To Vote or Not to Vote

I’m inspired to write about voting in light of comments from a friend that he, as a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter, will refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election if she is the Democrat’s nominee. It is a position that has people like me worried, not because I’m a Hillary Clinton supporter (I haven’t decided which Democrat I’m voting for in the primary yet) but because I’m a Democrat, a Liberal and a Progressive who can’t accept Donald Trump or Ted Cruz as President of the United States. In order to defeat the Republican presidential nominee, we will need the supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to put aside their differences and come together to vote for the Democrat’s nominee, whoever that is. In my mind, that shouldn’t be difficult.

Bernie and Hillary try very hard to point out their differences on the issues, character, experience and past performance. I’ve listened very closely. When it comes to their plans for the future, they sound like they agree on the big stuff. They both want people to have access to affordable healthcare, they both have plans to reduce the burden of student debt, they are both pro-choice and want equal pay for women, they both oppose the TPP trade agreement, the both want to enact immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship for the 11 million and stop deportation, they both want to address income inequality through taxation of the super rich, they both want to overturn Citizens United, they both want to increase regulation of Wall Street and neither one wants to put massive boots-on-the-ground in the Middle East. They both agree that Government CAN answer the nation’s problems. They both will appoint a Supreme Court justice that will break the Conservative lock on that branch of the government. There are significant specific differences but they are as similar in their agendas for the future as the Republicans are similar in their opposition to those agendas. Not only are they similar on the issues, they are both intelligent, experienced, stable and “presidential”.

I recognize that there are reasonable criticisms that can be made against both these candidates. My sense is that the Sanders supporters making criticisms of Clinton are more vociferous, angry and implacable while Clinton supporters seem less exercised about their differences. That might be a natural dynamic that exists between the “favorite” and the “underdog”, the “establishment” and the “revolutionary” but it seems to me those passionate feelings may cause them to lose their sense of proportionality. Their passionate disgust with Hillary should pale in comparison to the passion they should have to protect the United States from the specter of Trump/Cruz leading a Republican-controlled Congress and appointing a Conservative Supreme Court justice. And yet, one can appreciate a person’s struggle to bring themselves to vote for someone they loathe.

That leads me to the Shakespearian conundrum. Why do we vote and why should we vote? I vote, first of all, because I believe that it is my duty as a citizen of the United States. There is no law that requires us to vote. It is a choice that we are free to make and it may be the most important and valuable choice we have. Unfortunately, other than the limited options in a primary, we don’t control the pool from which we choose. Too often, we are left to choose between the lesser of two evils or an impotent third party.

In such a case, why bother to vote if you can’t feel good about it? It is easy to rationalize that since one vote rarely makes a difference, why not just satisfy yourself and indulge your indignation by denying your vote to the lesser of the two evils or spend it on a doomed third party candidate? I submit that in addition to believing it is a duty to vote, one should vote, not to satisfy oneself, one should vote in the best interest of the country. Most of us believe our vote means something important even if it is no more than a drop in the ocean. It should be important not because it does something for the voter, but because it does something for our country. Accepting the responsibilities of citizenship means agreeing with fellow citizens that we will make decisions together so that each vote will be multiplied by many others thus giving every vote significant power. Each of our votes in concert with millions of others offers a general direction to our political system and, when in the majority, pushes the country right or left. Our duty to vote is a duty to participate in the combined effort to guide our country into the future.

Even if one believes that Hillary Clinton is an unacceptably flawed candidate, I would argue that it is undeniable that she would steer our country in the general direction we want to go as opposed to where Trump/Cruz would send us. While she might look scary under the microscope, one should look through the telescope that sees the where entire country is going. No candidate is perfect and some less perfect than others but if one candidate offers a significantly better chance of keeping the country on the right road, your duty kicks in. Not voting or voting for a third party expresses your personal thoughts and feelings but fails to do your duty to put your shoulder to the wheel that moves all of us one way or the other.

Primaries are best for closely examining each candidate and supporting the one that best exemplifies our personal preferences and who aspires to achieve our dreams. But once the primary process resolves itself, the focus has to shift away from the individual candidate to the representative of a direction, left or right. The chance for a president to really achieve specific goals is quite limited especially for a Democrat faced with a Republican-controlled Congress. But it is undeniable that the Democrat and Republican candidates will offer to move this country in opposite directions. So during the primary, let’s lustily argue about who is the better candidate to represent our direction but once that is resolved, I hope you will do your duty to help move our country in that direction.

Hanging By a Thread

In the morning, when I return home from my walk up and down the Walhalla ravine, I water the outdoor plants. A week ago, as I was stretching the 100 foot garden hose to it’s full length to reach the bed of scarlet impatiens in the front yard, I spied a desiccated, shriveled brown leaf dangling in the air at eye level, suspended by one gossamer filament; just one long spit of spider silk attached to the tip of a bony, leafless branch. It twisted ever so slightly and slowly in the soft summer breezes. It is a phenomena I’ve seen before, a magician’s trick performed by Nature. Nothing miraculous but exotic enough to warrant a close inspection upon which I imagined that this particular leaf resembled a brown paper ghost on a stick. Having sufficiently marveled at this apparition for a few seconds, I proceeded to complete the ritual task at hand.

The next morning, it was still there. Despite its precarious existence in midair, it continued to defy gravity, refusing to become just another fallen leaf lying on the lawn. I was impressed that something, so fragile that it was vulnerable to a mere gust of wind or drop of rain, could survive to repeat its feat of prestidigitation for another show, another day. And the next day, it was still there. My son had come out to help me do the watering and I showed him the amazing floating leaf. He was amused but only took it as an opportunity to immediately try to destroy the illusion by bringing it crashing down. He cocked his head back, stretched his spine and waived his hands in the air but unlike a carefully constructed castle of sand or a tower of colorful wooden blocks that he delights in demolishing, this leaf was just out of his reach.

