Taste of Creation

There is something magical that begins with a blank canvas. An idea comes. For me, it lately tends to involve beaches and palm trees primarily. A sketch alters the whiteness, guiding lines for the finished product. I often stop there. For long periods of time. I put the sketch aside lazy about pulling out the art box, and setting things up for what is always something rather messy, the way I do it. I have to be in the mood.

And then, one weekend or holiday afternoon, as this one in progress, I am in the mood.

I love the feel of oil and the look of the blending colors. At first, as I apply the paint, I am not certain I am going to like what I see, no, it is something else. What I think I am going to do is not what actually, happens. There is a little otherworldliness to it. My hand. My brush stroke. But it is as if something appears that was meant to appear, whether or not that is ultimately pleasing to every eye that comes across it.

I am reminded of Michaelangelo's description of sculpting marble. The figure was within the block and all he did was to reveal it. Of course, what is revealed by my hand is not necessarily a masterpiece as it was with him or any number of artists. Not only perhaps is the picture revealed but something of my being. I have been surprised, for example, by the fact that my paintings tend to be very colorful. Bright. One might opine from this that I am a happy character all the time. And yet, inside, there is more gray than bright color. Or gray with splashes of color, to be more accurate.

And then, it is done. A completed covered canvas. In an odd way, it almost seems as if I did not do it, and I see things in the finished product that I did not necessarily intend to be there, but which please me. A surprising shadow that makes the painted cloud truly seem to move. A perfectly poised leaf on a tree. I did not make it so. But yet it is so. Out of nothing, something wonderful, new and part of the world.

Split Second Intimation

Veteran's Day. I woke up late, delighted at not having to go to work. Getting dressed for a rare Daily Mass I watched the story of a "revert" to Catholicism on EWTN. It occurred to me that at her worst she was more faithful than I have ever been and then I was off for the Grace of the Eucharist.

After Mass I went to the Grove for a couple of slices reading The National Catholic Register after the TV Guide. Then I made my second visit to Dad in the month at Holy Cross. I was chatting my fragmented thoughts to him when I suddenly saw the reflection of another visitor around the corner; embarrassed I quieted. Luckily I had ventured no untold secrets in that one sided conversation.

On the way home, I stopped at a favorite, Target, to get combined items, food and clothes and a DVD and thus avoid regular grocery shopping. As my wagon and me trekked back to my car, I took in that amazing scent of cooking candy from See's just down the block. I breathed deeply the chocolate tinged air looking slightly up as a bird, probably a pigeon, but with his wings spread surprisingly majestic swooped just above me. And for what could have been no more than a split second, I felt absolutely at peace. Pure contentment that seemed an intimation or paradise. No want. No ego. No need. Just safe stillness. God maybe? I don't know but I craved it as it slipped away. I opened my bottled coke and drove back home to write about an ordinary day.

Bee Gees: Tapestry of the 70s.

I ran across a biography of the Bee Gees tonight. I was back in the Bronx, a senior in college. The Bee Gees had been hit makers of the sixties and then they had faded away. One night I was watching a show, after Saturday Night Live (still in its early-ish days), called "The Midnight Special" and there they were in entertainment reincarnation. The performance, cuts from their then new album "Main Course" was electrifying, same falsetto voices, but with an edge that they had never possessed in the Aquarius heydey.

I was a late bloomer. (Heck, still am!) So, I was still living at home, a college commuter. Dad must not have been home cause I had the volume way up on the Sony Trinitron. And I was dancing around the room and oddly feeling pride at the comeback of the threesome.

It was only a year or two later that I heard the soundtrack of a new movie that launched disco, "Saturday Night Fever" and I raced out and got that record (prehistoric times that they were) which I brought to a New Year's Eve party at Glenn's (I was now in my first year of law school and no longer up to New Year's Eve party throwing) feeling like I had some obligation to promote the next big thing. I had no idea how "next big thing" it would be.

