EARTHLY IMMORTALITY

British novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (she’s a woman), writing vividly in the July 10, 2023 National Review about the modern quest for immortality, reminds us that there’s a difference between wanting to feel young — to have energy, to be free from pain and impairment, an ambition with which most of us would be sympathetic — and wanting to look young.

She claims that 46-year-old Tech tycoon Bryan Johnson boasts that he has the lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a man age 28. Shriver also claims he employs thirty doctors for his Project Blueprint to remain personally youthful, while getting regular transfusion of his 17-year-old son’s blood. His regime also incudes microdoses of Botox and the injection of salman-sperm DNA around the eyes. (Apparently, the son doesn’t mind the transfusions but, Shriver opines and many would agree, this seems an entirely vampirish practice.)

Shriver has obviously been thinking about the youth craze for some time. “For the Silicon Valley set, as for their neighbors in Hollywood,” she write, “appearance seems to be paramount. Especially for people so wealthy that money is meaningless, youthfulness is the preferred currency.”

She admits she, too, is vain. (and I’m also a charter member of that Vain #MeToo Movement.) But, she adds, “It’s just that a smoother complexion in middle age…is hardly one giant leap for mankind.”

Most of her essay deals fascinatingly and in considerable depth with the strikingly large tech industry working to cancel death and allow us to live forever — about which she concludes, “the vision of a species that has calcified into the same individuals forever, with no renewal, no turnover, no children, is ghastly.”

And that’s not half of the ghastliness.

MEMORIES OF THAT GENTLE DESCENT AT SUMMER’S END

August 31, 2023. Woodstock, Georgia….

I knew it would fly, this summer, this year. Hot, so hot. Time in the hills and by the mountains of upstate New York. And the Mohawk. Gone. Memories now. Another summer gone. Another year going….

I write from Woodstock, Georgia (again), having made perhaps an extreme decision to go an extreme distance to be away from the first of the season’s Gulf of Mexico hurricane threats. A long drive, but some peace at the end. I’m always in search of peace.

I guess almost every Labor Day, whether I realize it or not, I think of Joe O’Donnell. He was my peer, an intelligent childhood neighbor who grew up, like me, on Neponset Avenue. We were never in any school class together, never really truly close friends, though friends for a significantly memorable period. I think he wound up a year ahead of me at the Catholic school after tonsil and adnoids removal in third grade caused me to repeat the year. So we weren’t classmates.

Joe always had a crewcut, always seemed a trifle more intelligent than his years. I watched him, at least once, be the victim of a bully. He seemed to brush the experience off. To this day, I harbor anger on his behalf for the bully whom I met some years back at a wake ( which is where people from the old neighborhood always meet over the bodies of fellow neighbors and chums). The bully had become a somber, probably harmless working class adult with a perfectly nice, even pretty, wife, although I did sense a certain hostility enveloping him — and me. He’d grown up poor with probably a poor family life. I’ll make that excuse for him. We all, most of us, grow up. He might have done a better job of it than me.

But back to Joe O’Donnell

Joe’s father had been a World War II paratrooper who’d spent time with a broken leg as a P.O.W. of the German’s. Joe, by contrast, was not paratrooper material, nor was I. Riding our bikes was about as daring as we got. We were once both on a youth basketball team and mutually fretted about not being called upon to play. But, inwardly, I knew I could hardly dribble the ball and had been spared humiliation and was masking my relief with false indignation. Joe, perhaps, the same.

Joe’s mother was a wonderful woman who, come to think of it, masked her emotions pretty well in order to deal with life’s challenges. I say this because I met her at a 1989 Catholic neighborhood reunion and learned how upset she’d been when a raised multi-pane porch window at the O’Donnell’s house slipped free of its hook-and-eye overhead latch while roofers hammered overhead and came smashing down on me, putting my head right through one of the panes, leaving a scatterring of broken glass on my head. I wasn’t hurt, or even upset. I was half amused. Perhaps I’d been nicked and perhaps there was a little blood. Mrs. O’Donnell came rushing out, obviously concerned. I asked, calmly,”am I cut?” She said, “you’re ears hanging off, now stand still.” And, paradoxically assured by this and the absence of pain, that I was fine, I stood still while she commenced to clear away the mantel of broken glass and lift the window to free me.

