Category: Ruminations

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

T.S. Eliot from East Coker (in Four Quartets)

Not a real estate report — just a bit of poetry that, at this midnight moment, seems to fit the beginnings and endings and falling, crumbling world of this late October, 2020. Let’s all take the by-pass.

The spectacle is underway as I write — the confirmation hearings for Trump’s high court nominee. I feel I must listening and watch.

But….

It is so awful. And the vetting is not over yet, the cross examination not begun. The nominees sits masked, listening. Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse is giving a timely civic lesson. Good idea, based on what I’ve heard from the Democrats. Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, in a long, angry peroration, essentially called the nominee a “torpedo” aimed at the Affordable Care Act.

On and on. Later.

It is so easy, so cheap and easy to ridicule our enemies, political or otherwise, when they have an embarrassing moment beyond their control. During the televised Vice Presidential debate, viewed by millions, in this fraught and consequential political season, a common house fly found its way out of the Salt Lake City night and into the debate hall on the campus of the University of Utah. It then found its way into the brilliantly lit halo of studio lighting and decided, following a fly’s mysterious mental logic, to wing its way in front of the cameras that are electronically conveying images across the continent and into the homes of millions of Americans– and lands on the hair of the gentlemanly Vice President of the United States who, as it happens, is Vice President to the most polarizing President ever to sit in the White House. Michael Pence has generated some hate of his own. I hated him constantly talking over the moderator and wondered why the Trump/Pence team had not learned its lesson from the spectacle that was the Presidential Debate. I say that unreservedly. When I saw it land, I thought, “here will begin the easy ridicule.” I half-hoped the moderator could see it and, seeing it, seized the moment to clear away this distraction in jocular fashion. I knew if the insect landed on Senator Harris, nothing would be made of it – or, if so, only by the cheapest of cheap Trump/Pence supporters. Of course, it showed up brilliantly on Pence’s snow white hair.

Odd thing about flies. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s retelling of the Electra myth, the flies are The Furies. Trappist Monk Thomas Merton wrote a book of poetry entitled, Seasons of Fury about the troubled world outside his monastery’s walls.

It is, indeed, a troubled season. The monastery beckons.

A golden, somber October has settled over much of the country, over much of what I still regard to be home to the north. Here in subtropical latitudes, long ago and once again familiar to me, it is damp heat stirring in the palms. Green and yellow, never gold — seamless and sleep-inducing and somehow unreal. Think of this time of the planet, though, as a phantom wrapped in poisonous nightshade slouching toward a November morn to be born on that First Tuesday of ugly, inevitable reckoning and dubious realignment that, if it goes the way the liberal rabble wants, shall be greeted by Time Square-esque New Year’s Eve delirium. It will be CNN’s Morning in America.

Or — maybe not.

Seething hate has boiled up at the non-politician who was able to win four years ago perhaps because he was running against the most disingenuous and untrustworthy woman ever to ride the coattails of a far more politically astute husband to the place where, on behalf of liberal minions, she would symbolically break this faux Glass Ceiling — and I dare not say a word against this slow-grinding feminist uprising that will go on pitting women against men and daughters against fathers. Oh, what have we drunk? Poisonous nightshade while, in the back of the empty cafe — empty because we are in a pandemic and he can’t open yet — the sad proprietor strums his guitar and goes broke. Just one of the other elements in our current morass — and probably the one that will assure a Trump defeat. He has not handled it well. I for one don’t think anyone else would have prevented 200,000 American deaths, despite what the lying, conniving Democrats say. But from the outset he failed to set a tone of paternal concern and empathy and guidance and leadership. A simple piece of cloth over his face could have made an enormous difference. (Did he just not think he looked good in a mask??) I find myself joining the chorus of enemies, calling him a fool. And I hate that I find myself in that position.

Trump banners all about me in this neighborhood of this Battleground State loft and fall gently on streets named for far-off tropical islands and, all in all, called Paradise Island. Good people in good homes — artificial only in the sense that they are of vinyl and metal but the refuge of a middle class from across the nation, like me. I live here among them; for how long I know not. Other banners I see, besides the Stars&Stripes, celebrate the Nebraska “cornhuskers” and the Iowa “hawkeyes” and the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Flyers…etc…etc… There are some banners for Biden and Harris, the senescent Hollow Man and Has-Been and the sniveling bigot consumed like the man she’s partner with and once so effectively attacked in a debate — consumed, I say, by raw, untrammeled ambition.

