CONTINUED: Never Again

When I raised my eyes again, I saw him deep inside his doorway, waiting for me, watching me.  When my courage began to falter, he knew.  Just when I was about to turn back, he stepped forward out of the shadow to show himself more clearly.  I recognized him by the shirt he wore, a popular style that year with large panes of pastels, blue and pink and yellow and green, colors I associated with safety the rest of my life. 

My father knew me well.  As a child,  I sometimes wondered if he read my mind.  Later in life I recognized we had almost identical ways of thinking and brooding, doubting and procrastinating.   Mentally, we might have been twins born thirty years apart.

Mostly, he left me alone. I wasted much of my youth in a manner that would scandalize any modern parent, intent as they are in ensuring their child's efficiency and productivity.  When I look back on my high school days, I see misty mornings and lazy afternoons, with time on my hands during the long stretch of summers.  The early hours of a day held so much promise, but my young fires burned hot and quick, leaving me drained, spent on myself.  There were myriad mornings in July and August when the hours lay before me full of interesting tasks … things to write, to draw, to plan, to accomplish.  As the day warmed and the katydids raised their whining voices in praise of the hot sun, I squandered my time, letting it seep away until I burned with disappointment.  And having wasted the morning, I would fritter away the afternoon, first in self pity and later dreaming about the wonderful day coming tomorrow and all the projects I would finish.

In the evening I crawled into bed and sleeplessly worried about tomorrow, doubting I would fare better in my struggle to be free of the ennui that gripped my young soul.  Always focused on a fuzzy point somewhere in the future, I neglected the present and the need to engage it, as though I was unaware of the obvious, that I would never be here again.  I seemed always to be somewhere else, not where I should have been.

My father didn’t push me.  I was fifteen before I wondered why he never complained about my lethargy.  Perhaps he remembered his own youth and knew I would survive, that inside me a small clock was set to ring at the right time.  And it did, although by then my father was gone. 

I was still a young man  when he died.  I stood beside his bed as he sighed for the last time.  His soul got up and left.  I felt as I had years before as a little boy when I sat  crying on my mother’s porch in the hot afternoon sun,  the whining katydids mocking me as I stared down the block and wished my father would come home.

And after a year he did.  But like everyone the world has ever held, eventually he left for good.

After Dad’s grave-side service, workmen stood by ready to roll up the fake grass and lower the casket into the earth.  I didn’t care if they waited all afternoon,  I wanted a few more minutes with my father.  I needed to say things to him I had neglected. 

I stood staring at the newly dug pit and discovered I had no words. I thought only of that early morning when he watched as I walked to his house, and how he stayed in the shadows until he was sure I couldn’t go on without a little help.  Of everything he ever did for me, I remember that as the most caring.

As a chilly spring wind blew through the rows of headstones,  I walked up and placed my hand on the casket.  To the east, the clouds broke on the horizon and scattered into pinks and warm greens and golds.  Inexplicably, I heard my father shout and I swung around to the west where his voice had come from.

In the distance, over the roof of the little chapel and beyond the tall pines that circled the cemetery,  I saw Eternity in a sunset emblazoned on a sky of deep indigo blue, and knew my father had gone there ahead of me. He was finally where he was meant to be. 

A majestic bank of purple clouds rolled up and away from the fiery sun and marched toward the blackness of clouds gathering above me. The harsh, dark colors spoke of danger, power, birth and death.  I tingled from head to toe with an exhilarating renewal of my spiritual nativity. A strong spirit like a woman beckoned me away from the pastel skies of my boyhood and pulled me towards a mature life, a tumultuous expanse of the heavens above and ahead.  I could have refused, but my psyche burst from my soul and my head spun with delirium at the possibilities to be lived.

Born in that moment was the day I call my adult life, a bright morning of promise and an afternoon of achievement, love, loss and a few times of failure.  I often forgot I had the same mind as my father, but with different opportunities.  Still, I would re-make many of his mistakes.  

As the years went by I seldom noticed the slanting sun telling me it was getting late.  The hours rolled on and on and seemed not to be numbered, but they were.

My life has now reached its evening and someday when the purple sunset rolls up to crown my journey, thundering upon me as a great cloud of blackness, I will dread it and I will have no words.  I will have to accept that it is finished and I must leave.  I will never be here again.  I will be elsewhere, finally where I’m supposed to be, but hopefully not where I deserve to be.

copyright 2011, David Griffin

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The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

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CONTINUED: theology

I held out the jar.  He looked at it and smiled, rising up from behind his beautiful desk, an old executive’s model probably saved from the dump in recent years.

God was sixty-something years old with gray hair and a paunch littered with pipe ashes.  He was well over six  and a half feet tall.  He just kept going when he stood up,  and I followed him until my neck clicked.    Resembling a  heavy-set Moses,  he would  have passed for a Charlton Heston, though he had less hair.