But at that meeting with her three decades later, I became aware that she’d been deeply upset by the incident. I assured her it was a non-event for me, and how much I appreciated and was reassured by her tough-minded intervention. It did not seem to ease her own traumatic memory and, perhaps, guilt. So, yes, Joe’s mom knew how to hide her true feelings, at least at the point of impact.

And now, as I come to think of it — why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion? I believe I asked about him, and got no good answer why he was absent.

Again, about Joe, and as regards our friendship….

What is it that makes companions of people in their very early years other than proximity — people who will probably drift far apart when they move? Joe never moved — not for many years, anyway.

He seemed smart, but given to masking childhood’s typical petulance and easy emotions and tears, unlike his only younger brother Kenny or his young sister who were open books. In that sense, he always seemed a little older than his years. We were just kids who lived three houses and a short street crossing part. I don’t recall how we started hanging out together at maybe age eleven or twelve. What did Joe see in me? In him, I saw, as enumerated, a bundled up temperment that somewhat mirrored my own. Maybe that was the attraction — and the fact that you could have an intelligent, albeit still immature conversation on what we knew of the world.

Then, suddenly we were teenagers, probably both thirteen, still unathletic, perhaps only beginning to be interested in girls. There were no girls around that Labor Day weekend, though I was very interested in one. I never recall talking to Joe about girls, but we probably did. They were something else we were probably still a little afraid of.

And why do I think of Joe specifically at Labor Day? Because on our bicycles we rode from Neponset all the way out to the Blue Hills on Labor Day weekend on what I think was 1960. The Blue Hills were quite a distance, at least five miles. But I don’t recall anybody driving us there. Once there, we peddled all the way up one, probably the principle one, called Big Blue. It was not overly steep, that winding uphill blacktopped road, but still a bit arduous as he stood up to peddle and peddle and peddle, likely criss-crossing the road, on our very ordinary bikes of no particular brand.

It might have been the first year before full-fledged adulthood that I understood or cared about Labor Day’s significance as summer’s end point, and, accordingly, felt, again for the first time, that wistful sense of seasonal passage to fall and the end of unbridled childhood freedom and the looming return to classroom drudgery. For though technically now a pubescent teenager, I was still, in essence, a child who’d relatively belatedly mastered the balancing act that was riding a bike. It was still three years before I would be old enough — and more or less required — to “labor” for money, five years before I had a license to drive a car.

But it was still a time when summer was understood to be a period of unburdoned childhood freedom and, for me, that coming start of the school year registered an inordinate sense of dread, for I did not like school. (In retrospect, I sense that Joe O’Donnell, on the other hand, probably enjoyed school.)

It was warm. There were a good number of people out enjoying the weekend at the picnic areas we passed and at nearby Houghton’s Pond. But we peddled laboriously in tandem and in solitude on the shoulder of the two-lane road, for probably for over an hour, wondering when the ascent would ever end for us.

Then –suddenly — we felt ourself briefly to be on more or less level ground, still peddling gently for several yards. Then came our reward, a slow, steady downhill coast, riding about twenty-five yards apart, Joe in front…a slow, gently winding journey of –how long? Was it just a half mile? As much as a mile? It seemed, happily, very long, and cooling to us in jerseys and jeans we still called dungarees.

When it was over, I pulled up next to Joe and he said, like an adult, “it was a great feeling, wasn’t it?”

So, I guess Joe DID share his feelings. He did then, at least.

In our subsequent teen years, Joe and I drifted apart. He went off to Latin High School, the very best public high school in Boston and the oldest public school in the nation. I chanced to see him perhaps just once at Field’s Corner rapid transit (now MBTA) station, both of us either enroute or coming back from school (I was at Gate of Heaven in South Boston.)

I talked to him about the way famous authors’ stories we were being taught, as I recall, and how I disapproved of the method of the teachers. And he said, in that slightly sententious boiler plate adult way he had –“no, that is no way to enjoy a book.”

I presume he did well at school. He was bright. But somehow, I sense that science or math probably interested him more than literature, regardless of how it was being taught.

Flash forward….I learned he became an accountant….and flash further forward….

In 1999, six firefighters died in the burning of the Cold Storage facility in Worcester. Joe’s younger brother Kenny had become a Boston fire captain. I met him outside the church where the first of the six funerals for the men was being held. He was there with hundreds of other Boston jakes, paying his respects. I was covering the event as a Boston TV news reporter.

“How’s Joe?” I asked.