The crude, uncouth zillionaire might win (The Silent Majority hidden in their homes across America might come out to rebel and change the narrative; come out of their mortgaged, overtaxed refuges, be they modular or old wood and shingles. It could happen. It would unleash the despair of the chattering classes and the liberal elite. But, right now, this scenario seems unlikely.)

The non-politician President has flubbed matters mightily and infuriatingly. He has reminded us why it is not bad to be a politician or at least have good political instincts. Of course, he is a man who constantly trusts his instincts over advice from others– some instincts possibly good, no matter what anyone says ( for instance, getting us out of the murderous Iran Nuclear Deal). But he seems increasingly unable to sort bad instincts from good, like not wearing a mask during this pandemic. Going mask-less and failing simply to say ‘I hate White Supremacists’ — was below bad instinct. It was the proud and perverse death rattle of a man just outside the ring of normal discourse.

Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that the “experts” were telling us we didn’t need masks. However, wearing them, to my mind, is a sign of respect for our fellow citizens in this medically dangerous time. History and science will tell us someday. For now, Mr. Trump needed to accept the transient science and its symbols of common bonding and solidarity.

So the man convalescing in the White House marinates mask-less in his hubris and fantasies but still captures the hearts and loyalty of millions of beleaguered, decent, despised, underestimated, ignored, sane, common sensical, family-loving, patriotic Americans who have been declared “deplorable” by an elite or two. Who shall arise to save us all — the devoted, like them, and the ambivalent, like me?

And October creeps on. I will miss October. I will miss much more than that when November shadows fall over the lands where it is not eternal summer. That is my fear.

Ah, a woke book! Is it ever! Lucy Ellman. She’s a novelist. British-American. Her book is Ducks, Newburyport. Funny title. It’s a novel. Haven’t read it. It’s a single sentence. It goes on for 1000 pages. Okay. Whatever. (I’m going to write a novel of four, three, two, and one-word sentences.

Okay. Whatever.

Now (enough of that). The novel is narrated by an Ohio mother of four. Nothing I can say about it won’t make me unwoke. But let me say this: Lucy Ellman, in an interview last year said of her protagonist that four is too many children. In fact, she said, due to the climate emergency, humans should be aiming for close to “zero births.” She further said that women with children are bores who are wasting their time. Here’s some of her run-on stream of conscious thinking on the matter. She said, “you watch people get pregnant and know they’ll be emotionally and intellectually absent for 20 years. Thought, knowledge, adult conversation, and vital political action are all put on hold while this needless perpetuation of the species is prioritize.”

She did concede that the desire to have babies is “strong” and “forgivable.” Then she ran on to say, in what sounds like the kind of contradiction known to overtake woke people who write run-on sentences that “the power and meaning of motherhood are largely overlooked” in our society.

You know why? Guess. Take a 1000 pages if you need to.

Answer: “Patriarchy.”

Whatever.

This was during a stop at The Last Mile. Same place, if you were reading deep into this blog, where you’d find those drinking buddies and regulars known as “Sticky,” the retired carpenter and house painter and “Jackie the Crow”, the bricklayer. Sticky and Crow weren’t there that night. Every so often they stay at their boarding house and conduct a book club. (Yeah, believe it or not. Some night I’ve got to stop by and see what the book de jure is.) Anyway, I was having my drink of choice, a ginger ale.

Let me tell you, first, about ginger ale and me. An old editor of mine recalled the day his wife found in the pocket of pants he’d left for the laundry some of those beads they throw off floats during Madi Gras. Now she knew where he’d been when he said he was doing some lat night editing FOR THREE STRAIGHT DAYS. He’d used some frequent flyer miles on the old red eye to The Big Easy. His wife suggested he switch to ginger ale after that. I thought it a good rule of life to follow suit.

Anyway — this guy comes into The Last Mile. We’d never seen him before. For purposes of this story, we’ll call him Guy #1. He was apparently on a lay-over at the airport. The Mile, as we like to call it, is not all that far from the airport and in some way known only to God, strangers of every stripe find their way there instead of to the multitude of bars in the airport. They must be looking for that Golden Watering Hole where a golden destiny awaits them. Go figure.

