brothers, boxes, and just enough ladles: merry christmas!

oh, this blog entry is gonna be all over the darned place.

you'll love it!

well, you'll love it if you love me, if you know me.  if you've just wandered in, looking for CRPS research abstracts, or elogies to pain... oh, damn, here we go.  "elogies." excuse the heck out of me, but i am going to substitute the french "éloges" because i certainly am not referencing some down-in-the-mouth funeral oration or the light fiction of an obituary.  and see?  see?  see how my own darned self has killed any natural momentum to the act of writing by an obsession with words?

only one dictionary of the three consulted listed a definition having to do with praise, and that dictionary underscored the "archaic" nature of that meaning.  none would have appreciated, were dictionaries capable of appreciation, mine own irony.

i just finished mouthing off to some important people in my life, and my mouth did it -- again and again.  that these people love me back is one of the great mysteries of the universe.

to TW, the subject line might have been a canary sufficient to the coal mine:  "i have so much to say..." but he is far, far from timorous, and probably read on to the opening of the elucidating message text, even as the little bird fell like a ten pound rock to the bottom of her newspapered cage:

...and yet i can't.  damn that samuel beckett.  [i can never remember whether he ends his last name with one T or two Ts, so i look it up, and every time, google suggests "bucket."]
so i will stick to the stuff that matters.

it turns out that "the stuff that matters," judging by the relative subject-weighting as distributed in this morning's anemic oxygen-debted febrile communiqués (for which spell-checker demands "communism"), is dehydrated vegetables.  more specifically, how to use them in a stew.

a stew that is rich and deep, melded by something part gravy-with-sheen, part viscous broth.  all of which will be ruined by chicken.  (i have emergent need of protein.)

a missing detail:  TW has been intimate with these vegetables, having sown, overseen, harvested, and dried them -- before gifting us manor squatters with their dessicated, concentrated goodness in the traditional Celebratory Box.  the beautiful history of TW's Boxes can be found in some of this mass of earlier posts or more quickly captured at the first's box arrival, HERE.

it's a weighty issue, and by that i mean that i am talking about dehydrated vegetables again:

for instance... can i treat the dried maters like sun-dried maters -- as in DON'T dilute their intensity?  or should i rehydrate everything before using, in which case, what happens to cooking times?  if i wanted to make a stew... can dehydrated veggies stand up to crock pot treatment or does that just wipe out their beautifully preserved virtues?

you may be thinking something along the lines of "i wonder if anyone ever actually gets to EAT at Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé?" yes, smartass, when i cook, there is plenty of eating in the aftermath, usually with great praise.  born of starvation, perhaps, but great praise, nonetheless.

in any event -- a favorite phrasing -- this is kind of a belated christmas post.  or winter solstice party, quieted by a blanket of snow.

because as i cast my eyes about -- and sadly, i can -- i note that, once again, it is TW's gift, his plain brown boxes, that is the gift truly given, and -- finally, today, or any minute now -- truly received.

fred just inquired, all polite and all, "ummm, is there an ETA on that stew or should i go ahead and eat a little something now to tide me over?"

i love it when he whispers sweet nothings in these ears.

lest you think kindly of me, or even consider a revision in that direction, here's another epistolary extrait to a dear friend earlier this morning, mid-first cup of coffee, and after the dehydrated veggie soliloquy (she's a good cook), an extract having to do with me and my various bitchy attitudes at Christmas time:

bitter and fed up?  me? 

i kept thinking:  my stepmom, stepsister, and brother grader boob are all gathered at the beach, celebrating xmas the way i grew up celebrating it... i actually have a family that might welcome me... and here i am, doing THIS. 

yes, i about fell out of bed -- i got an email from my mom and stepsis, and one from the boob, separately.  they were nice, friendly, sweet.  it's like all anyone was waiting for was for dad to croak.  it reminds me of when he did his in-country service in vietnam -- that was the happiest year of our lives.

how ugly and crass is that comment, hmmm?  and yet i made it, and repeat it, here.  the feeling in my stomach the day he returned home had nothing to do with the joys of reunion, but the reignited fears of failure, and grief over the death of freedoms and lightness, the death, the agonal breaths, of lightness.

so, john lennon, yes, this is christmas... and what have i done?  nothing yet.  but i am getting ready to do the most ancient form of the freestyle crawl, not out of primordial slime, or even out of algae-flowered moat water, but out of this blasted bed, into the power chair, with a stop to freshen up, so as not to scare the genetically indentured domestic manor staff* on duty this fine afternoon -- finally heading out, smiling and humming, to one of my favorite kitchens in this wing of the place. (it has the cleanest spit and many shiny, copper-bottomed cookware, with just enough ladles hanging about, for ladling, and usually with sven and/or cabana boy hanging about, as well, for company.)

