ABOUT AS HAPPY

           Li’l Abner was a cartoon strip in the funny papers when I was growing up. He and his hillbilly cohorts lived in the stereotypic little, backwoods town of Dogpatch. One character in particular was a well meaning old guy in a ragged, black outfit named Joe Btfsplk. He was so unlucky his own little rain cloud followed him around. Misfortune was his reward for getting up each day and everyone avoided him after all, he was wet all the time. If he came inside the cloud came with him. So if I were from Dogpatch I think I would have been down the pecking order from Abner but well above Joe B. Still I meet different, for lack of a better word, people in coincidental, random circumstances who epitomize the Dogpatch ethos and I wonder, is it me, do I attract these folks or is it my mother’s wisdom come to haunt me? “There but for the Grace of God. . .” 

           Yesterday I was in New Orleans’ Lakeview neighborhood, shopping for tires. It was early and I was hungry so I stopped at a Panera’s Bakery-Cafe for a nice little breakfast quiche and coffee that rivals Star Bucks at half the price. I sat in a booth. Just off my shoulder across the isle was a man like me, old enough to be retired, at 9:30 on Tuesday morning, no place special to be. He was seated, talking over coffee to a standing man who was trying to escape. The seated man was still talking as his audience slipped out the door. He turned to me and kept on talking, something about cold weather and hot coffee. I nodded and he kept on. Shortly I realized it was incumbent on me to move over to his table or we would be shouting across the room like longshoremen on the docks. We shook hands; I missed his name but not the syrupy, Big Easy accent. It’s nothing like the slow southern drawl you find in Mississippi or Georgia, more like Brooklyn without the hard edge. In New Orleans they drop “r’s” too and run words together.  

           He asked where I was from then told me not to answer. He wanted to figure it out for himself. Obviously, I wasn’t from N.O. He said, “Not Lake Charles,” then a pause, “not even Louisiana.” I nodded. “You sound like California.” I thought I’d have a turn to talk but he motored on. Maybe 6 ft., well over 200 lbs, more like 250; his hands and fingers were huge. With a wide jaw, heavy jowls under a crumpled felt hat, he began a litany of what’s good and what’s not about any and everything. “We got the bess… sea food in the worl’… heaa…” He retired in ’99, two years before I did. He worked for a Ford dealer for a long time but got laid off; spent the next 20 years driving a cab. He asked but didn’t listen when I told him what I did. His wife smoked herself to death a decade ago and his kids are struggling to keep their jobs. 

           He reminded me of Dogpatch and Joe Btfsplk. If he wasn’t Joe before, he is now. He had been leaning into the conversation, or monologue, whichever; and he leaned back, pushed his hat back and took a deep breath. “How about the Pres-dent?” He rolled his eyes, “Everybody hates the Pres-dent. They hate ‘im.” He went on to blame everything bad on Obama. “That black Obama gave it all to the Mexicans and Muslims and now they hate the Pres-dent.” He had his say on bitchy women and political correctness, fake news and Obama Care. I nodded now and then, leaned forward and back. My coffee was gone but I could hear my mom, crystal clear. “When someone needs a friendly ear, lend an ear.” So I listened. When he ran out of material it only took a few breaths to tap off in another direction. A good ten minutes had taken their leave and I knew it was time for me to move on. I stood up, offered my hand and he took it. His Thank-you was sincere; “Nice talkin’ with you.” I echoed the sentiment and an affirmative, “You got it right on the sea food.” Going out the door I heard him talking but didn’t look back. 

          This morning I was in Baton Rouge, still looking at tires. I stopped at Waffle House. My waitress was a 30-ish woman, attractive as one can be in a soiled, brown apron, dealing coffee, waffles and dirty dishes. Her name was Amanda; I read it on the ticket. She was calling out to other customers and to the cook. The smile and tone of voice were convincing, natural, hard to fake. She told me today was supposed to be her day off but they needed help and she could use the money. She got my order right the first time and topped off my coffee before I knew I was ready. My bill was $7 and small change and I was wondering how much Amanda earns at Waffle House. I didn’t know at the time but it’s $3.95 hr. plus tips. I left a $10 on the counter and she thanked me. If I’d known about the $3.95 at the time I would have left more. Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying, “Folks are about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” Joe couldn’t make up his mind but Amanda could. I still need to get new tires. 

