashed across my mind and it occurred to me that people headed to their ship for a cruise, or people walking up to a grand hotel, or people headed to Vegas seem to have that exact feeling that I had last night seeing the village scene.  I see a cruise as a thing I’d have to get through, like a wedding or a trip to the dentist or my job, when I had one.  There might be fun moments or congenial people – there might be – but good moments would be like shiny beads strung among periods when my smile is fixed on my face, when I would be wondering what I should be feeling or saying or doing next, when I would feel out of place.  I feel out of place so often in my life.  Not unwelcome at the weddings or parties or jobs, not resented or disliked, but just like I am not quite sure what to do with my hands.  I am sure many of you have had occasion to attend a funeral or wedding or event that you attended because of your affection or respect for someone involved – or a family event with your fiancé’s family before you knew him (or her) well – where you were acutely conscious of being foreign to the commonly agreed-upon rituals and behaviors among the majority of the attendees, where there were nuances which escaped you.  This is how I feel most of the time in Western countries.  Even when I love some of the folks involved dearly – even the Breakfast Club events with my own family where we gather with my Mom every Sunday at MY house, I have this undercurrent of feeling that I am stringing together moments that are smooth and fun with intervals of casting about for the next thing to say or do.  And afterwards I sometimes wondering why I said this or did that, not cruel or foolish or rude things, but just things that I am not sure are in tune with the interests or mood or interests of the other folks present. 

Why I am utterly comfortable when I am in a place where I don’t speak the language or where the customs are completely unlike those I am used to or where people dislike my government intensely, I can’t explain.  I just am.  And I love it.  Maybe it is because there is nothing to live up to.  Maybe because I am so obviously at level zero that anything I say or do is a move up the scale, even if not always in the right direction.  As strange as everything might seem to most people, I feel like I am at last among people like me.  I am playing with people who are my age.  Nothing I say or do goes on my permanent record.  The more people are unlike me in fact, the more they feel, in my gut, like me.  It only applies to the general environment in these cases, or in one on one interactions; being invited to a home or to a meal can be acutely uncomfortable. 

I was actually taken by surprise by the depth of my feeling during that one moment in the show that I have described.  It wasn’t exactly like, “Oh my God, I’m home again,” but it was remarkably like seeing, in the opening footage of the Sean Penn film Milk, the front of the barbershop I used to go to.  I had a tremendous gut reaction of meeting an old friend, of having a free day, of beginning a wonderful vacation.   

Sadly, I think the jungle setting for this show is largely a pretext for having even more horribly gaping wounds and more grotesque injuries than the mere bullet wounds and car crash injuries on the medical shows set within the confines of the USA.  That is too bad.  I am perplexed at the pleasure a lot of folk must derive from close-ups of maggot-filled bodies or torn-open abdomens.  Yet if one brings these things up with any degree of description at a dinner party, one tends to get the same reaction as the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.  It seems to be my curse: I don’t get what people do or when they should or shouldn’t do it.  Pink Floyd has a song where the narrator says then he was young, his hands “felt like two balloons.”  Me too.  Only I feel like balloons all over, especially my mouth. 

Maybe this is why I like films and books about people.  Other folks, folks who get people, seem to prefer shows about speeding cars or injuries or poop and pee or guns.  Real people to a lot of people are a big yawn.  But I love something that makes me wonder how I would react or about how people resolve issues, how people cope with things.  There is a film opening, called The Dilemma which poses the interesting question of what one would do if one saw one’s best friend’s wife cheating on her spouse.  This sounds like it could really be interesting, and even as a comedy, could say some challenging things.  I may well go see it.  And I will hope, hope, hope that the reaction of the characters doesn’t involve farting or pooping. 

I’m an idealist.

To Dream the Impossible Dream

My brother Liam is a poet.  I hadn’t actually put this thought into words, but someone else told me this and I realized that it is true.  My sort-of sister-in-law Nellie (she and my brother Rob have been together for at least 37 years – possibly longer) is an accomplished musician.  She has made her living from music most of her life.  She and Rob lived together in Arizona until just a few months ago when her mother passed away and she inherited the mother’s house back here in the City just north of here.  Music has hardly made her wealthy and this was too good a gift to pass up.  Back in Arizona, an all-woman blues group of which she was a member won the state blues title (did you know there was such a thing?) four years running until they decided to stop competing.  That group and her previous group have made a number of recordings, and she has played with a number of blues artists, or rhythm and blues artists, over the years including Bo Diddly. 

