morethanenoughtruth

Suddenly present

in a green grass meadow,

watching wind cavort

in a rippling sea of verdance,

Where is it going,

so sure of itself,

when I know nothing

of where I will stay

this night, or any other? 

I wander and gander,

peering and scrying

this feasting of sight,

sunrises vivid with hoping,

sunsets dismal with knowing

what tomorrow will be

and how it will end.

~~~

I portion out cash for a day at the store,

and give it to clerks

to man (or to woman)

the register of each department’s purview.

I want it back at the end of the day

with what has come in

less what has gone out.

to serve the avarice sparkling green in my eyes.

~~~

It feels good to be working

on my feet and in charge.

Something will be what it can

if I but see it as possible.

Then I catch sight of Maggie

the golden, my wonderful dog.

There she is.  I love her!  I do!

She bolts into my house and hides.

I look for her, and there she is, under my bed,

Nose tucked beneath paw.

Now a different collie breaks into view.

They look so alike and lovely, I wonder

Which is true friend?

~~~

With doubt it cracks, splits, fragments,

a crazy kaleidoscopic tumble,

a panicky stir of geometries,

shattered rainbows

of color and of shape,

of feeling, delight and

anguish, love and fear

that delight, mesmerize,

titillate, obsess, disgust,

and then, in blink

of jaundiced eye,

stop.

~~~

I look in the mirror

And what do I see,

But a fearsome image

Grinning back at me.

It is small and shrunken

More bone than bonny

More hag than handsome

with pretty forgotten

Shredded to time addled dust.

~~~

What frightens more than bones

Caught in crepy lucent skin

Is the visual of a mouth rimmed blue.

~~~

“I see you,” it says.

“Please go away.

I don’t want to be the you

one more tragedic day.”

~~~

I waken with relief to

another day of governed rest

one of many to endure

but to never number.

Each will follow after

the one that went before

like ducklings

in a fuzzy row

while I hide

in fear of spectral death.