And so, watching the biography, with interview cuts of Barry and Robin together and separate ones of Maurice, I was smiling nostalgically and then I remembered.. They haven't been three Brothers Gibb for how long? I couldn't remember. Which brother had passed? Of course, it was the solitary interviewee. Maurice. The two remaining brothers sat at the end of the story, just two, singing "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart", the always thin Robin looking thinner and the formerly buff Barry bloated and his old mane of hair scarce and gray, and it was wonderful and sad, because I could hear how missing was the missing voice.

A Snapshot of a What Has to Be a Marriage

So after a movie at the Arclight Hollywood, Lenspeaks and I escalated and ambled into the in-house eatery. It was pretty empty tonight unlike most Saturdays, no doubt due to televised games and Halloween Pre-parties so I had a clear view of the table next to us. In between bites of my salad and sips of sparkling white wine, I glanced over to a scene out of Citizen Kane, the one of the anti-hero and his wife sharing a silent dinner of cold contempt--before the table got longer and longer. I had the impression my non-celluloid couple were well to do, something about his crisp blazer and starched open at the neck shirt and the way she ate the grapes from her cheese plate spoke "slumming from Bel Air". They said not a word for at least the twenty or more minutes I observed them. He dipped his chips in salsa with a smirk and she posited her hair behind her ear non-chalantly with one hand, while switching to a nibble of an unseemingly large and drooping piece of brie--no cracker required.

Then, there was communication of sorts . He had been drinking coffee. She deliberately reached over to his side where he had placed his mug and swooped it to herself, cupping it with both hands but not yet drinking it. His body was now at an angle so that he no longer was facing her. She seemed disappointed by the sweetener selection but resigned to one.

And then, he gestured with two well manicured fingers a sign that it was time to leave, the check having been settled by him alone, a traditionalist he must be. And they left, in single file, ample space between them.

Surely, these two have separate bedrooms. Or will.

Another Change of Direction

In this blog, anyway. I don't do much changing of direction in my regular life, alas. Not complainin' really. An observation.

Which brings me to: still feel I haven't a real focus in these pages. I started out, probably more on a political-philosophical note. Went toward the religious. And then was sort of wandering around in these entries. What am I trying to do here?

Maybe I should not try so hard, as if I am competing with the hoarde of writers out there, most probably better than I am. Try to just be without goal here. Just to write. Just to write. Not a journal precisely, because that sort of writing requires privacy, and heck we know THIS isn't private. But to what?

Observe and then write. Observe and then write, write what comes to me without agenda. It doesn't have to be urgent. Or profound. Just little recordations of life around me, that is probably life around everyone. So. There you are. There I am. We shall see what the future entries bring. I shall be uncharacteristically zen about it, and maybe something or another will intrigue a reader along the way.

Cellular Narcissists Among Us

Cell phones are an inevitable. We can't go back. We probably shouldn't want to, for every society must advance if it is to survive, and thrive. What they also are, however, is another opportunity for people with sad self images to seek the attention they crave, even if that attention is cultivated by irritating others.

We all have experienced it. At the beginning of a play, or any public event, the audience is reminded to shut off their devices. And at a critical denouement, off goes a phone. You figure the person will rush to silence it for surely he is embarrassed. But no. It goes on. It goes on. It goes on.

I have seen it even in a Church. As a Catholic, there is the moment when the priest raises the unconsecrated host and with Grace and intermediary prayer, there is the Transubstantiation, the God made Man is there, Present. And a cell rings. Tatata tatata tatata da! Over and over.
The ultimate human desecration of the Transcendent. Is there any shame? Or does the person bring his phone again, the next week. Neither man, nor God, will inhibit the incoming call.

Why do I think of our cellular narcissists today? I was in Barnes and Noble rummaging in the newly relocated biography section, by the Starbuck's Cafe. A man was talking as loudly as he possibly could. I assumed there was a live body next to him receiving the monologue, but no, he was on the phone. He was regaling the other side of the line with his business dealings, and surely making sure that others knew of his self-perceived success. Lately, I find the noise of our society is bothering me more and more, and with that bother comes an anger at how readily all of us surrounding a man like this, walking up and down and shouting his self for all to apprehend, are dismisssed so that he may absorb all life around him to satisfy a hole within. All sorts of remonstrations bounced in my head I wished to offer him, but I knew he would never receive them as fair critiques.

