CONTINUED: The Wind

The  young Brother and I work well together.  His professed name is Brother Saint Winifred of Gwytherin in Denbigshire.  We can’t imagine such a mouthful when we cheer him on in a softball game, so we have come to call him Kickstart.  The nickname relates to his hitting the road to join a motorcycle gang after getting his doctorate in Late Antiquity.  Seven years in a library will do that to a man.

I don’t at all like outdoor chores after the first frost.  It’s damned cold out there and at seventy years of age my arthritis always flares up.  I mentioned it to Kickstart but he wasn’t listening.  He worked beside me in a light jacket while I bundled up in a ratty old down coat stretched tightly over two sweat shirts.  

I lay here tonight in my cot and can testify the extra layers were not enough.  My hands ache and my hips feel like I slipped on the ice and fell.  But the wind howling outside our dormitory can’t get to me beneath the bed covers and three old work robes piled on top.  I am as comfortable as I’ll be through this long night.

When I think of my conversation with Kick earlier today, my spirits drop and I’m sorry I was not of more help to him in his agony.  His four years here as a contemplative have somewhat closed his eyes to reality.  It happens. 

 “Jesse," he said, as we fit rocks under the main beam of the porch deck,  "I think we’re all doomed up here."

“You mean like we’re going to be hit by a Protestant comet?”  I asked.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“I do know what you mean, but I have no answer.”

"They're going to throw us out.  I know it," he said.

I didn't tell Kick, but that's exactly what  I worry about. 

“Where are you going to live, Jesse?”  he asked.

I shoved a stone in farther beneath the beam.  “Maybe I’ll apply for assistance or maybe I’ll get a job in a store.  Rent a room down in the village … I don’t’ know.  After all, I don’t have as far to go down the road as you, Kick.  You have an entire life ahead of you.”

      “My life is here on this mountain," he said.  "I’m staying.”

“Well, you can’t,"  I told him.

“In the woods,” he said.  “I’ll stay in the woods.”

I sneered. “A real Desert Father, huh?” 

“Jesse,” he said , “everything I learned about my life and myself and God is here on this mountain.”

“God isn't only on this mountain,”  I said.

“What I know of him is,”  he said.

“Yes, but maybe it’s time to know him in a different way,” I said.

“God is unchangeable, Jesse.”

“OK, but not in your head He isn’t.  Our vision of him changes as we grow.”

 I have a tendency to be dismissive of anyone's faith that doesn't agree with my mental conception of God and how He operates.  That’s nearly the same as defining Him.  And given my capacity  to make mistakes, allowing me to play God is probably a bad idea.  If I were God, for example, the creation of the world would still be a great plan that I'd look into when I found the time on my busy schedule.  Let There Be Light might get done, but not much else.  Mountains and oceans and elephants would still be drifting around the universe waiting to be attached to something.

Order and precision are what you’d expect from God.  From me you’d get chaos.  I once dreamed of a complicated theory I had proposed and written in careful and full detail on a sheaf of papers. A wind came from I don’t know where and blew the pages off the desk, scattering them across the floor.  Like a mad scientist I fell to my knees in a panic to gather up the papers, but they no longer made any sense.  I realized I was dreaming, but could see the essence of a truly great idea and I did not want to lose it.  I struggled up from my sleep and wrote a note on the pad I kept next to my cot.  In the morning when I awoke, a minute or two passed before I remembered the dream.  I quickly grabbed the pad and read, “defrost the refrigerator.”

 The wind is picking up outside.  I love the sound of it. Hearing it whistle through the old shutters and moan around the eaves has always been like music to me.  Such an appreciation comes from the heart, not the mind.  And now I think that Kickstart was more right than wrong.

          I have for too long been overly interested in my mind and my soul, more than my heart. But my mind is getting rusty and my soul will never be more than what it is.  My heart is full of life, or could be.  It’s the part of me that feels someone else’s  agony.  And the part of me that longs for God, rather than tries to understand or obey him.  With a lot of work. that heart is the only part of me that stands a chance of leaving this world in better condition than when it got here.

On the other hand, I can easily make my experience of God a head trip, purely and conveniently a construction in my mind.  Entire churches have done so.  I forget He is in his creation, not just in our minds,  He is here on the mountian in the streams and boulders and pine  trees for Kickstart.  And for me He is in my body, my heart, everything and everyone around me and even in my desires.  When I long for Grandma’s special gravy and biscuits from sixty years ago on a Sunday afternoon, God is somehow in that.  I can’t tell you how.  I only know this to be true: after years of trying to meditate on His sacred mysteries, I more often see visions of chicken and dumplings.  It must be what He wants me to see.  You would never hear such nonsense from a theological council of any reputable church because it doesn’t make logical sense ... to the mind.  Maybe it doesn’t need to.  A church listens to logic.  The people listen to their hearts.

God warned us a long time ago He wasn’t going to wait around for mankind to catch up with Him as He continued to reveal himself.  Jesus told Nicodemus. “Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above. The wind  blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

So here’s what I’ve been laying here thinking on this frigid night when my mind can’t even conjure up a vision of Grandma’s chicken dinner.  Here’s my latest heresy.

If God were a short order cook, we’d never be hungry.

If God were an accountant, everyone would get what they deserved.

If God were a doctor, everyone would enjoy excellent health.

If God were a teacher, we’d all be worried about Report Cards.  But from what I’ve seen in the world, not many are worried about their Report Cards.

If God were a policeman everyone would be in a lot of trouble and if God were a judge everyone would be damned.