When I returned again to find the leaf still floating, I wondered if I should see it as a post-less sign on my path insisting that I take heed of some warning. It did remind me of a device I often use in my Valentines of suspending a symbolic red heart in a space near a real world object, like an ear or a brain or a stop light or a broken window, depicting the metaphorical connection I was making between passion and the subject of my accompanying poem. I didn’t need the dangling leaf to warn me about the fragile and ephemeral nature of my existence. Lately, every time I walked the ravine I focused on being aware of the moment I was in, worshiping the beauty of the sylvan cathedral with sky blue stained-glass windows and a choir of crickets I was moving through, comparing my invaluable freedom to that of an imprisoned criminal or my relative health to those afflicted with a disability, thinking of friends and family who had passed away and no longer had a consciousness of the sparkling stream of life that I continued to walk beside.

It had been about a week, the simple beautiful mystery of the weightless leaf had withstood a couple short summer showers beneath the green canopy of my laid back mulberry tree, so I finally decided it was worthy of being memorialized by photographing it with my cell phone. Later that afternoon, I was reading a book in my screened-in porch when I became aware of the rustling leaves in the front yard trees sounding like applause and then realizing that it was the percussion of another summer shower briefly moving through. After the rain stopped, I decided to check on my insubstantial friend and discovered that it had taken its final bow.

Recipe for a Perfect Summer Day

Start with a sunny day

Place in a blue sky

Mix in puffy white cumulus clouds

Heat at about 84 degrees

Then, into a private country setting with a shady lawn and a tree-lined pond, add yourself and your beautiful wife on a blanket

Peel the clothing

Stuff with a baguette, boursin cheese, tomatoes and fresh basil

Liberally coat with sunscreen and place on an inflatable island anchored in the pond.

Rotate positions to keep the flesh under the arched canopy while cooking so as not to burn or over heat.

Allow the inflatable island to slowly drift aimlessly around the pond propelled by soft summer breezes

Baste with a six pack of grapefruit shandy.

Serve in a quiet setting accompanied only by singing birds, fish splashing and leaves rustling.

Bon appetit.

I'm Thankful My Birthday is August 16

I’m thankful my birthday is August 16. I just finished my annual birthday bike trip to and from Antrim Park and it was another beautiful sunny day. I don’t remember a birthday of  mine that it wasn’t like this. I’m sure that over the past 63 years there has been rain on my birthday but the middle of August in central Ohio is pretty dependably hot and sunny.

My mom told me I was a ten month baby so I was obviously holding out for this date. Since I was her first it probably just seemed to her like a long hot summer that would never end but I enjoy thinking I was in no hurry. Its a day to just lay back and savor the flavor of the end of summer.

Numerologically speaking I love the fact that 8, 16 and 52 are all multiples of 4, my number. And of course, it is the day Elvis died which means since 1977 there has usually been something going on involving good music if nothing else than listening to the King.

Yes, my birthday is usually a halcyon day that I enjoy spending with Mother Nature including a dip in a rural pond which I’m on my way to do now. It’s good for a morning bike ride to a quiet place to contemplate the passing years of my life as the sun, the blue skies and the billowy clouds reflect on the water of the quarry. As I glided fast down Walhalla Ravine, I sat upright on the bike and held my arms out in the rushing air trying to embrace the warm love and happiness that surrounds me in every way, right now, today, my birthday.

I'm Thankful For Acorns

I’m thankful for acorns that fall on the road where I can smash them with the heel of my shoe. I love the sound of the cracking and the feel of the crunch that ever so slightly vibrates into my foot. It requires careful calibration of the length of my steps during the approach in order to land the heel directly on top of the nut and apply the full weight of my body thereby achieving maximum explosive effect.

It is something like the pleasure I get from popping bubble wrap but not quite. There is something more deeply satisfying about this act of destruction. Breaking something could be a way to relieve stress or experience a joyful sense of power that probably goes back to childhood. On our recent trip to the beach, my 4 year old son wasn’t as interested in building sand castles as he was destroying them. But I wonder if stepping on acorns doesn’t touch a particular core memory of mine.

I don’t have many memories, core or otherwise, of my early childhood but this is one that has stuck with me if only as one of the few fables of my youth that I have repeated to myself over the years. It was not a pleasant memory. Simply told, I accidentally stepped on what was either a water bug or a cockroach and it must have been a good-sized one because it created an audible crunch. It was one of those sounds that imprinted itself on my soul like the first time I heard an electric guitar live but, unlike the pure spine-tingling ecstasy of the electric guitar, the squashing of the bug was a disgusting wound to my psyche.

If crunching acorns with my shoe is something I enjoy doing, in part, because it echoes a childhood memory, am I cracking open a wormhole to my youth or am I embracing the wound and fondling the scab?

Slipping Away

Lolo, our new kitten, came to us when she was just a couple weeks old, having been rescued from the mulch pile at Lowe’s by my wife who was working there. Lolo was heartbreakingly tiny then and had to be fed with a miniature baby bottle which she attacked with amazing ferocity bordering on insanity. I would have to straightjacket her legs with one hand while forcing the bottle into her mouth with the other. Our persistence prevailed and she grew like a weed. The cute little ball of fur that had previously preferred to sleep in the crook of my neck and shoulder now bounded though the house like a small weightless cheetah, flashing from room to room, skittering across the floors, leaping on and bouncing off the furniture, flying up drapes, dresses and pant legs. She is fast, determined and relentless in her pursuit of human flesh to capture and gnaw on. It is an amazing sensation to walk across the floor in sandals and feel her sharp biting and scratching seamlessly alternate step by step, back and forth from one ankle to the other as if you are walking through a quicksand of teeth and claws.

Our cats have always lived the indoor, outdoor life style and I made the mistake of letting this feline cub get a taste of the suburban jungle a little too soon which probably resulted in her acquiring a case of fleas. Even supervised visitation with Mother Nature is now forbidden until she can get spayed. However, she remains undeterred in her quest for adventure al fresco. She sees her big brother exercise his freedom of movement and follows him right up to the door before being forcibly detained. When we open our front door from the outside, it is like triggering the lid on a jack-in-the-box. She has obviously learned the embarrassing sound of our SUV’s rumbling muffler allowing her to lie in wait and spring out into the porch at the first crack of light. It is hard to maintain constant vigilance for an unrepentant, recidivist escape artist during our normally unconscious habit of exercising ingress and egress.

