MAKE ME SMILE

Once in a while I will come up with something that reminds me of Andy Rooney. I have featured Andy in this blog several times and here I go again. A world class journalist and commentator, he finished his career with CBS magazine program, 60 Minutes. His contribution came at the end of the show with, “A Few Minutes With Andy.” That’s just what it was, a few (3) minutes. Take an idea, give it a beginning, a middle and an end and leave ‘em smiling; seems easy enough but not so fast. It’s not easy at all. But Andy was the best. I don’t try to imitate his style but sometimes after I’ve done a short piece, let it rest a few days and come back to it, I get a deja vu vibe from the 11 year-old who is trapped inside my head. He sends me a kind of neural-net text message: “Hey, that was almost Roonish!” I feel really good when Andy and I come up in the same thought. The text source was me but not the conscious me.  I think that rules out ego. I don’t know about you but I don’t get to feel one way or another at will. Feelings announce themselves without permission. By the time you diagnose the emotion, you are the recipient and there is no return address. 

The last time I got the ‘Feel-Good’ feeling was day before yesterday. The bird feeder outside my kitchen window was like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, bare. So I dug out suet cakes and sunflower seeds, set up the ladder, did my high wire balancing routine; all food in the feeder, no spills, no falling off the ladder. After putting things away, back inside my kitchen, the birds must have been hiding, waiting because there were all jousting for a spot on the perches. There it was, the Feel-Good feel. 

When my eyesight was 20-20 I knew them all by name at 100’, on a perch or in the air. Now I need binoculars but they haven’t changed. My favorites are the ones who frequent my patio. I don’t know if I favor the nuthatch or the red bellied woodpecker but either way, when they show up I smile. A pair of titmice went upside down on the peanut feeder and if you had been there you would have matched my toothy grin. By definition, happiness is a feeling or emotion that conveys pleasure or contentment. I think it is my nature to be mostly satisfied and content but my birds take me there even on a bad day. Then again, maybe they aren't mine after all, maybe I'm their human? 

WHISTLE STOP

Sleeping has never been difficult. In the army we got 5 minute smoke breaks and I could get a 3 minute nap in those 5 minutes. After all these years I don’t remember ever lying awake, waiting for slumber to strike. Oh, I wake up in the night sometimes with a dream, the mind going ballistic but not very often. When I do, there is only a short wait before I slip back into never-land. If the brain will not settle down I get up. Lying in bed wide awake is unbearable. I can clean house or play solitaire or sit down and throw words at the page. This morning is one of those times. 

The last time I checked it was 4:42 a.m. I had been wrestling with a mind trip so vivid I remember details and that in itself is remarkable. In 1973, in a very real but other life I had moved my family from the mountains of Colorado to the flatlands of SW Michigan. It was a new beginning, teaching school in a small, rural town known for corn fields and its football team. For 13 years we lived in that fishbowl. In reflection it was a bittersweet time but ‘Bittersweet’ doesn’t ripen overnight, it needs time to ferment. With career and family there was just enough pause to take things as they came, even feel content. 

Borrowing from Yogi Berra, it was deja vu all over again. The dream had all the right people, playing themselves. Four years ago I went back for a 40 year class reunion. I couldn’t get over how dramatically my former students and cohorts had aged, both in the flesh and between the ears. From one breath to the next we role reversed, they would be narrow and old while I was the rule stretching agent of change. What made the dream profound were well spaced flashbacks. We would be in the present for the moment and then it would be 1976. I was oscillating like a pendulum. The dream reminded me of the movie, ’Fried Green Tomatoes’. In it Jessica Tandy time travels between her petulant youth and the old woman’s hard earned wisdom. Kathy Bates is her willing accomplice whose own drama parallels Tandy’s. First is was Tandy’s busy, bustling village of Whistle Stop in the 1930’s and then Whistle Stop, the abandoned ghost town sixty years later. In my dream I identified with both characters; Tandy in her youth and the older, weathered and worn Tandy/Bates combo. Saint Joseph County, Michigan hasn’t dried up but the lapse between the 70’s and now is enormous. Buildings have new paint and the new school is now the old school but some things don’t change. Football is still king and self indulgent pride is still a virtue. The gene pool has been stirred but old family names are still entrenched. Bittersweet; just a word but it speaks volumes.