God looked down from his lofty height and regarded me with a face full of condescension,  He stalked around to the front of his desk and motioned for me to follow him to the florescent light cartons.  Here he allowed me the honor of dragging 500 light bulbs in their boxes over to the conveyor belt to prepare them for their trip to the shipping area below.  The belt ran at a steep angle down between floors and had to be loaded carefully. 

“Cock the boxes a little, like this,” he said, “so they don’t all slide off and crash when you get the belt moving.” 

While I worked, he bestowed upon me some of his encyclopedic knowledge of light bulbs, and droned on through their entire history since Edison.  This God loved light bulbs and everything about then.  As he talked on and on, I became less patient.

And I was in a hurry, to tell the truth.  I wanted to get back down to the office floor to watch blonde and blousy Belinda, the girl who answered the warehouse telephone.  When it rang, she would set her body’s poetry to motion.  She had a way of picking up the phone that just set my heart all a-titter.  As she raised  the instrument to her ear, shiny bracelets and bangles would slide and clang  as one lovely arm brushed across her bosom.   I liked that part.  She flipped her head and pulled her hair back to swing a four inch long earring out of the way.  And just before she said “Hello,”  … I swear I didn’t imagine it, even if I was seventeen … a tiny shrug would begin in her shoulders and flow down over her body.  With clinks and jingles, she greeted the no doubt surprised caller.   To me, her ritual was frankly erotic and might have been outlawed in an earlier time. 

Anyway ….. I was still stuck upstairs and God was beginning to bore me with his prodigious knowledge of lighting technology and his sermon on lumens and filament tensile strengths.  He paced around the floor as he talked, stooping to look out the various windows as though awaiting the return of a lost squad of angels.  He lectured about power ratings and glass safety and Underwriters Laboratories.  He said his biggest vexation was when stuff was left on the belt down on the dock.  It backed up his system.  ”God can’t deliver if the world isn’t ready to receive,” he said.   I hurried through my task without much attention to how I placed the cartons on the belt. 

When I could no longer stand his oration, I pronounced the loading task complete and interrupted his monologue. 

“So,” I said, “you’re the God of light bulbs?”  Turning hard eyes my way, he reared up to his full height and looked down on me.

"I am," he said, "the most senior employee in this company.  Mr. Lewis (the owner) was in diapers when his father hired me."

"Well, that's certainly very interesting," I said, as only a disinterested teenager could say it.

"And this entire business,” he said, “all the people in it, and now yourself included, appear to have no other purpose in life than to entirely piss me off."

"Well..." I began, in defense.

"Except for Belinda," he interrupted.  "She's a lovely girl."

"Yes, she's very...."

"I've seen you mooning at her.  Make one move toward that girl and I'll break both your legs and send you back down the conveyor belt where you came from."

Oddly, I was more impressed with his concern for Belinda than his bullying of me.  I simply nodded  and  left his presence.

The Lord Herb Almighty wasn’t the only employee with a biblical perspective.  The entire crew of men played out a farce all through the work day by speaking only to each other as you might imagine the Apostles did … at least on parchment …  always with a religious overtone or subtext.  I suppose I might have doubted their sincerity, but at that age I seldom questioned the motives of adults.

“Behold, His only begotten son,” Huey said of Gordon one afternoon.  And Louie would ask, “If I’m a worker in the vineyard, where is the wine cellar?”    But I more often heard biblical references to forgiveness.  “All blasphemy will be forgiven, except that against God,” Gordon told Dewey.  “Stop swearing so God damned much,” Hughie told Louie,

The Biblical bits and bites the men used no doubt came from Sunday mornings when their wives dragged them off to church.  They may have been unable or unwilling to accept the proclaimed precepts heard there, because the faith of their fathers had been warped by feminized Christian sensitivities a century before.  This was especially true of the music.  It was doubtful Gordon or his friends would have been  comfortable singing the hymn about “laying my head tenderly on Jesus’ breast.”  So the men cobbled together their own theology to suit the world as they knew it, a process not entirely different from that used by better known theologians.

On a cold afternoon as Christmas neared, the pace got very hectic.  I am still clueless as to why an electrical supply house got so terribly busy around the holidays.  God was thundering around up on the top floor and bellowing down the conveyer belt shaft, damning everyone to hell for all eternity.   Huey, Dewey and Louie were arguing and getting in each others’ way.    Gordon called us into his tiny cubicle.  We all took a deep breath and let our shoulders sag.  Opening a desk drawer, he brought out a Roy Rogers thermos jug, intended for milk in some kid’s lunch box.  Four shot glasses appeared and, excluding me, he poured a finger into each from the thermos that had Trigger’s picture on it.  As they lifted the tumblers, Gordon pronounced, “There is a spirit here that commands forgiveness.  We’re lucky to have it.  It is our covenant.”  As scripture citations go, that was close enough.  Huey said, “Thank you, Jesus.”  Louie said, “Thank you, Roy.”
 I grew accustomed to the men’s chatter and after a while I began to discern a shape to their banter.  They were certainly trying to get along with each other for eight hours a day, yes, but there was more to it than social grease. 