Recently, at the Breakfast Club (I think you all know that is what we call the Sunday breakfasts with my mother, don’t you?) a song by my brother Liam came on my iPod speakers (Liam was not present) and the conversation turned to songwriting and so forth.  Nellie said, “I have written some songs, but Liam is a poet.”  And she is exactly right – about him, whether or not she might be underrating herself.  Liam just seems to have a gift for saying things in such a way that you see the picture.  In a song of his that many people like quite a bit, he tells of seeing his son get off the school bus during a snowstorm and watching him come up the driveway with his coat unbuttoned, and it was “like watching a tear sliding down from the night”.  This song, The Loneliness Birds, (the title is from something someone else has written) is about hearing the news that this youngest son, at age sixteen, had been killed. 

My favorite song of all that he has written is a meditation on the story of Hansel and Gretel which reflects on how children ultimately decide their own paths and define who their parents were, no matter how hard those parents worked or how deeply they cared.  This song seems to me to encompass all the cares and worries of watching one’s children become independent: the driver’s license, the possibly dangerous friends, the parties where drink or drugs might be present, the person who will break his or her heart.

I can see the breadcrumbs

That you left to mark your trail,

And I see the loaf you tore

Them from grow grey and stale.

I see you moving on

Unconscious of the trap,

Not knowing of the crows behind you

Eating up your map.

All the warnings you have heard

Of strangers in the wood,

And all the lessons you have done

Don’t do you any good.

And as you hurry on, you drop

Your last small piece of bread

And walk in, without knocking,

To that house of gingerbread.

I go, “Wait a minute; have I mixed up my nursery rhymes?

Have I confused my heroes and my heroines?

Might I be thinking of some different dotted line?

Could it be me who needs the rescuing?”

But it’s you who writes the story

And you who turns the page.

Will I be the wicked witch

Who locks you in a cage?

And as I reach to touch you

Will you turn without a word

And hand me out the tiny bone

Of some small flightless bird?

Or will I be the woodsman

With bright and shining axe

Who searches in the forest

 To find your scattered tracks?

After I have saved the day

And freed you from the jail

Will you find your way home

Or another aimless trail?

I ask you, does anything describe the fragility of your child in your heart better than ’the tiny bone of some small flightless bird’?   Here goes this mere baby into the world, and that is his armor.

Liam called me last night, and we had one of the best conversations we have had in years.  It was good because I ended it (actually one of our phones gave out and thus ended it for us) feeling really good and engaged and a bit enlightened.   I passed on to him Nellie’s remark because I think people should hear all the good stuff about themselves that is said.  This got us onto the subject of poetry and song and writing in general, and we agreed that the really great stuff has a quality where two and two make five or ten.  Great stuff contains the kind of lines where what is said conveys more meaning than the words themselves actually say.  I always think, in this context, of the description of Tom and Daisy Buchanon (which I may remember incorrectly) in Gatsby, “They were the kind of people who broke things.”  These people were not vandals or vindictive, but merely sort of spiritually careless is my reading of this line.  It says so much, and yet that mere sentence in another context could be said about somebody’s ill-behaved children and contain no emotional depth or nuance whatever.

I always think also of Dylan’s line “Just to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.”  (Would that not be the best day of one’s life?)  Or Eliot’s famous over-quoted line, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” which can read as a flat statement of fact, but which conveys such depths of boredom, such shallow artifice, incomprehension and waste of time.  These are lines that sing in my head even though I have not heard or read some of them in a very long time.  Dylan Thomas was “young and easy under the apple boughs/ About the lilting house/ And happy as the grass was green.”  Isn’t that a wonderful image of childhood before you find out that there are people who don’t love you? 

Anyway, this was among the types of thing we talked about – Liam also brought up the secret language of families with its loaded phrases that seem so innocent to outsiders and which are such deadly shots to the members thereof.  There was no worse insult among us kids than “typical teen”.  My Mom had a habit of wondering why none of us boys dated certain girls and she tended to describe these girls as “full of fun.” (In short, they were the kind of girl that other girls would love to have around).  “Full of fun” became a deadly phrase among us boys, meaning a girl you wouldn’t date on a desert island where she controlled the water supply.  Mom herself had these innocent-sounding zingers – god help the person she described as “sweet as a peach”.  She used this roughly in the sense conveyed by others when they say “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”.   “And there she stood,” Mom would say, “sweet as a peach…” usually in reference to someone who had instigated a lot of trouble and who acted all innocent and, perhaps, even outraged by the resulting chaos.  Kind of like, “Who, me?”  There was no worse sin in Mom’s catechism than “troublemaking”.