Those 13 years shape a major theme in my story. If only a microcosm, neither good nor bad, that experience belongs to me, it’s all mine. Without it I would be incomplete. But like Kathy Bates' character, if you’re not ready to leap when it’s time to move on, you may not get another chance. I have never taken root in a particular time or place. It's never been important, where I'm from. Things in motion tend to stay in motion; Isaac Newton's 1st Law. I have no qualms with those who stay at rest but the thought of growing old in Whistle Stop is sobering. 

Quite a dream! Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  I suppose one could sit down at the fork in the road and ponder action versus inaction. That would create three possibilities. Marcel Proust gets credit for an illustration with a fork in the road. Each arm of the fork has a blank signpost. Having chosen one path over the other, moving on, you can look back to read the writing on the backs of the signs. The one you have taken is named, “Your Destiny” and the one forsaken reads, “No Longer An Option.” Proust understood inertia, both physical and mental. Destiny was somewhere farther up the line and Whistle Stop was no longer an option. 

Lyrically, Leonard Cohen’s, ‘Anthem’ captures the feel if not the fact; the dream and my story. I can hear him sining . . .

The birds they sing, at the break of day

Start again, I hear them say

Don’t dwell on what, has passed away

Or what is yet to be.

Yeah, the wars they will, be fought again

The holy dove, she will be caught again

Bought and sold, and bought again

The dove is never free.

Ring the bells, that still can ring

Forget, your perfect offering

There is a crack, in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts, you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart, to love will come

But like a refugee.

So ring the bells, that still can ring

Forget, your perfect offering 

There is a crack, in everything . . .

WRITING DOES THAT

Writing is a good thing, maybe not so much for others but certainly for me. The process requires mental dexterity and my mind needs the exercise. Language is one of, if not the most important evolutionary leaps in human history. Some people can talk faster than they can think the words. You just open the mouth and words come tumbling out. I have to think about this word and the next word and how they string together. Sometimes, often, I get trapped mid sentence, selecting the right words and getting them organized. In awkward pauses my mouth waits for the brain to deliver. People who know me allow me think space. Others want to help and finish my sentence for me. I reply, “No, that’s not what I was going to say,” and finish with my own phrasing. There in lies the beauty of writing; the pause works in your favor. Once the word is out of your mouth it has a life of its own and you can not take it back. With writing there can be any number of edits and revisions. If I have a problem it is that I talk and write at the same rate, self editing as I go. 

You can not have story without words and without story we would still be sleeping in trees and community grooming would be our most sophisticated social behavior. So I write. I use similes and metaphors like a machinist uses grease and ballbearings. I weigh words for multiple meanings and by how easily they fly off the tongue or off the page. In the end, if my story is clumsy or remote then I’ve either misled someone or worse, I’ve wasted our time. 

I tend to write in one of two genres. Sometimes I just spin story, real or imagined, worth the telling, worth the reading/listening. It can entertain or it can inform. Sometimes story is like Christmas decorations. At a deeper level it reveals a purpose that serves a greater good. Sometimes it just makes you feel better. Other times my writing is about clarification and continuity with my feelings, beliefs and values. Writing does that. It adds layers of understanding, decision making, word selection, ordering and streamlining to an issue that needs to be refined. My ideas and opinions are not always well received. Still, if you want any semblance of knowing what you’re talking about it requires defending your story in a civil manner. When strong opinions clash, people can get upset or even angry. You make enemies who must be argued with. It requires winners and losers, a long standing American birthright; the zero sum game. If it generates dialogue that’s good but usually, people who feel the need to push back aren’t interested in dialogue. They just want to leave the room feeling they have won the battle. 

In my journal I write in both genres, where I can pick and choose which ones I post on my blog, ‘Stones In The Road’. With no reason to upset anyone’s comfort zone, I keep the blog out of the trenches. At the root of every controversial issue is a moral principle that manifests itself in one disputed belief or another. When one’s investment in any ideology runs deep, objectivity is the first rational rule to be sacrificed. I work hard at being objective, recognizing the boundary between titilation and due diligence after all, if left to its own device, human nature would steer us all onto the low road. At the end of the day, feelings overrule intelligence. If not, there would be no seemingly insoluble issues; not climate change, not a woman’s reproductive rights, not immigration, but convincing the zealot is a steep, slippery hill to climb. 

Objectivity requires an open mind, a willingness to be wrong, to change, at least tweak a previously held position and to move on. You don’t do that as a concession but rather as better understanding. Those who can not challenge or see their own beliefs evolve, they confuse the benefit of rational thought with an ego-stroking reinforcement of redundant remembering  (tongue twister) and that closes the door to enlightenment. In some circles the word ‘enlightened’ is a dirty word. You must be willing to be wrong, willing to change. But being wrong is morally sinful if you’ve been steeped in that school of thought. 

