Bastards

I don’t know what
struck him,
but he stopped
and turned to me.
“Don’t let the bastards get you.”
Soft, serious words.
“What?” Not understanding.
“Don’t let the bastards get you.”
Each word solid, firm.
“What bastards, Dad?”
“You know…the bastards!”
The end, final, frustrated.
Taking his hand, sinewed
from years of sailing,
and veiny with age,
noting how dark his
skin was against mine.
I think,
he will always be more
Arab than I, always
tied to a heritage I
know little of.

We resume our endless loops
through the Alzheimer’s unit.
Returning to song,
old habit for our voices.
Songs he sung to his children,
and I in turn to mine.
Gilbert and Sullivan
come to Greenville –
one afternoon only.
Our songs neither soft nor subtle;
unaware of those listening.
Lost in our own little world.
One little world
of many there.
We sing together of
pirates and orphans,
modern major generals and nocturnal stealth.
One song following another as
one foot follows the other.

Walking had been Dad’s
way of late – so Mom said.
More compulsion than exercise,
some unknown impetus
that had made him thin
since the last time I saw him.
So on this visit home,
I walked with Dad
to be by his side,
to know this incarnation
of his ever devolving self.
I sang with him
how I wished I had
sung with him
when he was
strong and whole,
and adulthood was my
aspiration and not avocation.
That walk and those songs
for me were acts of
love and regret.
My hand clinging to his,
not wanting to lose
what was left.
Knowing I already had.

It would be the last time
intimacy could be
shared between us.
When next I sang to
Dad, it would be softly,
at his death bed,
when he was twisted
by Alzheimers,
and feverish to be shed of it.
So I took with me
from our walk and song
the only thing I could -
his final vague and personal
message to me.
And in all the years between,
I have honored my father’s
wishes as a son should.
I have kept my
weather eye out, and
the bastards have yet
to get me, Dad.

Circular Logic

When I was a little guy, I thought of growing up, what it meant to be an adult.  It was not as deep as it sounds.  I probably imagined super hero would be one of my career choices.  On the list of things that would come with adulthood was driving (were I denied the power of flight), a bigger bed (mine was just fine, but Mom and Dad had a big bed, so I thought it was a perk), and a house (though I couldn’t see why I would ever leave my Mom and Dad, and my brothers and sisters).

In order to earn those trappings of adulthood, I thought there was something that I needed to be able to do as soon as I could, and that was writing right.  I didn’t think they would let you be an adult until you could write like my father - with a fountain pen and in cursive.  I was sure in due course I would be bequeathed a fountain pen, but I knew the cursive part would be up to me.  Oddly, I never believed cursive would be something I was taught.  I am unsure why, maybe I conceived it to be an organic process, that once block print was mastered, Darwin would do his part and I would either naturally begin writing in script or I would go the way of the dinosaurs.  Now dinosaurs are undeniably cool, but their extinction was not to be emulated.  So I set about practicing in earnest to help evolution along.  I used paper and crayon to write notes, passages of meaning and weight.  Each line the same, a string of connected loops, a spiral across the page.  I could not read what I wrote, but knew whatever I put down on paper in this fashion could be read and understood by those more highly developed than I.

Well, I’m settling into my mid-fifties and I finally have a fountain pen that I used to draft this blog in script in my journal.  Darwin has smiled upon me – yet I am a dinosaur.  A very few years ago, I saw a news item of a teen who had taken the stand in a trial.  She was asked to read a note that had been entered into evidence.  She looked at the note and said she could not read cursive.  Just last month, I was with my grandson.  He was helping me with a project and I wrote some instructions for him.  He looked at the sheet of paper, and asked me if I could print it out because he was not that good at reading cursive.  Schools aren’t pushing cursive any more.