ETA on the stew?  ha! your guess is as good as mine.



* i've yet to publish the definitive documentation, nor have i made a clear explanation of how the genetically indentured domestic manor staff came into being, for i kinda fear for my life should i do so, but i did dip a toe in those waters, briefly, at the beginning of the infamous Looking Up the Garderobe Chute post.

LATE-BREAKING ADDENDUM:  We are proud to announce the successful creation and consumption of a delicious stew.  It had depth.  It had just enough heat for a first go-round with the beautiful peppers and chiles and tomatoes.  Two huge bowls, normally dedicated to pasta dishes, were consumed per diner, and more might have been eaten were it not for the necessity to finish off the remains of Fred's various birthday cakes.  For my brethren and sistren stewmeisters, I used a potato-onion-tomato-cream base and built from there.  Booze was involved, also chicken (Did I mention an emergent need for protein?  Fast and easy protein?  Think "protein whore, protein skank," and whaddaya think?  CHICKEN!), plus roasted, shredded, beautifully crunchy brussels sprouts, diced sweet, sweet carrots.  As for spices, I was a bit boring -- sage, rosemary... but mostly thyme.  No matter what flavor profiles were considered, my mind kept returning to thyme.
Next attempt -- probably next Wednesday, on behalf of the Militant Lesbian Existentialist Feminists (and darling Fred) for their Wednesday night supper, when I will be aiming for more heat.  I am training those women to have asbestos palates.  It's a necessity in this new millennium, this new world.

Fly Boys

Poor, dear Buddy remains captionless in his recent dead-eye photo.  He looks absolutely devastated, but then, he always looks absolutely devastated.

When I was in high school, I was extremely bored, extremely obsessed with tennis, and determined to develop a reputation as a bad ass.  The tennis obsession was hard to hide, impossible to discourage, and resulted in being undefeated during my entire three-years on the team.  Of course, I played #6 singles and #3 doubles, so how hard could it have been, right?  We fervently "stacked the deck," but not in my case.  Our number 3 in singles was actually our number one, and our number 5 was actually our number 2 or 3, depending on how hard her week was.

She was, for a while, my best friend.  Her name was Teresa.  I thought she was beautiful, with long straight hair that looked professionally streaked, but wasn't.  She walked with a lilt, sort of took a little bounce when she pushed off the ground with her big toe.  Her face was very plain, but so was mine, so I thought she looked pretty.  Her father took a long time to die of lung cancer.  He was career military, air force, a flight mechanic, and somehow I thought that all meant that they were being taken care of.  Her mom worked a lot.  Her dad lived in a brown plaid recliner -- which would not recline -- with an oxygen tank hung over the back left of that Archie Bunker chair.  It struck me as odd, even knowing how sick he was, that I never saw him in uniform, be that a zip-up flight suit, overalls, blues.  No name tags, no decorations.  Their oven never seemed to be in working order, they did not leave each other notes, and tended to rarely look one another in the eye when conversing, and most conversations ended "okay, okay, okay."

They didn't have a lovely calligraphic version of Royal Canadian Air Force's John Magee's sonnet, "High Flight," beautifully framed and subtly spotlighted.  Some kids learn Bible verses by heart as their earliest accomplishment in Rote.  Not I, though I tended to stop, sometimes suddenly, sometimes joyfully, half way through the fifth line.  When my father built his "dream" house, with his "dream" study, the poem was hung behind his ominous desk, and carefully offset by fine photos, finely framed in matching dark woods, of all the "birds" he'd ever flown.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

I've wondered sometimes, as I have become a decrepit piece o' crap, myself, if it wasn't so much that the butt ugly chair would not recline as it was that Teresa's Dad's arms and legs had become either too weak or too mavericky to make the darned thing obey.  I have what used to be a lovely leather recliner, bought at the suggestion of MDVIP Go-To-Guy, back when my right leg started to go really, really bad.  The cats loved it, and I was stupid enough to think I could train them quickly and well enough not to want to arch their tight little backs and stretch those claws luxuriously into that leather.  I used the cats as my Frustration Referent because I was too embarrassed to admit that my legs couldn't push the chair into position.  Structurally, there's not a thing wrong with the chair, and I even bought a cheap (but cute!) matching ottoman to make up for my physical inability to make it metamorphose... but I am embarrassed by how it looks.