But God is none of those.  He is bigger than the familiar. He’s larger than life.  So I’m thinking He must be a cowboy.  When you consider it, He almost has to be. He’s extremely courteous and won’t push himself forward unless invited.  He’s always mending fences.  I see Him out on the range  under a huge sky full of stars waiting for his doggies to bed down while he sings them to sleep.  And only a cowboy would say, “There, there, little darlin’” when with tears in our eyes we get down on our knees to pray.  Or more often to complain

You know,  I've lived for 35 years up here on the mountain the Indians called Onteora, The Land In The Sky.  So it appeared to them as they gazed up from the valley below.  Tonight it may still be pleasant down there.  But up here on the peak ... in cowboy land ... a white mantle of snow covers the blue-green hemlocks.  The moon has risen and the bare maples glisten black in the cold damp air.    Clouds scraped by the mountain top from the bottom of the sky  drift away like ships leaving without us. Tonight my brothers and I lie shivering on our cots while sleet and snow pelt the windows, and  the wind has its way with our creaking old house.

The spirit blows where it chooses and you don’t know where it’s been or where it’s going.

      But I know one thing.   He is taking care of us as we bed down.  And when the wind howls past the eaves and moans down through the holes in the roof, I know that God is singing us to sleep.

David Griffin                                   Copyright 2014

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Out of Gas

My steady date in high school seemed agreeable to my company, if not thrilled. I probably bored her. I doubt if the girl ever felt that much affection for me, but I was a steady date for her to plan on and her parents evidently believed I was safe. Unfortunately, they were right. We never became the torrid affair I imagined, like Bogey and Bacall. On the many occasions I asked if she loved me, she answered, "Huh? Oh, sure, yeah." I suppose it was just her style, but it wasn't very cuddly. I can imagine if we stayed together and had someday married. At the altar when asked if she took me to be her lawful wedded husband, she might answer, "Huh? Oh, sure, yeah."

   Over the years I wondered why I could not remember much about the girl, her tastes or opinions for example. I had no idea what might have been her favorite color, or music group, or car or TV program or ... anything. It finally occurred to me that I never knew much about her because I never asked. I was too busy talking about myself or a host of topics she had little interest in, such as the possibility of space travel and the various configurations of half wave dipole antennas.

In those high school years I seldom left the attic, so fascinated was I with short wave radio. My aerie up above the rest of the house was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  Plus it was dingy with the dust of over 50 years.  To make it more hospitable I brought home 3 or 4 refrigerator shipping boxes from an appliance store near my high school.  The cardboard  panels made walls to cut the breeze that blew through the attic in the winter and gave me vertical surfaces on which to mount weather maps and short wave radio posters.  Without the walls there was only the sloping roof.  The end wall of the attic was mostly windows.

All my paper route earnings went into my radio hobby. No one heard from me for weeks at a time. I neglected my studies, stayed up all night and took full advantage of the peak in the sun spot cycle. Each night, into the early morning, I sent and received Morse code over the Atlantic, exchanging signal reports and weather data with fellow Hams in Europe. I learned a lot about signal propagation, the grey line, the ionosphere and 10 meter atmospheric ducting. I threw my antenna wire higher and higher for lower radiation launch angles to increase distance, and installed loading coils for better standing wave ratios. I became conversant with meteorological patterns in Spain and Romania. I become so enamored of everything taking place a third of the globe distant that I forgot about where my feet were planted.  I flunked Geometry and had to take it again in summer school.

I had no study habits to speak of, but I had a terrific memory and remembered what took place in class. It sustained my mediocre high school record while I spent my spare time day dreaming, fooling with radios and playing in a rock band.

I almost flunked Religion. No one ever flunked Religion. It was rumored that if you started failing the tests, you'd be kept after school and sent over to the church next door each day to pray until either you got the message or God got the message and your study habits miraculously improved.

In Religion class I became upset early in the school year when I discovered we would not be studying Aquinas or Augustine. These were two church Fathers who had contributed much to the philosophy and theology of our church, and I wanted the benefit of a classroom forum in which to air my personal theories and opinions on various theological topics.

"I'm afraid we'll all have to struggle along without your ideas on the Majesterium, Mr. Griffin," Sister Mary Metanoia told me when I marched up to her after our first class and announced my disappointment. "We are instead going to study Our Lord's life on earth, here in this vale of tears," she said. "It will help you to put into perspective His final suffering and the debt he paid on the cross for your sins and mine. Probably more for yours."

"But Aquinas' ideas were always debated in the councils of the Church, Sister, and I thought we might continue the debates here."

"Here?" she asked. "Debate?" her voice began to rise.

"Yes, here," I said. "In Utica, on John Street, near the banks of the Mohawk."

"I don't think Holy Mother the Church will entertain any more debate on her theology, young man," she said, now on the verge of getting really upset. "Especially from a boy who can't even understand Geometry."

To say I was insulted would be an understatement. After all, I did in fact understand Geometry. I just forgot to memorize the theorems. When our religion studies commenced that year I found to my chagrin we were covering every route Jesus ever took in his walks around the Holy Land. You'd think he was aiming at a certificate to hang on the wall like you get for completing the Appalachian Trail. We even memorized distances. It's 18 miles from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee. Almost 80 miles down to Jerusalem. That's a long walk, and there were no tour buses in 30 A.D. The class was a travelogue of Jesus stopping at one well or another and offering a parable to desert people who would have rather had a tour bus stop. I soon tuned out. I began to fail, but quickly had a miraculous change in my ability to pay attention and study when Sister threatened to call my parents and suggest they make some changes in how I spent my time. That would have been terrible. Until report cards came out, I had my folks convinced I was a model student. A call to Mom and Dad would have shortened my runway.

My high school sweetheart and I parted at the end of high school. I guess she'd had enough of my immaturity.  I started arguments just to see if I could get a rise out of her. I would have tried to win them, but she was an Irishwoman in training and I knew better than to waste my time. Our estrangement was no surprise, but it left me crushed.