“He died,” Kenny said.

I was shocked. He would have been just a little over fifty, like me.

This was December. It had just been a matter of months. Pancreatic cancer. All very quick. Joe had become an accountant and a father. He was living up in New Hampshire. Kenny said he’d been fishing with him shortly before the diagnosis.

So I was doubly sad on that sad day of a funeral — for a fallen firefighter, and for Joe, now a figure in distant memory. I wondered, did he still have a crew cut? Did he still enjoy riding a bike? Obviously, he’d taken up fishing

But, again, almost without fail, I think of Joe on Labor Day. I pray for him. There must have been a widow and children. I pray for them, too.

And I suppose there are people enjoying the day all these years later in the Blue Hills where we made that little memory. I wonder if Joe recalled it as fondly as me — or recalled it at all.

So….time…..memory

Tonight, here in Woodstock, Georgia, I’m due to go to a high school football game. It’ll be some other kid’s memory.

The hurricane has swept off. Wind, a precarious life, a movie playing in the next room. I’m feeling it all, anxious, not quite at Labor Day rest.

What was that about boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? (Fitzgerald)

(And I wonder as a matter of fact –why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion with the rest of the family? Okay, he lived in New Hampshire and now had a family of his own. Distance puts up borders. But sometmes family borders go up, too. Was he keeping his distance for other reasons? His mother, now also deceased, told me (when I met her long after that reunion and when she again brought up her trauma over my head through the window) that Joe’s death deeply affected his ailing and seemingly tempermentally far more rugged dad. Again, hidden emotions.

And now I remember — she told me this at the father’s wake, for she’d lived on past both her son and her husband.

Rest in peace, Joe O’Donnell — and all O’Donnel family members.

Wishing Labor Day peace of mind — to workers, and to all of us who labor, compulsively, at remembering life’s little joys and sorrows at summer’s end and all through the year. They don’t always make for a Happy Labor Day, or peace of mind.

Let’s settle for gratitude. A grateful Labor Day. We’ve made it to another September. Go for a bike ride.

Amen.

AIN’T IT A SHAME?

In November, 2021, all kinds of negatative cultura/political “stuff” was coursing through our nation’s bloodstream with blinding speed, rivaling the ravages being inflicted on us by the pandemic. It was about the same time Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema was under prolonged attack by fellow Democrats for holding out on key tax, health and climate legislation.

In that November period, the reliably insightful Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review suggested that the countercultural Left, like the Marxist-Leninist Left before it, was Dionysian in character, given to public theater like Occupy Wall Street and even following their political enemies into the toilet, as they had recently done to Senator Sinema.

“The essence of totalitarianism,” wrote Williamson, “is the abolition of private life and privacy. “

Now, Senator Sinema is an Indpendent. And I understand a third of voters in once-reliably Republican Arizona are registered as Indpendent.

But Elvia Diaz, writing for the Arizona Republic, levied a decidedly negative and cynical assessment of Sinema’s Party shift a year after Williamson noted her persecution at the hands of the Leftists. Diaz wrote in December, 2022, “She’s ditching the Democratic Party because she either figured she can’t win a primary or she no longer needs the party’s money and infrastructure for her next move – or both.

“Her trajectory suggests she’s adept at ditching anyone or anything no longer useful to her. She began her public life as a Green Party activist. That went nowhere so she became an independent, which didn’t work, either. Her big break came after she conveniently became a Democrat.”

Maybe so.

Sinema wouldn’t be the first politician to shed seeminglyi bedrock ideological affiliation and drift among Parties looking for a softer resting place for their self-centered political aspirations. Consider Joe Biden, the “moderate.” Don’t make me laugh. Donald Trump, loyal Republican. Yeah, right.

But can we deny Sinema’s assessment that “pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges – allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities, and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.”

Isn’t that where we find ourselves in August, 2023?

Ain’t it a shame?

THE F.B.I.

As multiple political and law enforcement embroglios engulf us, I’m going to indulge, very briefly, my fears and mixed feelings about the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Bureau’s credibility has unquestionably been compromised by the domestic security missions it has undertaken. It has come to light, for instance, that agents were infiltrating and investigating Catholic Latin Mass-goers as potential terrorists. On what evidence did they undertake such a thing?

It remains, as far as we know, a bureacracy still capable of remarkable achievements in the area of criminal investigation. Of that I feel certain.