~~~

Why should I fear

some peaceful silent end

when I am

in verisimilitude

already dead?

~~~

Gone will come later

in soft sweet silent sleep.

Sitting at my friendly computer desk last night in my cozy flannel PJ’s, lining up lovely words into erudite phrases, I was lulled into a relaxed state of wellbeing.  Then something wiggled inside my right pajama leg.  I was up in half a flash.  It’s good the blinds were closed as I shrieked and tore off the entire bottom half of my sleepers.  I only stopped my frenzied jig when I spied the instigator of my terror, a big black cricket, creeping away to hide hopefully behind a white wicker wastebasket.

Why was I so afraid?

First: Things that wiggle don’t belong inside my pajamas.

Second: Things with exoskeletons are unnatural and meant to be observed from afar.

Third:  Things without any skeletons at all are weird and inspire a natural revulsion.

By deduction:  The more different a thing is from me, the more I am repelled by it.

It just may be the case that we are hard wired to fear the other.  Xenophobia is a feature of not just being human, but of being a sentient life form.  No wonder we assume racial differences to be perceptive demarcations.  But just because the big X is a natural feature of being a living creature, that doesn’t mean we should accept it as a fixed and irrevocable cognitive error.  We are intelligent.  We can undertake a fine tuning of our perceptions to make them more accurate and more loving.  We must try.

I can begin by acknowledging that it was actually a tiny black cricket—not a big one.  Why is it so easy to jump to the conclusion that scary black things are big?  Our subconscious always so readily connects for alliterative possibility, big black bugaboos vis-à-vis white wicker wastebaskets, easy to hide behind and restore hope, given their whiteness and their dainty thoughtful interlocked pattern of construct.  In my confrontation it was the cricket who demonstrated the enlightened intellect.  Bless him!  No doubt his perception of me was big, pink, and butt-ugly.

In retrospect, having calmed myself, I remember that this particular arthropod, so typically given to singing with gusto, was undertaking a studied silence while scaling the inner mystery of my pajama leg.  Perhaps it was because his music isn’t actually song.  It is more accurately an exuberant scritch-scritching between hinged parts of his scary exoskeleton.  Those induced vibrations author the happy reverberation we enjoy as cricket song.  Soft cotton flannel no doubt had a damping effect on the acoustics of his music.  Empathy is always a good approach to rivalry, whether inter- or intra-species.  How frustrating it must have been for his urge to expression to be muffled by my fusty old flannel.  When you gotta scratch you gotta scratch. When you gotta’ sing, you gotta’ sing.

Finally, I need to make the acquaintance of the individual cricket before making unwarranted conclusions about his character, motives, and personal integrity.  He might have actually been Jiminy Cricket, of Disney fame, personifying high conscience in the physiognomy of a bug.

It’s all about posture—and about communication.  Your body and your mind are in a nonstop palaver about what’s happening, what used to happen long ago, and what is sure to happen who knows how far down the road.  And how does that affect how I hold my head?  Or swing my hips?  Or pace my gait?  Everything!

This monumentous discovery cracked the light of day during the year I turned eighty.  That was the year I finally admitted to the possibility of mortality.  Until then I was operating under the fixed delusion that I could never grow old—never die.  That year was a cosmic comeuppance.  I have been dying, slowly, imperceptibly, ever since I cleared the womb.  Telomeres were losing tails.  Sunlight has long been jousting with molecules that lost the good fight, rearranging to form new and different ways to live in the biome.

That discovery suggested a better way to analyze the situation.  Reducing everything to constituents made it more accessible—friendlier—so to speak.  Of course analysis strips even the most formidable problem down to size.  Reductionism works!

When I found myself scuffing around in my apartment like some old person, I demanded a re-take.  What had gone wrong?  I began watching.  Every step was fodder for the reductionist mill.  Gait was circumspect all day—every day.  Time of day was surely a factor.  Level of fatigue played a part.  Setting was all-important.  What was going on at the time inserted itself.  Yesterday’s activity might induce residual soreness.  Diet must surely be a factor.  We are, of course, what we eat.  How about costume?  What to wear has always influenced how we are seen and even how we see ourselves, as perception becomes part of the equation.  What we have been up to this hour matters more than any of us might have suspected.  Who informs our self-definition—past and present?  Other people stir the soup.  Complicate it.  Make it fun or doom it to despair.  Just like my Mother said, “It matters what other people think!”

Just watching all this play out increased sensitivity to what’s happening.  I recall Bugs Bunny’s repeated question, “Eh-eh-eh-eh.  What’s up doc?”  Was that a commentary on the happenstance of my inquisition?  Methinks we are on to something.