He was something of a dedocated dick, as some men are, but he was her father, and so Teresa lived a life of hard work, kept her head down, helped her Mom, cared for her younger siblings, and somehow managed to keep everyone's hands and minds off of her tennis.

I would pick her up, a quick beep on the ominous horn of my 1965 baby blue pristine Cadillac, and she'd come bouncing down the front concrete steps, neat as a pin in one of her three tennis outfits.  She had two white, classic tennis dresses that she reserved for competition and a pair of white shorts to practice in -- like most everyone, really, except that she alternated the same two tee shirts, one orange, one blue, both plain, advertising nothing.  She wore Tretorn tennis shoes with incredibly white anklets.  She was the first person I knew who was completely sold on Yonex rackets.  Her racket made my shots sit up, begging to be clobbered.  In her hands?  She was the Queen of Spin, deadly at the net.  And yet she had one of the flattest serves ever, with a toss so high that I was sometimes tempted to jog around the court a few times while we all waited for the ball to descend enough so that she could flatly whack it.

That was the only element of our doubles play that got under *my* skin.  The return of her serve tended to be aimed at my mouth or perfectly down the alley as I cowered near the ground, protecting my plain face.

Now... as for what might have irritated Teresa about my doubles game?  Well, choking comes to mind.  Not an occasional choke for those occasional tight moments.  No, choking like not holding service -- not even once -- during an entire match.

It came in the form of a frozen back and a spastic arm.  My lower back refused anything remotely like an arch;  My toss began at hip level, entirely powered by a jerking wrist.  It was the ugliest thing ever.

And she'd never turn around.  She never came to talk it over.  She never had any suggestions (not by then, not at match time... in practice, sure, but always something like: "So why can't you do that when we play X and X?").

My coach would disappear to the other end of the courts.  She never talked to me about it either.

The one time I got my Dad to come watch me compete, I started my period during the match, lost one of my contacts (even then I was "legally blind"), and, yes, choked.  He left before I won.

My greatest familial experience with tennis came with Brother Grader Boob, home from college, where he was quite the racquetball phenom, bearing, in fact, the titles of both singles and doubles champ for his area. He competed both indoors and out, but preferred three-wall outdoor sport.  There seemed to be infinite variations to the game, something that tennis is sorely lacking.  Even messing around with "wall ball" avec Brother Boob was a riot.

So he would play half-court, using his short racquet, and a standard fuzzy tennis ball.  I'd play the way I usually played.  Of course.  We messed a bit with the rules, something about number of bounces, something about service lines, but not much.  It was so much fun, particularly when the courts over at the country club were full and Suzy Q and Buffy were forced to join the rest of us slugs at the beautiful downtown courts in the park.

Anyway, I choked through our entire state doubles match.  I drop-served, so as to at least get the ball into play.  We lost.  You can probably guess by exactly how much, if I tell you that we played beautifully when receiving.  But between her flat, here-I-come serve and my oh-hell drop-serves, well...

Teresa ended up with a tennis scholarship -- one of those female things, a drop in a bucket, added to an offer to work slave hours at the library, all glommed onto the heft of a loan.  It was a good school, and I hope she did well there, had maybe some fun, too.  It was a shore-side state university, a lovely place to be, a very different place from where she'd been.

Ha!  You'd never guess where this post was meant to go.  I referred to little Buddy's "dead-eye" photo, which made me think, of course, of "Dead-Eye" Jones, my English teacher.  She had an artificial eye, she was big, pretended to be mean, and I loved to imitate her.  Until the day, that day that happens to every bad high school jokester, the day the person you are aping appears behind you without you having the least clue.

As in my favorite crucifixion song goes:  "[She] never said a mumblin' word."

She did not need to.  She owned me for the rest of high school.  And she never turned me in for playing tennis during fifth period when I was supposed to be in French.  She laughed big long belly laughs when we barracaded a classroom against an unloved substitute who kept stomping her little foot in anger, yelling "Open that door, open that door, right now!" She never called my folks about the pimply airman I french-kissed while waiting for the fifth period bell to ring.  She gave me good advice on the last day of school.  "Everything you think shows on your face.  Be careful with that."