Later in the morning that Saturday, after having loaded the belt upstairs to the best of my lackadaisical ability, I descended from light bulb heaven back to the first floor, where I stationed myself at the foot of the conveyor belt on the indoor part of the  dock.  Crossing my fingers … an intemperate act for a Catholic … I pressed the button to start the conveyor belt.  As I stood waiting for the first box of bulbs to come down, I heard a thump above me, followed by a couple more thumps and then a lot of thumps in rapid succession.   Just as I heard the first crunch of breaking glass above me, an avalanche of boxes came down the belt out of the ceiling, breaking open and bursting out into millions of pieces of glass.  It happened so fast!  I stood there in shock as a Niagara Falls of florescent bulbs showered me from on high.

Gordon ran out of his little cubicle and stood with me among the destruction and debris.  Mr. Lewis came running, too, slipping on the tiny particles of glass strewn across the floor.

“My fault,” Gordon said to Mr. Lewis. “I guess I didn’t load the cartons as well as I thought I had.  We’ll clean this up.  There aren’t as many broken bulbs as it appears.”  Mr. Lewis harrumphed and turned to regard me.  I was trying to look like the most innocent of bystanders.  He spun around and stomped back to his office.

“Geez, I’m sorry, Gordon, “I said.

Gordon looked at me.  “Just think of me as the son of God, sent down to save your sorry ass.”

“Herb’s your father?” I asked.

“That’s what he tells me, Dave.  And he’s the biggest guy here, so I’m not going to argue.”

Over the years I’ve come to realize these young husbands and fathers, who were not especially religious, were working out their personal beliefs as they improvised an on-going religious skit,  performed as a kind of joke but staged on the more serious premise of locating themselves in the universe.   They had only a few years before seen their young lives through the lens of the Korean War, and often endured harrowing combat experiences.  Gordon and his crew … sometimes with the mature leading from “God” on the third floor, when he was behaving himself …  wanted answers and sought a prescription for living.  Not always consciously, the men hammered out  a theology … spelled with a small “t” … that made sense to them and helped to answer their questions and to ease their fears.   They somehow sensed their friendship  could be a sacrament … an outward sign of their regard for each other.  As well, they felt the human need for the mystical.   In the hurly burley of everyday work, even at home in the stressful affairs of heart and family, they yearned for peace and purpose amid the numerous klaxons demanding their attention.  In one way or another, they prayed their lives would not end in desperation.

The son of God and I were down on our knees behind the conveyor belt cleaning up the debris and were unseen by Belinda  when she entered the dock area, hiked up her skirt and tugged her stocking tops up where they belonged.  The most beautiful girl in the world within sight shimmied her skirt back down and then quickly returned to the telephone and desk inside, jingle-jangling all the way.  We had evidently discovered her secret dressing room, and I wondered what else she fiddled with during the course of her work day.

As our eyes followed her back through the door to the office I wondered how I might appease God and gain permission to flirt with Belinda.  I whispered,  “Does God ever grant wishes?”

Gordon turned from watching the girl and looked at me.  “Tomorrow, you could take him two jars of marmalade.”

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Copyright by David Griffin, 2007

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Everyone Is Selling Something

In the days before the "eggs" that are now sold with rolled up pantyhose inside, stockings came in thin white cardboard boxes lined with tissue paper.  Each pair had printed on the edge of the box the gauge; the color and the size.  When the customer would ask to see her desired choice; we would open the box;

fold back the tissue paper; slowly slip our hand inside the top of the stocking and gracefully show the sheerness of the gauge.  Displaying the stocking was an art and long fingers with lovely polished fingernails at the end of each digit was essential to show off Miss Johnson's stock.   While I had the nicely polished fingernails, I couldn't change the length of my fingers, and I suspect that is why I was moved into the sweater department where I excelled in form and deed.   There, I had no trouble displaying the beautiful colors;  keeping the stock in orderly piles when called upon to show it and explaining the merits of Wool over cotton....or over anything else. 

Jessie McGuire, was my Sweater manager, slightly older by two or three yrs. and six inches shorter.   She was what we would now call a dynamo except the word wasn't used in that respect then.  Miss McGuire was neatly packaged into a neat frame of  4'10".  She was a pretty curly headed brunette with blue eyes, extremely efficient and charming.  She caught the eye of all Arnold Constable's single male counterparts....even some who were not so single.  To make up for her short stature she balanced herself on three inch high heels and walked quickly over the mosaic floors.   (I can still hear the click click click of those heels as she passed between the Sweater and Blouse aisle, heading for the stock room where she took her break.) 

Salesgirls were not allowed to sit down behind the counter.  Indeed, there were no seats.  We had to be on our feet, always ready to answer any questions the customers had.  Talking to friends or relatives that came in to chat or to guys that came in to ask for a date, was strictly frowned upon so it had to be done surreptitiously while informing the "customer" of the quality and color of  Arnold Constable's newest wool cardigan.  Mr. Edgbert was the floor walker who kept constant vigil making sure we all played strictly by the company rules.   My sales experience of always being kind and friendly to customers was learned and highly developed within the walls of the Arnold Constable establishment, which proves you can always learn something valuable from every job - even from selling in a department store.    