But it has been assigned contradictory missions. This has generated problems. It has revealed incompetence, malfeasance and political bias in its ranks. This has hurt its reputation. We know supervisors tapped into partisan sources in their investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged Russia ties, such as uncorroborated Hillary Clinton campaign opposition research. Prior to that, by contrast,agents had cleared Mrs. Clinton of any wrongdoing in her email scandal despite finding that she had recklessly mishandled classified information and destroyed government records. It’s true, the investigation tarnished her image. She lost the election — and blamed the F.B.I. She might be right. But, here again, should such investigations be in the perview of the F.B.I.?

You might ask – who else should handle them? Well, frankly, I don’t know. But where the target of the investigation is an elected official, trouble in the form of political bias seems to ensue. Is it impossible to de-politicize the Justice Department? One would hope so.

Meanwhile, can we have any faith the Bureau is doing any better handling the multifaceted Trump investigation into, among other things, mishandled classified files? You can be certain Trump supporters don’t think so.

An agency like the F.B.I. lives by its reputation and credibility. It is just one of the federal agencies many Americans have ceased to trust.

That’s a problem for all of us.

SORRY, NIGHT GENT, WHEREVER YOU ARE…

For I missed your beautiful smile.

What –and who — on earth am I talking about? Well…

It occured to me last night — and I cringed at the memory — that there were embarrassing moment during my TV career when I had to cancel interviews with people I know were, for various reasons, eager to tell their story to a television audience — and this despite their trepidation about going before the camera. Often you’d find yourself gently pleading with them to put aside their timidity and consent to appear, only to be forced later to cancel out.

For some reason, I’m especially recalling the time working for Channel 7 in Boston when I was reporting on efforts to end dog racing in Massachusetts. Accordingly, I had set up an interview with a trainer at Wonderland race track in Revere, Mass. I was to meet him —and his champion greyhound, named Night Gent. This excited me. Yes, I love dogs, but more than that, viewers love seeing animals and they liven up a story.

Then, for forgotten reasons doubtless beyond my control and perhaps frivilous and unnecessary as often happens in TV (e.g., allegedly important “breaking news” somewhere), I was forced to cancel the interview. Thereafter, because the news cycle keeps turning, I wound up never doing the interview or the story.

The next day, I made a point of calling the trainer, apologized, and sheepishly asked if the cancellation had greatly inconvenienced him.

He was cordial and forgiving, but immediately noted, in a wry tone, that in order to make his celebrated canine ready for his close-up, “I even brushed his teeth.”

Boy, did I feel terrible! I’m sure old Night Gent felt even worse. What dog likes having his teeth brushed?

Come to find out: In 1986 (about the time I was going to meet him),Night Gent captured the Derby Lane Sprint Classic down here in Florida and was named to the All-America team. I believe he may even be in the Greyhound Hall of Fame. He was a super-star! I’d have brushed my teeth to have my picture taken with him –and, of course, feed him a biscuit or two.

But, alas, the moment, and Night Gent, have gone gently into that goodnight of dog racing, for the sport is on the wane and, at least in Massachusetts and other states, been banned outright, perhaps for good reasons.

I hope Night Gent‘s years in retirement were restful and rewarding, with naturally sparkling teeth. And that, first of all, they retired his toothbrush.

WOMAN MARRIES SNAKE

They are calling this ” a peculiar Indian love story.” It comes from Harper’s Magazine on-line.

Note: I started reading, on my iPhone, this story I might have thought, smugly, was merely an amusing novelty affirming my belief that the world has gone mad, forgetting the anthropological realities that divide humanity and make one soul’s rituals and objects of worship another person’s folly. And I most especially want to note that I have borrowed here from the narrative account of Mischa Berlinski, a writer unknown to me who made the journey to the ‘bride and groom’s’ village intrigued by the tale and on a mission to discern the truth in the best spirit of the best writer’s and journalists. I did not mean to plagiarize, but caution that, even without quotation marks, many of the words are Ms Berlinski’s in this highly condensed account.

And so, we learn:

In Bhudaneswar, India, in the state of Orissa, June 2nd of 2023, a thirty (?) year-old woman who claimed to have fallen in love with a snake got married to it. There was a Hindu ritual ceremony. Two thousand people were in attendance and there was the traditional procession of celebration.

The snake was a cobra.