Five presidents from Truman to Nixon, when they realized that a war in Viet Nam would be unwinnable they stuck to their guns, literally, rather than lose face and appear weak. Nothing is driven by defects in Human Nature more so than politics and governance. Overcoming that flaw is a really, really big rock to be pushing up the hill. Needless to say, I don’t meet many wanna be thinkers who dare to resist the pressure of their own partisan/religious conditioning. Maybe I should put out another blog where we begin by exchanging insults and superimposing polarized propaganda that we’ve been spoon fed since we were in diapers. Everybody wants to believe they have the right story, I certainly do. Being right carries a moral caveat that is so deeply rooted in our experience, we do almost anything to validate what we want to believe. Still, I try to focus on listening for the sake of enlightenment. Defaulting to orchestrated, canned rebuttals is easy enough to diagnose. If you don’t want to go there, you don’t have to. In a world that is predicated on change, sticking to your guns is not a virtue. It can serve you well or leave you in the lurch but you won't know which until it's too late to rectify. Human Nature would have us rewrite the story to sanctify the sin. Influential people, none of them truly want a taught plumb line or a level playing field. What they want is an unauthorized ace in the hole. I feel like the journalist who knows they are doing their job when they get criticism from every direction. 

THROUGH THE NIGHT

Seven a.m., standing in the hallway that stretches down from the church lobby to the kitchen I watched a tiny, little old man carefully sorting through a large box of sample size toiletries. He filled a zipper pouch on his back pack with tooth paste and tooth brushes. We talked; he was upset someone had taken all of the dental floss. He was clean, hair combed, dressed better than his peers. His shirt was a child size button up that I had sorted and put on a hanger rack the night before. The smell of fresh coffee and food from the kitchen changed the subject. His focus shifted with a smile, “That must be breakfast.” I nodded, “You missed with the floss but you are not too late for breakfast. Don’t miss out on the sausage and quiche.” Before he moved on he asked if it was Friday. I said that it was Friday, Valentines Day. Moving away he said something about vagrants being like family; “Valentines Day, we all need someone, don't we!” 

He and 52 other homeless humans had taken shelter for the night in our church warming center, slept on the floor under borrowed blankets. Outside the lobby windows, snow blew as the temperature fell to 2 degrees. Men outnumbered women by a large margin but the little old man was right, they were cut from the same cloth. I’ll not make a case for the plight of homeless people. If you don’t already know, you probably don’t want to hear it. Bitter, deadly cold makes a desperate situation not only unbearable but also hopeless. On those nights, homeless shelters fill up early, too many people, not enough beds. When the forecast predicts a low temp of 10 degrees we notify a network of organizations that we will be open.

At All Souls last night there were 27 volunteers working three shifts. Some worked through the night with only catnaps. For two nights in a row we opened at 7:00 and signed out the last guest by 9:00 a.m. I was there both nights, all night on Thursday and the late shift on Friday, 4:00 a.m. to 10:00. The Warming Center project was not an easy sell. For more than a year our congregation discussed and debated. Even with volunteers, the operation is expensive. We get some support from local thrift stores on clothing, markets on produce and foods near the must sell date but unexpected expenses add up, the laundry bill for blankets and abandoned clothes is substantial. 

If you’ve never put yourself in a role where your client’s needs are profound, unable to sustain a residence, you might not want to put yourself in that hard-place. Like climate change deniers the easiest way to save face is denial (Get a job!). Joseph Campbell said, “You can’t cure the world of sorrows but you can chose to live with joy.” I take that to mean, “Fix what you can and take comfort in that.” What I come away with is a large serving of gratitude and humility. My life has been blessed with good karma and good fortune. Whenever I’ve fallen there was a soft place to land. When I’ve failed there has always been a path to rise up and try again. I’m sure there are pilgrims who accept extreme hardship as their way of life but they are few and far between. 

Homelessness and poverty are the Siamese twins of the underclass. The whole ugly mess is easy to ignore, all one has to do is look the other way. Granted, my charges from the last two nights may be better off than Syrian refugees in leaky boats, fleeing death squads but finding consolation there is the denial I spoke of. I know I’ve worn out my mother’s words but she was so ‘On the mark’. “There but for the Grace of God go I.” Not selling religion but certainly attesting to the frailty of blessings and good fortune. You don’t have to be lazy or stupid for your world to implode. Wrong place, wrong time, even a random stranger’s bad timing; any of those can launch you down a path of life’s undoing. 