Anyway, Guy#1 takes a stool at the end of the bar and Deano, the bartender, sets him up with a Micholob draft and a shot of rye. And he tells Deano within my hearing that he’s from Florida and starts talking about the night he drove by the house of this woman he’d suddenly decided he really liked who lived around Fort Myers. As it happened, he was on his way out of town that night to see ANOTHER woman outside Orlando — a woman he used to really like and, keeping all options opened, wanted to see if she might still like him — “like” being a very broadly defined term here. It was before dawn. There was a car in the driveway of the woman whom we’ll call WOMAN #1 in For Myers– belonging to a guy he knew; a good friend of his. This told him WOMAN #1 was actually kind of a speed, a rounder, a two-timer. In great sorrow and disillusionment he got back on the flat pre-dawn Florida roads headed toward WOMAN #2 place outside Orlando. By the time he got there, he’d decided he might want to re-ignite things with WOMAN #2 as a way of softening his disappointment over WOMAN #1. But WOMAN #2, after they’d shared dinner and as night came on, seemed a little tentative about that “proposition” and asked if it wasn’t a little too late for all that and didn’t he want a little more privacy during his visit which, she suggested, could be achieved by checking — alone — into a nearby motel and, by the way, she was busy the next day, but he should feel free to use this free pass she had to DisneyWorld issued by this real estate office where she worked. Perplexed as well as disappointed ( for a second time) but persistent, he informed her that he really wanted to stay at HER place and that they really could make beautiful music together — once again. I mean, didn’t she still like him, after all? I mean hadn’t she actually told him once that she LOVED him? At right about that moment, WOMAN #2’S cell phone rang and she went into her bedroom to answer it. Guy #1 took that moment to go out to his car for his overnight bag. That’s when he noticed a guy we’ll call GUY #3 sitting in a Volvo across the street from WOMAN #2’S house. He was on his cell phone. (Any guesses who he was talking to?)

At about this point in the telling of the story, bartender Deano, a fellow impatient with illusions to the point where we call him The Iceman, popped the obvious question about whether GUY #1’S intentions with either of these women was — honorable. Guy #1, working by now on Mic and rye #2 and having informed Deano that he minored in philosophy in college, asked Deano to define his terms. Deano the Iceman, dishrag in hand, who has never, so far as any of us knows, taken any philosophy classes, replied that honor was something like that plaque over the bar. He pointed to it now — a dusty, dimmed hunk of wood and brass, badly in need of buffing and awarded to The Last Mile’s golf team a generation ago for coming in first place in some long forgotten North Shore charity tournament. Deano the Iceman, I’m told, a fair golfer and a stand-up guy, adheres to an icy variety of honor since, if anybody gets to fool around it’s bartenders, provided, like Deano, they’re reasonably good-looking. Deano is actually much admired by female patrons, all of whom, when they turn amorous, he keeps at a minimum length of ten yards, regularly shuts off and cajoles into concentrating on Keno while he pours them a complimentary bitters and soda for a remedy before calling them a cab, an uber or their husband to come get them.

Anyway, here’s Deano asking GUY#1 a question he’d probably never been asked before — even in philosophy class. I mean GUY #1 didn’t like the fact that the woman he liked was apparently fooling around, unless the guy — we’ll call him GUY #2 — whose car was in Guy #1’s new heartthrobe’s driveway — just happened to have come over for a game of penochle and was sleeping on her couch. ( Of course, most card parties consist of more than two players. So maybe they’d just watched a movie and was too tired to drive home. Maybe his car didn’t start. Maybe neither of their cars started. Huh!! I’m sitting there on my bar stood, smiling, still eaves dropping, running through this list of lame excuses GUY #2 might have told his wife — because apparently Guy #2 (who’s car — in case your confused — was in WOMAN #1’s driveway) was, according to GUY#1, married.

So Deano told Guy #1, who’d just about drained Mic and shot #3, that honor was just one of those things you know when you see it, sort of like pornography. Sort of like that golf plaque on the barroom wall. About that time, GUY #1 had been advised by Deano to abstain from Mic and shot #4, and obligingly sat for a good long while over a bitters and soda, playing Keno, then settled up with Deano, stood ( not all that steadily) took out his cell, called for an uber and went out on the street to wait for that ride to the airport. We saw him get in the car and disappear, never to return, I’m sure. He’d had enough of The Iceman. I felt a little sad for him.

Deano did get out of him where he was headed.

“California, LA area,” Deano said, wiping up the bar, clearing away the guy’s empty pilsner and shot glass. “He met a woman out there he likes.”. Deano gave me a wink.

“He ever been married?”

“He didn’t say. I didn’t see a ring.”

“He’s looking for Mrs. Right. Someone more honorable than himself.”

“Let’s wish him luck, then.”