The story was picked up by all the Indian daily newspapers, the wire services and translated into two dozen languages. Thousands of bloggers commented on the post (including, now, this one). Gay bloggers still living in countries where gayh marriage is illegal wondered why, if this woman could marry a snake, they couldn’t marry their beloveds. Hindu bloggers took issue with the marriage, saying that it was the kind of thing that made everyone think Hindus were weird. It affirmed conservative arguments that marriage, so broadly and loosely defined, would inevitably lead to people marrying their pets. On Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert countered that attacks on gay marriage growing out of Bimbala’s nuptuals were misplaced, because the union was, in fact, heterosexual: the groom/snake in question is male.

Ms. Berlinski who visited the site of the wedding was introduced to the snake’s new mother-in-law, a trim, 75-year-old silver-haired woman. She seemed to feel her daughter’s marriage aspirations were the work of God, since the girl had been unhappy and unhealthy in a multitude of ways and had visions that a snake had helped cure her of sickness. “We cannot disturb God’s work,” the woman said. The writer also learned from her guide that the snake is not an animal to the people of india. It is a god — and considered the religioius leaders of the girl’s village.

Indeed, anthropologists tell us that there is strong evidence of snake worship in antiquity. “One of the first challenges of the authors of Genesis was to confront the cult of the snake,” writes Berlinski.

Prehistoric Indians found themselves confronted by two terrifying animals — the powerful elephant and the unpredictable, often venomous snake.

The worship of the cobra in modern India is particularly associated with the god Shiva, one of the more impressive and terrifying of god in the Hindu pantheon. Shiva is often depicted with a cobra hanging around his neck.

But Berlinski, in her journey of research, had yet to meet the bridegroom. In video made of the wedding, only a brass snake is in attendance. Apparently the real snake could not be coaxed into attending. Apparently it (he?)lives in an anthill.

The writer’s account ends with the greatest of respect, describing village women on their knees in prayer near the bride’s hut on a peaceful afterenoon, “saying very little and hoping that Debo (the snake’s name, apparently)would come out fro the antihill.”

So what shall we make of this? With equal respect — again, having borrowed many of Mischa Berlinski’s words verbatim — I will say that we mortals of every race and creed, are groping our way through the heat, chaos and fever of life toward the god of our understanding. Can I be anything but humble, as a Christian, knowing how, in sacrament, image and prayer, I go on reaching toward God and the God-man Christ through the tangled darkness of the material world?

THE SAGA OF THE MALTESE HAIRDRESSER

A guy named Knox (don’t know his first name), a commercial artist, somehow started finding his way to The Last Mile Lounge on a corner of that busy, barren strip near the Lynn/ Revere line. This was fifteen years ago. He was originally from California. Someone suggested he got lost leaving the airport (a joke, of course). Then the guy who owned the woodframe block in which The Last Mile sits at street level let him rent an apartment upstairs. There was a back porch facing Revere Beach ( barely visible and only in the dead of winter) where he found light to do more “serious” work. It was a strange choice of real estate for an artist, if you ask me. He’s still living up there.

And he still come downstairs at least once or twice a week and sits at the bar nursing something called A Blushing Monk — Benedictine, Aperol, Suze, Lillet. Blanc and Lime juice. Deano, as forbearing a bartender as you’ll ever find, obligingly indulged old Knox, who is probably not a day under sixty, his rare potion. Deano had to special-order the ingredients. (Sticky Sammartino took a sip of it one once and confided to Jackie The Crow that it was like sipping terpentine and Sticky should know because, having made his livelihood as a painter, he’d regularly sniffed, if not actually drunk, toxic solvents.)

But Knox (actually, recently I heard his first name supposedly was Wilfred) is a hoary-headed, slender, tall bearded figure no one could mistake for anything but an artist.

Some weeks back, I made a rare Thursday night visit to The Mile and found Knox seated at the end of the bar over his Monk with his sketch pad. I decided to sit down next to him — I’d chatted him up before — and, over my tonic and cranberry juice, saw that Knox was working on a face — many version of a face. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was in what I would call (remembering what little I learned from a humanities course in college) the style of the artist called Modigliani. (Pull out your college arts book, if you still have it or went to college, and look him up — or just go on-line. You’ll see all these narrow, s t range faces.) These wre just pencile sketches, with red pencil scribble. But I noticed that Knox had brought two Crayola crayons for the evening’s work (he’d found time to work his Monk down about half way — more sipping than usual) and his sketches were a shade of yellow and a shade of brown. Each of his rather beguiling female figures had hair that blended both.