Inevitably, I let my guard down and release the Kraken. Usually, her escape is short-lived as I bend down to confront her under the chaise lounge, grasp the closest portion of furry anatomy and gather her up in my arms, apologetically assuring her of my love while scratching her under the chin to soothe the savage beast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when she finally did successfully elude immediate and easy recapture, it would be under cover of darkness. I came in from lounging on the porch one evening for just a moment to retrieve a book and my reading glasses. When I returned I realized I had thoughtlessly left the door to the porch open. After a cursory search of the house determined that the prisoner was missing, I grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the dark world of unlimited possibilities that must have stretched out before her.

I was aware of every second ticking by as I fell through the trap door of fear and self-loathing. I’ve been down there before. My first son eluded my supervision when he was three and there were a few minutes of sheer terror and imagination run amok before I found him tagging along with our golden retriever as they blithely explored the neighborhood. Obviously, searching for a cat wasn’t as terrifying an experience but it does play the same accompaniment of regret and self-criticism to the mental melody of the search protocol. In between my observations of the way the street lamp lit the hilly contours of the neighborhood lawns with an empty yellow-green smoothness and the way my flashlight would cause bush leaves to project shadows moving in reverse toward me, momentarily looking like my dark little escapee, I thought about how I had let so much in my life slip away. Girlfriends, my mother, my first son, my career. I had lived for the moment and lost the strength of memory. I just never had a strong grip on the steering wheel of my life whether through carelessness, laziness or just reveling in my imagination.  When your head is in the clouds, the world slips through your fingers.

After having circled the house for the third time, I decided to take a closer look at the area underneath the van in the driveway where I had shined the flashlight from a standing position earlier. That extra effort to get down on my knees yielded the result I had been searching for.

Crying

Last Mothers Day, I once again found myself looking for inspiration to use in creating Mom’s card. She lived alone and other than exercising at the spa in the morning, Mom filled most of her days watching a lot of television. She had switched from having CNN on all day to watching the Turner Classics Network. Recently, she had been effusive about what a wonderful movie “A Streetcar Named Desire” was. When she talked about it, there was a smile on her face and twinkle in her eye. I thought maybe there was something there I could use to make the card because watching that movie had really touched her.

Naturally, the first thing I thought of was the iconic scene where Marlon Brando, in a torn shirt, cries out “Stella” from the street and pretty quickly, I morphed “Stella” into “Momma”. In trying to justify that segue, it occurred to me that Stanley was crying out to his wife in the apartment above much in the same way a child might cry out to his mother if they were separated and he needed her love. Using that tenuous connection and my limited artistic abilities, I created a pretty scary looking Marlon Brando crying out for his Momma in a big word balloon. I added a poem for the inside of the card to help explain the thought behind the image that I worried looked a little strange for a Mothers Day card.

Later that June, Mom died in her sleep. Despite the fact that she was 90 years old, her death was shockingly unexpected. Up until the last time she laid her head on her pillow, Mom was apparently healthy, happy, active and mentally sharp. It was hard to believe that anything had gotten the better of her because she was so strong. I often told her that I thought she would outlive me. When the family gathered at her home that day, we said the good-byes she could no longer hear and kissed the face that could no longer respond with her sweet smile. I had brief fits of crying and shed a few tears but mostly I remember just shaking my head in disbelief.

As with my father and my son before him, it fell on me to prepare and deliver the eulogy at the burial of Mom’s ashes. I didn’t write about how her death effected me or anecdotes about experiences we shared. I focused on her, how she lived, what she accomplished and what was important to her. The morning of the ceremony I rehearsed it a few times on my porch hoping that it would help me develop the strength or emotional callous I needed to get through it without breaking down and losing the ability to speak. I needed that because I knew I was a crier.

I’ve always considered myself a stoic personality. I know how to take things in stride and  keep my emotional equilibrium. When it comes to the death of a loved one, I focus on being thankful for the time we shared. I don’t have much use for dwelling on the negative. Wallowing in grief and regret for what might have been don’t seem to be “productive”. It doesn’t help me get to the happiness I’m always trying to reach. Mom’s favorite story about me was how, at a very young age, I came up to her and complained “I’m not having any fun.” It was a simple story but it seemed to encapsulate the search for happiness that drove me throughout my life.

On the other hand, I know how easily I can cry. For instance, it happens with regularity when I watch CBS Sunday Morning whether it is a sad story or, more often, just something beautiful. Not beautiful in the visual sense, something that is aesthetically pleasing, but the beauty of the human spirit that resonates with my beliefs and values, something that touches my heart by way of my brain. It could be a speech that stirs my pride in my country or seeing the sacrifice someone put in to help other people. It could be the lyric of a song that uncovers a salient truth or the music that takes me back to the purity and freshness with which I experienced it in my youth. Just now, I welled up at the precision solemnity of uniformed South Carolina State Troopers taking down the Confederate battle flag.

The ceremony was at the grave site with a small group of family and friends. Despite the rehearsals, I had a tough time getting through the eulogy. My halting voice would occasionally crack into the high-pitched range that forecasts a downpour. At times, I had to stop and gather myself with a deep, cleansing breath. There were tears but no storm. After struggling to make it to the finish, I felt like much of it had been unintelligible but my family assured me they’d heard it all. It was a beautiful, mild summer day and the sunshine seemed to dry me out. I walked around to hug my brothers and sisters and felt composed again.

Then the attendant directed us to the polished wooden cube that held Mom’s ashes and suggested we might want to touch it, thereby leaving something of ourselves with it, before burial. I hadn’t envisioned this part of the ceremony but, feeling a bit dazed, I followed the line to say a final good bye. When I got there, an involuntary impulse directed me to fall to my knees. My mind was no longer in control of my actions. My body bent over and my head and hands fell on the box. The dam inside me broke and the tears fell in a torrent. I was flooded with a grief I had never experienced before and did not know I was capable of feeling. An anguished cry of “Momma” burst from my throat.