But of course, this is just a nit of a bigger problem of the generation in which there is an I but no thou, in which morality is a laugh and breaching the social contract is a given since the rights of the me always take precedence over the rights of the other.

On the way to work the other day, I saw a man, neatly dressed, on the corner of Vermont and Beverly Boulevard here in Los Angeles, preaching repentance, in Spanish. People were avoiding him. A crazy man, no doubt. As crazy as John the Baptist, eh? How did I get from the cell phone to the end times? I don't know. Just feels like one of those signs of a culture in decay. Not the phone itself of course, but how we are in relation to it and each other.

A Harder Life

I have a friend who's having some significant life problems affecting his reputation more than anything else, but reputation is often the most often identified with our very selves so an assault on it can be life altering.

I think he is a victim of evil and that what is happening to him is a visible sign of how people do evil, with or without intention. With or without intention makes no real difference in terms of the consequence to the person who is the object of the evil, although it might have relevance to the nature of the universe's or God's response toward the evildoer, if you believe in such things. Of course, whether retribution is warranted is an ambiguity. No one knows the heart of someone who causes evil. And each of us can repent of it, if with a sincere and sorrowful heart.

But for the victim, the effects of the wrong cannot be taken back, even if the instrument of that wrong apologizes and is forgiven. The damage is done.

For all this preamble the nature of the evil and its effects is not the subject of this entry. My friend is a convert to Catholicism. For those of us who are cradle Catholics, cradle anything I suppose, the idea of someone coming to the choice, in late adolescence or adulthood to become a member of a particular faith tradition is elusive to us. It is often slower and more torturous a journey than the dramatic and sudden change of Paul on the road to Damascus. It is a planted thought, a long resistance, a reading, a talking to others, a decision that may well be the Hand of God, but less a push than a breath. And so it was for my friend. Slow. Carefully determined. What did he hope for? What did he expect? I wonder whether the convert realizes that choosing Catholicism (or any Christian faith, and I must speak here in a small apologia that I DO believe that in Catholicism subsists the fullness of the faith) he acknowledges and accepts following the Royal Road of the Cross. I would imagine that if the convert does so, he does so better than the cradle Catholic for whom the dogma is taken for granted, if even noticed, but I also imagine that neither really expects that he will be expected to suffer, no, not really. Not me. Someone else. Not me.

Which is what his recent comment to me raised in my thoughts. We accept. But only if it doesn't cost us. The comment was that his life had become harder since he became a Catholic. He did not explain it to me further, and I did not inquire, so as not to intrude unduly. Given a panoply of challenges in his life over the years, I can see how this perception would seem to be true. I am leaning toward agreement. First, you cannot really avoid hardship whether you have a faith or not. The hardships may correlate with the faith, but could it not be said that the hardships would have come whether he converted or not. Perhaps not the same ones, but hardship all the same. Suffering is. (Pardon to my Buddhist friends who would suggest I think in my limited understanding that we can transcend our suffering here, now and that we are the cause of our suffering). Catholicism has nothing to do with the fact of suffering. But it does point to a way of looking at it that tries to join us to God made Man who in a cosmic sense, holds us as we suffer in the same way His Father held him as He did. And that is the second level of hardship. I always find it amusing when someone dismisses religion as a means to avoid suffering, or some palliative or what one famous person, whose name escapes me, said was the "opiate of the people". My friend's comment indicates the complete opposite. To be religious is to face the things that are there, to be endured, axiomatically by virtue of our mortality, and to at best have a certain faith of something beyond or take a chance (e.g. Pascal's Wager) that there is. Some people say that that's cowardice. Or is it really harder, braver not merely to endure the suffering which will happen anyway or to embrace it as a faithful follower of One Who Went Before. It is easy to say, no, I don't believe and leave it at that. But to begin and begin again for faith, to have certainty in the a world that floods us with ambiguity, that is indeed a harder life. The next question becomes, whether it is worth it? I can only answer that for myself. And what help does it offer my friend to tell him, yes, it is harder as a Catholic. I guess I can try to say, something flippant, like, "No pain, no gain", but is that really flippant in this context? I am betting on the gain, as my faith is not certain. At least today. One day at a time. And it is hard indeed. But I guess I see it as being in Good Company and I hope that I do not leave the road. I hope that my friend doesn't either.