THEREFORE I AM

I woke up this morning to a brand new year. It is so easy to anthropomorphize animals, even objects and ideas, even years. I remember cartoons on New Year’s Day of a gray bearded old curmudgeon limping off on a crutch while the New Year dropped out of a cloud in a diaper, without a clue of what would go down on his watch. When it takes only 365 days to spend a lifetime, it has to hit the ground running. So for me, this new year gets a day to feel good but tomorrow will be another story. The new year won’t be new any more, it needs to be walking and talking on the 2nd day, able to communicate ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ - able to ask the big ‘Why’ question. By its 2nd sunrise the romance will be over and blame will come from every direction.  What a rotten year already; it’s so cold when it’s supposed to be mild and people haven’t changed a bit, just as mean and selfish as last year. Last year will start looking better after all, a little peace on earth, good will to man gave the last two weeks a good feel, even it it was mostly imagination.  Happy New Year. 

The best thing about 2017 is framed eloquently in the title of a recent Willie Nelson song; “I Woke Up Still Not Dead Again Today.” Life is pretty special. I have a rock from Grand Canyon that is over a billion years old but it doesn’t metabolize anything, can’t replicate itself. People are wonderful and terrible in the same breath, depends on how you feel in the moment and changing our minds comes easy. But I think therefore I am and wonderful or not, it beats a billion years of rock. In 2018 I’ll look forward to wonderful wake-ups and well deserved fall-sleeps. I hope it’s not too much to ask. 

REQUIEM

It is the last day of this year leaving a few hours to wrap up the goodbye and jump both feet into the New Year. There is something empowering about new beginnings where the best you can say about endings is that hopefully, the letting go doesn’t hurt very much. My New Year resolutions have been more wishful thinking than commitments but it certainly is about forward leaning-anticipating. But I like reflections too. Stories don’t hatch in a vacuum, not without a seed. My resolutions for 2018 will be shallow, easily modified as need be. Low expectations improve the probability of success. 

The Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge is a modern, red brick building under live oak trees on Goodwood Blvd. They have a tradition there for the last Sunday in December. The program is called “Requiem”. On Requiem Sunday both the minister and the choir take the day off as the service is in the hands of a committee. They've been preparing all year. If anything is as fundamental to us as birth, it is death. Every year, people who leave a legacy of what is good and to what we would aspire, some of them run out of days, just like the old year. So today at church we listened to their music or note their contributions to the arts, to literature and service to others. 

This time a year ago, nobody knew who would pass from us but preparation had to begin. Musicians were lined up to sing and play, not knowing any of the details. Readers without scripts agreed to fill spots. The 2017 program began with Tom Petty, rocker supreme. Popularity was one thing but the way his lyrics mirrored his life was another: “Well I know what’s right, I got just one life, In a world that keeps on pushin’ me around, But I’ll stand my ground.” Then it was tribute to Mary Tyler Moore and her work not only as an actress but a producer, film maker and author, on the front edge of women breaking the glass ceiling and a fledgling women's movement. Jerry Lewis was Dean Martin’s wacky sidekick but remembered more for fund raising against childhood disease; he died in 2017 too. They went on from Glen Campbell to Della Reese, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. 

When the program ran out of time, just like an old year, we found ourselves reflecting on what we could still hang onto and what had slipped out of reach. It’s been 50 years since the group “Blood Sweat & Tears” recorded, “When I Die” but the message still moves me. “And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone: there’ll be one child born and a world to carry on.” I think that’s the bottom line. This life doesn’t transition, year to year. It slides through our fingers moment by moment and if we try to digest it in bigger bites, the good stuff can get lost between headlines. Tonight I’ll be at Snug Harbor, a jazz club-restaurant on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, just a few blocks off the French Quarter. Food and music will be great and I keep only the best company. We will be home before midnight and I’ll sleep well, wake up a few hours later, next year. 