My Habit

I call it my ‘retirement beard”. As the days of court appearances dwindled down to a trickle, mornings without the shaving ritual accumulated, allowing a force of wispy soldiers to occupy the pristine beaches of my face. I’ve dabbled in a few tonsorial adventures in my life. The most memorable were the copper-red muttonchops that I allowed to grow wild and referred to as my ‘lobster claws’ because one was longer than the other. I was young and I believe the look I was going for was weird or just plain rebellious repulsive. As I aged, an occasional extended vacation period presented the opportunity to dispense with the daily shave and flirt with the stranger in the mirror. But these dalliances never lasted long for one basic reason. I couldn’t stop playing with it.

Now, I am not someone who is prone to any sort of obsessive compulsive behavior or addictions. I never developed cigarette smoking or coffee drinking habits in large part because I was too cheap to be anchored to any financially draining pastimes. Fortunately drugs like caffeine and nicotine didn’t do enough for me to justify the expenditure when compared to the drugs and alcohol I did enjoy. Even those worthwhile drugs and drink were relegated to functions of social events, or what I generally referred to as “partying”. Other than elevating my consciousness to watch an occasional ballgame on television, I’ve never been one to sit around by myself and drink or get high. I don’t hang out at bars to drink unless there is some live music I’ve gone there to hear. My self-analysis has always been a diagnosis of a non-addictive personality. Playing with my facial hair appears to be my Achilles heel.

If I’m not using my fingers to tug, twist or twirl it, I’m using my lips to mash it or to be brushed by it. Consequently, I often look like either a dastardly villain plotting someone’s cruel demise or an excited old toothless prospector. It’s one thing to indulge this pleasure in my private moments but when I’m with other people its embarrassing to constantly succumb to this telling lack of self-control. On the other hand, I’ve known women whose hair-fingering obsessions wove an hypnotic spell on me that enhanced their attractiveness. Maybe their habit says more about their weaknesses than I may suspect but I just don’t think there is an equivalency of acceptability between playing with the hair growing from one’s scalp and the crop growing on one’s face.

Unlike most addictive substances or amusements, my facial hair is always there in perfect unlimited propinquity to my lips and hands. Indulging my habit costs nothing, usage doesn’t result in any material depletion and it’s harmless except for the damage to one’s social esteem, much like nose picking or chewing the inside of the cheek. Its pleasures are manifold. The face is one of the most sensuous organs and erogenous zones on the human dermal landscape and when combined with the sensitivity of the fingertips, its hard to resist bringing them together. Twirling a tuft of beard between the forefinger and thumb slaps it against the shaved cheek with the soft propulsion of the pad of a kitten’s playful paw. It pinpricks the skin with the slightest shock, like that of one electron. Plucking short strands of mustache, I bend and release them so that they bristle against the top of my upper lip. The sides of two fingers pull a row of beard, twist it like a curling iron and sculpt it into a bouncy ringlet to be pinched and preened. All these fine motor calisthenics are done repeatedly, pulling and pricking the skin with just the slightest amount of stimulation, relieving stress, anchoring me to the corporeal and allowing my imagination to roam.

An addiction is a means of filling a hole with something other than what’s missing. What subconscious need compels me to engage in such constant self-fiddlement? Am I merely seeking physical pleasure and stimulation or is it just another temporarily satisfying but ultimately futile attempt to find the connection between my mind and my body that I’ve been searching for since I was a little boy coming home with a stolen Playboy?

Resumption

After a winter suspension
    my morning walks resume
    and the ravine is just waking up

Tree limbs are still just black webs against the sky
Broken and sawed off trunks are scattered like dinosaur bones

Newborn bush petals float in pale green and yellow clouds
    of mist across the slopes

Bleached brown survivors who refused to fall
    hang like abandoned laundry on branches
    bravely standing out until they are overwhelmed
    by the coming Spring clothing

Discrete spiked explosions of green
    shoot through the blanket of dead leaves

Recent rains have the creek
    loudly rushing over shale steps
    falling into pools of bubbly froth

A lone emerald head white collar duck
    sits in the swamp

Waiting at the end of my walk
    is an orphaned kitten
    I will begin to love

The Value of One Vote

Today I helped one person cast one vote. When I talked to him on the phone yesterday to make arrangements, I thought he might be elderly. Unless being 8 years younger than me makes him elderly, he wasn’t. It turned out he was disabled in ways that made him sound old. He had a beautiful smooth face, twinkling eyes and a big toothy smile but he had extreme trouble stepping off a curb or getting in and out of my car. Once he got going, he could shuffle along at a good pace with his cane but getting up out of a seat had me counting down to three with him to coordinate our efforts in the slow motion lift off, at times freezing in midair on the way up.

He explained to me during our car trip from his apartment on the West side that his arm had been mauled by rottweilers and his neck snapped after being hit by a 102 year old Florida driver. It caused him to retire from his 37 year career as a male nurse, the only one in his graduating class at OSU. He had been a scrawny, effeminate, black kid who was never treated respectfully by family or friends but who never let it bother him. He just laughed it off, held his head high and led a happy, successful life. He recounted the pain he felt about losing a brother who never listened to him about his partying life style and died a horrible slow death from diabetes. His brother would call him hurtful, disrespectful names but he would give anything just to hear his brother’s voice just one more time.

This physically broken man had a resilient spirit that kept him smiling and wisecracking. He flirted with all the ladies at the voting center and when he noticed the Romney wagon in the parking lot, I held him back as he played like he was going to go over there and kick some ass. Instead he was satisfied yelling “Racist” and “KKK” through the car window. He was fiercely independent, refusing the wheelchair inside the voting center when it was offered to him but he allowed me to help him through the process. Because his address had changed since last voting, he had to apply for and use a paper ballot. I knew to let him fill out all the paperwork and ballot with some helpful direction. After taking an excruciatingly long time filling in the small dot beside Obama’s name, he asked me what all the other names were about. I explained but resisted suggesting he consider giving Obama some help by at least voting for Senator Brown. Voting for president was enough for him which was something of a relief to me when I thought about how long it would have taken him to fill out the entire ballot.