In my second year of college, I lived at home, still mostly in the attic, checking out the weather in Finland or Bulgaria in the middle of most nights and interfering with my neighbors’ televisions when I transmitted. I popped up on a well known Utica eye doctor's stereo, calling "come in, Yugoslavia," the night he had friends over to play them a new recording of Stravinsky's Petrushka. He lived a half mile away and his letter to the FCC in Washington resulted in my second official offense for interference.

I began to wonder what Jenny was doing.

Turns out Jenny was growing nicely. She had one of those great girlish shapes that would not survive very far into adulthood. I didn’t care much about the future at that age and what I saw was a terrific looking girl who always gave me a cute smile.

When Jenny accepted a date with me, I was about to begin my second year at a local community college and Jenny was thinking of going to live with an aunt in Syracuse. That city was just fifty miles away and close enough to get home on weekends, or every night if necessary. Syracuse represented the Big Town to young Uticans who didn't want to go too far away. The city was distant enough to justify renting your own apartment and getting away from your parents’ eternal quest to see you through to maturity as a virgin or a eunuch. And it was a new place where you could start fresh and leave behind high school friends who knew everything about you from the date of your first period to the time you threw up in Biology class when Petey Sardini pretended to eat the frog he was dissecting.

In 1962 there wasn't much to do in Utica, or maybe I was cursed with a limited imagination. A typical date at our age was to go to a bar for a few beers and dance to music on the jukebox. I suggested we drive out to the Blue Note on the Oriskany road, but Jenny said she didn’t like the place. Ditto for McGuirl’s on Eagle Street. I began to suspect she didn’t want to run into my old girlfriend, whom she knew. 

At eighteen Jenny was in great shape, the effects of a sedentary job and child bearing still in the future.  On our first and only date we headed up to Old Forge and I forgot to check the gas in the tank of my father’s car.

Jenny and I drove up the new Arterial, which ended with a sigh half way up Deerfield Hill, as if it couldn’t wait for the new addition of highway that would stretch over the top of the hill and connect it to the old four-lane at South Trenton. On to Forestport and then to Thendara, over smooth new road since Route 28 had been rebuilt in the late 1950s.

By the way, having watched my older brother buy the only car he could afford and see it break down all the time, often in embarrassing places, and then spend weeks earning money for repairs, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why any teenage boy would want his own vehicle when he could borrow his father’s showroom-fresh late model chariot. Dad didn’t quite see it that way, but I managed to use his car evenings fairly often.

On that Friday night there must have been a terrific party going on in a secret location, because we stopped in three bars normally full of kids on the weekend and each place was empty. I asked Jenny twice if she could think of any place to stop that I had missed. Her shrug told me she didn’t care very much and she said, “Whatever you think.” We pushed on past Old Forge and finally sat down at a sticky table in a quiet dive somewhere south of Inlet, near Eagle Bay. We ordered a beer.

"So," I said, "you're thinking of moving to Syracuse."

"Maybe," she said. "I have to decide whether I'll go to college or get a job, but Syracuse might be a good place for either of those."

"Have you ever thought of going into business for yourself?" I asked.

"No," she laughed, "what would I do?"

"Sell hot dogs," I said. "I got talking to a guy in Yorkville the other day and he makes a good living at it. The cart isn’t that expensive, and you can take out a payment plan."

"I don't think I'd be good at selling hot dogs," she said, her smile now gone.

"Sure you would," I replied.

"I think I will probably find something better to do in life," she said.

"You could sell them wearing a bikini." I said.

She didn't answer.

"For a few years, anyway." I said.

I found it difficult to have a conversation with Jenny. I wasn’t so much tongue tied as I was unable to find any common ground. Of course, without asking very much about how her life was going, I launched into The Story of Dave in 3D and Technicolor, conveniently served up with my own reviews and a self-supplied laugh track. That this approach never worked on any girl didn’t stop me. It was my Magnum Opus at the time and I was sure it deserved an audience.

Jenny was polite, but unimpressed. She didn’t have the wherewithal of the young woman I dated the next year, who one night at the Blue Note in the middle of my lengthy monologue reached across the table and grabbed the front of my sweater. She roughly pulled me toward her as the ash tray went flying and said, “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to break this beer bottle over your head.” A slight young woman, but impressive nonetheless. I always wondered if she wound up killing her husband in the ensuing years.

When Jenny and I got in the car to drive back to Utica, she fell asleep over against the far door, possibly as a self defense against the onslaught of more chatter. Of course, she may have been faking, but a gentleman doesn't inquire. Besides, if it got too quiet I could always talk to myself, an easy task for someone who spent most of his life in his head. I didn't try to wake her until I checked the gas gauge. It sat just above Empty. How the heck did that happen? I had put two dollars worth of gas in the night before. And how did I not notice it on our way up from Utica?

"I think we're running out of gas," I said.'

She said nothing, but stopped breathing.

Finally, she said, "That's not funny."

"I'm not trying to be funny and I didn't arrange this. The tank must be leaking. Don't you smell gas?"

"No," she replied.

"I do," I said.

"We're not spending the night in the car," she said.

"Well, if we have to, we have to," I replied. "You can sleep in the back seat and I'll stay up front."

"You can sleep in the trunk," she said.

"I think my father has a load of stuff in there for St. Vincent de Paul’s."

She didn't respond.  A moment later she pulled her coat over her shoulder, turned away from me and did everything but snore to indicate she was asleep.

I watched the gas gauge very closely, hoping it would stay on the safe side of “E.” There was an all-night gas station on Deerfield Corners in North Utica and I hoped I’d make it there. But by the time we passed through Forestport and turned down Route 12 at Alder Creek, I was sure we'd run out of gas before reaching Utica.