Then, I wanted to write about tennis, it being French Open time and all.

I didn't mean to write about Teresa, and looking back at what I did write... I wish I really had.

We did not have a fight or officially even end our friendship.  It died a natural death, in my opinion.  In my stepmother's opinion, it was an impossibility to begin with, due to different social strata.

My stepmother.  Now that'd be a post.  She'd have been a perfect Brahmin.  Teresa was not untouchable, except, well, really, yes, she was.  Her clothes may have been clean, neat, and mended, but nothing matched in that breathless, thrown-together matchy way.  She didn't accept invitations to our home.  She was ugly. (As for me and my beauty?  The first time I plucked my unibrow, she said, swirling a scotch and soda, "Oh, profderien, that was your one good feature.")

Teresa and I were both barely hanging on, and we hung on through tennis.  We knew we could always find each other on a court somewhere, and that town had three options -- on base, at the country club, or in the lovely, lovely park.  She hung on through some very tough things, as did I.  Thanks to life and tennis, we learned to let them go, and in so doing, we lost each other.

Teresa and her bleeping slo-mo flat-as-a-pancake serve and a slowly suffocating father.  Me and my social anxiety, my various shames.

We'll call this the Father's Day-French Open combo post.

But I still want some suggestions for Buddy's Caption.  If it tugs at your heartstrings at all, Fred is determined that Buddy is feeling ill, or at least, "blue."  He is basing this conclusion on the fact that Buddy has decided to sleep on the living room rug rather than in the ether of his cat tree condo.  Some dude who passes himself off as the Cat Whisperer on Animal Planet claims that this is a bad sign.  Cats should want to be as high as possible and when they go low... well, uh-oh.

My point of view?  Buddy runs around like a crazed rabbit, plays fetch with abandon, chows down with gusto, drinks, pees and poops as if these were the most natural things in the world.  He comes to me for head pats and gentle finger chews.

Give the lad a caption, would 'ya?

Oh, and Happy Father's Day, and congratulations, Rafa!

In terms of what's actually happening -- surgery is Monday, June 18.  Today is another surgical pre-op, with one more later this week.  I'm stressed.  My hips were x-rayed and the one that is killing me looks okay, but the one that I put up with is in dire need of replacement.  Ha. Ha. Ha.  A former fracture of my sternum (from CPR) has decided to torture me again.  Why, no one knows.  I look the wrong way and bones break.  Breathing is interesting.  My kidney labs might look screwed up to the uninitiated, but really they are fine, I am just dreadfully dehydrated from daily fevers.

on loaded guns and father's day

Father's Day, for me, is a shameful day. Understand, please, that the shame is mine, not his.

Honor thy father and thy mother is the fifth commandment in the Christian Top Ten, and the first commandment to add a Carrot to the Stick.

Honor your father and your mother,

that your days may be long

in the land which the Lord your God gives you

--Exodus 20:12 (RSV)

One of my favorite off-the-cuff and exceedingly clever remarks to make? "Ewww, that is sooooo Old Testament!"

It's so wonderfully scathing a thing to say in response to some wannabe's harsh judgment or other. Sniff.

After dropping promptly out of college during my second semester, I toyed with this course and that course, using up precious elective credits while working as a nurse's aide in what was euphemistically called a "neurological post-intensive care unit." (Think carrots, peas, corn, eggplant.)

I lived with Baber, a drop-dead gorgeous woman who suffered various addictions -- to cocaine, marijuana, tequila, moonshine, cigarettes, and sex. She was lots of fun, for a while, until her Probation Officer began dropping by too often, and for the wrong reasons. If you get my blaring drift.

Somewhere toward the end of our year together, The Baber lost her job as a Respiratory Therapist, became a short-skirted waitress, began to deal coke out of our apartment (she had, believe it or not, a hollow-ended pool cue that sometimes came into play), and received her second Driving Under the Influence citation. Actually, I think these things are listed in the wrong order. Whatever. It all seemed to happen at the same time, belying cause-and-effect neatness.

Part of Baber's DUI sentence included the temporary suspension of her driver's license. She insisted I go to court with her that long ago early morning, getting us there right on time in her jaunty Toyota stick shift, expertly maneuvering into a choice parking spot three-quarters up a tree-lined, steep, and narrow street.