As with other social ills, I blame the computer, the tablet, the cell phone.  We have circled back to a time when learning typing in high school was a necessary skill if you had any hopes of entering the business world.  Typing is being taught again (now at a younger age), only it is called “keyboarding.”  Now everything is written and read in 12 point Times New Roman block print or something equivalent.  The handwriting in my journals will become the new hieroglyphs sooner rather than later.  People will open them and tilt their head squinting and see not collected letters forming words and sentences and paragraphs, but a string of connected loops, a spiral across the page.

Eastern Wisdom

Late afternoon clouds, low

moving over Pikes Peak as faux mist.

Weak translucent shade

pulled over the proud peak’s silhouette,

a massive wall rising from the prairie,

both gateway and barrier to the West.

The low cover a pale disguise

seeking to evoke the Appalachians,

eastern grandfather of the Rockies.

Where mist is the white hair of old age,

draped across shoulders

that have born the weight of war

and across eyes that have seen

the birth of a nation and

subsequent hemorrhage and healing.

Wearied by it all, yet patient with its people.

The Rockies represent a different world

of coarse courtesies and jagged prose.

Whose stark and rugged good looks

bow before the grace of eastern beauty.

Whose brashness has little to teach,

and much to learn

From the wisdom of the East.

The Death of the Son of Santini

Last night, Pat Conroy died from pancreatic cancer, and I sit today in shadow.  I have cried some and simply sat to feel about the edges of the void.  The biggest part of that void being the recent loss of my mother, it’s boundaries brittle and tender to the touch.  Now Pat Conroy’s loss has left those tenuous edges ragged and torn.  And so I sit here at my keyboard, fingering the jagged tear wondering if I can draw the blood of spirit to cleanse this wound, to help me find the flow of words to say goodbye.

Before I chose to step on the writer’s path, reading had already chosen my pantheon of gods to follow.  It is comprised of a small damaged group of fearless authors with Pat Conroy at its head.  What granted this high post to Pat Conroy was not just his gift of language, but that he was the antithesis of a god.  He did not seek tribute and supplicants.  Each book he wrote was in turn an offering on the altar to the congregation, his readers.  He was not granting forgiveness, but seeking it.  He saw his hurt and anger and weaknesses as demons that might be exorcised through lyrical incantation and exposure to daylight.

The son of Santini was in his own way a fighter pilot like his old man.  Only Pat’s plane was literature, his armaments his words, and his wars were racism, sexism, bigotry, giving voice where voice was demanded.  He helped to pave the way for women at his Alma mater The Military College of South Carolina, he stood in protest against the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina State House, and he took the time and effort to lovingly teach black children on the isolated South Carolina Island of Daufuskie when the school board and society wanted nothing more than for them to just disappear.

It seemed to me from reading Pat’s books, that the primary architects of his disastrous childhood and pain-filled adulthood were both his mother and his father.  I think most of the books he wrote were attempts at forgiveness (of himself and them), and attempts at healing the deep wounds to his spirit.  With his last book, The Death of Santini, I believe he had finally achieved that, limping sweat covered across an ill-defined finish line, if not at peace at least in some kind of equilibrium.

In simple terms Pat, your writing always made me want to write.  Your words stirred me in ways I would never have expected combinations of letters to be capable of.  Thank you for not shying away from the world.  I miss you, goodbye.

Summoning the Moon

Midnight in frigid air
With the shaggy silhouettes of trees
Standing guard over the moment
The eastern horizon
Discerned only as a darker line in the dark

No moon amid the stars
Only a low tantalizing glow at the edge
Just a little leg to make the pulse race
In this hour between days

Experts calling for snow
As echoed by the chill
A storm heavy and deep
To imprison the world
Within soft thick walls of white

I already knew weather was afoot
The moon had told me on recent eves
Softly ringed above
Whispering to the sailor in me

Tell me more, tell me tonight
Reaching out with these thoughts
To the sacred orb
As smoke rings sent from my pipe
Try to entice her from hiding

Giving into the witching hour
As if I were the stuff of magic
As if my tongue
Held some aboriginal incantation
Rather than wish and fiction