What got me started here before my usual dilatory trip all over the place was something that clicked into place in my head near the end of our conversation.  I have long known a few faults or characteristics or habits of mine, as we all do about ourselves if we are not borderline psychotics.  I wrote an essay or entry or blog (what does one call these things anyway?) some time ago on my defunct Spaces blog about my love of going to out-of-the-way places (my first trip abroad was to Zambia) or of trying things that most people don’t try – or even want to try (hitchhiking across the USA; living in Saudi).  And anyone who has the least degree of perception seems to see, as I most certainly do myself, that I have a big tendency toward depression and inactivity – the sin of sloth is my vice of choice, which is certainly the least attractive of them all, and the least fun, which is even worse.  I have always attributed my tendency to end up sitting around doing nothing to the depression which has dogged me since my teenage years at least, and which once ended me up in a nuthouse for eleven months.  So I have thought about this sloth at times and I have thought about the adventures at other times.  The only way I have ever thought of them in tandem was when I felt lousy; usually I attributed this bad feeling to not being on some kind of adventure.  Mostly though, like other things I think about, I thought of either one or the other, but not both at once.  Suddenly, while I was talking with Liam last night, the two came together with blinding clarity, and when I said this sentence to Liam, he was equally struck by how exactly correct it seemed:

I would rather do nothing than do anything that is ordinary.

Like most things, this means more to me than it will mean to anyone else – but it somehow is a whole new way for me to look at what seems to be my current dilemma.  A sort of corollary to this is that I hate doing anything unless I feel I can (and notice the word is CAN, not WILL) become very good – among the best – at that thing.  I think this explains such things as my sudden complete revulsion toward going to the gym.  I actually didn’t mind going for six months, and I originally went because it seemed to be a healthy thing to do, and I was concerned about an increasing lack of muscle tone and a real lack of stamina.  I really had no goal other than to ameliorate my physical deterioration somewhat.  But six months into it, something happened.  I found I had lost two inches around my waist, I had reached a level of elasticity that allowed me to touch my forehead to my knee, I had gained an inch on my biceps and, most important of all, I noticed one day in the mirror that there was the tiniest hint of an indentation on each side of the place where one’s abs should be. 

“Wow!” I can imagine many people thinking, “What a great reward for what really, after all these years, is not a huge amount of time!”  How can this be a bad thing?  But a this brought  a very subtle change into the whole process; it is exactly the kind of thing that has often stopped me in the midst of other endeavors.  (OMG, I just realized why painting my dining room has never been completed!)  You see, for six months I was visiting a strange land.  I wasn’t “one of them.”  All about me were these serious people who worked out – either younger people who were building truly admirable bodies or seniors who were “keeping fit.”  So long as it seemed like I was some kid wandering in and being tolerated by the ‘real athletes’, it was kind of fun.  But now I was ‘one of them.’  At first I thought I was elated when I saw real progress.  I could have a (smaller) waist again; I bought pants two inches smaller than my old ones and they fit perfectly.  But shortly after this, I couldn’t make myself go any more; I really couldn’t figure out why.  It seemed pointless and unrewarding.  Although everyone there was friendly, no one became a friend.  They weren’t there to make friends –nor was I – but I felt like I might have wanted to go if there was the subtle pressure of expectation by a friend of seeing me there.  But whether or not this is true, that isn’t the real problem, I realize now.  The problem is I was ‘getting fit’; I was becoming one of those seniors who would never, ever again look as good as the younger folks at the gym or the younger me, and this made me feel pathetic.  I don’t want to look "good for my age", I want to look good, period, or else to hell with it.  I was now only doing what a lot of old people do, and over time as I aged I was going to get worse and worse.  It was pointless, because I didn’t feel ‘special’ any more.  I was so ordinary, so predictable, so ‘still active in my golden years’.

There are so many things I can do a little; I am better than average at calligraphy, I used to draw well and I still draw better than average.  I HATE ‘better than average’.  I want ‘great’ or not at all.  I don’t have to BE great, but I have to believe that it is within the realm of possibility to reach that point.  When I was young, I loved to run.  I would run across our pasture lot or across the lawn or through a field with complete joyous abandon.  The joy arose, however, not from the feeling of running itself, or the exercise or anything like that.  The joy was because I truly believed, with every fiber of my being, that I could run faster than anyone else on Earth if I wanted to.  The day that no longer seemed true was the last day I ever ran.  What was the point?  This is why I don’t try learning to dance; I am too old to be the best.  It is not a case of defeating others, but just of being really good.  “By ‘best’ I don’t really mean better than anyone else so much as ‘as good as the very best’. 