A move to California to help in the Country's war effort ended my career with A.C. and I again took up my chosen profession of selling... but this time it was in a hole in the wall in the small town of Richmond, outside of San Francisco.  It was one shop really, divided in half, down the middle with a photographer on one side and a jeweler on the other.  I was the photographer but to call me that was quite a laugh because it was one of those places where you got five pictures for a quarter - or was it .50 cents?  There wasn't much selling involved.   I just had to place the customer on a stool, turn on the lights; stand by the small door and push a button five times; enter the door;  put the film in a solution and wait for the image to develop.  Our customer's were mostly from the armed forces and it was easy to please the boys.  No real selling, but a steady flow of customers and lots of fun!

A side benefit was what I learned in the art of selling from listening to the technique of the jeweler's wife, Stella.  She invariably looked at the watch coming in for repairs, and before giving any information as to why it didn't keep good time, her declaration was that it was dirty and had to be cleaned first.....".and that will be $14.95".  I suppose each industry has it's nuances but this put me wise in the years to come whenever I entered a jewelry store to be on guard for the standard response of cost repair.  

The war ended before we experienced a full year and our return trip back to the East coast was made without needing to use any gas rationing coupons.  Gas flowed from every pump at the gas station which was a welcome surprise!

Marriage and four children kept me in the hospital, the kitchen and the house over a span of some time but eventually my husband needed help with the finances.  I wanted to be an at home Mom so with  furniture and other goods supplied by relatives and friends I held garage sales which was a fairly new industry just starting up. The popularity of my yard sales was so great that at each sale we had to stretch a rope across the end of the driveway to keep the customers at bay until the appointed hour of opening.  Quite often there were 10 or more people waiting.  I would giggle behind the garage door thinking it was not unlike opening up Macy's Department store.   Selling and redistributing those things was easy but eventually I ran out of my own stock of collectibles and was then thrown into the business of Estate sales when friends would ask me to sell their things.  I usually took a commission of 15 percent... which was good money then.  My selling acumen reached fever pitch during this period and many chapters could be written giving the interesting experiences of trying to please both customers and owners.   It was often necessary and at the same time difficult to fend off buyers who wanted to come ahead of the pack with stories like this :  "My sister is having her kidney stone operation tomorrow ..... so could we see what you have for sale today?"   Needless to say, I learned to say politely that, "I advertised antiques and if I sold them the day before the sale, my ad would not be truthful...so please come back tomorrow."  And then there is always the question of:  " You are asking $15.00 for this, can you do better?"  Smiling, I would often say, "Yes,..... how about $15.50?"   One has to know just how to handle that question.   If the item is fairly priced one can hold steady but the trick is to size up the customer and know just when to fold and when not to fold.  It's a fun lesson of jovial repartee in dealing with buyers and I thoroughly enjoy the exercise.  

Real Estate was another try.  I joined a Century One Agency and listed one house - the lovey home of a dear friend who wanted to move back to California.  When the house sold a month or so later, as the listing agent I received a commission of  $900.   Wow!  "That was easy", I thought!   The check was signed by the manager of the branch and I gleefully went to the bank to cash it,  but it bounced!  I was told by the bank teller, that I could come back in a few days and try again.... OR.... I could go back to the Agency and complain.   I chose to do that but the "50 something" manager's young 23 yr. old wife was there  - 8 month's pregnant.   I was told to put the check in again on Tuesday.  I tried, but again the bank teller said there were still no funds there to cover it.  I knew I wouldn't stand a chance of getting my money by appealing to the law before a judge with the very pregnant wife in full view so I gathered my acting ability together and stormed the agency.  The lady owner was the only one in the office - no manager or wife.  Thrusting the bogus check before her, I gave an Academy Award performance announcing my intention of suing the manager, the owner AND Century 21.  She had no knowledge of what the Manager had done. ...so she said.  Whereupon I was told to come back at 7:00 pm and she would have the cash for me.  I arrived back at the exact hour and received all nine crisp one hundred dollar bills in a white envelope.   Thus I voluntarily ended my R. E. selling experience with that Century 21 branch.   What did I learn?   I learned it's not always easy to receive what was rightly mine, compensating me for my time and effort..... but I did enjoy meeting the public. 