Notice that I didn’t mention age or physical debilitation as a contributing factor.  Everybody jumps to those assumptions and gives up.  Don’t!  How can I lose my keys when I hang them every time from the helpful front doorknob?  I am in control of every moment as it plays itself out.  The inevitable loss of memory need not incite panic.  Who needs memory when we have an endless supply of clever devices to extrapolate our humanity?  Maps?  Forget them!  I have Siri.  She’s a constant companion.  In 2011, I thought it was soon to be over, but then I bought an IPhone.  The rest is a history I share with a planet full of cohorts.  We will die, but we’ll have a helluva wild ride getting there!

I must have slept last night since I remember a marvelous dream that knitted together what has been a long recurring nightmare into a glowing hopeful masterpiece of remembrance.  Every time I entered this worrisome landscape, I was beset with concerns about components that were mislaid, perhaps lost forever, carefully positioned in some special place and then forgotten.  I needed to locate them and complete some important project, but every visitation only increased the heavy overlay of anxiety.

 

The problem was exacerbated by being strung out over multiple venues.  It took place in many different houses, offices, manufacturing facilities, located across a whole panoply of real estate.  It was while trudging from one location to another last night that I met the key to my dream’s resolution.  Like a vision imported from Gibran, I met her walking upon my path.  There she was, holding in her arms the entirety of my project’s components.  Carefully arranged within the clarity and safety of plastic was every dear part that I had worried near to distraction with my strivings and agonizings.  There they were, with all the tape and glue and wishes and dreams I needed to bring them all together into a great cohesion of finished.

 

The package glowed in her arms.  Were the parts made of gold, or did they only seem that way?  And the woman—was she me at some past juncture?  Younger?  Stronger? Totally assured?  That mane of hair glowed with its own inner light—a lush swirl of blonde—more living than life.  No grisly used-to-be-blond tangle here.  This was the me that used to stalk the halls of the military-industrial complex and beat them at their own trumped-up silly game.  This was the Dorothy that played with tools and machine concepts invented just for the fun of the encounter with the marvels-of-things.  Pay was incidental.

 

OK dream—I can take it from here.  Thank you Dorothy-that-was-me.  I understand.  This all came together when Lane, my son, and Remington, his son, along with Rem’s new wife Emily, gathered with me for lunch at the Longhorn Steak House this past Wednesday.  That meal was the next shoe to drop following my insistence on the read-around of “Aunt Margaret” after the Martin family Thanksgiving repast in Richmond.  It turns out they had been perusing my blog, even discussing “Change Happens.”  They were throwing around references to morethanenoughtruth.com like it was part of family lore.   Emily’s eyes glowed with the recognition of meeting a kindred spirit.  She, as it turns out, likes to write.

 

When my boys were small I made a pact with them.  Any book they read from my personal library became theirs.  It was their way of building their own personal bookshelves.  Before long I had lost every one of my treasured collection of Robert Heinlein to Lane’s gathering bibliophilia.  It was good.  It was very good.  Now I take more pleasure in Lane’s growing home library than I ever did in my own.

 

I learned last night that while in New Orleans, overpaid guys in tight pants where bashing heads together, my family and I were getting to know each other here in Cincinnati.  A visit to Word Press/Site Statistics verified that Emily Valentine Taylor is now following my blog, morethanenoughtruth.com   Praise the Lord, and pass that blooming dictionary!  After last night’s adventure, my dreary never-ending dream of desolation should not be haunting my REM episodes.  I just might get some restorative sleep.

Crouched beyond the ragged rim of dawn, tomorrow waits

And mornings yet to be envisioned

Silently assemble.

Aeons dimly convene in that sweet silent place,

Listening, waiting, gathering purpose,

Wanting to make of future days

Some greatness, some goodness,

Even some poetry of action.

 

Will that dawn break glorious

Or will it slip-slide-slither in?

Will its herald be tittering bird-calls or

Fission blasts assaulting ears and minds?

Predawn is a time for questions:

What will become of this new day?

Will it distinguish its gathering self

As some great time that men will wonder at

Or will it slog into being an obscure

Past not worth remembering?

 

It’s all there waiting, assembling

Promising, even planning

A great and noble time

When level heads prevail,

When fisticuffs hesitate,

Think twice,

Decide to wait and see.

And hope.

It’s all there crouched as incipient possibility.

 

Will it explode as in the noble hymn:

Break forth O beauteous heavenly light

And usher in the morning?

 

Or not.

 

Perhaps it listens

Wondering what might come

If it takes that first grand step

Into a day of majesty.

 

Will it?

 

It must.

 