“Might I make an inquiry?” I said. It was all I had to say. For he told me he was doing multiple images of a Maltese hairdresser he’d met in a Florida department store in his youth. She was in the hair salon, and was, yes, born in Malta.

“She was beautiful,” Knox said. “I was in the hunt for some interesting shirts, saw the salon on the second floor and, awary my locks had grown a bit shaggy, went in in to have them trimmed. As wonderful good fortune would have it, she was the stylist on duty. From that very moment, I just wanted her for myself — a beautiful figure, wonderful brown eyes, charming manner, hair that, given her Mediterranean liniage, was probably not blond but, given her profession, she’d managed to bring to a wonderful, albeit artificial shade of blond. It might have been the only time in my life I settled for something artificial.” He glanced at me. “Which, perhaps, should have been taken as an omen.

“We talked, oh, did we ever talk! She spoke in that wonderful Maltese accent! I went back to her in just a few days under the ruse of needing a slightly closer trim and a neck massage — she gave wonderful massages. And I think she saw through the ruse. She knew I’d come back just to be near her.”

“This all sounds very promising,” I said.

“She was unattached, but she confided that she’d been living with a fellow.”

“Shameful,” I said. He ignored thesarcasm, the false moral indignation. He was dreaming — was, in his mind, back in Florida and in love. “She shared with me that she and her paramour had parted company, utterly separated.” Again he glanced my way. “Now, you seem like a man of the world, Mr. Wayland.”

“Indubitably,” I said. More sarcasm.

“Well, then you know that a woman, a virtual stranger, does not share such information with another stranger — be it a customer and other such client — and that she would not have been telling me unless her romance was lying on the slab at Cupid’s coroner. This was clearly an invitation. She was imparting to me, Mr. Wayland, that she was lonely, that she was rid of a nuisance, that she was about to be homeless (for she’d had been living at her boyfriend’s domicile), and, most importantly, that she was, as they say,’ on the market.’

“And, of course, we can alway use someone with whom to share our room and board, correct? Especially a beautiful someone. I was quite impecunious in those day , making my living with drawings as best I could. My angelic hair stylist was also quite enthralled by the knowledge that I am an artist. I knew her to be — or, at least, claimed to be — a fan of the opera. Perhaps she had seen a Miami production of La Boheme. Perhaps she took me for a Rudolfo in search of his Mimi. On my third visit to her — not for my hair but for my heart and my aspirations to be eternally near her — I brought a finely drawn portrait in acrylics that I’d hastily but no less carefully made of her entirely from memory, a perfect but artistically rendered portrait of her. In the style of (ah! I knew it) Modigliani. She was flattered to tears, though perhaps might have hoped I’d done something with a bit greater photraphic likeness — like the pictures of herself all over her mirror (another omen) .

“Then I invited her to come share my apartment with me — my own Parisian garrett which was, in fact, a former garage tucked away in The Grove. She agreed. I was feeling a thousand miles high.”

“Well, well, well,” I said, “and as we always ask ourselves after reading each day’s installment of our favorite comic strip, what happened next?”

“Nothing comic about it,” said ole Wilfred Knox. “In fact, it was tragic from my fractured point of view. She informed me days later -after not answering her phone in all that time — that, upon hearing of her plan to move in with another man, her paramour blocked her BMW in the driveway with his motorcycle. His very unmistakable way of telling her their affair was not over, that he expected her to ride eternally on the back of his Harley Davidson. Nor was she about to resist, which surprised me. For, indeed, I took her to be a strong woman able to resist any man’s wishes.”

“Apparently she was resisting your wishes, Knox,” I said. ( I’m not strong in the consolation department for men who’ve been gulled by women and who should have seen it coming.)

Knox didn’t disagree. He let me see his sad eyes then. “I believe she used me, Mr. Wayland.”

Talk about stating the obvious. I sipped my cranberry and tonic. “I think that’s a very strong possibilty, Knox. You were leveraged for, shall we say, a healing moment between lovers — or, in this case, slave and master. She played you for a sucker.”

Then — I just had to know, I asked, “what happened to that portrait of this Venus?

“I saved it,” Knox said. ” And our esteemed landlord and prorietor here at this establishment has agreed that we shall unveil that very portrait amid great ceremony here Saturday night. ”

Wow! (Note: this was, as I said, weeks ago.)