After one Christmas season my husband fell into bed with the words that he didn't know how we were going to pay the bills.  We owed both Sears Roebuck and W.T. Grant over $100. each.  (Lots of money in 1965.)  I resolved to try selling (myself) the next morning and without telling my husband my plan,  I rose early, dressed after he left for work and headed first to Sears and the Manager's office.  His secretary did what secretaries do best.... she ran interference and wanted to know the nature of my business.   I gave her no explanation but stated firmly that I wanted to speak privately to the Manager.  Whereupon, after a few minutes of their consulting with each other, I entered the brightly lit office of Mr. Angelone.  He was a good looking Italian man, with rosy red cheeks about my own age.  He sat quietly behind his desk and listened to my story.   I poured it out.  I explained how my husband was worried at not being able to pay the bill and I wondered if I could work it off in some way in some department.  (Remember I had worked for Arnold Constable years before.)  He was so moved, I thought he would be reduced to tears at my very unusual proposal.  I sat waiting for his response.  It came.   He asked what I would like to do and I said, "I'll do anything."   He said, it just so happened that the Coffee Shop needed a night manager because the girls working there were giving away the hot dogs to their boy friends who came in after school.  He asked "Could you work from 5 - 9 each day?"   I was given the job on the spot and I left carrying a size #12, white cotton uniform to wear the very next day.   With joy, I raced home and skipped the thought of asking for a job at the the less attractive store...  W. T. Grant.  When my husband arrived home at the end of the day, he was very happy to hear my news.   After each pay day I marched into the Accounting office and handed over my pay check until the entire bill was paid off.   It only took two weeks.   At the end of that time they asked me if I would like to stay on and and so it was that I worked the next six months until the school year ended and I was needed at home.  In the Fall they asked me to come back and I did that working again until the next summer.  They asked me a third time for another six months, and at the end of that time they offered me the Full Managerial roll of the Coffee Shop.  However, I had to decline because the daughter that was putting the prepared meal on the table was going off to college in the Fall.  The next oldest child was a boy and altho he loved eating potatoes. he didn't know how to cook them.  There remained the youngest boy who was too young to set the table and do the dishes.  Ahhh.... but the lessons I learned during that chapter of my life were many including:  that Management valued loyalty, honesty and dedication.  

After being introduced to the Market Place, so many years ago, with all these challenges, selling our house of 44 years when downsizing was in order, was easy....not to mention selling the various cars that have passed through our lives (and garage) as well.  When you look around everyone is busy selling .... from the hardware store to the bagel store; from the car salesman to the funeral director; from the politician to the bartender; from the Medical Industry and their pills to the NRA and their guns; from the girl on the street corner to the big box stores; from the financial advisor to the guy with illegal drugs.....from eBay to Crag’s List...from television advertisers to gullible listeners......"Everyone is Selling Something"! 

copyright June T. Bassemir, 2016

CONTINUED: Dog 101

I’ll need a responsible job ... one that pays well and provides top notch benefits such as a cute little secretary of an esteemed breed.  Maybe a Collie for good looks, or a Chesapeake if I locate near the water.  Of course, a big Newfoundland would be comforting on cold winter nights.  And a German Shepherd would tear the heart out of anyone who threatened.  But come to think of it, a diminutive Chihuahua might add a little Latin zing to my life.

As usual, I’m ahead of myself.  Before I spend a lot of time contemplating what I want in life, I need to get ready for today’s world of win or lose, triumph or heartbreak, Winner’s Circle or Circle K.

Part of one’s preparation for a worthwhile life is of course a proper education.   I’ve read that college provides ample opportunity for eager-beaver students to witness adult men and women … the faculty ... make a comfortable living by doing mostly nothing.  But they do it with style.

“I’m thinking I’d like to do my undergraduate work at MIT,” I told Himself, “and then pursue my PhD and ongoing academic glory at Stanford and maybe wind up on the faculty of Princeton.”

He looked  down at his feet.

“We have possibly enough money set aside to send you to typewriter repair school.”

“What’s a typewriter?

“They were used before personal computers.  You can buy one real cheap today.  You can learn to fix them for even less.”

I could foresee an awkward moment some day in the future when my Curriculum Vitae was read off at the Nobel Prize ceremony and my only entry was Phil’s Typewriter School.

“You have no need for a technical or professional education,” Himself said.

“Why not? Let each become all that he is capable of being.”

  “Because no one is going to hire a university trained dog as a junior executive to analyze insurance forms.”

“You’re probably right,” I said  “But I was kind of hoping I could talk Home Depot into hiring me as an appliance salesman. I’m certainly personable.”

“But Murphy,” he said, “the only person who understands you is me.”

“We haven’t tried Berlitz yet,” I said.

“It may take more than that,” said the old man.

“But once I learn to talk like you and Herself, there’s no limit to my potential.  I could even become a TV Weatherman.”

 “So you could tell people who never go outside it will rain tomorrow.”

“Well, yeah ...”

“For thirty years, every night. ‘Temperatures moderating over the delta, periods of

rain likely ...’”

I had to admit it. “That does sound pretty boring.”

“Anyway,” said Himself, “you do have a few talents that might be put to use.  Maybe as a  Nanny for a suburban family.”

“I don’t like most of the children I’ve met.” I said. “If I could tie them up and hide them in the cellar that  might work for me.”

“Or how about a therapy dog …” he said, his voice trailing off as if he was sorry he mentioned it.

“I think people just need to get over it,” I said.