There are few processes I enjoy (writing is one of those few, however, so long as I can keep from letting it fall into that area where all things become futile).  I enjoy the results of things.  I don’t want to make curtains, I want to have curtains, really nice, unusual curtains,  that I made.  I enjoy knowing I can do things.  I have a spiffy leaded glass window I made 30 years ago depicting the head of a Watusi warrior I modeled after a picture in a National Geographic.  I kind of love it, and I am quite proud of it.  I never made another.  Because it would have had to be better.  I remember in first grade we were each given a lump of modeling clay and told that whatever we made would be displayed for our parents at a forthcoming PTA session.  Most of the kids began making those coiled baskets where they rolled the clay between their palms into long thin tubes and then wound the tubes into a basket shape; or else making turtles – essentially a big rounded lump of clay with five smaller lumps attached for head and legs.  I, however, decided to make a giraffe.  I couldn’t imagine why the others were going for stuff so simple and dumb and obvious.  I can still see the giraffe as I pictured it then – and from the first I could picture how it should look very clearly.  But my hands couldn’t seem to make it happen; to start with, the neck wouldn’t remain upright.  I couldn’t believe I couldn't do it!  Finally, I realized it was beyond me, so I set out to make something I thought would be easier – either a hippo or an elephant (I think I tried both), something thicker and sturdier.  But my hands just couldn’t seem to make the clay take the desired shape.  I kept wadding the whole thing up and starting anew, and of course, time ran out with all the other kids’ turtles and baskets perfect, as turtles and baskets go, and me with a big lump of nothing.  Nonetheless, my opus was displayed on a piece of colored construction paper with my name on it among all the other offerings.

My Mom, never one to pay in false coin, made a funny little story out of it when she told me about the PTA meeting.  “All the other mothers,” quoth she, “were saying to me, ‘Look!  My Ginny made this nice turtle!’ or ‘See the nice basket Bobby made!  What did your Davy make?’  And there I was pointing to this lump of clay, saying, ‘Well…’”  Mom wasn’t being mean, and she actually made me laugh and feel better by telling this story in the way she did.  I was never one of those kids that could draw a picture and respond happily to something like, “Oh is that a doggie?” when the speaker was pointing to my depiction of one of my brothers.  I know when I have failed and I do not gain anything from anyone else’s pretending otherwise; it only makes it worse, as if I am pathetic and beyond saving.  If you have to ask, it isn’t right. 

It is all very well to say that I shouldn’t feel this way – the ‘nothing or the best ’ way.  Actually, ‘best’ is only one way that would be acceptably uncommon; even ‘worst’ would be better than ordinary.  But I didn’t know I DID feel this way exactly.  I saw bits of it, and perhaps I am only seeing a bit more of it now, rather than all of it.  This whole linking of the ‘ordinary’ with doing nothing is somehow a new slant for me.  Fear of failure?  Maybe.  My favorite film of all time, hands down, is Lawrence of Arabia.  I suspect that the film assumed mythic proportions to me when, in response to the pleading of Prince Ali who cared deeply for Lawrence and was trying to persuade him to take a more reasonable, less risky and debilitating course than the one he was on, Lawrence asks, "Do you think I am just anybody, Ali?"  Oh. My. God.  Yes!  Yes!  Yes! That is a truly great person!  As early as junior high or early high school, a time when I was deeply Catholic, a girl I liked said to me (after a friendly argument - she always liked to present herself as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic) "You will either wind up as Pope or Anti-Christ."  Can you see why I liked her?    

So this is why I feel so free, I think, in Third World countries.  I will never be ‘just one of them’.  I will always be different.  I don’t have to DO anything except be undemanding and interested (because demanding and superior are ordinary ways to travel there.)  I can relax and have fun.  One of the greatest compliments I ever received was after I left Saudi when a Bangladeshi I used to chat with told Papa I ‘”wasn’t like the rest of them.” 

It is hard to change how one thinks or behaves if one doesn’t know why one does so.  It is impossible to change if one doesn’t even KNOW one does something.  It is something to think about – and it is certainly a useful piece of information to have when I am thinking, “What next?”  Maybe I’ll forget it all tomorrow, but maybe I won’t; I hope not.  It seems kind of commonplace, so perhaps only I know how right and powerful this exact linkage between doing nothing, and doing something extraordinary is for me.  So why should anyone even care? 

Well the thing is: I went to all the trouble of writing this down; I might as well do something with it.