Thus the moon remained coyly
Behind the earth
As my pipe died out
And I relented to the hour and the cold

Because the Spirits always see
Recognizing those weak in conviction
Leaving them to wander in their folly

Dismasted, My Mother's Passing

I once had a sailboat, it was my favorite sailboat actually.  She was a 23-foot Hunter that I named JMS Handal after my wife.  I was out in high winds on Lake Pueblo with a friend of mine.  We were having an exhilarating time with the sails full and the boat seeming to fly.  All of a sudden, a whipping jib sheet on the windward side caught a cotter wire for a clevis pin to one of the side stays.  The wire was pulled free, the pin fell out, and my mast broke in half.  In a heartbeat, the boat was no longer heeling, she was simply floating along and the heart racing ride had been replaced with a stillness, an emptiness in the wake of a catastrophic event.  I wanted mayhem, I needed it, my mast was broken, my guidance gone.  My energy and reaction instincts, my adrenaline were at their peaks and I had nothing to do, no task to undertake that didn’t have the luxury of being performed slowly and methodically.

This morning I found out that my mother had just peacefully passed.  A personal catastrophe that has left me in the violent calm once again.  Buffeted and rocked by waves of weighty emptiness in the wake of my mother’s passing.  While the world about still turned at its normal lethargic pace.  My wife and I hug and kiss and cry, it is mainly what we have to do while we tie up what loose ends we have at home before traveling South.

I ache to do something, anything, but I am 2000 miles away and have been for decades.  My sisters and my brothers are back home taking care of the things that must be taken care of, and I am 2000 miles away.  I am glad that they are there together and mom is not alone.  I am glad they are there together, rocks for each other, and no one of them is alone.  I just can’t stand the calm here when the world should be as upside down as it feels.

Our mom was the quiet rock of us.  Her personal mantra being that she didn’t want to cause us any trouble, and she never did.  I wish she had, she was worth trouble.  Her life was one of self-sacrifice for her family, and this has never gone unnoticed.  It was also one in which she embraced her blessings, gave her love unconditionally, and bore one of the defining smiles of my life.  I just think such a woman and such a life deserves some noise and upheaval, some scrambling to make things sea worthy if only to be able to limp back to port.  But mom leaves us as she led us, with things to do with as little trouble as she could make it, a calm not before the storm, but in spite of it.  This calm is acute and disquieting, there are other winds to keep my sails filled, but she was one of my world’s trade winds, and how do you replace that?

Performance Anxiety

Life is full of disappointments and I have never wanted to be one of them.  It’s not easy going from day to day worrying that you may disappoint your boss by not going the extra mile on every project, or fearing that your wife will think less of you if you squeeze the middle of the toothpaste tube or leave your underwear lying around on the floor, or that your children will turn away from you in shame if you don’t know how to help them with a particular math problem or their geography homework.  Now my chronic insecurities have found a new and frightening place to nest.  I am afraid to disappoint my phone.

Some time in the last week, I was exploring the features of my Samsung Galaxy 6S Active.  (perhaps that was my first mistake, accepting ownership of a phone named after an impossibly vast celestial structure…who could live up to anything with Galaxy in its name?!?).  Anyway, I was pressing buttons, checking out apps, opening folders, windows, gateways and suddenly this screen popped up that offered some incredible features that my tactile compunction disorder could not resist.  It was built around personal health.  There was a widget to check my pulse (a little too high) and even one to check blood O₂ absorption (SpO₂ – 95%)!  I remember thinking that my phone rocks.  Well somewhere in all that touching, probing, pushing, and pressing, I must have triggered some action that lead my phone to the mistaken belief that I wanted my activity to be tracked.  You would think any phone smart enough to be able to do all the things this phone can do would be smart enough to know if I wanted my activity tracked, that I would hire a private detective.