“Murphy, perhaps you need an education in the humanities that is tailored especially for anyone who is not intellectually inquisitive.  A plan for someone who will navigate through life without a great deal of precision.”

“Where could I go to school for that?” I asked.

“Right here. You needn’t leave home.”

“You mean a correspondence school?”

“Not exactly,” he said, “although much like it.”

“I don’t know.  I was kind of looking forward to all those campus activities I’ve read about.  Those that tickle a young man’s fancy and do just about the same for a dog.”

“You mean “booze, broads and mini Coopers?” he said.

“No,  I meant sleeping late, skipping housework and being irresponsible.”

“Yes,” he said.  “You’d be good at that.  Do you like Chinese?”

“You know I like any kind of food.  Or garbage.”

“I think,” he said, “everything in your universe, everything you need to know, you will find on the paper slips found inside fortune cookies.”

“Really?”

“Yes, listen to this gem: “A smile is your passport into the hearts of others.”

“That’s pretty astute,” I said.

“And this one: “Change can hurt, but it leads a path to something better.”

“Wow,” I said.  “I’d sure like to be able to quote sayings like that.”

“I propose we have take-out two or three times each week and you can memorize your fortune cookie lesson each time you eat the cookie.”

“And that’s a proper substitute for classes, books, term papers and final exams?

“Yes, for you it is,” he said

“What about Beer Brawls,  fraternity smokers and all night beach parties?”

Himself raised his eyes heavenward and sighed.

“No,” he said. “You’ll be too busy with your studies.”

So I feel a lot better, now that I have education plans in place. I’m to be taught by the finest scholars of the current dynasty, the People’s Republic of China.  I have to hand it to the old man.  He almost always has a solution for any problem. 

A couple of my friends outside the fence scoffed at the plan to educate me with Fortune Cookies.  Billerica the Boxer asked  why not just memorize a Chinese restaurant menu.  “Because,” I told her, “if asked about the cause of modern mankind’s social dilemma, I certainly would not want to answer  “General Tso’s Chicken.”

Hudson, the Airdale Terrier,  said I should be concerned about my triglyceride levels.

And so today, for lunch we went down to Mr. Chow Wu’s take-out:

Chow’s Hot Chow

Wet Drinks Our Specialty

All Food Must Go.

I got the Sweet and Sour Pork and the  first lesson of my academic career.  I cracked open the cookie and rolled out the slip of paper.  I’ll share it with you since it may apply more to you than me.

Your shoes will make you happy today

I should have it framed and hung in the corner of the kitchen where I do my homework. Maybe I’ll use it someday in the opening of my Nobel acceptance speech.

http://www.fortunecookiemessage.com/archive.php

Paws are not very useful for holding and writing with a pen or pencil, so I dictated this to my man-servant here ... the old fellow who insists he owns me like some kind of pet.

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copyright, 2016  David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

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CONTINUED: Power

Rather than run their air conditioning, Efficient Neighbors choose instead to tough it out and find their cool elsewhere while the rest of us are safely tucked in our beds with a blanket over us, the air conditioning turned up to high.  Now that the Power Company has exposed these poor folks as conservationists, I no longer worry if their A.C. is off because of lost jobs or other financial setbacks.

 My Efficient Neighbors turn their heat down in the winter and sit around watching TV while wearing those Obi-Wan Kenobi robes as seen on TV, the kind in which you can hold and sip a Hot Chocolate while keeping your hands covered if you're careful.  You can bring the cup inside the robe if you like danger, but that voids the warranty.  These same neighbors achieve gasoline efficiency by looking for routes to the Organic Store that are mostly downhill.  Sure, they have to drive back home uphill, but to save fuel they make the kids get out and walk.

The Power Company didn't announce a name for my kind of power glutton.  Maybe they would call me an Energy Abuser.  I leave lights on in the cellar because I'm planning to go right back down as soon as I grab another cup of coffee from the pot I keep running continuously.  I turn the heat and the air conditioning up to high,  not usually at the same time, and let my engine idle in the driveway to warm the car up before taking off by flooring the accelerator.  I throw away batteries before they become exhausted just to be sure my flashlight never starts to go dim and I've been known to fall asleep in front of the TV late at night and let it burn up the kilowatt hours until dawn. 

Just as you can pick out the nerdy Efficient Neighbors by their sweat and tears, we Energy Abusers are also apparent to all but the most casual observer.  Usually our homes are well lit by incandescent bulbs and our eyes are not all squinty from trying to read in dim light or the yellow glare of those new bulbs that look like soft ice cream cones.  We leave the porch light burning all evening because our kids will be coming home at eleven.  And if we just stopped by your house to drop something off, we left the car running in the driveway.  Our utility bills are so high the power company has considered hand delivering them.

"We're here to help you save," says their folksy envelope stuffer.  "We're not a company of businessmen," it goes on,  "we're a

company of conservationists!"  That is enough to make one reach for the Dramamine.  Their plan calls for embarrassing me into using less power while they appeal to the State Utilities Commission to raise rates to “help customers to conserve.”  Then they can do less work to produce less power and make more money.  Maybe their company motto should be, “This isn’t a business, it’s a screw job.”