” You see,” Knox went on,” I sat and told him this story just as I’m telling it to you. This was just a few days ago. And he was quite, ah, charmed by the whole thing.”

“You mean, amused.”

“Yes, that ,too.”

And, so, yes, ( to update things here), they did, indeed, hold a little ceremonial unveiling of Knox’s Portrait of a Maltese Viper. I made a point of being there, and seeing it. It was quite a spectacle — the gathering, that is.. There were about nineteen souls in the place — men, women, some regulars, a few visitors. But Knox assured everyone they were free to adorn his artwork with their own “expressive augmentations” (meaning everyone, women included, was free to vandalize it spitefully. I counted three different black Sharpie moustaches.)

Back to the night in question — the night on which I got to hear this story from old Knox — I spent the balance of the night catching a little of the Celtics game on the overhead Sanyo flatscreen, hardly thinking about what Knox had told me — while Knox continued his fevered sketching next to me. At some point, he abruptly gathered up all this sketches and disappered.

Then when I was walking to my car, I saw that he’d made a litte pyre out back in the dirt near the rear dumpster. It was miniscule — just a bunch of crumpled small white sheets (his sketches). I’m sure he reasoned that, since he’d created a large acrylic representation of his vanished, devious angel, he could destroy all other evidence of her. The pile burned out very quickly, sparks scattering over the ground. Good thing there weren’t any fire department jakes around that night. I know at least one of them drinks at The Mile.

I walked over to Knox. “What’s up?” I said. He said (as I expected), “one portrait of my deceiver is enough.”

Maybe I’ll grab a cellphone picture of that scribbled-over and desecrated portrait sometime and show it to you. I doubt this woman was as weirdly indescribable as that wild riot of intermingling colors would suggest — with eyes like ripe figs and brown/gold hair resembling the stuff that bursts out of old sofas after they been left out in the rain.

Stickie Sammartino, taking a turn as an art critic, described it as a waste of paint. He was a man who never wasted paint. He’d do a whole house with three gallons. But he was happy to toast to it — to the hideous Gorgon who broke old Knox’s heart. ( I suspected, somewhere on some south Florida highway, the woman whose name we never learned from Knox is still ridiing on the back of her lover’s cycle, clutching him around the mid-section, taking jobs at salons far and wide, now and then transforming herself with assorted highlights and extentions and multiplying variety in a wilderness of solon mirrors. Someone who doctored Knox’s painting (which hangs with various other framed novelties in the passageway to the rest rooms), gave her a very long, black tongue. I saw one female regular I know only at Trixie adding cauliflower ears.

Even before all the adornments, Jackie the Crow simpy called the portrait, “ugly.” A very direct soul, ole Jackie.Just what you’d expect from a bricklayer.

And I asked Knox, standing in the dark on that cool, mid-winter night as he made his miniscule bonfire three blocks from from the chilly Atlantic, ” did you ever see your dark Angel again?”

“Never,” he said. “I was told she married the fellow who barricaded her in his driveway . I trust she’s now blockaded in a very unhappy marriage.”

“No doubt about it,” I said. “She’d have been much happier parking her BMW in the dirt out here behind The Mile, living up over the bar as a seamstress to the starving artist Knox, sewing up your skivvies in a cut-rate version of La Boheme. .”

Knox smiled and said,”You are a most crfuelly cultivated fellow, Mr. W.” and, as I made my way to my old Subaru, he commenced to sing — almost certainly under the influence of a fourth Blushing Monk, a sonorous, barely in-key version of Che gelida manina…

Yeah, that was some night.

A BUTTERFLY, A GRAPE ARBOR, THE RIVER

July 12. Rotterdam Junction. All over the land, floods and heat. Only breeze and drizzle here. No, no breeze. But that’s alright. Warm. Safe.

And only my broken decades, dammed up joy. Gratitude for having been saved from my even worse proclivities. So far. So many prayers.

Memory. Memories.

Back from Bennington, out the kitchen window, a white butterfly, a grape arbor, grapes green but abundant, the flags slack on the golden eagle-crested flagpole. (No, no breeze.) The river. Thanks God for rivers.

A butterfly, a grape arbor, the river.

Wednesday. Middle of the week, middle of the month, middle of the summer.

Clouds.

God help me. God forgive me.

I will write now. Always write.