I learned to drive in a vintage pristine 1965 baby blue Cadillac, which resembled nothing so much as a boat, after which I was gifted with a white 1963 Ford Falcon, my first automotive love. That was the extent of my experience as a driver. (Please note that as I got older, so did my cars.)

So it was no surprise, to me, at least, that I almost got us killed on the way home. We lived in a mountain town, a *hilly* mountain town, to boot, which helped not at all as I struggled to hold my place in line at stop signs and to respond to Baber's barked, angst-driven instructions.

After that, my roomie called on her many other friends to get her from points A to B to wherever.

I remember a strong feeling of disconnect during those final weeks of living with Baber. I was working Night Shift at the hospital so as to free up my days and evenings for two classes: The Bible as Literature and The History of Western Civilization, Part One.

People like to play the game of "where were you when...?" -- I guess because it creates a reassuring collective -- something we had more of when we were less evolved. Where were you when John Kennedy was shot, and Robert? Where were you when you heard that Reverend King had been assassinated, that four were dead in Ohio? Where were you when they tore down the Berlin Wall, when Nixon resigned? When Lennon fell, and George died, and Pinochet got off scot-free? Where were you when the Challenger blew up, when the Twin Towers came down? When Michael Jackson overdosed, when Obama won the election, when the market crashed?

Where was I when I first encountered Plato's man in a cave, chained both fore and aft to his fellows, facing a blank wall, that blank tablet on which was cast the shadows of things?

Sigh. Everyone fancies themselves a semiotician.

Reference the shadow.
Reference the thing, itself.
Reference the thing that cast the shadow.

Where was I in that famously pivotal moment when I was washed in the Allegory of the Cave? Turns out, it was one experience that took place at two different times. Once at its first reading, in that mountain city, in the campus library, where I sat peering out a huge plateglass window at the golden light, setting. The bookend of the experience came 6 or 7 years later. I was walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, and came upon a beautiful blue shoe, a woman's pump, silk. One left shoe and I was awash in the arbitrary nature of the sign, and in what Plato makes Socrates call "truth"!

What a rush.

Okay, let's get it out of our collective system. This was years ago, before hegemony and eurocentric became part of my stilted academic vocabulary, definitely prior to the time when I began to question the validity of The Canon, and a few universities away from reading Gramsci (as a requirement).

I was as if lost at Baber's place, never feeling it even half mine, despite paying half the rent. Work was rarely fulfilling, and if the Allegory of the Cave could rock my world, imagine my stupefaction when faced with the poet Isaiah, with Socrates drinking hemlock because his principal and the Superintendent of the School District deemed his teaching impious and too snarky for impressionable students. [In case you are wondering, I've topped out today at 101.3.]

Time with her was not a waste. I made some good and lasting friends, earned some easy college credits, and saved my money. I met a man and fell in love. I met lots of men, in fact, mostly musicians from Baber's work. I generally found them in the kitchen, searching desperately for coffee, happy to let me brew a strong pot while they played guitar in the living room. Baber was never an early riser.

But as someone famously said, about something else entirely: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."

Baber had a gun that somehow made its way under my pillow, and the man I loved was called home. I felt a failure at 19, and spent 50-60 hours a week talking to people who literally oozed, telling their parents, their pregnant wives and lost-without-her husbands that "you never know..." I was sleeping with the husband of a bisexual friend -- actually both Baber and I were -- in exchange for unlimited organic carrot juices at his downtown health food store -- also for pot and blueberry shine.

One day, the precariousness of everything became too much. It had been well over a year since I had called... home. As if it were a habit, I picked up the phone and dialed numbers like an automaton.

The rift between me and my father is bottomless and so wide I cannot see the other side.

"Please come get me," I whispered.

"I'll be there tomorrow afternoon," Dad said. "Be ready to go..."

I may have 3 semester hours that were awarded for the apt completion of The Bible as Literature, but I had forgotten, let's say, that though Deuteronomy and Exodus are credited with the Ten Commandments, they cannot hold a candle to the grave legislation of Leviticus, written around the time of the Babylonian exile, and not, as some hold, by Moses -- but by that amorphous group designated P, for Priestly Sources.

"You shall rise before the gray headed and honor the presence of an old man, and fear your God: I am the LORD" (Leviticus 19:32).

Reverence, fear, curse, honor, obey, mock, scorn, contempt -- Biblical parent language is loaded language.