IT'S ALRIGHT

While lauding the “Breathless woods . . .” Lord Byron said, “I love not man the less, but nature more.” This time of year I default to that kind of logic when I think, “Not that I don’t like Christmas, I just like Solstice more.” Western culture doesn’t embrace it as a holiday, more an astronomical, geophysical occurrence but I celebrate just the same. Maybe a thousand years before the patriarch Abraham cut his deal with Yahweh (God), astronomers were keeping track of the sun’s arc and the shadows it cast. At Stonehenge they had stone pillars aligned so precisely, at Solstice-sunrise a thin beam of sunlight knifed between them, reaching the alter if you will, at the center of the observatory. They knew winter was upon them but unlike Yahweh’s mythical rainbow promise, not to drown his creation again, Solstice was then-still is a tangible signpost that days will grow longer and the sun will arc a high path across the sky. It still means that even though you must endure a cold passage, things will grow and food will be on the menu again. I don’t know how they celebrated but I bet they did; I bet it involved fire and something that would pass for music. 
         It was cloudy all day yesterday and dark early. I took wood shop scraps from my basement to the patio and fashioned a pyre in my Mexican chiminea. Soon the flames were crackling and I was both warmed and illuminated by the flames. The day was mild but turned cold with wind out of the north. I turned my back to it, booted up my laptop and selected an I-tune play list I assembled just for the day. Then I poured two fingers of Peach Brandy in a red enamel tin cup and sipped. George Harrison’s guitar framed the introduction to my pagan ritual, and he sang: “Little darling, it’s been a long, cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it’s been here. Here comes the sun, here comes the sun and I say, It’s alright.” I sang backup on the chorus and it sounded good to me. Sunshine songs gave way to my favorite, feel-good artists; Jerry Lee Lewis, Buckwheat Zydeco, Bonnie Raitt, Etta James; all the time knowing tomorrow, daylight will last a little longer, cast a shorter shadow and arc a little higher in the sky than today: Here comes the sun, and I say it’s alright. 

MIDDLE WAY

It’s the week before Christmas already and I’m not hearing any holiday music. I see lights and tinsel here and there but it is sneaking up on us. It will come and go and if you blink, you’ll miss it. My gift giving is pretty much confined to grand children so I don’t really have any shopping to do. I give them each a Silver Eagle, technically a silver dollar but made of one Troy Ounce, 99.9% silver so their worth depends on the price of silver. My thought was, still is, that someday they will each have a collection that didn’t wear out, didn’t depreciate or go out of style. They get enough toys, clothes and technology from other directions that I avoid that hungry hole. Giving money may be practical but it’s pretty cold and calculated. I’m not religious but the holiday was always warm and fuzzy, feel good more because of people than presents and at least the pretense of Good Will. It’s when we celebrate baby Jesus’ birthday and that’s enough to hope for some Peace on Earth whatever your bias. So my choices are, or seem to be, either get some religion or take a few days off and throw money at people who expect you to shell out. 

I want to find a middle way; my experience is that family and food bring out the best. We should all watch one version or another of Dickens Christmas Carol even though we’ve seen it, know it by heart. I think he got it right. Things change and we’re all about as happy as we chose to be. So for a while at least, appreciate the good life we take for granted otherwise. God Bless us every one. The idea that a new baby can turn our attention to hopes for a just and a peaceful world is profound. The premiss of Original Sin is, I think, a human construct. We are certainly born with the capacity to be mean and evil but you have to know you're being mean and evil before it's a sin. When Baby draws that first breath and imprints with its mother’s odor, that is pure innocence. I’ve never been one to handle little babies but never the less, I am smitten with them at a distance. It’s not until later when we understand both the selfless We and the selfish Me, and we chose the latter at someone else’s expense that sin sprouts. I have some devout relatives who pray for me regularly so I feel like my heresy is covered in that regard. 

I remember Christmas when snow and cold was pretty much guaranteed. My brothers and I got mostly clothes, a toy of some kind and a bag of fruit and nuts. Not saying the old days were better but they were good. Television hadn’t made it to our house yet so we played board games and worked on jigsaw puzzles, listened to the radio. We got together with my aunts, uncles and cousins, kids ate in the kitchen while grown ups circled the dining room table. After dinner the men all smoked, ladies went to the piano, sang carols and declared the kitchen off limits. Kids play, always have. I don’t know what it is that we do now but some day my grand kids will tell their grand kids how cool it was. 

Gone away is the bluebird.

Here to stay is a new bird.

He sings a love song, aw we go along . . .

3 MINUTE SKETCH

I had a friend in high school who worked in a shoe store. He said you can tell a person’s character by the shoes they wear. “Women who wear high heels with open toes are looking for love.” I thought everyone with five toes on each foot were looking for love.  My friend died young so I’ll never know how he would have turned out. If he were here he could check my shoes and tell me how I did. My little bit of insight turns, ironically, on reading and writing. I think what one reads and writes is an indicator of, maybe not their worth but certainly their possibility. I have friends who read only menus and street signs, who write only to text message and sign their names. It doesn’t make them any more or less but I get a sense of their curiosity and their need to know, about anything. I get a feel for the size of their ideas. I don't think Buddy got beyond handling ladies feet and sneaking a peak up their skirts. We all went through that phase but he died and I didn't.