Religion used to be our cultural carrier, but now it’s become Hollywood.  We can bemoan the situation or roll it into the biblical canon.  A useful exercise is to choose ten of your own favorite movies, arrange them in a meaningful order, and stand back.  What you see is a portrait of your own distinct personality.

 

For me, the result of this research is arranged below.  This little list must be part of any meaningful memoir left for the edification of my progeny.  I urge them to enjoy getting to know their ma and grandma and to begin accumulating their own playbills for ages yet to roll.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Sound of Music: Maria Von Trapp, finding love in all the right places, is every bit Dorothy Jeanette Martin.  Orphan, tom-boy, wanna-be-religious, not sure about all those children, but finally delighting in them, dreaming of and winning her own true loves, matrimonial then maternal.  Julie Andrews only acted the part.  I lived it, pirouetting on a West Virginia hilltop, singing my heart out to the wind and the birds who shared it with me.  Bluebirds and skylarks took flight— swooping again and again across swales of verdant green and flower tops.  They rode that ocean of floral fecundity.  Life bloomed!  I was part of it!  Julie could only playact and sing; I made real babies and figured out how they worked, or tried to.  I didn’t always do it right, but I did it with fervor.

 

Contact: Eleonore Ann Arroway, determined to be brilliant, scaring up her own adventure that braids science, spirit, and faith in a lustrous plait of meaning, stands in for Dorothy at this intersection of work and fulfillment.  I once promised to invent anti-gravity—a silly thought, but how was I to know where brave plans and delusions of questionable grandeur forked in the road?  Assured that such things were possible, I determined to set about doing them.  When I announced to my father that I would wed, he came to my remove in West Virginia, picked me up, and set out on a road trip to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, where the rocket program was getting its start.  He had me wait in the car while he entered and chatted-up an old friend, remembered from Manhattan Project and Experimental Aircraft Association days.  He returned, sat in the car and asked that I give up my plan to make a family where none existed in my as yet untethered life.  It was a done deal.  I had only to enter the facility, accept the position he had secured for me, finish my degree program at night school, and all would be well.  I demurred.  It would have been a hollow victory to win the good fight based on my father’s history.  I had to make my own.  It was, as it turns out, the perfect decision.  The best part of the memory was that Daddy loved me enough to try to save me.  Nothing is ever simple.

 

Book Thief: Word is meaning, now as it was, even in the beginning.  Everyone has a place where the Nazi atrocity plays itself out in personal thinking.  For me it is this meaning dense terrain where Lisl Menninger meets a new adoptive family and sets out to put together what is real and important while trying to make a meaning filled life out of a world gone mad.  She crosses paths with a Jewish man, helps her family hide and care for him, and learns the joy of reading and writing from his well-deep understanding of Jewish wisdom.  Hitler’s war kills her family but saves her assurance of her life as a woman of honor and integrity.  She steals books, borrows them that is, but is not in any sense a thief.  It is an interesting irony that such a life-filled story is spun out in the hollow voice of Death.  Maybe her real larceny was her own life, stolen from Death, a pyrrhic victory snatched from the not-always-inevitable jaws of defeat.  As I prepare myself for the long sleep, I refer often back to the Book Thief for reality-checks and simple satisfactions.

 

The Education of Little Tree: A beauty filled understanding of nature as determinator of what is real and right, and what works, in a world too complex to know itself as fully human.

 

The Help: Race is not a useful discriminator even in a cesspool state like Mississippi.  People of goodwill can overcome our history if they care to and try.  In 2012 Cincinnati, I locked horns with an activist who insisted that I was a racist just because I have blonde hair and hazel eyes.  I bristled—insisted that I had been loved and cared for by one Lillie-Mae Choice, a black woman who was coincidentally housekeeper and maid of my aunt, Jewel Josephine MacNeil.  Lillie-Mae was my second mother, and I loved her.  It follows: I cannot be a racist.  I pointed to The Help as being one of my all-time-favorite movies.  The activist laughed and postulated that I was only enjoying the feeling of privilege accruing to my stature as a daughter of the South.  I walked out of the meeting and never returned.  She is, I suppose, still spewing such division.  I did not handle that well and wish I could find her, give her a hug, and sit down for a good talk and an even better listen.

 

Priest: Love trumps religion, even in the oligarchy of Catholicism.  This film was (and I assume still is) condemned by the Vatican, assuring its wide and popular dissemination.  A conservative and closeted gay priest is assigned to a Northern Ireland parish where he works with a liberal straight priest who is enjoying the sociable foot-warming of the parish housekeeper.  When true evil rears its ugly head, all such peccadilloes pale in the face of an authentic Satan.

 

