The Afternoon Froze

 I sat in the small space in front of the apartment, looking out at the parking lot, savoring the August heat. For some reason, I relished the warmth, and welcomed it into my body, as though I had dropped into this moment from some colder part of the year. I looked down at the book in my hands, then up again at the world around me.

A person crossed the parking lot to get into her car. I recognized her as someone who was very conscientious about wearing her droplet mask, but she wasn’t wearing one. Neither was I, I noticed, like someone in a dream noticing he is naked in public. Then I stopped worrying: clearly, this must be a time before the pandemic, or after. A time when people had no need to mask. This thought was reinforced by the sight of two jet contrails in an otherwise-clear sky, and a jet overhead, laying down another one.

I lowered my head, relishing the silence. It was so very quiet, without the constant, oceanlike sound of traffic. Was I wrong? Was this indeed a time of quarantine and isolation? I looked up to try to confirm that my neighbor was unmasked, if she was still in the parking lot.

She was still in the parking lot. In the parking lot, she was still, sitting in her car, hands on the wheel. Ready to back out of her space, but not doing so. Just sitting, still.

I noticed that the jet overhead seemed to be in the same position as it had been. I moved my head so a telephone wire lay between me and the plane, and as I watched for several heartbeats, it didn’t continue past the wire. The plane was still, flying. Clearly, the afternoon froze around me.

Well, if this is the End of Days, I wouldn’t mind it happening here and now. If, on the other hand, it was simply a temporary phenomenon, I welcomed it; I had often wished I could step outside of time and settle my mind before proceeding onward. I remained in place, afraid of disturbing the frozen time. I sat motionless, like the third person at the end of a Police Squad! Episode while the two principals stood motionless in a seeming freeze-frame, trying to fit in.

I looked down at my book again, and read it. I read for several pages, until I became bored, or maybe it was that the silence was getting to me. I looked up, and saw my neighbor still in her seat, the plane still overhead, everything still.

 

This is the poem which contained the phrase, “The Afternoon Froze”: Minor Miracle by Marilyn Nelson. I recommend it highly: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47528/minor-miracle

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Wow."

The Amassing of Things

Things accumulate around you in the normal course of life. For many people, their accumulation of things is a direct function of how much space is available to hold them. They may become a burden, requiring that you purge your accumulation, and it can be painful to do this, deciding what to keep and what to discard.

The amassing of things, on the other hand, is a conscious process. You intentionally seek out new things to add to your surroundings because each thing is especially pleasing. It displays your wealth, or your good taste, or you are assembling an authentic Victorian parlor in your home, or you simply take pleasure in collecting a lot of something (comic books, stamps, postcards).

We are a tool-using species. We require tools like clothes and pencils and some form of housing in order to survive, especially if we live outside the tropical environment in which we evolved. The conscious amassing of things can be thought of as making a virtue of necessity, but it can become a vice as well.

My wife and I spent many years in a large old house, and it gradually became full of things, many more things than we had an actual use for. We had books, tools, all manner of oddments. One reason for this was that we often had occasion to give people things they needed, and we had an impulse to not let useful things go to waste, going so far as to engage in “dumpster diving” (I preferred to call it “delving”, since we didn’t normally climb inside). When we moved form that house to a small apartment, by far the biggest difficulty we faced was how to “downsize”. It gave us great pleasure to be able to provide a thing that someone needed - a student with an art project, or a neighbor setting up a household.

On one occasion, a homeless man stayed with us for a few days, sleeping on our porch and having a couple of meals with us. When he was ready to move on, he mentioned that he would need to scrounge a few things, like a waterproof covering and a new pillow (I forget what-all, but it was several things), and we were pleased to be able to obtain every one of the things he felt in need of. It was as though he would be taking our hospitality with him.

We were less pleased that after accepting these things, he scolded us for being so “materialistic”, having so many things we could give them away with such a free hand. After he left, we had a decorous laugh over his remarks, thinking that he had failed to understand why we had those things, and that people unhealthily concerned with amassing things would have clung  to the things we had given him, because having twenty-seven pillows was so much more comfortable than having a mere twenty-six.

dayshttps://tellingthetruth1993.com/2020/04/30/of-the-empire-mary-oliver/

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "It is better to give than to receive - or anyway, it is more comfortable."