So now, when I check my phone (which is frequently - another compulsion I am not proud of) there is a running update.  Not an update of my activity level, but my phone’s subjective assessment of my activity level.  I will wake up my idle phone and on the greeting screen will be a messages like Activity goal not met yet, You have walked less than yesterday, and Are you going to eat the rest of your dessert.  Activity goal?  When did I set an activity goal?  If I had knowingly done such a thing, I would have low-balled it to provide the false sense of security I am accustomed to.

The first part of this week I was in Washington DC on business.  The narrow scope of my visit left me a little time to explore.  I spent part of one day walking around, looking in bookstores, and riding the subway various places (in my old age I find myself turning into a train dork).  At the end of that day, I was checking my phone (once again!) and the message on the screen read Congratulations! You have exceeded your goal.  This is your best day yet!  Are you going to finish your dessert?  I made the last part up, but the rest was true.  You would think after getting such an encouraging and life affirming pat on the back from my phone, I would be happy.  I would be shouting to the world, or at least doing some jumping jacks to exceed my phone’s expectations by a wee bit more, but noooooooo.  I felt guilt and pressure.  Now those days of not achieving my goal (actually failing to achieve my phone’s goals for me) and the messages of stark disapproval flashing across my screen came flooding back to me.  I didn’t want to see those again.  Not because I was now motivated to regain the athletic form of my youth, or that I wanted to achieve some annual resolution of a healthier lifestyle, but because I didn’t want to disappoint my phone.

This makes me insecure about my insecurities.  I have now reached a new low, a whole new classification of phobia that makes me beholden to an inanimate object.  I feel like William Shatner stuck in that diner on the Twilight Zone, unable to leave or act unless the fortune telling machine in his booth granted him approval.  Now I am worrying if my phone somehow knows I am writing about it and plotting some Machiavellian revenge by adding on to the goals that it already has for me, some double secret activity probation.  I mean it’s a machine, and it’s connected, and I am writing this on a machine, and it’s connected too.  Of course my phone knows!  Of course my computer is sharing information!  All those electronic bastards know each other! 

What the Hell is That?

It seems that in January of this year Khronos the god of time said, “Hey, Teever, what the hell is that?”  Humor being my default position, I turned my head while thinking of the wonderful SNL “What The Hell Is That” skit.  Instead of thinking of comedy, I should have resisted the urge to fall for the oldest trick in the book, because when I turned my head back around it was late December 2015.  Where did the time go?  Tempus fugit on wings getting mightier by the moment.

It used to take forever for my birthday to come around.  Forget about Christmas, when I was a kid it was little more than a weak hope, it took forever to arrive.  Summer vacation was a little more reliable and felt a little more achievable – just a little more.  But as I have grown older, the things that I waited for pass by at supersonic speeds barely giving me a glance.

I have a theory of why this is.  I have run the theory by my family and friends here, so why not bore a larger audience?  Time is relative.  Not in the Einsteinian since, but in a proportional sense.  This is where I lose most people who at this juncture in my theory begin to gesticulate wildly in random directions saying, “Hey, Teever, what the hell is that?”  And you know where I end up – talking to myself.  But if you have been willing to read this far, perhaps you will walk with me a little further.

My theory is best illustrated as follows:

1.      When you are born and first see the light of day (or the glaring maternity ward lights through clenched eyelids with your grandfather in the corner praying the rosary as much for a healthy grandchild as to be spared the exact details of natural childbirth – inside joke, consult my family for explanation), even a second is incredibly long because in the next second you are twice as old as you were.  Think of it, at one second old, a year is 35 ½ million times longer than your young life.

2.      When you are one-year-old, face buried in birthday cake while your parents click away with their cameras or phones assured by your determined motions you are still breathing, you and a year are on equal footing.

3.      Down the road at ten, a year is no longer as daunting as it once was.  A year is only one tenth of your life and getting relatively smaller all the time.

4.      I am now 53, and a year is less than 2% of my life.  The years fly leaving me to feel as if I am wearing roller blades on a treadmill foolishly and helplessly watching the world turn beneath my wheels.