After spending two hours and driving forty miles with him, I completed the task of helping one man cast one vote for one candidate. I felt enriched by having made the acquaintance of a man who was so positive and joyful despite all the trouble in his life. It was an honor to assist him in doing something that he felt compelled to do. While one vote may not make any more difference to the night than one star in the sky, the value of it is measured in the light it shines just for you.

Best When Used By...

    I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to home maintenance. In fact, I’m generally one of those do-as-little-as-possiblers when it comes to maintaining my environment. My desk at the office is a farrago of files, messages, stray documents, bills and small clerical devices. Often, my daily approach to getting work done is working on whichever file I see first on the surface and attacking the layers like a mountain top removal excavation. Finding the calculator, correction tape applicator or the letter opener often requires vertical mining methods punctuated by expletive blasts of frustration.

    At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.

    I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet  by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.

    Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.

    As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.

Recycling

One of my tenants died. She rented an efficiency apartment in my vaguely odd Spanish-style stucco building incongruously located in Italian Village. She was a holdover tenant when I purchased the place and probably had lived there for 20 years. The low rent fit her disability income which frequently required relatives or a church fund to supplement. She suffered from diabetes and a respiratory ailment. Our communication was limited to her polite requests for extensions to pay, dealing with unpaid heat bills and a few maintenance issues. A couple years ago, I entered the premises for the first and only time to examine a problem with the kitchen floor so I knew what I was in for when the responsibility for dealing with her stuff fell on me after her relatives declined the opportunity to salvage any remnant of their family member’s worldly remains.

She’d spent the last four or five months in the hospital and rehab center. When I entered the apartment, it was like shedding the first rays of swirling dusty light upon an ancient undisturbed tomb. As I entered, my attention was drawn to the fake wood plaque sitting on the end table that she probably had picked up at a truck stop or Cracker Barrel. It read ‘God Bless This Mess’. The kaleidoscopic clutter strewn over every surface from the floor to the furniture attested to her faith in having received absolution for a surrender to chaos that could only have been granted by divine indulgence. Like a bird’s nest built with scraps, discards and fragments, her cramped abode was covered with the loose change of everyday existence. It wasn’t garbage, just a timeless accumulation of cheap junk and medical supplies.

Presiding over this sepulcher of her meager relics, like funerary figurines perched along the back of the couch and cushioned chair, stationed in numerous shelves and lying in wait in cabinets and drawers, was a lifelong collection of stuffed bears. Like an immortal corps of ursine sentinels, their glassy eyes had been fixed in unwavering stares on a dark and soundless abandoned chamber, patiently searching for their adoring queen. I stuffed her anthropomorphous family into their own trash bags in hopes that I would be able to get someone to adopt them but after repeated calls to her brother and a post on Craigslist failed to turn up any takers, they disappeared with most of the remainder of her possessions, carried away by the unseen hands of Bulk Pickup and alley scavengers.

It seemed so sad that everything this woman owned, her small solitary world, commanded no more respect than unwanted trash, so, partly out of respect to her, I tried to put as much of it as I could to some good use. I salvaged a few things for myself and let the guy who was rehabbing the place for me take what he wanted. I boxed and bagged up her clothing along with all the plastic, glass, paper and cardboard I could find and stuffed it all in my car for a trip to the recycling center conveniently situated beside the Volunteers of America store. It was raining as I pulled into the shopping center and I parked near the door on the side of the VOA building designated for drop offs.

I sprinted the short distance to the dry area under the small awning that jutted out from the store’s massive wall and rang the door bell. While waiting for a response, I looked over at my car to check on my young companion in his car seat. It was my day of the week to take care of him while his mother was at work. As I stood there, confined in the little invisible box that was protecting me from the rain, I could see his shaggy blonde hair and beautiful smiling face peeking through the rear side window. Here I was, almost sixty years old, having spent the last 4 or 5 years living alone, my own son and his childhood a distant, impenetrable memory, and now, suddenly I’ve opened my door to a young woman and her child, filling the house with crying, joyful screeches and adorable babbling, floors littered with food, toys, clothes, plastic containers and various kitchen utensils, a state of perpetual upheaval, sharing everything I have left to give, once again loving and being loved. I looked up at the towering wall composed of three dimensional bricks designed to undulate like concrete waves. I rang the bell again.

Christmas Morning

8:30 Christmas morning
Get out of bed
and squeeze the oranges for mimosas
that bubbleth over
Ball up the newspapers
Pile on the kindling
and a couple logs in the fireplace
Start a nice small blaze

Presents first
Mutts by McDonnell
Amphigorey Again
Lindsey’s Playboy
and a Kindle
new Tom Waits and Gyllian Welch
paint a lovely picture to get lost in

Then the cream cheese and lox
on toasted bagels from Blocks
that crunch just before melting
in your mouth

The laptop says Patty Cake is open
and the Sticky Buns you forgot
might still be had
with a walk down the quiet ravine
on a crisp sunny morning
On the way back
sample the molasses cookie
Return for french-pressed coffee
and warm frosted pastry

Remember all those
with whom we shared this morning
in the past
exchanging smiles and gentle touches
in the warmth of our home
and searched for a peaceful happy moment

I Wonder What Prince Valiant Has Been Up To Lately

As part of my personal financial austerity program, I regretfully canceled my weekend subscription to The Columbus Dispatch. I might be tempted to use the trendy excuse that I get my news and opinion digitally these days (is WCBE digital?) but that has been true for a long time. The fact is the newspaper never served to keep me abreast of current events or provide much in the way of in-depth coverage or intellectual enlightenment. I primarily used it to satisfy a more basic hunger for the plebeian entertainment found in the sports section and the funnies. Reading the softly lit online version of their Buckeye coverage feeds my appetite for spiritual intimacy with the team but I miss the comforting sensory experience of the traditional weekend morning spent settling in on the couch and maneuvering large sheets of crinkling newsprint that waft through the air like wings when the pages turn and end up falling like leaves collecting in piles on the floor and the furniture, scattering the den with headlines and photos echoing the exploits of my champions.