While in Warming Center mode, volunteers wear a tan apron with the All Souls logo on it and the 1st principle of out mission statement. “We recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” One of the last campers to wake up yesterday was a middle aged, wild eyed man with bushy red hair and beard. He needed to be reassured that he was awake, that he hadn’t frozen to death in the night. He came in long after lights out, barely able to walk, couldn’t hold a pen to sign his name. I watched him toss and turn on the floor, watched him struggle to his feet. After some coffee and a speed wash in the restroom he went to every volunteer thanking them personally for saving his life. Whatever his story may be he is someone’s son, probably someone’s brother and somewhere there is a good chance that somebody still loves him. What he got from us was, he got through the night. That was all we could do and I can live with that. 

THAT'S WHAT WE DO

On the planet right now, according to Wikipedia, there are in the neighborhood of 7.7  big ‘B’ billion human beings. For total people it’s 7.7 and eight trailing zeros. Again, roughly one third, (1 of every 3) righteous souls is either Chinese or Indian. Americans account for less than 5% of the 7.7 billion. I’m not preaching politics or environmental stewardship today, although I could. I’m trying to visualize the American niche when it comes to travelers on Starship Earth, my niche in particular. 

People my age or older make up just under 3% of the 7.7. Think, out of every 100 people alive in the moment, my demographic would be represented by two average old men and a one-legged dwarf, all over 80 years. The critic would argue that between fluctuating  birth and death rates, quantifying world norms by age is impossible and they would be correct if you want to think of it that way. But (people) love manipulating data and seeking universal truths. Certainly there is a number that falls within an acceptable range of accuracy that we can accept. It changes minutely from nanosecond to nanosecond but so what! It’s all theoretical anyway. The whole idea of universal truth is more about propping up ideologies like economics and religion than about anything universal. So, we’re moving on. 

On the wall chart that’s me between the dwarf and the tall African which means the dwarf is female and probably speaks Mandarin; the African could be a woman as well. If you want to know the percentage of 80+ Americans on the earth, get your calculator and do the math but I feel safe predicting the number to be significantly less than 1%. I can interpret that to mean, using random selection, the chances of finding another person in my demographic will be a long shot. In another 4.5 years (with good health and good luck) my number will surpass 85 and the frequency distribution for that crowd will shrink my category to an even lower representation. In that case my place in that graphic display might be a finger nail on the hand of a single, legless, one armed dude who also speaks Mandarin. I am becoming a rare commodity. Understand when something becomes rare its worth generally increases correspondingly. Either the message isn’t getting out or there is a caveat lost in the details because nobody is throwing money or seeking my counsel.  

With all that in mind my story is about life in the nether zone, 6 or 7 zeros removed from the decimal point. I tell stories, that’s what I do. There was a movie several years ago about a 90+ old man, living alone in rural, scrub/cactus, Southern California. His name, the movie’s name were both ‘Lucky’. It was a bitter-sweet rendering of sometimes lonesome, sometimes lonely, knowing the ride had nearly run its course. It was about affectionate relationships with locals and about drinking coffee, about walking for the sake of something to do, about finding shade in the heat of the day. Humor, both light and dark was like the urge to pee, no respecter of persons. If one suffered from depression it would be the wrong movie to see. Otherwise, it was what it was, the story of an old man making the most of limited resources, making the most of days and nights, one at a time. My takeaway was a reminder; not that I need reminding. Make today count. 

In the end, my times will be remembered for social unrest, for people who believe they are righteous in their extreme values and behavior. They have pitted themselves against others who believe likewise in their own, diametrically opposed, sacred truths. They are neither right nor wrong, just different, both with skewed views on moral principles. This kind of turmoil is not new, we’ve come this way before but that was when the world moved at a much slower pace. Sources were more responsible. Information at the speed of Twitter makes us nails instead of hammers. I still use my big screen computer, not my device and I trust sources with long standing reputations for independence and fairness like BBC and the NY Times. We all have feelings but passion is something else, feelings on steroids. Passion motivates like nothing else but likewise, passion is unreliable. Passion can leave you on a mountain top or at the bottom of a deep hole. By its own chemistry passion will pass, leaving you with feelings that you didn’t have when you began. Most often, we have too much invested in a passionate cause to put it down and say, I was wrong.  I leave ideology that feeds on passion to radicals and populists. 