Thanking Our Dead Teachers

I heard the prompt, “Thanking Our Dead Teachers”, and turned it over in my mind. It could refer to people whose stories I had heard of people who lived long ago, or people of long ago whose books I had read. It could also refer to influential people in my life who were dead - my maternal grandmother in particular came to mind. Yet another possibility was that it described people who have moved out of my life, who might not literally be dead but with whom I have lost touch.

I found my mind carried back repeatedly though to people who had been formally designated my teachers, at school, and who were literally dead. In particular, to a time when I was training to be a nursing assistant, working under supervision at a nursing home. Sent to spend several days in the “locked wing”, where residents suffering from dementia lived, seeing the doors marked with printed signs identifying the residents. Here was JOSEPH BLOEW, his name surrounded with waves and anchors and an American flag, evidently a Naval veteran. Here was JANE REAU, her name surrounded with barns and horses and fence rails. Then I came to a name I recognized, embedded among apples and slates and wooden chairs. With some trepidation, I looked into the room, and found it vacant, its plastic-covered mattress stripped. Evidently, I had “just missed” my First Grade teacher, whose kindness and patience I still remembered.

As fondly as I remembered her, I thought it was just as well not to have had a “reunion” with her, especially not at the very beginning of what turned out to be many years of serving men and women who had spent long lives of self-reliance and had come to such a vulnerable state.

After the writing period of my group ended, and the host read the text which had contained the phrase “thanking our dead teachers”, I was amused to find that it primarily concerned a literal dead teacher, who had intrigued the author by the ritual of licking her coffee cup while sitting in class, making eye contact, an action which caused him to wonder if she were flirting with him. I was immediately reminded of my own years teaching massage, to groups which usually were mostly women, in which I had to take great care to avoid saying or doing anything which might appear flirtatious, which would have impaired my ability to teach.

From there, my mind turned to the fact that I am evidently the only man in this writing group, and my occasional thought that my presence might put a damper on it. Did the women restrain themselves to avoid giving the impression of flirting with me, or of “putting themselves out there” to invite my attentions? Did they presume they would need to defer to me in order not to irritate me? Or feel a desire to freeze me out and encourage me to leave? I did think these things occasionally, even though I’d received only welcome and encouragement.

I remembered a woman saying that a man who finds himself alone in a group of only women was delighted, a woman alone in a group of men was terrified. While sympathizing with anyone who finds herself the “only woman”, I thought to myself that in fact, any man who is even slightly aware of women as people will be at least somewhat concerned about imposing, at least until he is affirmatively made welcome. From there, my thoughts turned to the women, living and dead, who had helped me to understand how to be comfortable in the company of women, and how to make women comfortable in my company, and offered them my thanks. 

https://arts.cgu.edu/tufts-poetry-awards/graduation-2020-what-a-year/

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It is a blessing to be a teacher, or a student."

Honeysuckle Under The Moon

“If I hear the word ‘honeysuckle’, for instance,” Miguel said, “or if I see honeysuckle growing somewhere, or a picture of it, my mind will always go back to one particular Summer night in Georgia when I was twenty-two, when I intentionally pursued a woman with the intent of having a one-night stand. I’d had a couple before that, but this was the first time I decided to try to get a woman to spend a night with me for no other reason than that I wanted that one night.”

He lay down four cards: a Four of Diamonds, a Four of Clubs, a Nine of Diamonds and a Nine of Clubs.

“Mixed doubles,” he said, and put a Trey of Cups on the discard pile.

“Did you get her?”, I asked, silently cursing that mixed doubles  were on the table, which meant I couldn’t lay down the two Treys of Clubs and two Aces of Clubs that were among the thirteen cards in my hand. If there were mixed doubles on the table, you couldn’t play same doubles.

He smiled.