There was also a very practical secondary use that was part of my recycling efforts. One of my cats, Muffy, aka Muffah, is a surly old girl who does things her way and using a litter box is just not her style. She does show me the courtesy of consistently using the same general area of the floor enabling me to keep it covered in recyclable material. While Muffy’s lavatory literary selections usually consisted of the mundane black and white sections of the paper, I kept the colorful pages in my bathroom where I rationed consumption of the strips, like hoarded Halloween candy, to be savored throughout the week.

Not that the Dispatch offers a great selection of periodical humor. If Bloom County was still in there, I would never have canceled my subscription. Doonesbury has always been well-written, masterfully illustrated and precociously liberal for such a conservative rag. Foxtrot was my favorite new strip with powerful, simple lines, bold blocks of color and a topical narrative about a commonplace American family that was wickedly smart. 9 Chickweed Lane had a whimsical weirdness factor but I was more attracted to its very soft-core porn whose proximity to the Family Circus always amazed me. As for the rest, I enjoyed the art and humor in some while others just provided mindless reading material to pass time as I occupied the throne.

I’ve been reading the comics in the Dispatch for fifty years probably. Some great ones have come and gone like Li’l Abner and Calvin and Hobbes. Fortunately, editors were smart enough to reprint classic Peanuts. Some of the strips grudgingly keep going, impervious to the passage of time like Blondie, Beetle Bailey and, one I just started reading a few years ago, Prince Valiant. I’m not sure what kept me from spending time with Prince Valiant earlier. Maybe its realistic style seemed sloppy to me, maybe the subject matter seemed too uncomical. Once I started reading it, however, I got hooked on the momentum of its never-ending story, an epic that began 3,700 weekends ago, according to Wikipedia. In the early days, apparently, the Prince did some aging but the passage of time seems to have slowed to a crawl. Valiant is as much of a bad ass as ever and Queen Aleta stays youthfully beautiful without the help of plastic surgery. Over and over Prince Valiant bravely meets the most dire challenges and barely emerges victorious to fight another Sunday. There is no quitting, no changing, no defeat. As the colorful life of the funnies rolls on, now without me, I find myself wondering what Prince Valiant has been up to lately.

The Mystery of the Blue Suede Boots

   After spending half of the lovely first Sunday of Fall inside my cave watching football, I felt obliged to go outside and take a walk in the balmy air that seemed not to want to let go of Summer. It turned into one of those walks you take by yourself sometimes to figure out where you’re going and what you want to do with your life. The daylight wore the clouds like a gray sweater it didn’t need after all. Kicking through the season’s incipient layer of leaves in the street, I noticed a few splashes of red, orange and yellow, the stigmata of the autumnal equinox. As I descended into the cooler atmosphere of the shady ravine, I imagined risking a new start and sidestepping the March of Time. But before I could break away from the path I was on, I needed to solve the mystery that had held me in such excruciating suspense for so long. I had to know why The Girlfriend never came home.

    When I’m walking or bike riding down the ravine, I usually have to remind myself to keep my head up and enjoy the scenic view of this sylvan corridor instead of focusing on the the wildly irregular surface of the patched and potholed asphalt. However, no amount of innate concern for my personal safety could have prevented me from noticing  the incongruous presence of two cornflower blue suede, high-heeled half-boots sitting in the glade between the road and the rocky bank of the creek, barely hidden by a lace veil of leaves. Their intensely colored skin and flamboyant design brazenly called out from the quiet woodland browns and greens. It was as if two pieces of sky had fallen to Earth.

    I wondered what the story was behind this oddly conceived still-life. I assumed that a woman had purposely set them there because they were standing next to each other, carefully aligned side by side, the way they might be neatly stored on the floor of her closet. She hadn’t just tossed them away like the various forms of debris thoughtlessly strewn along this precious thoroughfare. It was unlikely that she had forgotten about them. On her way out, the rough terrain under her bare feet would have reminded her. She had probably placed them there temporarily with the intent of retrieving them upon the completion of an adventure in which boots could not play a part. That plan had apparently gone awry in a manner so serious and unforeseen as to cause her to reject her need for their comfort, endure the pain of an unfettered retreat and abandon a once-cherished item of her wardrobe.

    All that remained for the inquisitive passerby was the silent image of a lonely pair of boots, empty of their human companion, unable to follow her, unable to move forward and no explanation to be found.

The Visit

My son, Ruyd, would have been 36 years old today.  I visited the pecan tree in Goodale Park that was planted with some of his ashes. Over the past nine years it has grown tall and broad creating another oasis for Comfesters seeking shade near the Main Stage. There’s a little bronze plaque installed at the base illustrated with the small relief of a squirrel holding an acorn. Ruyd always had a thing for squirrels. A couple splotches of guano had landed on the metal and I cleaned them off with spit on my fingertips. On previous trips, I would talk to the spirit I imagined inhabiting the tree. Today, I was silent, remembering a recent radio discussion of the poem  “On The Nature Of Things”  by Lucretius and his revolutionary idea, for a Roman, that death is the end of a person. There is no one there to talk to anymore. The living are left with only memories. So I just stood there and gazed at the thick trunk and the profusion of thin green leaves.

Suddenly, a squirrel descended from the branches above. His headfirst scramble froze right in front of me as he clung to the rough bark of the trunk, seeming to defy gravity, with his tail flicking in the air above his head that was cocked up to allow his big eyes to look straight into mine. He stayed in that precarious position for what seemed an extraordinary amount of time considering how close he was to me. He showed no fear of me. On the contrary, he seemed mesmerized by me. I stood still and silent, meeting his stare, returning whatever effort he was making to connect with me. And then, I smiled.