As I write this, it has been 20 years since I have spoken with or seen my father. I think of him everyday, which does neither him nor me any good, but it is, in all honesty, the very best I can do. I know you think otherwise. Sometimes, usually early in the morning, in the kitchens not making coffee for musicians, the man I loved long dead, and Baber's rabid enthusiasm finally understood as the manic portion of bipolar disease... I also think that I could do better.

There are no guns in The Manor, nor under my pillow -- and there never will be. That's the last full measure of my devotion.




My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

--Emily Dickinson

Mitigating Factors: Dame Marjorie Chardin, P-876954, and Nathan Hale

Do you remember Uncle Victor, Harold's one-armed relative, the sleeve of his dress uniform folded neatly and rigged to a mechanized salute? The one described as "General Bradley's right hand man"?

The one who said: The two best wars this country ever fought were against the Gerrys. I say get the Krauts on the other side of the fence where they belong. Let's get back to the kind of enemy worth killing, and the kind of war this whole country can support.

While I wasn't exposed to statements exactly like that, as a military brat, I did grow up tapping my toes to the tune of regret. Regret that the average soldier was more interested in the benefits promised after a few piddly years of service; Regret that black men were enlisting in disproportionate numbers; Regret that the military found itself more and more in the position of a finishing school for people that never really even had a start.

I am still confused about my father's view of war. He did not love it or hope for it, though he did wax poetically nostalgic about the unity war supposedly gifted to this country prior to, say, 1950.

Brilliant, in some ways, my father rationalized his involvement in the decision to kill other men and women. It was, thought he, inevitable that they should die. Therefore, he served proudly as their personal Mitigating Factor.

As Mitigating Factor, he transformed what might otherwise be seen as -- simply -- sanctioned murder, into the cleanest, quickest, most painless death possible.

He was a pilot, of course. Dropping bombs (and other things) -- not onto people but onto strategic targets. Eliminating those targets would advance some battle plan or other, and the smooth advancement of that plan would likely have a domino effect of smoothness on the overarching blueprint for the war.

Fewer of "our boys" would die. The "conflict" would be shortened, the enemy thereby benefitting as much as our own valiant selves. Collateral Damage, meet my Dad, the Mitigating Factor.

I think he was only at peace in the sky, flying high. He didn't become a Total Fart until they pulled him down from up there so as to better pick his brain for its brilliance in organization and logic.

His logic could, and did, drive people crazy. Foundational logic. As if it were so decreed by the Boy Scout Manual, he never did or said anything without the sturdy tripod of an unassailable foundation.

This liberated him from responsibility and guilt, and rendered him always right. He had a heart, and he loved deeply, but those emotional twinges couldn't compare with the imperative to be always right.

Someone who drops bombs on people cannot afford to entertain the notion of being wrong.

So it only followed -- oh, how tired I grew of everything following, everything proceeding logically -- So it only followed that when his 20 year old son, a tall, good-looking, and terribly smart piece of Collateral Damage, bared his soul to reveal that he did not have enough money for food, my Dad, his Mitigating Factor, replied, "You once told me to get out of your life, and I have."

In the world of a Bomb-Dropper, choices and options appear but once and you don’t have the luxury of “opting out” of your choice. It’s all or nothing, black or white. The bombed people are either dead or alive, never wounded, never forever barely there, pursuing promises in prosthetics the way a hormone-driven boy might pursue a twitching skirt.

At the age of 16, I marched into the living room one evening and opined that I would like to, possibly, maybe, if it wouldn’t upset World Harmony overly much, visit my Mother -- from whom I had been separated for roughly a dozen years. It took more courage than I actually had to stand in that precisely decorated room and make that particular request. I clearly had not considered how it might be transformed by Foundational Logic, or how I might be promptly and expeditiously molded into Collateral Damage by the very dominant Mitigating Factor.

“I will get your luggage down from the attic, you can pack all your things, and leave now,” he answered. Within minutes, he had the trap door and rickety stairs pulled down, and my soft-sided, blue-plaid luggage set came flying and bouncing down, tossed one right after the other: 3 suitcases of graduated sizes, an overnight bag, plus one hard-sided makeup case that I inherited from my step-mother.

I've never much enjoyed arguing either side of nature versus nurture. I see my father's same frightening intransigence in myself, and therefore understand my nagging need to place my absolutism clearly in the Realm of That Which is Good.

And Right. Good, and Right.

I am sure that you can probably find there where I fly above it all and drop bombs for the furtherance of conquest, as well. Excuse me for excusing myself from that much insight.