Sixty Minutes is a television, news-magazine program that has been running since the 60’s, still going strong. Recently they devoted a full program to honor former reporters, showing clips from their best projects and listened to off camera comments and observations. Beginning with Harry Reasoner and Dan Rather they did in depth exposés and human interest stories into a new century and finished with Andy Rooney. Up until his retirement and subsequent passing, Andy Rooney wrote for the program and did a short, 3 minute sketch at the end of each show. He took a bit of trivial fodder and made something of it. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with irony, he put his own skeptical, unpredictable spin on ideas that should not have held your attention, but they did. He was a great student of the Human Condition. Andy had great quotes. One was, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” He thought his readers deserved that. He could be bothersome, even offensive but he dug after the bone until his story was complete. Sometimes he was wrong but he never made excuses or passed the buck. After critical comments on NAACP strategy and boycotts in the south he was arrested for riding with blacks in the back of the bus. When he was wrong he apologized and fixed what he had broken. 

I read a self help book back in the 1990’s titled ‘Do It!’ At one point the author used writing as an example: “If you want to be a writer” he said, “you don’t need an agent or a computer, all you need is a pencil and paper. When someone reads what you’ve written, that makes you a writer. If you want to be famous or win a Pulitzer, that’s still where you begin.” That makes me a writer; not famous or even successful but sometimes people read my stuff. I can’t say Andy Rooney was my hero or that I even wanted to be like him but if someone today would include us in the same sentence, I would be flattered. The fact that he was a writer with bushy eyebrows, an agnostic, more liberal than conservative earns him high marks in my book. I really identify with his quote, “I didn’t get old on purpose. If you’re lucky it could happen to you.” And, (I know you never begin a sentence with 'And' but I did anyway - Creative License) and he also said, “People accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they believe.” All I can think of now are climate change deniers, anti vaccination/anti sex-education people. Maybe Andy is a hero after all. 

DO THE MATH

Breathe in, breathe out, I see the sun is out and leaves are all on the ground: and it’s time to breathe again. If you live to be 90, measuring life by the breath, the breathe-in-breathe-out loop will repeat itself about a billion times, 9 zeros; do the math. Think of Tarzan swinging vine to vine through the jungle; each vine only good for 5 or 6 seconds, then he has to catch another vine, another breath or the machine starts shutting down. If there is no other vine or if he misses, he only has a couple of minutes swinging back and forth to catch another vine, draw another breath or his swinging-breathing journey is over. Discounting modern medicine, it doesn’t leave much room for error. But evolution has made us pretty consistent, pretty proficient at the breathing in and breathing out. Still, you understand the unforgiving aftermath of failure, just for missing one breath, the next one. I was 20-something, studying human anatomy & physiology in college: the simple consequence of missing the next breath got my attention. 

My dad wasn’t complaining, more a resigned lamenting. In his 80’s, the 20th Century was winding down, his friends were dying and all he could do was go to their funerals. He would say to me, “The curse of long life is, losing your friends.” It left him weighing two dilemmas: how to cope with this pattern of loss and the weight of his own inevitable demise. In her own time Margaret Mead observed, and nearly all credible anthropologists agree, end of life rituals (funerals/memorials) are about the only venue where we openly mourn the loss of life. But what we do according to (Mead) that is not so obvious or public is, in the shadow of another’s passing we grieve for the loss of our own life. Mortality lurks out there somewhere but it is no less assured. People can accommodate that grim reality by either denial or distraction and meeting the day's need is a powerful distraction. But deep down in the brain where we can not be trusted with the keys, we understand: Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

I just learned of the passing of a friend. His health had not been good but the news was unexpected. My sympathy and affection for his family are real. I will miss him but I still have things to do. You can’t let grief weigh you down; you can’t be afraid of when or how your journey will end. My friend lived long and well and there is some consolation there. But then in the last year I saw a photo of a drowned refugee, a Syrian child washed up on a Mediterranean beach. The photo made a statement about war and politics. It was news intended to move a person’s sense of humanity. Too far away, not enough in common to go fight another man’s war but I can only speak for me. I’m thinking of my own next breath. You can be young or old, good or bad, it doesn’t matter; do the math. One’s next breath is so important, the one you can’t live without. I’m old enough I don’t take anything for granted. Life is good; I am the old Tarzan, clinging vine to vine, breath to breath, remembering a time when vines had handles, too many to count.