Risky Behavior

As the days of our lives turn into the years of our lives, the building blocks of the passage of time are made up of patterns, habits and repetition. When we look back, we see the highlights decorating our personal history with memories of special events and unique experiences. but like trophies, framed pictures and art objects, they merely adorn the mantel of the fireplace built with identical bricks and mundane mortar. My mornings are filled with rituals and routines. Most weekdays I wake up and exercise on my stationary bike or, weather permitting, take a real bike ride on the Olentangy Trail. If I take the trail south, I always look for the white heron standing in the wetlands. If I go north, on my return I will detour through the prairie wildflower preserve.

Each morning I have to be in Court, I must walk through a metal detector. During my wayward youth, I developed a survival instinct triggered by the presence of law enforcement that assesses my vulnerability to being arrested by doing a mental scan of my physical circumstances. There must have been hundreds of times as I approached the courthouse checkpoint that I questioned whether I might be carrying some contraband paraphernalia and imagining the consequences of it being discovered if I set off the alarm. This morning, I was going through my usual self-inventory as I walked up to the x-ray machine conveyer belt when my fingertips detected the slender wooden box housing the metal mock cigarette that I had picked up off the bedroom end table and pocketed with the intent of returning it to the den before I left the house. Depending on my short-term memory is always risky behavior and now the dangerous situation I had imagined so often was upon me.

I flashed back to the image I had seen just minutes earlier outside the courthouse of a handcuffed, barefooted man in a white tee shirt and what looked like black boxer shorts being escorted by a sheriff down the sidewalk towards the back entrance to the jail. I had wondered how he came to be transported in such a state of undress. Had the cops rousted him out of bed to execute a warrant for his arrest or had he rushed outside chasing after someone in a fit of passion during a domestic dispute?

Even though I had often considered the possibility of finding myself in this predicament, I had never formulated a plan to deal with it. Without looking directly at them, I knew there were usually four or five security officers staffing the station and that I was likely being observed. They see me walk through there almost daily so I was trying to maintain my normal flow of activity by placing my bag and the tray with my phone and keys on the belt while frantically calculating my options. I let my belongings pass through the x-ray and then made a momentary retreat around the corner to think. I realized I was now acting suspiciously and the “flight or fight” response hormones were coursing through my body. I had an unusually busy schedule that required me to be in three different courtrooms so I had been particularly focused on being punctual that morning. Weighing the gravity of my responsibility to clients, opposing counsel and the Court against the inconvenience and the perversely anomalous nature of just abandoning my entrance in midstream and returning to my office, I allowed myself to be swept away by the momentum of my familiar pattern of behavior, braving the dangerous rapids of the magnetometer.

Still Smilin'

The summer usually feels like an endless death march through a hot arid desert devoid of any of the life-sustaining nourishment and hydration, the intellectual and emotional pap if you will, that is otherwise provided the remainder of the year by the vicarious thrills I experience living on the edge of disaster, celebrating victory and agonizing over defeat as I watch the slowly unfolding drama of my favorite teams’ seasons of football and basketball. A truly uncivilized time of the year when one is actually left with no other option than to venture outside into the brutal nuclear light, cutting one’s own electrical umbilical cord, abandoning the mind-clearing sterility of pristine cold conditioned air for the profane breezes corrupted by inapprehensible earthly ingredients, replacing the gorgeously colorful, focus-group-approved digital images with the stark green reality of wild trees and untamed grass and weeds and the shimmering waters whose cool refreshment beckons you like a Siren to immerse yourself and feel the visceral relief of a suicidal plunge into aquatic madness and dissolution.

It is only every four years that I’m able to find some some blessed relief in the comforting growth of anxiety and apprehension that comes with the early stages of a presidential campaign when some measure of sanity is restored to the womb of my darkened cave, illuminated only by the flickering images of talking heads as I hang on the results of the endless stream of each new poll. Thank God for my deliverance from the soul-killing, existential boredom of this off-year election by the divinely-timed confluence of the rise to power of the Tea Party and the expiration of the debt ceiling. Little could I imagine that the results of the 2010 election would rain down like manna from heaven to relieve the stifling heat dome of 2011. Just as Moses raised his arms and parted the waters of the Red Sea, the Republicans have, with the same biblical majesty, overreached and used their power to reveal the deep chasm that exists between progressives and conservatives and a clear path to the Promised Land between towering walls of massive economic destruction.

The current countdown to ecstasy has been a deliciously painful and torturously slow crawl on our hands and knees toward our dominatrix who will eventually determine our credit-worthiness as we beg for her to tighten our bonds. The ultimate denouement of our unknown, yet inevitable punishment still awaits us just a few tantalizing days away. But tonight, I was rewarded for my for my slavish attention to every unfolding minute of congressional pornographic pageantry as I let fly a righteously satisfying exclamation of glee upon learning that Speaker Boehner had suffered a humiliating spanking at the hands of his own party, like an insane snake thrusting its fangs into its own body. It is a moment like this, standing on the precipice, seeing, in the near distance, the voluntary and self-induced dismantling of our way of life with misery, deprivation and increased suffering in the future of so many, where chaos and reverberating recriminations will fill the air, as our nation and world decline into a nightmare scenario where the fragile framework of our interconnected stability begins a slow-motion crash into dystopia, as we turn our heaven into hell, for this moment, I realize how glorious it is to still be able to smile.

The Cat That Didn't Come Home

I allow my cats to do as they please. If they want to come in, I let them in, if they want to go out, I let them out. I whistle and call for them when its time to eat and before I lock up at night. They don’t always respond to my invitations. They tend to hang around within earshot but they also venture out into our quiet little neighborhood. I noticed that my old Norwegian skowcat, Weiner, hadn’t been around for a couple days so I got on my bike and looked around in the direction I had often seen him heading, toward the next street parallel to mine. I knew there were some neighbors over there who had a reputation for feeding strays and that is where I found him, lying in the sun on their little concrete porch beside a paper plate filled with dry cat food.