It is not a difficult theory, nor is it earth shattering (even if I give it a name like “The Asymptotic Behavior of Time Relative to Life”).  It is really just me trying to rationalize why it is increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in a hectic life.

However, thinking of time in this way has shown me that we are part of a miraculous and chaotic dance.  The young at the Arthur Murray stage following foot prints on the floor, with each successive generation getting a step closer to mastering the Tango.  So as the clock ticks down the seconds to the next in a ceaseless procession of new years, enjoy the dance, and make your resolution one to teach those learning by looking at their feet, and for you to learn from their attention to details you may have missed.  Part of leaving the world a better place, is passing it on to good and prepared hands.  Happy New Year, and if you could just look over there.  Over your right shoulder…no there…what the hell is that?   

Christmas Time and Time Again

I’m convinced that Christmas is so cherished a holiday in part because it fits our oral tradition so well.  Gatherings of family and friends to open gifts and share meals is not only the perfect incubator for new memories, but is the ideal venue to share old ones.  I’m no different.  I am drinking in the experiences of this holiday season, and I find past Christmas’s rising happily unbidden to the surface.  These memories come in no particular order, no particular priority of smiles, and they come as naturally as the season itself.

When I was a young man and in my freshman year at Clemson, I remember coming home for Christmas break.  I couldn’t wait to see my friends from high school and their families.  One of the first things I did was grab some magic markers and a square of cardboard from one of my dad’s dry cleaned shirts, and I made an arrow sign with the words “My Tree” on it.  I then got my little brother Greg and my youngest sister Ginny to pose for a picture in the upstairs hallway pointing the arrow sign towards the family tree in the living room downstairs.  I then took this sign and my camera to the Lovejoys, the Wilsons, the Barkers, the Campbells, the Whitakers and others.  I got that film processed as quickly as possible and put together an album, I just couldn’t wait to do that.  I think on some level I intuitively understood that I could only experience these connections that were so critical to my formation this one last time in my life.  Beyond freshman year, the centrifugal spin of life casts childhood friends apart towards their individual destinies.

I also recall a Christmas just seven years ago when I was in the car with my grandson, Russell.  He was about ten years old.  It was Christmas school break and he had been to work with me for the day.  We were listening to 850 KOA Sports Zoo on the radio for the long ride home, and one of the hosts was going on an uncharacteristic rant and accidently implied the nonexistence of Santa Claus.  I took a quick look toward Russell and held my breath, I didn’t know what to say to him.  At ten, some children believe, some don’t, and others are on the cusp.  I didn’t know what Russell thought about Santa, and I was frozen as my mind held a veritable traffic jam of scenarios it was attempting to deal with.  In the midst of my panic, my grandson placed a calming hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Bumpa, I know about Santa.”

This Christmas while listening to carols as my wife and I drove to our daughter Haley’s Christmas party, the radio station played “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Jean-Marie and I were singing along and laughing as we took turns forgetting how many maids were milking and how many swans were swimming, only sure that there were five golden rings.  After a time, we were both struck with memories form a Christmas at least fifteen years ago.  We found ourselves hosting a dinner for a group friends from Texas.  A dozen of us around a long table, enjoying good food and good conversation.  After dinner, Jean-Marie and I served dessert on our brand new “Twelve Days of Christmas” dessert plates.  I no longer recall how it started or whose idea it was, but we began singing and laughing our way through that song, each person singing the part that was on their plate.

There have been other Christmas’s and other memories.  There will be more Christmas’s and new memories.  They will find places for themselves in my brain with no guarantee when or if they will rise to the surface.  It’s not that different from looking at presents beneath the tree.  You don’t know what lies inside the wrapping, but each box is a gift and a surprise and a smile.  Merry Christmas.

Duck! They Have the Bomb!