“When I was twenty-two, I could probably have had a night with any woman I took a fancy to. Well, compared with how I am now, anyway.”

“Don’t fish for compliments,” Laea said. She was twenty-two herself, the youngest person at the table, who could probably have had Miguel or I or Bezunesh, the other woman playing with us, if she wanted to.

Laea lay down a King of Diamonds and a King of Clubs.

“On yours, Miguel. I know what you mean. If I smell burning newspaper-it smells different from wood, or burning books-I always think of a time I had no firewood and tried to warm a room with just the huge pile of yellowed newspapers that were nearby.”

She put a card on the discard pile, neatly lined up with Miguel’s discard, and the Trey of Wheels which I’d laid down when I’d dealth the hand. The card was face-down, a “dat card” instead of a “discard”.

Bezunesh put down the first run of the hand, a Queen, King and Ace of Hearts, and discarded a card which had begun life as a Joker holding a banner on a staff, but which had lost its Os, Ks, Es and Rs, and the banner from its staff, all carefully scraped away, and gained in their place two Spade pips under its Js, and a shovel blade to the end of the staff, turning it into a Jack of Spades.

“That line of belly hair that runs down from the navel,” she said. “The first time I saw a man wearing shorts that exposed his navel, and who had that hair, I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight. It turned me on incredibly. Ever since then, I have watched for that whenever I see a man in shorts, or swimming trunks. It always sets me off. Which is funny, because it was absolutely the only time my uncle ever turned me on. But hey, I was thirteen, and everything turned me on.”

The play had come to me. Could I lay anything down at all? I didn’t see anything - oh, there it was.

I picked up the entire discard pile, all the way down to that Trey at the bottom. It was hard to hold all sixteen cards and still have their faces showing, but I immediately lay down the four Deuces. I was about to discard when I saw that Bezunesh’s dat card had been a Ace of Diamonds. I quickly lay down an Ace of Diamonds, saying, “On yours, Miguel. Fireflies.”

I smiled fondly at the thought.

“I’d never seen fireflies until a night when I was walking along U.S. Route 2, a two-lane highway that runs parallel to the Canadian border from Michigan to Washington. I was in a stretch of countryside, walking along on a night so dark I had to bring one foot down on pavement and the other on gravel to keep from either wandering into the middle of the road or into the ditch. I saw a moving light ahead, and realized it was a firefly, blinking away in midair. A little further on, I saw a couple more. Such beautiful little green lights. Then I came around a bend in the road and I saw a whole field full of them, blinking on and off as they perched on blades of grass, like an immense diagram of synapses opening and closing in a brain. I stood there watching, mesmerized, for a long time before I moved on. A couple of years later, I moved here, where you can see fireflies most Summer nights, but they always remind me of that night.”

I discarded a Jack of Hearts.

“Gin!” Miguel said, a fraction of a second before Bezunesh did. I sighed as I saw Miguel lay the Jack down in front of himself.

http://whatisfoundhere.blogspot.com/2018/05/letter-to-local-police-by-june-jordan.html

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Be cautious in what you discard."

Song Into Sacrament

One thing it is not possible to say is that my Quaker Meeting can provide a truly uplifting and satisfying singing experience. When Kathe and I were attending together she would often compare the occasional hymn-singing before we went into the Meeting room with the religious music which had been her primary motivation for attending her mother’s church. She was a very active musician in her youth, a cellist in an orchestra (she still had her cello when I first met her, although I never heard her play it).

The Meeting’s singing was a trial to her - poorly-organized, half-heartedly sung, a dreary moment for her and probably for others, but no-one made the effort to train the singers, even though I think some of the others also would have liked it.

The online Meeting itself was also unsatisfactory. The elusive feeling of a truly Gathered Meeting was definitely eluding me now. As I logged off, I thought again of the Walking Meeting which took place at th same time, with Friends walking through a neighborhood at the prescribed six-foot distance. It, also, didn’t really appeal to me, but I thought once again that I should try it. Next week, perhaps.