That’s when the tiny NY State Trooper station loomed up on the left. For years I’d seen the little ranch house perched on a rise by the side of Route 12. I remembered a gas pump outside the garage doors beneath the house. I braked and turned left into the driveway. I told Jenny I was going to try to get some gas. There were no other vehicles around. I got out of the car, leaving it running because I'd read that starting a car takes as much gas as driving for fifteen minutes. I climbed the hill to the front door. It was locked and I peered through the little window in the door. No one was inside. What the hell, I thought. Back down in the driveway, I inspected the pump as best I could by the weak light of a floodlight mounted on a utility pole. The nozzle wasn’t locked to the side of the stanchion as I’d once seen on a farm. When I backed the car around and tried to pump gas, I found the electricity to the pump was not turned on.

I really did not want to run out of gas. I didn't know what would happen if we were stranded. I could wish for a friendly Trooper to see us later by the side of the road... maybe the guy who should have been upstairs in the barracks. He might carry a full gas can for just such emergencies. But I doubted it. It was more likely he'd call a tow truck and I'd have to pay a service fee for a man to bring us gas, or even pay for a tow. Either way, it could cost $25. It might cost more. I was just a poor student.

The $25 would have to be taken out of the $100 I had saved so far for a new radio transmitter I had my heart set on, a new rig that would triple my output power. Of course, I could use it only very late at night or blot out every radio and television within a six block radius. I pictured myself throwing the big switch, the house lights dimming, and the power surging through my antenna. Any of those damned birds perched on the wire would go straight to the hereafter with their feathers sticking out in all directions. It would be just my luck to find someday when I got to those pearly gates that St. Peter was a bird lover.

If no rescuer showed up and we never got any gas, Jenny would be forced to spend the night with me. She would hate me. Her mother would probably have me arrested. Well, we were not likely to fall in love and get married anyway, but I have never wanted any woman to hate me. I always felt I was a nice guy. A little self absorbed, maybe. But I had come through my teens and no one had seriously tried to kill me. So I think I was somewhat likeable. My inflated opinion of myself happily leveled off as I reached age twenty. Had it followed a natural arc of ascending absurdity, I would have been impossible to live with. As it was, I was only annoying.

I kept staring at the pump as if I could wish it to turn on and fill up the car with hi-test. Jenny was awake. Through the open window of the car she said, “What are you doing?"

“I’m trying to get some gas from the New York State Police," I said, "because you won't sleep with me." I was exasperated with her pretending to sleep.

My sarcasm was met by silence. I'd call it a cold, stony silence.

I could hear trickling when I stuck the gas nozzle into the car’s filler tube and I hoped at least a tiny amount of gas was flowing into the tank. A kind of siphoning action may have been happening. If I first held the nozzle up in the air and then brought it down and inserted it into the filler tube, a small amount of gas could be heard leaking down the hose and into the tank. I repeated the procedure numerous times while my mind floated to nowhere in particular. I wondered if any part of this technique of raising the hose high in the air before inserting the nozzle into the filler might lend itself to making the act of conception more fruitful. I might be able to patent something here and sell the idea to childless couples. Television was the way to sell an item that promised results and I tried to imagine the artwork, thinking of the TV commercials that sold kitchen devices for $19.95. I’d have to get around the FCC’s ban on prurient advertising, of course, but I might be on to something that could lead to millions in sales and royalties. My fame would certainly embarrass that nun who flunked me in Geometry.

Gassing up by this method would take a while, so I reached in the car and turned the ignition off.  Jenny was sitting ramrod stiff in her seat, staring straight ahead. Her eyes were wide open, like a deer just before it gets run down by a Peterbilt. My heart melted and I knew her derision was in fact fear. I felt awful that she might be afraid of me.

"Jenny," I said, "don't worry. I'm a dope who forgets to put gas in the tank, not someone who would try to take advantage of you. If we have to stay out all night I'll sleep outside on the ground. You can lock yourself in the car. I'll explain everything to your mother and offer to compensate her for her worry."

She turned her head slowly toward me and said, "Compensate her?"

"Well, uh, yes," I said. I'll offer to mow her lawn for a couple of weeks, or maybe ..."

"My brother does the lawn," she said.

"You have a sister, Jenny, not a brother," I said.

"My older brother," she said. "He's married and lives in New Hartford. And he's gonna kill you!"

I repeated the lift and fill procedure a couple of dozen times, all the while worrying that a Trooper would return to the station while I was stealing his gas.  With the engine now off, I couldn’t tell if the gas gauge was ever so slightly heading up away from “E.”

A constant swishing of tires out on Route 12 was interrupted by the sound of a car slowing down and soon it could be seen at the end of the driveway. The headlights described a wide arc as the car turned in. I froze. I heard Jenny say, “What’ll my mother say?”

The car came to a stop just off the road. It could not have sat there for more than five seconds. Then it backed out. The transmission clunked into Drive and the car continued on its way north. I have no idea who it was or why they decided to momentarily stop in the driveway. I could see nothing but headlights out near the road. If it was a Trooper, he almost certainly would have seen our car, but maybe not me since I was standing on the far side of the vehicle. He may have gotten a call on the radio and decided to ignore my car in the driveway until he could check it out later.

In any case, I decided I’d had enough. I'd pumped out only a trickle of gas and risked getting arrested. I held the nozzle up in the air and this time brought it down aimed at the ground and squeezed the handle. Nothing came out. I’d gotten all the free gas I deserved.

“I didn’t do this on purpose,” I told Jenny again as we headed south.

“Your old girlfriend said you did things like this all the time,” she said with a sting in her voice.

“Well, not on purpose,” I said. “We all make mistakes.”

“Yes, we certainly do,” she said witheringly.

