Keep the conversation going

If you've been out of work long enough, everybody wants to know what you've been up to. Whatcha been up to, poot? Lemme tell you, it's one big annoyance, to have to come up with something on the spur of the moment. You'll be sitting there on the saggy couch, feet up, toes curled, big fraying holes in your socks, and they stink, too, those dogs of yours, which means that you're in your element, having bodily asserted yourself about as well as anyone could in this wishy-washy world, an exemplary male human animal, picking strings of red meat out from between your teeth, then washing them down with box wine, when somebody calls you up and asks you what you've been up to.

You know, people make fun of box wine, but it does the trick just as good as the bottled stuff and anyway the world is running out of cork. Hell, the world is running out of a lot of things. Overshoot. But you can't worry about everything.

Especially when you're sitting there, watching TV, listening to supposedly real people yapping about themselves, their health, their weight, the money they've lost or won, their houses and cars and whatnot, so many of them crying over spilt milk and now waiting for their ship to come in, or for the rapture to carry them up, or whatever you call it when Big Daddy smiles down on you and then knocks you on your arse. It's something, watching these otherwise unremarkable humans demanding their right to emote on cue -- as if any of what they're experiencing is true -- giving their TV audience one big lesson in needless histrionics. The art of getting worked up over nothing. And then the pharmaceutical ads come on, always starring people your age or older, silver foxes lurching slo-mo through golden fields of grain, big synthetic smiles pasted on their jaundiced faces, the music jaunty and shallow, people who look as though they've never been sick in their entire lives. "Hey Mr. Lipitor, whatcha been up to?" How effin sick is that?

Quist used to tell me that people don't really expect an honest answer when they ask what you've been up to. They're satisfied if you say, "Not much but I'm feeling pretty good." That's usually enough to keep the conversation going until you move on to another topic, like the movies, or football, or books.

I remember

Where are you? I was your boy once, fair-haired, smooth-skinned, a singer, a story-teller, a goof-ball, that's what you called me once, a goof-ball, happy to lie with my head nestled in your damp lap, listening to your soft singing, I know that hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but it was true -- you were the fairest flower, you called me your little savage, and I tried to live up to the name. I danced for you and saw how you smiled. Boys performing for girls, boys so fragile, so silly, despite their big bones, their hard-ons, and their dirty mouths. You knew what I was. You saw me dance and you dispelled my awkwardness with that thousand-watt smile of yours. Lit up my whole world. You know, darlin, I lived for that smile, that look, those eyes. And when you sang "Down By the Salley Gardens," I cried.

In your eyes, I was better than I was anywhere else in the whole world, at least it felt that way. Your romantic fair-haired boy. These days, it feels like I'm making it up, the story of the two of us, riding across the southern tier of New York State, succumbing to the American dream of highway freedom, listening to the wind, heading west, a little savage and a sensible girl, wedded to the wind by a music of their own making. Everyone was trying their hand at ecstasy in those days. Past Binghamton on 17, remembering John Gardner's fatal ride, you said, there is no such thing as moral fiction, no, there is no such thing any more, and both of us became sad and quiet, giving in to the illusion of freedom between Endicott and Elmira, the four lanes unspooling out over the ancient hills of the Allengheny Plateau, that ribbon of highway. We stopped at the glassworks in Corning, forsaken, forgotten, holding each other and singing, singing brave little love songs. Just like in the movies. Watching craftsmen blow the molten glass into fantastic shapes. A crystal seahorse. Stars surrounding a half moon. Lilies.

Where are you today? Tonight? All my troubles, all my pain, you know how hard I tried to get it out in the music, but the music only lasts so long, you can only keep banging on the keys for so long. Effin boy grows up and he's got to make a living. Call it reality, darlin. I am lost unto this world. Effin girl grows up and she's working two jobs to keep the kids clothed and fed. Today I got an e-mail from someone I haven't seen in twenty years or more. And now they expect the badger to come out of its hole, shed its private male stink and re-enter the world of broken promises and haunted melodies. Good luck, darlin, good luck in trying to work it out, where the time went, how your fair-haired boy forgot the tune, how the crowded world closed in on you and me, on all of us. Go ahead -- write your e-mails and hope someone will respond.

My old buddy Rich used to contend that college was just a rest home for burnt-out adolescents, that our prolonged childhood would eventually catch up with us, that we would wind up spoiled brats at fifty, staring dumbly into the Well of Narcissus, surrounded by our useless toys, effin earplugs hanging out of our ears, all our drugs legally prescribed now, wearing the accoutrements of the good life, as we conceived of it back then, the little savage and the sensible girl, all grown up now.