If I have to embrace a cause for the sake of meaningful living I’ll pass on politics and religion. Remember me for my music and story. We are the only animals who have that capacity. Humans are like toddlers walking down there at curb level, clinging to a condescending hand, believing that we know where we’re going and that we can change the world. When will we ever learn? (Sounds like a Dylan song). Knowing is more complicated than it might seem and at best, we think we think. Everything we’ve ever learned, in order for it to be shared it must be translated into language and framed in story. Music is pure story, reduced to a few verses, a bridge and a chorus. It soothes the savage beast and elevates the heart from camaraderie to amour. 

You can take the Speaker of The House and the Senate Majority Leader, you can have the narcissist-bigot in the White House as well. Polarized hyperbole, that’s what they are serving in lieu of mutual respect and common courtesy. I will revere and respect the legacies of Mark Twain and Maya Angelou, of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Their contributions will endure out of affection. We feel, that’s what we do, long before we think or act. I prefer peaceful reflection to prideful indignation, you would think they could figure that out. I am listening to the Tedeschi-Trucks Band; Midnight In Harlem. Agonizing over things I can’t change would be an exercise in vain self-conceit. Be well, take care. 

NO ALTER CALLS

I don’t dwell on long life or old age but things change when your reason for meeting the new day loses its salt. After they collect your keys and assign your parking spot to someone new, excuses and make believe are simply inadequate. It’s like driving through a strange town, needing fuel, passing stations on the wrong side of the street, then passing one on the right because of long lines. Before you know it  you are out of town and you still need fuel. So much for the perfect truck stop, feeling foolish for not stopping sooner. Turning around and going back are options. Still, fuel is one thing and living meaningfully is another. Without keys or a parking space there is no going back to a purpose that has been reassigned. If you don’t reinvent yourself, the journey can go from smooth sailing to running on empty.

I go back to my old school several times a year, walk in the front door but must register as a visitor and wear a security pass. With 40 plus teachers in the building only a few were there when I retired. Everything changes and the biggest change is me. I continue to grow with great, wonderful experiences every year but like a comet that has looped around our sun, I am speeding away from my solar system and I’ll not pass this way again. 

Mortality is the premise that we are born, we live and we die. Human beings not only associate bits of unrelated information to frame new meaning but also invent language to create stories. One story that keeps recycling is the one whence we can circumvent death by either restoration or rebirth. It necessitates a supernatural (god) being that is so thoroughly entrenched in  human history that I needn’t elaborate. With faith, people can be long lived without the fear, anger, anxiety or disillusion that impending mortality raises. 

People I’ve never met, don’t know their names or faces, they are very good about depositing money into my bank account, twice a month for as long as I live. I have no reason to think that financial benefit will dry up but I have no such expectation about immortality. Stephen Grellet was a Frenchman, assigned to the King’s personal guards. For whatever reason, he lost the king’s favor and was sentenced to death. But he escaped to the American colonies. His brush with death and exposure to Wm Penn and the Quakers led to his well worn quote, and I paraphrase: “I expect to pass through this world but once. Therefore, any good or kindness I can show any fellow creature, let me do it now for I shall not pass this way again.” I can’t speak to Grellet’s views on mortality but his words open a way to put it in focus. Life is a story with a beginning a middle and an end. The plot can take unexpected turns but the sequence is irreversible. Unitarians for the most part believe that people create their own heaven and hell, in the present, right here on the planet. So it would seem, skipping death and going straight to rebirth to collect your $200 is too long a stretch, too much to count on. Rather, the present moment should not be taken for granted.

          Modern day Unitarian Forrest Church put it this way; “Want what you have, do what you can, be who you are.” There is something about “NOW” that doesn’t resonate with people who think they can cheat death. They may be so new to the planet they can’t imagine growing old or trust faith enough to squander the moment with fiction and hyperbole. They miss the urgency of the present. Wisdom tells us to learn from the past and to save for the future but I’ll not pass this way again and I want to squeeze the moment for all it’s worth. If you like ‘Biblical’ then go to the bible, King Solomon in his frustration with mortality, the wisest man of all; “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.” That sounds like the moment to me. I didn’t know I was going to preach this morning but my sermons are short. There will be no singing, no offering and no alter calls. Like Nobel Laureate Ellie Wiesel, I write to understand as much as to be understood.