Ghost: Good vs evil is an either/or spiritual choice.  It isn’t enough to leave it to others.  We must do it anew every day, a quotidian decision, daily to be made and lived into.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Gender is a shape-shifter.  Beauty is generously found in the garden and must be understood and befriended.  Goodness can hide in dark and quiet places, even as evil goes blithely on parade.  It is always necessary to discriminate and value a creative balance.

 

Dead Poet’s Society: Says as much about educating the next generation as it does about the abstraction of verse.  In a perfect world I would have been born as Robin Williams.  Wouldn’t that have been fun to play out?

 

Claire of the Moon: Love whom you love, for heaven’s sake—and for earth’s as well.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

I invite you to summon your own set of Hollywood essays.  If you love a movie, it has already slipped into your psyche and recognized you as a friendly.  You will find yourself in their light and color, advancing film by film, frame by frame, set about your own shining sky of mind, an always honest mosaic of all that it means to be “The You.”

 

The ragged caravan of velocipedes moved down Erie Avenue headed for MEAC (Madisonville Education and Assistance Center) loaded with 195 boxes of great-bird fixin’s.  It was a unique experience showing up right-on-the-dot at the advertised 9:30 AM to join that lively crew of 17.  They were already locked and loaded, ready to go.  I was the first to volunteer and the last to show up—not late, not early, exactly on time— my signature approach to getting there.  But these Episcopalians were already grooving.  There were only a pathetic few cardboard containers left to fill my Highlander.  They were promptly stowed, and after a prayerful blessing we were off in a cloud of love-thy-neighbor dust.

 

I didn’t know where I was going, a common problem for me, new to the state, but I’ve learned that in Ohio you are just supposed to know these things.  I took off, roughly toward where I thought MEAC must surely be.  It worked.  In no time at all what had been a rough aggregate of disparate vehicles converged on the center of Madisonville, a merry clot of good will.

 

Everybody grabbed a stack of loaded cardboard from any vehicle and filed into the quiet grey building.  In no time at all, vans were empty and an impressive stack of heaving containers strained a long row of sturdy tables, creaking, sagging, wanting just to give of their bounty.  And give they did.  The first donation was to the assorted Redeemer parishioners who volunteered for this project, asked by a frantic Liz Coley to lend a hand and a vehicle to the annual event.  I had hesitated to offer my car with its peeling clear-coat to a group of surely better ones.  But—why not?  The rest is history, or moving in that direction.  Getting to show up and be a part of this loving roundup is the best Thanksgiving gift a person could receive.  What fun to imagine the grateful happy faces soon to be arrayed about our stack of plain unwrapped boxes.

 

I’ll never forget this, my first experience of benevolent Episcopalians in action.  They came—they gave—they conquered.  And they didn’t have a whole lot to say about it.  They just made it happen.  The lady representing our Presbyterian counterparts rounded us up for a photo-op, and everybody agreed on a group grin.  There wasn’t even a flash as her iPhone swallowed the cheerful scene.  Everybody waved and headed out to wherever.  Our job was done—this time.

 

But, there’ll be a next time.  Next time I’ll know that it’s a good thing to offer, even what is not much.  I couldn’t even think of lifting those boxes with my old tricky shoulders, but others could.  I can do some small part of what is needed, so I’ll be there.  The rest is up to God.

Age is just as just,

as fair as eye for eye.

A time to lively live

A time to finely die.

 

The chicken and the egg

couldn’t quite agree

on which came first.

They agreed to disagree.

 

I’ve thought so hard

my brain is inside out.

Perhaps a better plan

would turn it outside in.

 

Everybody’s dying.

It’s the latest thing,

devoutly to be visioned,

finally achieved.  But…

 

It’s the locked gate,

the-Katie-bar-the-door,

of sad good-byes.

Who’s Katie anyway?

 

We all have to die.

I do.  You do.  We all do.

It’s the only right and

proper thing to do.

All living things must surely die.

 

 

When stray radiation from deep cosmos impacts a living cell, the nature of the attack, in the case of cancerous growth, is spoiling universal law that all must die.  Other mechanisms of change leave molecular mortality intact.  Those mutated cells are different but benign.  We know this, either scientifically or intuitively.  The ultimate arrogance is to wish for the eternal life which, in the natural order of things, we are denied.  Whole religions have been built to deal with that predicament.  Jesus did it and got away with it.  After three days, he got up and shuffled off—to a  great deal more than Buffalo.  But that’s another story.  It’s easy to get sidetracked when addressing the reaper, grim or gracious.

 