Time to Wake Up

For those among us who happen to be Catholic Christians, the name of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe brings great pride. He is a modern martyr, dying of starvation and a final injection of carbolic acid to finish the job in 1941 at Auschwitz. When 10 prisoners were selected to die, as a result of a camp escape, he took the place of one man who had a family.

I did not know, before this Sunday when our priest spoke of Fr. Kolbe during a homily, how he ended up in Auschwitz in the first place. He had, done, for some time prior to the time he was arrested radio shows critical of the Nazi regime.

We think, in these United States, to the extent we know of these horrors of only the last century, blinded as we are by our own narcissism and conspicuous consumption, that such a thing could never happen here. In fact, it is well on the way. Moments that get little play in the broader media which presage a totalitarianism of the leftist Left this country has ever seen. Little intrusions on the reality posited as fact, when they are lies. Say it, go ahead try to say it, and you
get a lecture, with ad hominem flourishes. But the worst is happening.

Two groups visit Washington, D.C. Not to protest. To see the seat of their government, once the beacon of liberty. One goes to the steps of the Capitol. Another to the Lincoln Memorial. The group at the Capitol, in this country founded, let me say it, founded under God, but allowing all to express their beliefs whatever they may be, or not be, dared to. . .pray. A group. Yes. But the prayer was private. Individuals gathered together in praise of the God who guided the great republic into being. And they were told that they could not do so. They were not free to pray as visitors to the steps of the Capitol.

The other group, at the Lincoln Memorial, recited of all things, The Pledge of Allegiance. They were intercepted and chastised by a functionary of officialdom.

A not so parenthetical fact: Almost half of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, concerned in large part with slavery, invoked God. You may remember the last paragraph: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

In the play and movie, "1776" John Adams, in the throes of the most disorganized disagreements of the Continental Congress, on the precipice of the great founding or a great foundering, asks, "Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?." He saw the greatness and he helped to give it birth . We, the inheritors, will we see what we must do to preserve it? Or will we be forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, even death, from speaking the truth of this nation? Martyrdom is not without possibility if we do not stem the tide.

Planet Earth: My Backyard

Last night, my friends and I went to the Hollywood Bowl, featuring clips from the series "Planet Earth" against the sounds of George Fenton's Live theme music. For me such amazing nature tales are evidence of the existence of God. My mind kept repeating a portion of a biblical line, in those portions of the documentaries in which one animal chased and killed another, "And the Lion shall lie down with the Lamb", this of course, at the end of time, in Paradise. For those of us who make it there. . . .well THAT's another entry.

I realized that what played out on the screen plays out in my urban backyard every day. I woke up to one this morning. Mother Jay squawking frantically. I got up and went outside. A crow. Of course, a crow. From about April on, it is the season of baby birds and crows love to cop the unhatched eggs as well as the helpless newborns in the nests that surround us. There is one in the foliage between my apartment building and the one next to me. No doubt mama bird was keeping the crow at bay, and as in one of the features last night, not entirely successfully. My arrival was the thing that scared him off. Me and mama bird, protectors of her little ones.

Over the years I have come to know there is little to be done. Some new birds will survive. Many will not. It makes me cry, watching a screen or seeing it in real time.

There are also the squirrels. They walk across the electric wires fairly high above the two story buildings. I saw one fall once onto the top of my garage roof. I could only hope he wasn't hurt. But I had no ladder to look. And I was on the way to work.

The possums come out at night to eat the cat food. I like to watch their long noses in the cat dish. But that's as close as I am going to get. Once I got a good close up camera shot of a baby possum on top of our little outside gazebo like thing.

A favorite is the hummingbird. I never saw one until I moved to California. My backyard is full of them. I know their sound now. Wings whirling and an odd chirp unlike any other bird back here. One once actually stopped on a branch above where I was lying on a bench and watched me, watch him. A long time. We seemed to enjoy each other equally.