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David Griffin                                      Copyright 2011

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

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CONTINUED Sacrifice

But it’s no surprise I’ve lusted over Lucy’s ample figure. I’m just a man. Lucy, Immy, Sally are lovely souls, each one special in my eyes.  But in one sense they're all the same to me as male. Carl Jung explained them as my anima. In "Two Essays in Analytical Psychology," he said, “The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light and air.”  My anima is like a dress I began to stitch as a child.  It’s sewn from my psycho-social-sexual dreams.  From time to time I drape it over a woman and think I’m in love with her.  That’s not a condition of the male psyche one gets over easily, if he gets over it at all.

I do have to constantly work on quelling the self, whether it be the greedy self, sexual self or just the normal inflated ego.  We have a tradition in our order when we enter the cloister of reducing our self-importance.  Our name is changed to that of a patron saint.
  

Long ago someone in authority upped the ante by deciding brothers and priests would take the name of a woman saint.  I suppose that’s no different than the thousands of nuns who to this day take a male saint’s name.  But I’ll bet sixty years ago when the brothers heard their names would get a sex change, many were quite upset.

I’m sometimes asked if I did indeed choose St. Jessica’s name.  Yes, I did.  It was not given to me.  We were left complete discretion in our choice.  And frankly, I chose it because I wanted to be as anonymous as the saint.  


Not many Christians remember Saint Jessica of Galilee, the wife of Chuza, a steward to King Herod Antipas.   She was one of the women who accompanied Mary Magdalene to the tomb on Easter morning.  She may have kept her friends a secret from her husband.

Given my personality, I hoped Jessica’s name would help dampen my ego and leave me forgotten. Her name didn’t diminish my ego one bit, but it turns out I have been completely forgotten anyway. I’m a monk, so I guess that’s OK.  But it would be nice to hear from my birth brothers once in a while. Not counting them, there are only two or three relatives left to die and then I won’t have any family funerals to go to. What a shame.  I’ll miss the food.

At funerals I  have stood innocently next to a pretty woman and pretended we were married. Just for a minute or so.  I’d join a circle of men and women discussing one topic or another, usually having nothing to do with the dearly departed. There was always a brief patter of Hellos to me and What’s New? (Nothing is ever new in a monastery. Sometimes I quip,”Do you mean since the year 1200?”) The group would resume their discussion and happily ignore me. I’d  choose a woman in the circle, usually a lady next to me, and turn slightly toward her as men and women do if they are a couple.  I’d steal furtive glances at her to fix a firm picture of the woman in my mind.  And then I would let my imagination play with what she might say about her real husband, imagining myself in that role.  Soon I’d have thoughts of driving home with her, picking up milk and bread at the convenience store and sitting around in the evening discussing the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  It’s a little mind game I believe helps me through the lonely times.

If I had married someone instead of becoming a monk, this morning the woman and I might have shared our …. oh, maybe our 16,427th breakfast together. I wonder what we could have possibly talked about on sixteen thousand mornings. “Pass the butter” and “How about those Yankees?” 16,000 times would probably not help to  form a scintillating relationship.   But I may be wrong.  The right woman might not care what we talked about.

Although my residence in a cloistered monastery makes it a little easier to deal with, I must acknowledge I’m a single male in a world dedicated to coupled males and females.  Sex can be distracting and has caused much grief over the ages. but any evolutionist will tell you the invention of sex made the development of our world extremely efficient and sped up the process by billions of years. 

I can’t change my biology.  Like monks have in the past, I live with it as best I can. But I don’t totally deny it. I lay awake some nights yearning for a woman to lie beside me. To talk to, share my thoughts and dreams and to tell my fears. To lay my head upon her breast and listen to her heart beat, to smell her sweetness. To feel so close to another human being, another soul. And to have planned a life together, to have raised children and to have sat on a Sunday afternoon after dinner on a wide porch in the soft sunshine and watched grandchildren play on the grass. A woman to share my body on long walks in the woods and at night in the peace of our bedroom. To care for her in sickness and to hold her when she suffered pain or grief.

This is what I gave up to become a monk. I didn’t fully appreciate my sacrifice when I decided as a young man to enter the religious life. I didn’t know I was going against every cell in my body in remaining celibate. I knew I could live without the young woman I was involved with before entering the novitiate. Leaving her was in some ways a relief. But I didn’t know life without any woman would eventually become a hell of loneliness.

My old abbot often worried I would one day in a funk fling myself off the roof of the Chapter House.  But only once was I tempted to join the spirit on the horizon … to step off the roof into her arms.  It happened after a storm thundered down the mountain and pounded the Chapter House with blasts of wind and a torrent of rain. When it ended and the stained glass window of St. Lucy lit up with rays of sunshine through her colored glass, I went up the roof ladder hoping to see a rainbow. I popped my head out the trap door and swung my eyes west toward the late afternoon sun. There on the horizon golden edged clouds blazed, appearing pink and green against a pale blue sky. I made my way along the peak, crawling up to the edge of the roof. I became overwhelmed with yearning.  It frightened me to suddenly feel something pulled inside my chest. A woman spirit seemed to be calling from over on the horizon, a place where we might live forever.