Once accepting our hard-earned somatic humility, we must set about the question of getting to dead.  It can happen in an instant, as in flattened-by-a-truck, or can be accomplished over a gracious span of earth-time, relative of course, to whatever remove from light speed is the person doing the dying.  How long it takes to deconstruct a cell is controlled by the current length of its telomeres.  Every time a cell divides, a wiggle of its tail is used-up in the division.  When all are gone, that cell no longer divides.  Senescence ensues.  We have the science that proves telomeres can be lengthened with doses of the enzyme Telomerase, but such dramatic supplementation is typically cost-prohibitive.  So it doesn’t help all that much to understand how we age.  We must understand, accept, and harness that knowledge to our lively purpose.
We can slow telomere shortening, to wit:  Reduce stress, stop smoking, lose weight, exercise more, and eat better.  Frankly, we are sick of this song.  Death is the only sure-fire stress reduction.  Anybody dumb enough to smoke doesn’t deserve to live.  Anybody too greedy to push plate away when they’re full has already had much more than their share.  If we’re too bored to get up and move about, what do we have to live for anyway, if our get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went?

 

Which brings us full circle:  We decide when we should die.  Our very cells know the time.  Our skin decides to sag.  Our muscles get cranky and stage a litany of cramp.  Things that should rise don’t.  Our bones go porous and dump us on our color coordinated Persian rug, or on our dust-free Swiffer-slick eco-friendly no-wax floor.  No matter how well we are preserved, we know when our number’s up.  Our cells know—our organs know—why do we cringe from the knowing?

 

It’s our intelligence that deludes us.  Too damn smart we are to die.  If religion fails us, spirit will come through.  The Jesus message was inherently spiritual, though mainly lost to the mysticism of its own myth.  If fey, we grab on and ride our ESP, our drop-dead-pretty purple Unicorn, carrying us through any running of the bulls to satiety of china-shop exhaustion.  Even glorying in our surety that there is “more” won’t save us.  Before we get to whatever reward may be just, or justified, we must first give up spooky ghost.

 

Dying should be a project not an abdication.  I’ve got a window seat on the most fascinating adventure of a lifetime.  A prime consolation of nearly all seniors is the obsessive cataloguing of ills that point toward personal deconstruction.  It’s not that we are hypochondriacal, even if we are.  It’s that we are bored to death with parts of us unwinding and leaving us to fuss with whatever’s left.  We haven’t given up.  Why should they?  These were good organs, strong systems, dedicated to integrity of body, strength of will.  Given all the pills we bought for them, how dare they just lie down to some Q-sign oblivion?

 

That’s one side of the war; the other is our own.  My parts may still be cranking, but I’m as good as done.  I am free to see every pain as gathering end, every new symptom as possible final solution to an up-and-coming morgue-rat dilemma.  If every forgotten word is handed over to Alzheimer’s, every missed appointment consigned to senility, what’s to keep us out of the bloomin’ grave?  If I can’t pass by the bathroom door without stopping off to contribu-tinkle, what do I expect a bladder to do?  It will shrink, of course, but if I take over and do my human job, that bladder can be taught to serve a higher good.  Away from that lovely siren-flush, my bladder and I can pass whole afternoons gadding about the town.  If I greet words-remembered rather than lamenting words-forgotten, most words seem to hang around for more than enough of the fun.

 

When push comes to shove, my genome is the boss.  Ask those brown spots gathering all over little-red-headed-girl white skin.  Are they a Parthian shot from the melanin that was supposed to protect from a too-aggressive Helios.  The big M failed.  Not my fault, or was it?  Doc says it’s a gift from my ancestors, but I could have stayed out of the sun, like the old folks said, wearing the old-lady-ugly sun-bonnets they prescribed.  But I knew better.  A day at Jones or Myrtle Beach was worth any future carcinoma.  I’ve told my grandchildren how this works.  A visit to the dermatologist is oh-so-full of excitement and fun.  This month’s coterie of pre-cancerous lesions frozen off, as well as a suspicious mole snipped, packaged, and shipped off for biopsy, and maybe the next Mohs surgery.

 

Every system has its swan song.  All contribute to the dying, some more, some less.  “23 and me” is glad to trade good cash for an informed list of which systems are most likely to contribute toward biting the dust.  Then we can plot retribution.  I have tagged an ascending aortic aneurysm, a hiatal hernia (shortened esophagus leading to chronic gastro-esophageal reflux), a cardiac-insufficiency plotting an inevitable attack or throwing an embolism, nine thyroid adenomas in their own little cocoons of misery, allergies to bi-valves, molds and dust mites, as well as the ever-ubiquitous house dust, sensitivities to gluten, sugar, lactose, and GMO proteins.  None of this is intractable.  It’s all treatable and cannot serve to assure a speedy exit, and we haven’t even mentioned eyesight.  That’s too depressing to discuss.

 