I was quite relieved I’d found him. I called him and he came to me, yowling in recognition. I carried him home, which he didn’t appreciate, fed him and let him back out whereupon he immediately ran away. I wasn’t sure he would return to the neighbors and regretted not putting a collar on him with an ID tag. Years ago, someone found and returned one with my info by hanging it on my front door handle. It hung there for years, a ghostly reminder of the long gone cat who had eschewed it. The next day I walked back over to the neighbors and there he was, perched on the porch. I brought him home again and put the collar on him leaving him none too pleased. He bolted as soon as I let him out of my grasp.

At this point, I started to get the message. He had relocated and if I wanted to see him, I would have to visit him there. Nothing had changed or happened at home that I knew of to make him want to stay away. The neighbors told me that he and my other cats had been visiting and dining at their place for years. For some reason, his usual habit of returning home was now forgotten or rejected.

I began to make the short walk around the block to spend time with him on a daily basis thinking that I needed to regain his trust. It soon became evident that he was willing to continue to accept my affection but only within the  framework of a long distance relationship. A routine developed in which I walk up the yard to the the front porch, he utters a little cry and gets up to greet me. I either sit on the porch with him or in the grass if he has been seeking shade by the side of the house. I scratch him and pet him as he winds his way around allowing me to get at different angles and areas that need attention and insistently nuzzles my hand if he’s not getting enough. Then after five or ten minutes, I get up and walk away. When I turn around, I usually see him contentedly preening himself, apparently unmoved by my departure, much less inspired to follow me home.

Its been a couple weeks now and my regular efforts at professing my unwavering commitment to him haven’t yielded so much as one return visit. I’m sure he remembers the way home, he obviously had been traveling it back and forth for years. I guess he’s just not impressed with my refusal to give up on him in the face of rejection or he mistakes my understanding approach for acceptance of his decision to make a change. I realize that cats make changes in their routines and the places they like to hang out but this one seems pretty extreme.

It has led me to contemplate the possibility that maybe he’s no longer my cat, that if I quit visiting him, he might be just fine with that. He’s been my cat for about 15 years. When we were living in Grandview, the Girlfriend brought him home from a family down the street that was moving and couldn’t keep him. I’ve taken good care of him and spent many hours loving him and sharing the couch and bed. When all of my cats would stake out their positions atop my supine body, he always occupied the furrow between my shins. In the last few years, I’ve watched two of my cats expire and suffered the disappearance of another one. Those losses were painful but seemed to be in the natural course of things. It is harder to accept that a pet I have loved so long and who seemed to return my affection could make a decision to leave and stay away without any apparent explanation. I still plan on visiting and can't imagine just giving up. When the door hasn’t been shut, hope keeps Love walking around the block.

How Lucky You Got In

At the end of one episode of my favorite television show, Taxicab Confessions on HBO, there is an old guy from Brooklyn playing the violin in the backseat while he talks to the driver. He’s playing “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life”, a song made famous by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald back in 1935, in which the lyrics make the banal observation that the “mystery” is solved when one finds love. But while he scratches out the melody in a saccharine vibrato, he embellishes on the song’s meaning in a weary wise Brooklyn brogue. “It’s about the enigma of Life, the fact we are in existence which is a Big Number. You want to sit back sometimes and look at yourself, examine yourself and when they ponder the question, you know, its begging the question, ah sweet mystery, its the great sweet mystery of life. What a gift, heh? How lucky you got in.”

I’d been pondering my existence and wasn’t feeling my “Number” was too “Big”. After completing nearly five decades here on Earth, it felt like I hadn’t made much of that incredible gift I’d been given. In terms of my career, I wasn’t very successful. I was satisfied being a “poor people’s attorney” so I never made a lot of money or gained much renown. My job was never my passion, it never defined me. I enjoyed the respect I received, I enjoyed being my own boss and helping people with their problems but it was what I did in order to survive and do the things I really enjoyed doing like listening to live music or volunteering. When people refer to my “work”, I often say “If that is what you call what I do.”

Just surviving means that you don’t get to to taste the cornucopia of luxurious goodies that the world has to offer. I haven’t had the expensive toys, made the trips to foreign countries, experienced the gastronomic delights, the inspiring architecture, never saw a Broadway show. Of course the best things in life are free or nearly free but I haven’t cashed in on much of that either. Despite my love of words, I haven’t read a lot of books. I never became much of a musician. I remember thinking at age 18 that it was too late for me to learn to be a good bass player. I’ve dabbled in drawing and watercolor but its not much more than child’s play. My writing is quite amateurish, I know. I would conclude that I’m too lazy to make much out of what little artistic talent I may have but I know that I am capable of hard work and enjoy it. I guess I just haven’t pushed myself beyond my comfort zone.

As for the “Sweet Mystery of Life” that Nelson and Jeanette were singing so rapturously about, I’m not sure I’ve had that revelation. I believe I’ve been in love, experienced obsession and jealousy and the black hole of heartbreak, but I’ve often wondered if I have actually loved anyone beside myself. There have been people for whom I would do anything to help them or make them happy, people I cared for unconditionally, but did I love them in a way that transcended my own interests? Did I ever make the Copernican transformation from the center of the universe to a planet in an eternal adoring orbit? I tell myself I have but the answer to my personal mystery may be unknowable, eclipsed by my ego.

There may be much I’ve missed out on in my life, many wondrous and beautiful opportunities that I couldn’t or didn’t reach for. When I seek consolation in that existential emptiness, I picture myself, marching down the middle of the street in the Short North on the Fourth of July, surrounded by a motley crew of patriotic clowns wreaking an uncontrolled cacophony of musical silliness upon the assembled crowd, clad in a short, red, white and blue striped summer dress, red fishnets and black boots, my flailing wavy white gold locks topped by a red elfin beret, my face disguised with pointy black and silver sunglasses, my head tilted in the air as I raise my clarinet toward the sun, blowing with all possible enthusiasm a joyously crazed obligato paean to being alive. How lucky, indeed.