The gas gauge needle had moved up slightly, or maybe it was my imagination. Soon it was moving downward past E. As we crested Deerfield Hill, I switched off the ignition, convinced I could coast down the long hill to North Utica.  Today the steering lock on most cars would prevent that while the car is in motion. Soon afterward I began to think I should have just put the car in neutral. Starting the car again would probably take more gas than I saved by turning off the engine. With the engine dead, there was no power steering or power brakes. No alternator, either, and the headlights began to dim. Oh, great. I might make it to the gas station, but my battery would be dead on arrival. Just as I approached a leveling out of Trenton Road where the firehouse is today, at 40 miles per hour I turned the key back on. Instead of using the starter, I slammed the automatic transmission into Drive. It worked and the car started. I probably saved 4 cents worth of gas. A week later my father paid $200 to have the transmission repaired. He gave me that look when he came home from the repair shop, but he knew I would respond to any inquiry with a well practiced countenance of innocence mixed with puzzlement. I’d been working on it for years.

Finally Jenny and I arrived at Deerfield Corners. I left the engine running to charge the battery while I put two dollars in the tank.

By this time Jenny’s mood had improved and she seemed to join in the adventure. Once we were fueled up, she relaxed and laughed about it. You’d have thought we were an old married couple as we discussed one thing or another as I drove up John Street and then on to Cornhill. She laughed at my jokes and I asked her about her life and we got along famously.

I parked the car in front of her house and we sat on her steps, continuing to enjoy our conversation. By then we'd had a terrific evening.

I never saw her again.

I truly cannot remember exactly why we did not go out again. I think I did call her for a second date, but maybe she was not able to arrange her schedule. I would have gotten the point and not asked again. And soon I left to live in New York City. I was home for the weekend a few years later when Mom showed me a newspaper clipping of Jenny's marriage. Mom always saved clippings about my friends, but not if they were arrested. No older brother was mentioned in the write-up.

The night of the gas heist Jenny and I parted friends after an evening of only slightly getting to know each other. We sat outside her house late on that moonlit evening until she had to go inside. I leaned toward her and she put her face up and we kissed. She was a lousy kisser. She may have thought the same of me.

I've never been sure of what a good kisser is anyway. Short of drooling, I suppose any kiss is a good kiss when you have the right person in your arms. I never knew if I was good kisser until I met my wife. It's a good thing she loves me and never thought I was all that annoying, except on our first date when I tried to sum up Aquinas' teaching for her. At least she's never threatened to break a beer bottle over my head. Not in quite a while anyway.

###

copyright 2013, David Griffin

CONTINUED: Truth

When reality came to be what I saw when I opened my eyes, rather than what I was sure I’d see as I kept them clamped shut, I reached the understanding that the truth was not always obvious.  It often required an act of the will, like what we experience when we try to wake up from a deep sleep. And only after years of  waking up over and over did I  realize I’d been  falling asleep. 

There seem to be different kinds of truth, but there are not.  It’s true I’m pretty free with the facts or lack of them when I’m telling a story for its entertainment value.  I do distinguish between storytelling and truth telling.   But each holds the truth in its own way.  I am very careful about my honesty when I conduct my affairs with other people and when judging myself.  I wasn’t always so careful.

    In writing, there is so-called literal truth, but a story teller is not very interested in the literal truth of anything if it doesn’t serve the story.  And for me, the sharp accuracy of fact is not something I worry about when writing a tale. In the realm of storytelling, I understand there are those who think literal truth is very important, but I'm not one of them.  For me, truth is seldom precise. It is often confusing.

The Oglala Sioux shaman Black Elk would begin each spiritual tale by saying, "This is the way it happened. Or maybe it didn't, but it could have. And  anyway, this is what carries the truth."  I try to carry the truth, if not always the facts. 

There are factual truths such as gravity and other scientific concepts that we feel pretty sure of.  There is truth that is much more personal.    It touches us where we live and for me it parallels the “three times” of discernment spoken of by Ignatius of Loyola.  Truth may be a logical construct, or it may come from the experience of living life.  Truth may rise from a certainty lying deep within us, a conviction we may not be able to measure or describe. We just know it's there. Truth is not arithmetic. It is language. It comes not from working a formula, nor is it a dramatic testimony. It is more like the continuing unfolding of a story. 

I sense that behind it all there is a single truth in the Universe, though I can’t begin to define it.  My failure to explain the ineffable speaks only to my humanness and not to a lack of truth in creation.  It is there, all around us.  If I needed proof, I can think of only one piece of evidence for the existence of truth … our age-old desire to find it.

Copyright 2011, 2015  David Griffin

Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

dave@windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Elizabeth Busch

 I don’t know what her salary was but as a single woman she lived with one of her brothers and his wife for most of her life.  Her weekly financial input was necessary and gratefully received for years and years.  All Christmas and Birthday gifts from her to nieces and nephews and to her sister Anna came from Bamberger’s and they were exceptional.  On the anniversary of her 25^th year with the store, Elizabeth was given a diamond ring, clustered with 12 diamonds, which came to me the Christmas after she died and has been on my hand for over 60 yrs.  Is there a department store of today that rewards their help in such a manner?

 All went along happily for many years, until brother Bill and his wife decided to buy a new house ...”and there wouldn’t be a room for Elizabeth” who was by that time retired. 

Also at this time Elizabeth’s health was failing.  Where would Elizabeth go?  She asked to come to her sister’s house.... a widow now in her 70’s living in Seaford, LI, NY..  While it was not an easy decision to make, to Anna’s credit, she welcomed her sister in.  Elizabeth was quite bitter and critical to have been “turned out” after so many good and faithful years...[or.... so she thought.]  This attitude caused her to change her will to exclude her brother and include her sister Anna instead.  This of course, did not sit well with her brother and definitely not with his wife.   ”After taking care of her all... those... years”... wailed Emma when Elizabeth finally said “goodbye” to this world. 