I opened up YouTube and called up “Time and Stars”, and let its sweet, painful words wash over me:

Our lives are brief as falling stars

That streak the sky like tears

My life is stretched by a slender thread

Across a million years

This, at least, could still affect me. I felt the aching sense of love and longing as I followed along through its familiar words, its promise of rebirth.

When the Weaver draws our threads across

Another Where or When

I will meet, and know, and remember you

And love you once again

Once again, the ache of Kathe’s loss was at the front of my mind, but it was a good pain, precious to me. I didn’t want the pain of her loss to go away.

If only, I thought, I could actually find that song and listen to it. It still remained one of those things you couldn’t find online.

 

http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/06/672-vision-wendell-berry.html

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Keep searching."

For Saying No At First, But Yes As An Afterthought

Epimetheus, the god of afterthought, is a sad sort of fellow, as gods go. I’m not aware of him appearing in any myth other than the first creation of Humanity, where he gets cast as the clown, the thoughtless one who bungles the making of animal life, using up all the powerful defensive and offensive traits on other species and having none left for the humans. His brother Prometheus (Forethought) had to fix his blunder by stealing a part of the power of the gods to give to the poor furless, clawless, slow-running humans.

Wow, it only just occurred to me: as the god of forethought, Promethus must have known exactly what he was getting himself into. He really was selfless, accepting his fate of being chained to that rock for thousands of years. Stuck there with only that hungry bird for company, cut off from the friendship of gods or humans until Heracles came along, someone who was both human and god, to free him. And he knew at least in outline what was going to happen to him.

I’ll admit, I prefer the story of Hanuman, the Monkey King, who sacrificed his tail to set a string of fires to accomplish his mission, assigned to hiim as penance for invading Heaven, and when he asked for his tail to be restored, Brahma said, “No, your destiny is to never have a tail again. Instead, you shall become the father of a race of tailless monkeys who will rule the world.”

Hanuman - although I actually prefer his Chinese name, Sun Wu Kong, because then he’s King Kong - clearly was lacking in forethought, or he wouldn’t have tried to challenge the Supreme Being. I wonder what his afterthought was, as he nursed the cauterized spot on his behind and contemplated his descendants, tailless and hairless and walking in such a ridiculous fashion, torso parallel to legs, that their footprints would always be unmistakable in their weirdness. Did he wonder if we were a fair trade for his lovely tail?

But what about poor Epimetheus? Aside from mourning his own failure and his brother’s suffering, what did he do with his afterthoughtful life? Did he visit humans who had behaved foolishly and torment them with all the things they should have done? Did he invent the mirror, so people could reflect? Did he lurk on staircases to taunt people with l'esprit de l'escalier?

Or was he something kinder: offering people a chance to turn the past over in order to become better? After all, the past can’t be changed even by the gods, but we can at least reflect on it to improve our future.

[Afterthought: Oh, right, he was also the husband of Pandora, and was equally ineffectual at saving her from that nasty trick the gods played on her.]

https://comraderadmila.com/2020/01/23/phase-one/

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Think."

What Never Added Up, Will Add Up

 My phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and answered, even though it was a unfamiliar number.

“Hello, is this Kathe Bottero’s husband?”

“Well, I was for awhile, anyway.”

Only 35 years….

“Hi, my name is Gabrielle Morgan.”

“Mike’s daughter?”

“Heh, I was for awhile, anyway.”

I suddenly recalled what I’d heard Gabrielle had said, some twenty years ago now: “I keep thinking, how can my Daddy be dead? I’m only nine years old.”

“Well, um, hi. I’m really glad to hear from you.”

Mike Morgan had been Kathe’s “informal foster son”, a teenaged runaway who had come to Kathe’s door asking for food and wound up staying. He’d been more like Kathe than any of her biological children, which was saying a lot since I’d always seen a lot of her in her other kids. After he died, his wife moved east with Gabrielle to be near her parents. The last we’d heard from them had been Gabrielle’s high school graduation, when we received a card with her graduation portrait printed on it. We’d hung it up and talked about Mike and Caroline, his wife, and admired the photo, glad to see she looked healthy and evidently was doing well in life.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch. I only just heard that Kathe had died.”