Sometime that January -- it was cold and icy up there in Ithaca all winter -- we went to the movies, I forget if the art house was on State or Green. Fellini's Amarcord was showing, that merciful and generous act of memory, such a funny vivid dream, you would hum that Nino Rota accordion tune for weeks afterward. Remember the soft-brained uncle who climbed up a tree at the picnic and wouldn't come down? We knew people like that. The movie ended with peacocks walking around in a fake cinema snowstorm, so we buttoned up and walked out into a real snowstorm. No one is prepared for the kinds of things life throws at you. Who was it said, it'll make you strong if it doesn't kill you first? Yeah, I guess so.

I'm writing this with no regrets, no answers either, just a feeling of tenderness and deep gratitude for those light-hearted days. This life may not go all the way, but it's gone a helluva lot further than we once thought it might. Take care, darlin, and bundle up. Someday we'll meet again.

The supper of the lamb

At dusk on Holland Mountain Road, heading toward Milton, I swerved slightly to avoid a fox trotting purposively along the shoulder, his resplendent tail caught in the headlights. There was no one coming in the other direction. I was sleepy though and the road was slick, which meant the maneuver was a little more heart-stopping than it should've been. People tell you to steer into a skid, but the action is hardly instinctual.

I wound up some seven, eight feet into some deep wet grass bordering a golf course. My heart thumped and the car filled with a sweet damp smell. Wet leaves. Mud. The engine running. I remember it sounded normal. An odd phrase ran through my head: "Keep the home fires burning." I was uninjured and so, apparently, was the car. I've been driving a Subaru for many years -- up here in winter a four-wheel drive is mandatory -- so I wasn't worried about getting out of the mud. I looked in the rear-view mirror. A frightened and embarrassed ape grinned back at me. The right thing to have done would've been to back out slowly onto the road and drive away, into the supposed safety of the routine.

But it was too quiet there, and an eerie light hovered above the manicured fairways, and I could hear a stream somewhere splashing over rocks, and I thought to myself, so much of this miraculous world I take for granted. Why tonight? The effin ape wanted to pray, to tell someone or something that he would do better, that he would live inside his skin the way an animal does, conscious only of the present, without care for the morrow, or regret for the past. But the ape couldn't pray. The ape had lost the ability and the tongue. The best the dumb brute could do was follow the fox into the brush.

I stared out at the dark green serenity of the golf course. The oncoming night was warm and the mist had lifted. I shut off the engine. Hush. Who amongst us is still good at it? Prayer. Acknowledging the great unknown. Honoring the sacred. Anyone you know, poot? I sat there and remembered Father Capon -- what was it, thirty-five years ago? -- out on the Island, in Garden City, at the Mercer School of Theology. Hunting the divine fox, he called it. Yeah, right. Just like tonight. Tell me, Father, who is hunting who?

The land of make believe

There are people who believe that watching Gone With The Wind on a video screen is watching a movie.
--There are people who believe that eating a McDonald's Quarter Pounder is eating a hamburger.
--There are people who believe that listening to Wayne Shorter through earbuds on an iPod is listening to jazz.
--There are people who believe that drinking Bud Light is drinking beer.
--There are people who believe that reading Nostromo on a Kindle is reading a book.
--There are people who believe that television news is news.
--There are people who believe that laying off workers to increase profitability is managing a business.
--There are people who believe that praying to a Big Daddy in the Sky is medicine.
--There are people who believe that staying in touch by phone is staying in touch.
--There are people who believe that a long drunken weekend in Cancun is foreign travel.
--There are people who believe that shooting at animals with a high-powered rifle through a telescopic sight out of a helicopter is hunting.
--There are people who believe that two underfed Russian teenagers copulating in front of a webcam is arousing.
--There are people who believe computing is thinking.
And there are people who think, oh lord, help me in my unbelief.

Two Poems

The Ferry

Each morning
I cross the river

Each evening
I cross the river

It is never the same river
It is never the same "I"

There is one river
I am not ready to cross

The Closed Room

Last night I awoke
in a room without windows or doors
and lay for a long time trying
not to open my eyes,
wondering if the light
I was seeing
would go out.

This morning I awoke
in a room with a window of frost
and imagined seeing clouds and buildings
and people going to work,
wondering if I opened my eyes
what I imagined
would stay put.

There is only so much light in the mind.