The only thing for it is to treat, but with careful discrimination.  Of all these unremarkable complaints, which of them promises a dignified final repose?  In my case, it’s the aortic aneurysm.  No pain, no fighting for breath—just a quiet slipping away—never to wake nor worry.  Of course there’s the sleep apnea—just an innocuous she-died-in-her-sleep, leaving everybody sympathetic but pleased that oh-well-she-had-a-good-death.  My c-pap machine is on hiatus right now since a mole under its mask decided to go rogue and become a basil cell carcinoma.  It’s always something.  When all my various parts conspire to end this thing, who am I to say no?  I’m just along for the ride, a spectacular one.  It’s been fun, but it needs to be over.

 

But wait, dying is something other people do.  It is impossible to imagine a world without me in it.  It took three quarters of a century for me to awaken to how incidental I am to the universe of things.  I can relax.  God has everything in hand.  The world will keep on turning without me twisting the crank.  Maybe that’s why we so love our hamsters, cats, and dogs, creatures who adore us.  We are their gods.  Children know better.  They have seen us at our worst, and they know.  Liars all, we must at least make fun of death.  How else dare we speak the words—Happy Halloween!

Jesus said: “Verily I say unto you. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

 

What does that mean?  What is it at core that sets the mind of a child apart from our own?  Children are first of all vulnerable.  They are open to any skullduggery, and are helpless to affect any change.  They perceive their position in the universe as children of gods.  Here they are, due to no fault of their own.  They didn’t get a vote.

 

Beginning at this rock bottom disadvantage, they must climb up and out.  The humility of lying turtle-like on their backs awaiting milk and dry diapers points toward sainthood.  But even a child can’t maintain that posture for long.  In the benevolent order of things, diapers give way to training pants, and the dark of the night is for sleep.*  Healthy child narcissism struggles with innate helplessness to presage the future adult.  Somewhere in there a turning point lurks.  An intact adult ego is hopefully the result.

 

Depending on upbringing, children are likely to be optimistic.  With most of life’s abuse still ahead of them, they have little memory of evil.  They expect more of the good stuff.

 

The Buddha made much of beginner’s mind.  A clean slate is universally revered.  A mind that is overrun with pre-conceptions is not likely to see the new with any clarity.  It is an everyone amazement that a clean white sheet of paper speaks to the soul.  All hearts leap up when thoughts of September school supplies cross the mind.  A shiny new pencil, a pristine yet to be opened pack of notebook paper, or a brand new book engenders an inner smile recognized by any and all.  A child’s mind waits for incipient amazements yet a-birth.  It visions possibility.

 

Children are unlikely to have caused harm.  They are happily free of guilt.  The adults in their lives quickly disabuse them of that mindset.  The minions of guilt hang dripping from every tree and bush.  Soon even the most gentle and pious of children learn to shoulder their load of self-retribution and loathing.

 

Children tend toward honesty.  This doesn’t mean they will starve before they steal an apple; it means they are willing to own their own hunger.  Like any home-grown Texan, they tell it like it is.  They start with a nascent veracity and proceed.  You know where that ends.  It’s not likely to be pretty.  What is more honest than the first cry of a newborn?  Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!

 

Vulnerable, humble, optimistic, guiltless, honest.  It’s easy to see why Jesus admired kids.  He did speak to the possibility of conversion—change for the better.  Find friends who help you be a better person.  If they fail that basic test, dump them.  Aging with its gathering second childhood may be a blessing in disguise.

 

*Dr. Spock, First Edition

After Redeemer’s new organist completed his first Sunday service of the new church year, I bounced up to the organ dais and declared, “I like your snappy style.  Those hymns bounced right along—no slouching to Jerusalem here!”  I wasn’t alone.  Several others of the choir had rushed the organ after sitting transfixed through the Bach postlude.  It had been a game-changer.

 

But I hedged the awkwardness of the moment, speaking to my stature as an ancient song-bag hanging on for dear life.  I surveyed the crowd and offered, “Sure, he really needed to hear that from me.  Actually, he needs to hear that from everybody!”

 

“Hear.  Hear,” the group agreed–a jovial concession to elder wisdom.  What’s going on here?  Hmmmm.  I understand that it is jarring for young people to be presented with the spectacle of an old person, much less an old woman, flitting about dispensing compliments right and left.

 