“Yes, she did. I’m sorry, I tried to get in touch with you at the time to let you know, but the letter came back.”

“Yeah, we moved.”

“A forwarding order only lasts so long. Even a notice of the new address only lasts so long. They try to get mail through anyway, but they don’t always manage it.”

“Anyway, I wanted to call and let you know, tell you I’m sorry it happened.”

“Well, thanks. It was as good as it was going to be: it didn’t take long, and she wasn’t in any pain-” An exaggeration, but one I usually made, because why magnify grief? “-and she died holding my hand.” I always said that. It was true, and it was one of the things I was glad of.

“Well, that’s good. Anyway, I’m going got be in Portland on business, and I thought I could come see you.”

“Wow, I’d like that.”

I gave her directions to the apartment and we hung up.

“Guess who that was?” I called to my daughter Michu, who happened to be visiting. “It was Mike’s daughter, Gabrielle.”

“The girl whose graduation picture you guys had hanging in the living room?”

“Yes. She’s going to be in Oregon soon, and wants to come visit.”

“Oh, that’s cool! I remember when we met her Dad, soon after we got here from Ethiopia. It made us feel better about living with white people, to know that Mom already had a black kid.”

I looked over at where Michu wasn’t standing and sighed. It would be good if she were visiting, even if we had to refrain from hugging. Just as it would be good to hear from Gabrielle. I doubted I ever would, but it would be good.

 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/meaning/

Watch Your Head, Sweetheart

My life had fallen into two modes: at home by myself, or when I was going out. “Going out” also covered those extremely rare occasions when someone was coming to visit me. Then, “home” became a part of “out”, the way Kipling’s “They” became “a kind of ‘We’.” In my non-solitary mode, I would wash more thoroughly, make sure I was wearing clean clothes, &c. I definitely became a different person on those occasions, a little bit more like my former self.

I’d never lived alone before. Not this alone, anyway. I’d lived with my parents, or in a dormitory at college, or in barracks with a roommate in the Navy, or with my parents again, or with Kathe. I hoped this solitary life would end eventually, perhaps fairly soon. In the meantime, I was trying to embrace it as an opportunity to lead a different kind of life. Seeing as how I had no choice.

Turning it over in my mind, the only period in which I had slept alone night after night, with no way of reaching another person if I needed to, was during the couple of months that I had spent walking and hitch-hiking in a roundabout way from Virginia back to Oregon after getting out of the Navy. I hadn’t slept in the same spot from one night to the next, usually on the ground, in a sleeping bag with at most a tarp pulled over me. It was kind of unnerving if I gave it much thought, just how strange this solitary existence really was.

Everything was different. In the first few weeks, I’d been busy with moving things out of the storage lockers, consolidating them into one, putting the rest in the storage space of the apartment building, or piling boxes up “temporarily” in the apartment, without having to worry how Kathe would feel surrounded by all of them. Removing the rugs from storage, I decided for myself, without having to consult anyone, that I would lay most of them out overlapping on the carpeting. Then the lockdown began, and I went out rarely, at intervals of days. The boxes have stayed where they are for now, awaiting my decision to carry them up to the storage space, or to discard them. I could go through the boxes here in my solitude, or not. There’s no rush.

The time runs out, and the host reads from the poem that contains the line that made me think of Kathe, her presence and her absence:

https://www.rattle.com/pride-by-diana-goetsch/

Diana Goetsch says, “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” 

So I think, was that your mission, Kathe? To redeem something as hard to reach as me? Alone, I have to answer for myself, and remind myself that Kathe always liked me, and respected me, more than I did myself. When we were having our worst times, she could get beautifully fierce with her desire to reach me as I withdrew from her.

I’m so grateful to you for all you did for me, Kathe. If you had died twenty years ago, or even ten, I would not have been able to survive on my own as well as I have. Your love made me strong enough to be able to live without it.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are going to meet someone. Not a stranger."