Every time I walk through airports, I notice they make many visual offerings available to travelers both sublime and ridiculous, perhaps to take the edge off the anxiety that flying from here to there and back again can bring. Flotsam and jetsam adorning walls or in plexiglass cases, displaying the local board of tourisms version of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum.

On one trip, I had some time to kill before braving the security line at DIA and toured some of the large wall mounted exhibits around the main terminal building. One of my favorites is a colorful map of the United States, with a picture or two in each state of some little known tourist trap or oddity.

Naturally I looked at Colorado first because I live there, then I looked at Tennessee attractions because my wife is from there, and finally I looked at South Carolina because that is the land of my birth. What I saw posted in SC wiped out any memory of what I found in Colorado, Tennessee, or any other fifty states for that matter. Apparently there is an Atomic Bomb Crater in South Carolina. Let me say that again, apparently there is an Atomic Bomb Crater in South Carolina!

I was shocked, stunned. I was aware of many facets of my home state, but never knew somebody had attempted to nuke her. Fortunately, I was armed with my smart phone and therefore the all-knowing, all-powerful internet to dispel this hoax. For surely it was a hoax perpetrated by some drunken local with too much time and a shovel on his hands. I Googled it, then I tapped on the Wikipedia entry for it, and then my jaw dropped. Here is what I found.

During the Cold War (oh to again have an enemy that we only made pouty faces at), bombers were launched from an Air Force base in Savannah on March 11, 1958, to take part in European exercises and to be on the alert in case war broke out with the Soviet Union. As one of the bombers flew over South Carolina, the captain noticed an error light on one of the bombs showing it was not properly secure. He dispatched the navigator to the bomb bay to investigate. Apparently the locking pin had not been properly latched, and as the navigator reached around the bomb to reset the pin, he inadvertently pulled the emergency release pin. When the bomb hit the deck the bomb bay doors opened and now comes good news, bad news time. Good news, the navigator was not sucked from the aircraft. Bad news, the bomb obeying the quite insistent dictates of gravity plummeted 15,000 feet down to Mars Bluff, South Carolina not too far from Florence. Good news, the fissable material was stored elsewhere on the plane. Bad news, the bomb still contained high explosives. Good news, the bomb landed on an empty playhouse in the woods and exploded leaving a seventy-five-foot crater. Bad news, three little girls, their father and brother were injured (not killed thank goodness!) by the blast. The incident made international headlines, and the family made $54,000 for pain and suffering incurred by friendly fire.

Having found this out, I discover that I am unable to set the incident aside as easily as the Gregg family and the world did. Now, I love Georgia as much as anyone. As a youth, I was taken on many pilgrimages to Atlanta to visit family. When I was older, I would drive there on my own for family and Braves baseball games. When I was fit, I would go to Georgia to run in road races in places like Atlanta, Augusta, and Tacoa. I still have two uncles, an aunt, and numerous cousins of various types in Georgia that I keep up with through the wonder that is Facebook. That being said, I believe that back in 1958 a line in the sand was crossed when Georgia dropped an Atomic weapon on her neighboring state.

The US will not tolerate a missile test in North Korea, and it spends untold amounts of money trying to curtail Iran’s weapons program in the hot and sandy Middle East. The US goes about the world trying to stop proliferation of the nuclear variety where ever it may raise its ugly head. It is intolerable that they simply shrug, dip their hands into their pockets, and are content to simply buy off the victims of state-on-state violence and then go their imperious way!

That is why I am calling for a unilateral disarmament of Georgia. More than that, I want the United Nations to send its inspectors to dismantle Georgia’s nuclear programs and arsenal. I want Hans Blix to be set up as supreme overlord until fare and free elections in Georgia can take place and this heinous act of unwarranted aggression by the Peach State can be finally and completely put behind us.

It is hard for America to justify being the world’s police force when we cannot police ourselves. It is difficult for our government to make a case for curtailing the sales of small arms, when weapons of mass destruction are indifferently handed out to whatever state desires them. And it is impossible to bring about world peace when Georgia has the bomb!