And then, of course, there is Elwood. A cat. The cat. Orange tabby, all bowed legs these days, somewhere around 17 years of age he is. He used to live inside, but decided it was too lonely there, with my neighbor. So he went outside, where all this is going on. The jay thinks he's a danger to her young, but Elwood is too old be chasing birds. And he's afraid of her dive bombing anyway. He just wants his food, his water, and a pet, from time to time, extra on the weekends when I am around. My little piece of the planet earth.

Watching Them, Watching Me

I get into the elevator in the building in which I work. I press my floor. And then I am captivated. I mean it. Captivated. By the Captivate Network, a screen for which has been placed in every conveyance going to every floor in our massive building.

I hate it. But I cannot avert my eyes. Snippets of news. Stock prices, over and over, and over. Quizzes. I am particularly seduced by the word of the day. I have a new one in my verbal quivver, "Snolleygoster". Yep, a real word said the shrewd man, or in this case woman. Well, that's a good thing, right? I got a new word out of my travels from Starbucks to my desk.

They have recently changed the format and the logo. Or had I not noticed it before? It is a modern art version of an eye

Oh Oh. Didn't the book and movie of 1984 feature flat screens in every room that could not be avoided or shut off?

There is a cognitive dissonance in knowing that your society, the one you must remain in until you die, is going down an obvious, terrifying road, and being unable to do anything other than stare at the screen."I am NOT a number, I am a free man!" So saith the "Prisoner" circa 1968. TV again.

Yeah, right. Freedom. Slipping like a flat noodle through our grasping fingers.

Soon, that little elevator television will be talking to me, lulling me into a hypnotic trance from which I will not awake. Hello, Big Brother. Watch out for Rover.

Hoping for a happy ending to this entry? Ain't got one. I am probably one of the cowards and not one of the resistance. How about you?

"Be seeing you."

One Woman's Saturday Morning

You may recall the saga of the piano a few entries back. In my effort to recreate my space, a one bedroom apartment in which I have lived more than half my life, I had painted, tossed or stored some of the old accumulated "stuff" much of it beloved, but not particularly useful. And I decided to have the piano, scratched and pocked and worn, restored. When it returned, and was in the second stage of tuning, it became clear that the pinblocks needed to be replaced as well as some strings. Since it had not been an expected problem for a variety of reasons, Simon, my piano technician, agreed to have the pinblock replaced without charge for his time. And the piano was removed a second time to a workshop far far away (the Valley).

All that remained tangible to remind me of its absence was the bench. For now, nearly two or more months, the bench, repository for my landline, has gathered dust. I left town for vacation. I returned. Work became extremely busy as a new boss is coming aboard in a week or two. Friends and family had crises which distracted me from my dreams of rediscovering the raw musical talents of childhood. Occasionally, my uncle, who mostly orchestrated the apartment renovation would ask, "When is the piano coming back?"

Today.

As I write, there is the annoying/lovely sound of tuning. Given the number of strings, it may be a while. And so I have been trying to act as I would on any Saturday, with a cacophonous background accompanying. I removed clothes for dry cleaning to my car. I washed my white cat's eye with a solution of diluted boric acid so that he does not again have an infection requiring an always expensive visit to the vet.

And then, I sat down to read, coffee in hand, a short short distillation of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. Or short short short, because, although Thomas may have meant his work for the so-called "beginner", a beginner in his time apparently was a genius compared to a beginner in these days. Me, my college and graduate education are poor matches for the disputations of St. Thomas, Articles (Questions), Objections, Sed Contras (On the Contrary) and conclusions of Thomas himself on the issue.

I had to laugh at myself, sitting on my couch trying to consume lines from the Summa while Simon pounds at the piano. Who else in the world would be doing this just now? Pretention!? Idiocy?!

A snapshot of the Djinn's peculiar life in Los Angeles!