I haven't seen or spoken to the man since 1989. I look at pictures of his father in old age and figure that he must look roughly the same now. My aunt, his sister, exploded the myth of that grandfather as kindly some time ago. I wrote about it, here. For some reason, my reaction has settled into complacency. I am not gifted with logic, for my thinking goes something like this:

Granddaddy was not the kind and gentle man I [thought I] knew. He terrorized and beat his children. So it makes sense that he was an orphan. That he was an orphan explains everything.

Huh? Do you follow that? I don't and I am the one thinking it.

Dad did not just bomb the life out of people. He also did brave things like fly a huge, lumbering (indefensible) aircraft very low over enemy territory so as to rescue a group of injured compatriots. We called them "hospital planes." They were converted C-141s, not exactly lithe and agile aircraft.

He was practically the Patron Saint of Hospital Plane Jockeys, and there were large numbers of female flight nurses who adored him. They would hoot and holler at him when he rode around base. He ate it up.

There is a remarkable photo essay, I suppose it might be called, that the Denver Post recently published on the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30. It is called "Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War."

In the middle of all these words, I had to stop and look at something. I trust the visual, even knowing that it, too, can be manipulated. I needed to feel sweltering tropical heat again, that heaviness, that being-under-water feeling. Every afternoon at four, I would sit on the porch and watch the line of fierce rain travel across the rice paddies, the verdant hills. We lived right next to the Perimeter Fence. Negrito women who could not take care of their newborn babies threw them over that fence in the hope that an MP would find the tiny thing and take it to the hospital.

For some reason, an image formed in my mind of an MP with a wee enfant skewered on the end of a bayonet. That never happened, of course.

I find myself increasingly tired of people and their antics, even as a weird encompassing love for people is born in me. We are so foolish, so full of ourselves. So fundamentally fucked up.

Harold says to Maude: You sure have a way with people. She famously responds: Well, they're my species! -- and we all smile to ourselves, indulgent.

Of course, she waltzes through the film with a number (P-876954) tattooed on her forearm, as well. This is supposed to make the odd, beloved character an even greater life force, of course, careening toward suicide with unparalleled joie de vivre and Cat Stevens crooning "trouble..." in the background.

(A Curiosity: I have noted, over these many years of forcing my friends to watch Harold and Maude, that there are two, and only two, types of viewers in my acquaintance. There are those who come away chattering about daisies, and incessantly blathering about how they "feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [point to a daisy] yet allow themselves be treated as that [gesture to a field of daisies]." Then there are the people who realize that Maude's munificent world view was born of essential and terrible hardship, and maintained in spite of naked and recurring evil. It scares me sometimes that I, and people of my ilk, do not engage in any synthesis. One is either a daisy-pointing dolt or a sarcastic bit of Damaged Goods.)

I have dreamt about that film often enough. In my succinct dream style, the film just has a few scenes, pretty faithfully reproduced.

There is the moment where Maude announces, "I took the pills an hour ago. I'll be gone by midnight," and we see the horror of comprehension spread across Bud Cort's young face and hear his scream coalesce with an ambulance's siren.

Not quite superimposed, more like... overlapping, is the scene where Harold's modified hearse flies over the cliff.

But, annoying as a computer popup screen, is interspersed Uncle Victor, the stump of his right arm flying up into a salute, crying: "Just like Nathan Hale... That's what this country needs -- more Nathan Hales."

Ears to hear

Real life. It comes as a shock.

My aunt Nancy is 75 years old and looks marvelous -- she is trim, pretty, blond, well-dressed, tootling around in her Cadillac. Her brother, my father, also only drives Cadillacs.

He is best off left as "her brother," or "Barry," or even just he/him.

My grandfather called me "doll baby," and Nancy told me today, in between anecdotes about how he beat her until she bled, that I was his favorite. I knew him as a benign and loving blind man, a retired pharmacist, who was a world class gardener and animal expert. He taught me how to compost, how to know when zucchini is ripe, the best kinds of tomato for certain soils, the names, habits, and calls of regional birds, and the right design of birdhouse to make available. He paid me a penny for every Japanese beetle I trapped. He almost beat her to death one day when she refused to take a dose of Castor oil and hid under her parents' bed.