 It was suspected and then voiced that Grandma Widman (Anna) and my mother Helen had twisted Elizabeth’s arm to do this, when no such thought/action had ever been suggested or taken place.  Also I suppose there was another fly in the ointment, which was that Helen had become interested in a religion contrary to any religious thinking that was going on in the various New Jersey Busch residences.  If there was a strong religious belief held by them I never knew it, but we were certainly aware of the animosity aimed at the religion my mother had decided to embrace to raise her four children.  My mother was an avid reader, in more than one sense of the word, and she took to a new book written by Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, MA.   That, combined with the reading of the will was enough to cause a rift between the families that lasted for the rest of everyone’s life.  It never closed.

Money and the lack of it /or the love of it, does that to some people.

 And thus it is that I never knew any of my relatives on the Busch side of the family from New Jersey.  Cousins along with their children have long since disappeared.  Nor did I ever learn what became of The Imperial Laundry managed by Louis and William Busch, Elizabeth’s two older brothers.  It was quite a thriving business back in the twenties and thirties when not everyone had a washer or dryer, as they do today.  It was housed in a large red brick building on a corner in Newark, NJ....although an Internet site says “Orange, NJ”.

I still have a few of their advertising “give aways”, a spoon; a big white carpenter’s pencil; and a spatula.  I wonder if there are any more of these items deeply hidden in the kitchens of New Jersey households?  Each item would have the words:  “Imperial Laundry...when things look black.”  Wouldn’t it be fun to go to garage sales there and hunt for these things?

 June T. Bassemir   2/22/2014

CONTINUED: Responsible

My, how I could talk.  And about so little, if measured by any sensible metric.  I had no more than 5 or 6 interests in my young life.  Most would have been about sex, leaving only one or two for polite conversation.

Never once did the girl turn my way and say she was tired of listening to me.  I would tire of hearing myself before she did.  I suppose she guessed that. 

Almost two years later we sat on her mother’s front porch in the evening and listened to the breeze rustle the lilacs.  The sound of a late summer thunder storm came rolling toward us over the flat farmland that stretched out twenty miles between us and the  St. Lawrence River.  A week before our wedding day, we were full of plans and little disputes as we began to blend our lives together with early small steps.  We disagreed over whether we wanted a drip coffee maker or a percolator.  Certainly that was an important decision for a married couple.  We were so naïve.  If the angels hadn’t been busy forming a lifetime of plans to protect us, I’m sure they would have been laughing.

As young as we were, we had already built a few memories. As the thunder came near we spoke of our walking about in New York City two years before.  She told me she hadn’t always listened to my tales as we walked, not exactly. 

“What were you listening to, if you weren’t following my story about having my car fixed?”

“To your heart,” she said.  “I wanted to know what kind of heart you had.”

“That soon?” I wondered.  “We had only just met.”

“But I wanted to marry you.”

“Really? When did you decide on that?”

“The night you came to my apartment to offer me a ride upstate on weekends.”

“I was just trying to be helpful,” I said.  “And I liked you.  I remembered meeting you once before at that bar in Utica.”

“I remember that night,” she said.  “You ignored me.”

“That meant I liked you.  I was tongue tied, afraid of saying the wrong thing.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said.

“What did you learn about my heart while I was telling you all about my old car that was always broken?  I never had the money to have it fixed.”

“That you were passionate about what interested you, but often got in over your head.”

“And you still wanted to marry me?”

“Even more.  Because you worried about things.  I knew you were responsible.”

At age twenty-two, I’d never thought about being responsible for someone else.  I would have been worried whether I was handsome enough, smart enough, rich enough or astute enough to win the love of a woman.

Turns out I probably wasn’t any of those.  So it was my good fortune that none of them mattered.  I needed to be what someone wanted.  Lucky for me, someone wanted me and I wanted her.  God’s greatest gifts to me have always come without my asking. 

But gifts can often have a price.  Not a tit-for-tat “you owe me” price, but rather the kind that brings more responsibility.  My wife, family, career have all been gifts that brought more obligations.

As a young man I thought being responsible for the woman I loved meant protecting her.  After a few years I began to  realize I was also responsible for my part in nurturing her.  We weren’t often conscious of the process, but each of us would learn to grow up over the coming half century together, and we needed each other’s help in doing so.  Condemnation of the other would never build anything, only tear it down, even when tossed at the other with a sly humor. 

Neither of us began our marriage with what it took to stay married for fifty years.  No one does. We had to carve that miracle out of the raw life given us.  And feed it to each other, as we did the wedding cake on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1965. I don’t know the origin of the ceremony where the bride and groom feed each other cake, but today when I’m at a wedding reception I see it as a symbol of the two feeding the lessons of life to each other.  It’s an awkward sight, but they do it lovingly and slowly, helping each other to manage the task.  

We met life as it uniquely presented itself to us.  The problems and frights, the successes and the failures, the joyous and sad times, “in sickness and in health.”  And as each chapter flew by, I came to realize how it worked.  First, I was responsible for myself.  For my behavior.  I could blame nothing on anyone else.  And second, while my wife was responsible for her own life,  I had promised to help her when I vowed I’d be with her “from this day forward.”

We never had any formal rules or expectations of each other.  We felt our way in the dark and did what was comfortable.  A relationship really shouldn’t need a lawyer and it isn’t balanced by each doing half of everything that needs to be done. 

My wife has never done half the lawn mowing and she hasn’t taken out half of the garbage.  She has done none of it.

A balanced relationship has each doing what the person feels is theirs to do in a unique arrangement that works for them.  How that comes about only they will know.