A Newly Minted Celtic (Fan)

I have paid little attention to professional basketball. For that matter, I guess I am not much of a fan of any organized sport. I am not, mind you, disdainful. But since my parents had little interest, I developed their lack thereof. I have enjoyed, in fact, over the years the occasional foray into the bleechers of one sport or another. Hockey. A King's game once. Baseball. Len of Len Speaks has been my host, if you will, at Met and Dodger games, and even the odd Yankee game. Never been to a basketball game.

When I was recently back East, I was in the home of some friends, who are big Celtic fans, and in the middle of a gathering, I noticed most everyone was off in the den catching up on the one of the early games between the Celtics and the LA Lakers that would determine the championship for 2010. I sat with them and they, in between successful shots of their team, asked me who I favored. I had to admit that I was really neutral. Jokingly, they suggested I needed to make a choice, given the loyalties in that room.

I found myself wishing I had the kind of passion for the game that they did. And that I had a team to root for. A passing, not particularly intense thought was this.

Back in Los Angeles, car after car waved Laker flags in anticipation of the last game, the one here at the Staples Center that would make or break it, now that the teams were tied.

Game 7. I happened to run across flipping channels, the beginning of the third quarter. I found myself sitting, and watching. And enjoying. I could imagine my friends back in Massachusetts noisily delighted that the Celtics appeared to stay just ahead of Kobe and Company. I had a slight bias, I realized, toward the shamrocks. I actually felt a little nervous as the Lakers' defense kept the Celtics from shots to get them way ahead. And then the Lakers were able to pull just ahead leaving no further chances for the Boston team. LA wins. My disappointment was nominal. And then. . . .

In celebration, a rather significant number of "fans' of the Lakers decided to rock taxis, vandalize businesses and light inappropriate items on fire. It has happened before. Back in Boston, I hear, the losers were more, well, civilized. Nary a person or thing was disturbed. All was as it should be. But here in LA, shameful behavior, again. And I felt a need, a silly need, perhaps, to rebel.

So, as of that night, I decided. I am now officially a Celitc fan. Next year, I will be watching, and rooting for, them. I will be doing this particularly when they are playing the Lakers. Oh, I know, it wasn't the Laker's fault. I am not necessarily applying logic in making this decision. But it's a statement of some sort, that I need to make to myself, for whatever it is worth, likely nothing. It is, as they say, what it is. Go Celtics, 2011!

Thoughts on a Sunday

I have been kicking around my apartment since I returned from Church and a quick run to Bristol Farm for supplies. And oustide my apartment because the gloom of June ended earlier today and there was sunshine to enjoy. So me and Ellwood shared a sandwich (don't feed cheese to a toothless cat parenthetically. It gets stuck on the room of the mouth) and I made an entry in my private journal while the breeze meandered about me.

This morning, lying in bed just awakened, I thought suddenly about a bronze coin a friend gave me, a memento of hers or someone she knew from the Bicentennial of 1976. I was suddenly cognizant of just how young this country is and how I, probably we, never really consider that the events we treat as ancient history are really adjacent to our own. I remember standing on a Bronx roof, courtesy of one of my late uncles, that overlooked the Hudson, watching the tall ships sailing up in one of the commemorations. I had lived already, 22 years of that 200 years since the founding of our country. I have now lived 56 years of the 234 years since the founding of our county. Not that many generations separate me from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the beginning of the great American Experiment.

Or separate any of us in the fifty states from that delicate balance which is Democracy in America. And yet we treat her, America, as if we can say or do anything without damage to the core values. We treat her, in fact, as if those core values mean nothing, and can be rearranged wily nilly. Or worse, we treat her, as if those core values should be eradicated in favor of those kinds which we have seen if only we remembered destroy the rights of man using deceptive self-aggrandizing rhetoric. I think perhaps Daniel Webster was more astute at discerning the rhetoric of the Devil than we the people have been of late. This country is young and it hasn't taken sufficient root for us to assume that the values of the Founding Fathers, which are by the way under vicious and alas even smug attack, will survive. Without the values there is no America, despite the appeals to their irrelevancy. And some of those appeals are from our own representatives, who refuse to listen to their constituencies about key issues. Even mock those constituencies in an early expression of government despotism.