I finished off my ginger ale. At least once during my eaves-dropping session, I’d missed parts of GUY#1’s saga during a trip to the john.

“Deano,” I said,”did that guy ever say who was in the car — the one outside his lady’s place outside Orlando?” (Referring here to GUY#3 on the cell phone — obviously to WOMAN #2 in her bedroom, spotted when GUY#1 went outside for his bag — just in case you’ve lost track.)

Deano shrugged and moved down the bar. We both knew the answer. Deano, being honorable — and the Iceman — was done with the topic. We both knew GUY #3 was somebody like GUY#1, disappointed like him, since GUY #1 was spoiling his overnight plans with WOMAN #2. Or was he?

I drank two ginger ales that night. I admit, for a fraction of a second I thought about how nice it would be to pound down a couple of boilermakers and how it would send a golden glow over those three women farther down the bar who’d been flirting most of the night with Deano. But there was only one left now — and she was playing Keno. Her husband came in and Deano made them both his late night special — iced coffee. Just what you’d expect from The Iceman.

“I’ll have one of those, too,” I told Deano. When he served me, I just had to ask one more question. “That guy ever say where he slept that night?” (Referring here to GUY#1, then in WOMAN #2’s house in Orlando, now on his way to the airport.)

“Motel, ” said Deano. “Then he went to DisneyWorld. He had a free pass, after all.”

The Iceman chuckled.

“He meet any women there?” I asked.

“Snow White,” Deano said. “No joke. He even had a picture.”

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and ex-

hausted wells

(hyphen in the original)

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

(This fragment I shore against my ruins…)

Just past midsummer — July 20 — living for however long in a peninsula (Florida) of  most intense  summers, I find myself dreaming of that place where summer is just among the long multi-tonal movements in the six-movement symphony (each state being a movement) that is New England. And I’m thinking of Cape Cod, a storied sand bar in that symphony of places and seasons. We always read more into places than is really there — at least the places we have tried to like or even loved once. Florida is in that category. So is the Cape.

Now, understand that I walked today amid the subtropical beauty of a Pinellas County, Florida public park. They have many beautiful parks here and much savage raw beauty. It was very hot, but there was a breeze and I looked over a lake at a line of slash pine and there were pine and palm all around me and live oak and Spanish moss and tropical and domestic and some migratory birds calling and singing and shade and moving shadows of mountains of clouds so  typical of summers here. Beautiful! I should feel at home — if I were a tropical bird. (Well, that’s a little churlish of me. And ungrateful.)

The landscape, of course, is flat — it is flat on the Cape, too. It is often flat where there is only sand and scrub pine. And it was about 92; has been 92 most days and will be close to 92 until October. One lives in air conditioning down here.

But then, I’m hearing it’s very hot up north — as hot as 98 — so when summer simmers up in extreme ways up there, down here where summer is always consistently a matter of clean 90 plus temperatures, it get’s even hotter.

But — I’m thinking of the Cape Cod of sand dunes, and cedar shingle cottages and lobster pots we hope to find when we go there,  crossing over those bridges  and trying not to think of cluttered, ordinary, traffic-ridden Hyannis, for instance– off we go over the steel at Bourne and Sagamore, and rumbling over the mental bridges that take us into memories. Like all places that we see on postcards, there is always the modern reality — that roadside, utility wired, squalid reality, social and topographical. As a reporter, I’ve covered murders and other terrible crimes on Cape Cod — and here in Florida.

What am I trying to say? I need to get that book called Going Home in a Homeless World.

I guess I’m just thinking many thoughts of home while I’m without a home now — and no, that I don’t have a home, really– home being ultimately more than the state, for better or rose, where I was born — and being, in many ways a state of mind. And I’m feeling lost, meaning away from anything that feels like home — struggling with a swarm of personal regrets and frustrations of the kind for which nostalgia is a temporary antidote. Temporary. But the search for peace, that painful, hopefully gainful search, must begin and may never end. We move through life like turtles, burdened. Hopeful.

I will go feed turtles now in a pond that swarms with turtles  about a half mile away.  A pond that is “home” to turtles. And in the old-man face of the youngest turtle looking for a pellet of food — a small turtle on whom that shell sometimes seems like a freakish misfortune and burden to be carried for life and from which the creature within might long to be freed if they only knew it  — I will try to forget this unhappy moment, this angry moment that I, frankly, am having trouble truly articulating. I’ll go see the turtles…. I’ll feed them.