My stepmother, Margaret, is probably the person, after my grandfather, whom I would have characterized as most kind, gentle, caring, and just plain fun. I was lucky enough to live at home after the others had run off into their lives as students and wives, racquetball champions and Beowulf scholars, scraping by or thriving, depending on the day. I found myself telling Aunt Nancy about the afternoons of boating on the lake, especially that day when a storm blew in so quickly and we "capsized" -- hooting all the while (until it began to thunder and lightening).

Hmmm. You know what? I began a post a few days ago, and just left it undone... because the memories hurt -- the memories were so sweet to me, so dear. "Yadda yadda..." are you thinking? Well, get the hell out of my blog, then, you turdescent piece of crap in triplicate!

[Where is the good captain Haddock when you need him?]

Nancy was talking about how she knew she'd never speak, much less renew a relationship with,
either of her brothers. My mind, not exactly a steel trap, traveled to my stepmother Margaret and those halcyon days on the lake, the glory days of my life, I suppose.

She waited until I paused, then said -- in a voice that was studied, loud, clear: "Margaret is a weak woman."

Margaret, if you are out there and have stumbled upon my blog, know that I came to your defense -- well, not really. I was shocked and demanded an explanation. What I got was reasoning that -- sorry to say -- was impeccable. Since I am imagining you reading this, I'll just cut to the chase: "Think about it. What kind of woman would your father pick?"

She said that you were profoundly deaf now, and I am very sorry that is so. I hope that you still make spaghetti sauce in second position, that you still dance as you clean, that you've been back to France, that maybe you've taught a little.

I hope, dare I say it... Of course, I dare. I hope that life has been more than an art appreciation course. (Yes, I hope the same for myself.)

Are you a weak person?

Did you know that my grandfather beat his children to the point of bleeding?

Did you not hear the echos of abuse that strummed through all the lives around you? Did you not recognize the intransigence for what it was?

Am I making you the black sheep, the focal point, because it is easy to do?

Undoubtedly.

Anyway. She talked about "Uncle Otie" and his grist mill. About Harrison and "The Farm." About Reba and how, yes, I was there when she died. About her grandfather's jewelry store (your grandfather also had a jewelry store, yes?).

She worries that no one cares about "the history" of "The Family." Part of me wants to help her write the texts she struggles to compose; Part of me wants to let it all die, decompose, rot, stink, eat itself up. She is a brave woman in many ways -- she is really the antithesis of everything I was lead to believe growing up.

She seeks to stop the cycle of abuse, telling her sons and her grandchildren that they can always come to her, that they will always have a home, that there is nothing they could do to make her stop loving them. She realizes, though, that there is a good measure of work and insight necessary on the part of those to whom she makes these grand offers. Like I said, she is a brave and (what I neglected to mention) intelligent woman.

It hits me now -- she never mentioned my grandmother, her mother. It's true -- I don't even know what to say about her. Whispering, always whispering; Secrets, always secrets. "When I die, this will be yours..."

My "folks" (I'm sorry, I don't know how to designate them anymore) -- they tried to get me worked up, after her death, about how what should have been left to me was "taken" by Nancy. I didn't care then, and don't care now. It was all part of the anti-Nancy campaign of which I was not a part, anyway.

My last memory of her is so sad. I almost hurt her. We were leaving and were congregating near the front door to do the final hugs -- and I almost knocked her over. She looked scared and small. I felt like a clumsy dolt.

Actually, that is all I feel like these days, too. A clumsy dolt.

I am in loads of pain today -- I cleaned house like a maniac this morning and feel very rotten, physically. Emotionally, I am glad that Fred has gone back to the infusion Center to get my antibiotics and lab results, because I just want to cry for awhile.

For Nancy and her brothers, for my brothers, for my granddaddy who beat his children, for my Nana who saw her only worth as coming after death. For Margaret, who had a choice.

Nancy is the only person in my world who knows the pain about my oldest brother -- and the only person who could so knowingly exclaim, "But it is not his fault! He has nothing to apologize for!" -- when I relayed that the other Brother-Unit would have nothing to do with him -- oh never mind... the story is long. And tiresome. And she's right.

She came bearing gifts! A great food basket that Fred has already plundered. A lovely tureen from Jewel and Jimmy. The best thing? A drawing someone did to honor Jimmy after his death -- for all his work on behalf of the Audubon Society -- of cardinals.

Because when all of this stuff is weirding out my mind, I can think back to the animals -- everyone seemed to truly love the animals.

And vegetables.

Bless her bones for coming, bless her bones for speaking her truth.

Do I have ears to hear?