The problem seems to be a readiness to give opinions where none is solicited.  Who asked me?  Nobody–but I have nourished a style of supplying compliments where, though none is required, I am nevertheless sowing in bounty.  At my age it is satisfying to count your many blessings.  One of the most delightful of those blessings is a constant parade of wonderful things and people doing their very best.  It seems most reasonable to report their accomplishments.  “The world is so full of a number of things; I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

 

I haven’t always been generous with adulation.  When I was five, my father off to war and military hardware a big deal, I wore tiny B-17 bombers on my pigtails.  One day while lunching with my mother and her friend, the woman’s daughter began giving me a hard time about having airplanes on my braids where everybody knew ribbons were the required adornment.  Undaunted, I let the fatuity fly by.  Addressing the mother I sniffed, “Your daughter is a mighty big girl to have such a small mind.”  I might have addressed my complaint to the girl, but she was hardly worth addressing.

 

I don’t, you see, offer tribute where none is due.  Seventy-five years later, I provided a pat-on-the-back to Redeemer’s new basso=profundo section leader.  His is an arresting vocal apparatus that reminds me of Henry Kissinger.  What a voice!  He’s a marvel!  Why shouldn’t I tell him how his performance speaks to my soul?  Why?  Perhaps because others don’t spread compliments willy-nilly.  Others are more circumspect—more collected.  Others are more balanced in their adulation.  No wonder my mother’s all-time-favorite question of me was, “What will people think?”  What, indeed?  They might think I am claiming some superior knowledge—that I know better—that driven by some perceived surety of understanding I am weaponizing truth to my will.  Are they correct?  I hope not.

 

A 1970’s book, “What Others Think of Me Is None of My Business,” by Terri Cole Whittaker was a hallmark in sounding depths. or shallows, of people’s cognitive dissonance.  I took its admonition as a cautionary injunction and let the chips fall as they chose–weighted to the side of self-expression and pride-of-species.  It makes me feel good to speak of excellence; don’t ask me to defend that.  I am happy to be a human animal.  Homo sapiens sapiens is indeed the crown of creation, whether evolved or—if you wish—a body formed by God’s own true hands.

 

That doesn’t lead necessarily to pride of person.  At Redeemer Episcopal Church, I am surrounded by parishioners of superior intellect, more resplendent bono fides, and better connections.  In the face of such a daunting surround, I continue to offer my opinion as if it mattered.  Am I oblivious?  No.  It does matter.  One of our choir altos is a graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Architectural Engineering.  I am titillated with the thought of picking her brain for building design morsels.  What an opportunity!  My husband and I once made a living in the Sierra Nevada drafting building plans for people wanting elegant cabins and homes in their Mammoth Lakes and June Lake neighborhoods.  We launched High Country Drafting from our less-than-elegant cabin on Mono Lake—legal because we didn’t claim certification as anything at all.  Larry and I filled a need by providing affordable building plans for people who wanted the savings of forgoing an all-bells-and-whistles architect, who would gladly charge by the square foot.  We floated our boat under the sail of “designer,” not “engineer” nor “architect.”  Our plans could be handed to a contractor who would build our brainchild under his own license.  Clients had to choose their own accouterments.

 

We had one drawing table.  Adjusting it to vertical, he drew on the back; I drew on the front.  We agreed to announce incipient erasures.  We managed–and we had a marvelous time doing it!  We soon expanded to a Lee Vining office across from Niceley’s Restaurant and Bar, equipped with his‘n hers Vemco V-Tracks, where we turned out some memorable flights of creativity.  Does the honest humility of this situation dictate a future of not-good-enough?  I think not.  High Country Drafting did some good work.  We didn’t make a lot of money.  No matter.  I look forward to an exchange of war stories with my choir buddy from Harvard Yard.  Why not?

 

Who am I to render an opinion about anything?  A nobody?  A somebody who cares—who gives a damn!  I have as much right to an opinion as anybody who has eyes to see, ears to hear, and mind to assess.  It’s good to remember that this is an internal dialogue.  Nobody has raised this issue in the range of my hearing ears.  This is a castigation of and by my own devices—my very own Trojan horse.  It is up to me to lead him out, give him a swift kick, and scare him off into the hills where he won’t bother anybody ever again.

 

Our choir director, Dr. Brett Scott, is doing a wonderful job of selecting soloists.  He deserves an Atta boy.  If somebody doesn’t thank him for his good work, I will have to do it myself.  Somebody’s gotta to do it.  Inner dialogue suggests that he gets paid to choose soloists.  I respond, “He is paid to fill employee positions; doing it with panache must be honored in the coin of gratitude.”

 

Making a case for any and every-body’s right to an opinion is a worthy endeavor, not likely to win friends nor influence any-body at all.  If I insist on being opinionated, people will just think I am annoying, but I hope they’ll love me anyway.