As the sun burst free of the clouds and began to warm the roof, the bell rang for Vespers and I headed back down for Chapel.   I backed down from the peak to the trap door. Then I backed into the roof hole, closed the hatch and backed down the ladder. I backed down all the way. I'm always backing down.

When I go up on the roof and look out over the valley I often sense something that is feminine. I can’t say why. It may be the lush fruitfulness of a summer afternoon as the haze rises from the river that runs through the valley to suckle the trees and grasses. It may be the wind whispering to me, playfully tousling me, wrapping its arms around me.  It may simply be how the ineffable creator has chosen to remind me that I will always be incomplete and feel overwhelmed by a yearning I cannot explain.   What I feel as a void in my life ... what I think of as my sacrifice ... may represent the deepest desire for an ultimate communion with the one who made me and yearns to have me home.  She waits for me.

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David Griffin                                     copyright 2016

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Labor

 My wife appeared nervous, and that rattled me a bit because this girl was not often shaken. I knew, having tried sometimes to get her blood up when I just wanted to start an argument. But now as the caring and concerned father of our child, I tried to live that role and asked if there was anything I could do to help. She mentioned that if it were possible, she might prefer I undo something.  That being impossible, she   settled for my stopping to get her a Coke.
      "Well," I said, as we continued our journey down West Genesee St., "you look pretty healthy to me. You'll do fine. Don't worry about anything. My mother had three of us and look how she turned out."
     That was the last time I heard her laugh for a couple of days.  As it turned out, almost forty hours would pass before our son was born. He was as reluctant to enter this vale of tears as today he is reticent to enter into conversation. A quiet and thoughtful man, my son is very much like me, but a lot less likely to think out loud. And he's a better writer.
     Syracuse's old Memorial Hospital was a dark and dingy place in 1966, just a few years before it closed. If you were born here in the 1960's, your parents were likely Medicaid recipients, beneficiaries of a newly minted program for the poor or studious or, like me, both. Trying to live on peanuts each week, I certainly appreciated the largess of the state's politicians' use of federal money. Nelson Rockefeller was the governor at the time and  I always thought I should have chosen his first or last name as my son's middle name. Before I discovered we were eligible, I lay awake nights trying to figure out where I would find the funds to pay the hospital $275, the obstetrician $250, and an extra $25 for the circumcision if it were a boy. I joked about wanting a girl to save money.

My night job at the Daws Drug store in the mall paid only $1.25 per hour. I had occasional high paying work from IBM installing engineering changes on the large mainframe computers around the Syracuse area, but it could only be done in sizable chunks of time during vacations. When Mrs. Dave became pregnant, I considered quitting school, but she made me promise I wouldn't.  I settled down to the job of becoming a father-student.
     Back to Mrs. Dave, she wasn’t having very much fun, either.  The dark and dingy halls of the hospital didn’t inspire much confidence that she would be properly cared for.

And as it happened, she wasn't. But 36 hours of labor finally produced our first child, a son, on a Tuesday morning in December of 1966.

What do two twenty-two year old kids know about having a baby? Through all of this, I sat two floors below in the father's waiting room. Around me, young fathers came and went from Sunday night to Tuesday morning, receiving news of their child's birth from a telephone over in the corner. From time to time, I'd take my attention away from my books and call upstairs to inquire about "Mrs. Griffin," and each time I used that name I felt like I was asking about my mother.

Finally, the call came downstairs and I bagged my stuff and took the elevator up to see my wife and new son. Mrs. Dave was lightly sleeping when I was shown to her bed.  She was so white I wondered if she was dead. When I remarked on my observation to the nurse, as politely as possible given the circumstances, the woman smiled and said having a baby took its toll on a woman. My God, I thought. What had I done to this poor girl?
     Life restarted itself, as it usually does, and we began our life as a family, adding to our number in 1969 with the birth of our daughter.  We just jumped into family life as does any young couple with babies. High chair in the kitchen, no smoking in the car, the little spare money we had from time to time now earmarked for some purpose unthought of a year ago.

Family life in America.  It didn't last very long. The kids grew up faster than speeding bullets and I grew old even faster. Today they have their own households, and I have grandchildren who come down the Thruway and set up a temporary art studio of crayons and rubber stamps and stickers in my study, this one with central heat and wide windows looking out on a field of grass and trees and no gas station.

Life has been good, and Mrs. Dave's labor was fruitful.  The two children she gave me are gifts I couldn’t possibly deserve.  How do you thank someone for making you a father?  I would guess by doing the job as well as you can.

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Copyright 2010, 2016  -  David Griffin, Windswept Press