With the children my wife tended more toward matters of the heart while I tended to the practical.  We had our roles.  Some no doubt came from our families through our experience watching parents as we grew up.  Many of the practices we took and many we left came from watching them and choosing what worked for us. 

As young parents we thought we knew everything.  After all, we read lots of books.  We really didn’t know much at all, but I suppose our arrogance allowed us to forge new paths and our ignorance guaranteed our self-satisfaction.  I assume our parents did the same.  Perhaps the delusion of self-sufficiency is evolutionary and helps parents acclimate to a changing social environment.

I’m not sure I knew it then, since we took on our roles as parents naturally, but today I realize that parenting is work.  And some men and women are not ready to put in the effort.  Looking back on it, I remember times when I had to do things or not do things when I didn’t want to.

Like any other spouse or parent I sometimes fled my responsibility.  The impromptu business trip was a favorite.  So was the sudden desire to be with family members who were in any case getting along quite nicely without my presence most of the time.

As my children struggled through their teen years, my answer to the temporary chaos at home was to build another house in the back yard for myself.  A tiny shed, my retreat was no larger than Thoreau’s shack on Walden Pond,  I built it of rough cut lumber out behind our home, in front of a field that backed up to  woods of hemlock and oak,    I didn’t sleep there or take meals in the little structure.  In fact, I spent less time there than I had planned, usually escaping to it only for an hour or two each time to tie trout flies.  The interior  was furnished with old camping equipment, a toboggan and a camp stove, all in “1950s  Boy’s Life,” as a neighbor described it.

“It will be quite small,” I said to my wife before I began construction.  We stood back near the woods one violet summer evening and I showed her the plans, carefully folded so as not to reveal the full future extent of it.

“What’s this folded over on the other side?” she asked.

“Oh, just a ‘someday’ plan for an attached kind of barn.  To house the tractor and the garden stuff.”

She unfolded the map and held it up to see. “It’s larger than the little house,” she observed.

“Just a garden shed for way in the future,” I said.

She laughed.  “You’re not starting another family back here, are you?”

At that point, it would have been the farthest from my mind.

I wouldn’t be the first husband to admit that from at least an emotional point of view, I took more than I gave in our marriage.  But it was a surprise to me when I finally realized it.

I sat one afternoon in Woodstock with a wonderfully insightful woman who with me shared a shift on the telephone Hotline.  “Any problem under the sun,” was our agency’s motto.  During times when the phones were quiet and our volunteer chores were up to date, we drank coffee and spoke of one thing or another and sometimes of what might be bothering either of us.

My wife had recently started back to school, bent on a career that would fully utilize her talents and abilities.  Her days and nights were consumed with classes, plus the time to drive to them fifty miles distant.  I missed her.

“I feel abandoned,” I said. “When I get home from work she’s not there like she always was.  I have to make my own supper and take care of the dog …”

“Poor baby,” was the woman’s reaction.

”And I don’t mean to complain, but the house is not as clean and picked up as it always was.”

“She probably doesn’t have the time,” the woman said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So tell me one thing that disappoints you about how she’s not keeping house,” said my shift mate.

“OK,” I replied. “the wash not being done as often.”

“How much does that bother you?” she asked.

“Oh, not much.  Not really.”

“But it’s the first thing that came to your mind.”
”OK, yes, it bothers me.”

“The wash needing to be done bothers you.”

“Yes, it bothers me,” I said.

She looked at me and sighed.

“So then why don’t you do the wash?”

I stared over her shoulder out the window at the trees on the street.  I continued to stare fixedly at them.  She waved a hand in front of my face as I sat opposite her, dumbfounded.

“Why don’t I do the wash?” I repeated, aloud to myself.  I had never even thought of that as a solution.  And I could do the dishes and even vacuum the rugs. 

“Why the hell has that never occurred to me?” I said.

“Aha,” she said, “the value of launching a problem on the waters of conversation.”

I should have realized my responsibility much earlier, but I was too used to being cared for. 

In September of this year (2015)  the girl who walked with me all over New York City and I will celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary.  I cannot tell you where the time has gone.

I am still responsible for her, although lately I find myself having to transfer some of my burdens to her shoulders since I am evidently aging faster than her.  She has taken on a few of my chores.   She remembers facts I now easily forget.  I bring her with me to the doctor’s office and often introduce her jokingly as “my memory.”

Shuffling chores to one another to fit our lessening capabilities after a half century of marriage reminds me of standing up in a row boat and changing seats.  It doesn’t feel very good.  My arms reach out to maintain my balance.  But there’s nothing to grab on to except each other.

As time goes on we will together need to hand more and more chores over to outsiders.  That will be tough.  But we can draw together as close as possible in the center of the boat.  Eventually our only responsibility will be to hold each other, to love one another.  Just like in the beginning when we first met and walked everywhere hand in hand.  In our hearts, we’ll do it again.

copyright 2015, David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: CONTROL

Murphy and my wife have different views on my recovery plan.  I’ll let you guess which one doesn’t think a regimen of lying around the house is all that necessary.  The other never needs an excuse to have a good time.  The dog’s reaction to my taking station on the couch much of the day is pure ecstasy, to know I will join her on the furniture she considers her playground.  I don’t mind sharing the space with Murphy, but I’ve insisted on a No-Fly Zone.  No jumping through the air and rolling right over me down the length of the couch.  She runs it with three somersaults before executing a triple axel at the end with both her feet in the air.  Then she flops off head first on to the floor.  I’m speaking of Murphy, by the way, not my wife.

For this particular travail, Murphy has been more attentive than my wife, who describes my infirmity to friends as quite minor and deserving of little notice. 

“If he were smaller,” she says of me, “I’d throw him over my shoulder and burp him.”

For the times Murphy hasn’t found me on the living room couch, she’s been happy to stop by and visit me in my little office at the back of the house.  She sorts through the wastepaper basket for a failed story to chew on.  She noses through the zillion wires under my writing table that connect computers, radios, Yamaha keyboard and audio cables.  She bites down on her favorite wires, as though her teeth could sense Eric Clapton shivering his notes onstage at Glastonbury.  When she gets bored, she leans against my knee until I notice her.  I’m speaking of Murphy, by the way, not my wife.

She cannot figure out what happened to the shoe laces she so loved to chew.  They disappeared with the warm weather when I switched from shoes to sandals.

When she comes upon me her first thought is of food.  That’s because she’s never seen me without it.  I’m a grazer and am always nibbling on something.  It’s probably a bad habit, but I’m convinced if I eat more often I’ll have more opportunities to substitute nutritious snacks for the sugary ones.  And once in a while I do.  Murphy doesn’t care about nutrition and will eat anything I happen to be carrying as she follows me around the house.  I wish she’d stop begging.

But when she behaves perfectly, I begin to wonder if dogs are sincere.  I tell my doubting wife a dog’s actions may appear to us as affection, but are no more than the animal’s instinct to find out where the food is and how to get at it.  I suppose their apparent devotion is no more than a survival technique honed by evolution to help the dog ingratiate itself to a human benefactor.   But I mistakenly suppose figuring out her psychology is one way of learning to control her.

While Murphy does not have a sentient mind that truly cares about  my well being, I would be cold and heartless to not accept her desire to be with me as at least  a tiny bit of evidence of her affection for me.  She is a dog, not a human, but to treat what appears to be her devotion as no more than a primal desire to guarantee a food supply would speak more to my lack of soul than to any advantage I might have from my intellect. 

Owning a dog forces one into a metaphysical discussion of why we relate so well to them.  OK, not everyone is forced into such a dialog, but there are those of us who can’t let a bumble bee fly by without facing the temptation to dissect its psyche.  Especially if we want to control it.

We spend so much time in life trying to control things and we don’t spend enough learning to see anything beyond what’s apparent or logical.  Or to believe in more than what our feeble minds can comprehend.  Not all of what we  experience can be measured by a ruler … or a dollar sign.  There are dimensions of the heart we cannot explain.  They are not measured, they are heard.  They do not explain, they simply witness.

I can’t tell you why I have befriended a small animal whose best skills are often useless today.  I no longer need a Springer to hunt in the autumn fields or depend upon a canine companion to protect me.  And I have rescued more dogs than have rescued me.

When I become upset with Murphy because she’s still a puppy and won’t stop biting my toe,  chewing her way through the bottom row of books on my shelves or scaring the hell out of me by showing up uninvited in my morning shower,  I wish I’d remember my job is not always to control her. But rather I should be patient with her, let her grow up and love her.  Even though I still think she’s more interested in my food.

Copyright David Griffin, 2015

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: A Dance

To be honest, I like the lyrics for Ms. Murray’s song, but for me the frisson of the melody is long gone.  Still, I enjoy dancing with my wife, or … don’t tell her … probably any woman.  It’s such an extraordinary thing to put one’s arms around a woman in a fairly dispassionate setting, or so it seems to this Irishman.  I often wonder how an uptight society came to allow it, except for the frigid holy ones among us.

As I think back, I didn’t put my arms around a girl until my first dance at age 13. Understand that I came from a family of boys, and I’m sure that’s pertinent.  We would not have wanted a sister,  but if one had been dropped off at our house for inspection, the three of us would surely have been polite as we walked around the girl and studied her, as a group of gallery patrons might scrutinize a bronze statue.  When she popped her chewing gum, we would have quickly run off like scattering monkeys.

When I entered junior high school and was forced into social functions with the opposite sex sooner than I wanted, I found myself unable to simply walk up to a girl and begin a conversation.  I knew that such was within the scope of male potential, because I saw other more confident boys doing so.  But I couldn’t seem to manage small talk.  Even saying the word ‘dance’ felt so unmanly that when asking a girl to dance, all I could manage was, “Would you like to?”   Had an overly sensitive father been standing at her side, I might have received a black eye.

One Friday night, after standing around  the edge of the dance floor doing nothing but trying to look cool,  I finally worked up the courage to ask a particular young lady if she would “like to.”  As we stepped out on the floor, I  very gingerly took her hand and then swung around so that the two of us stood chest to chest,  a phrase I could never have said out loud.  I slid my arm around her and put my hand on her back.  That felt brazen and intimate to me, but everyone around us was doing the same and so far no one had been arrested.

I felt brilliant about my accomplishment, until I realized I was expected to make conversation.  “Would you like to” was used up and at this point certainly not appropriate.  “Nice weather,” seemed banal, even to me, and “How’s school?” might not be successful if she had just failed an exam.

Finally, thinking it would be safe, I tried, “How’s your mother?”

“What?” said my surprised partner.  “Do you know her?”

 “No, I just thought that… ah .. we all need to care about our parents.”

The conversation didn’t go much further.

But eventually a girl came along who stayed in my arms after the dance ended, a girlfriend.  With her, my social abilities quickly expanded, although they were never to be a natural fit.

My wife has been the major influence of my life and has taught me the important things.  Not just social graces, but about love and loyalty and selflessness.  I am not an apt student, and often not even appreciative.  But I am convinced I found the right teacher.

 “Smile,” she told me as we swung out on the floor at our most recent command performance.  We were at the wedding of her cousin’s daughter who I thought had married enough times to tire out the entire family.  I was not smiling.

“I don’t know how much more of this song I can take,” I said.

“Sing it to me,” she said.

“You first,” I said.

We can still make each other laugh.  I think that’s called a survival skill. It’s one we’ll need if we plan to dance the rest of our lives.

Copyright 2009, 2015 David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com