We haven't been around so long that we can afford to think ourselves indestructible. Countries and empires with far more years under their territorial belts, died writhing deaths, as did their citizens, failing to heed the lessons of history.

I don't know. I don't know why I was thinking about this stuff in my bed on a Sunday in June. But I actually got a littled chilled to think that so little time in the past, a group of adventurous, thoughtful men (and it's ok with me that it was mostly men since that was the society of the time, foward thinking, but still with the frailty of humanity) were birthing something so magnificent that we might let die because of our negligence or wilfullness. Worse because of our ignorance of the value of what we have had.

A Wee Let Down

When you have been out and about in different territory, somewhat adventurous territory compared to one's everyday life, the hustle and bustle begins to seem like it will never end and there is a joy in that. While I was away, there was a lot to do and see, perhaps more than I could possibly manage in just ten days in two locales, one the pandemonium that is New York and the other the quietude of the oceanside in the South Shore of Massachusetts. And then, I came home, to the usual. At first, it was nice. Relaxing. Recouping. Catching up. And then.

Back to work today. The same problems big and small. The same debates. The same, well tiredness, after too many years trying to save a world that just doesn't want to be saved. It's not like I do it "pro bono". I get paid a decent salary. But the time away, seeing the bigger world thousands of miles away from my everyday, reminded me of the glory of possibility that returning to the same ole, same ole just eradicated, all in the space of one 7.25 hour day.

"What AM I doing here?" All this effort to get to management and what? So what? Pension. Check. Other benefits. Check. All done according to hoyle. Check. Not ungrateful. Check. But. . .the forever but. You know. The path not taken. The path too late to take. Choices that did not really seem like choices. But they must have been. And now? Ideas pop in and out of my mind. I even have a folder of those that can be reduced to application or description. And then the existential stuff, the stuff that no folder can contain. Perhaps no mind. Not mine, anyway.

Going away. Coming back. As if it never happened.

The Somewhat Unfriendly Skies and Thoughts of an Otherwise Lovely Vacation

"I'm Afraid to Fly; and I Don't Know Why. . ." goes the tune from "They're Playing Our Song" which has been running in my mind. It was running in, through and around my mind, yesterday, as I was flying home from Boston to Los Angeles around endless lightning storms illuminating cloud after cloud over pieces of the United States but not enough around the concomitant turbulence. Also were words of prayer and petition leaving my lips silently. I worried that other words would escape more loudly. I would have kissed the ground like the ersatz Pope John Paul II, upon arrival at LAX, except I was too tired from six hours of anxiety and just wanted my bags to go home. So, I guess I KNOW why I am afraid to fly. I am amazed by those, perhaps the majority, who are willing to get on planes all the time to go anywhere and everywhere. I'd like to feel like that, but for me, each such trip is an effort. But was it worth it, this typical sturm und drang that is my experience when I fly, to New York this time, and out of Logan?

You betcha! as someone in politics is wont to say.

It most definitely was. Five days in the heart of New York, meeting up with friends and family, re-establishing my life long identity as an adjacent child (the Bronx as you know) of the city, certainly one of those who rode the subway, and the buses, and walked the street of midtown, and lower Manhattan to work. I did a lot more of that walking during those five days, passing one of my first job locations, 60 East 42nd Street, just across from Grand Central, among many other places familiar to me, still, this 28 years after I escaped to a more temperate clime. I shall always be a New Yorker. This is not always appreciated by the more laid back with whom I now reside who find me a bit, well, abrasive. But I am as is the city, vibrant, but a bit intense perhaps for some never immersed in its identity. Fast in speech. Impatient. It is in my blood. And I am happy for this, perhaps only because I know it is an irrevocable reality.

I was staying with a friend of my late father's, now firmly my own friend, a surrogate East Coast "mom" on West 65th Street, the city at my feet. A definite pro on the list, New York v. California, the ability to hail cabs. If I was not walking, I was in a cab, going cross town, at a snail's pace admittedly, but giving me a chance to catch my breath between engagements with Aunt Teri, cousin Carol, cousin Maria, Bob and Ellen (yum, the Bar Americain) along with Len of Len Speaks (on one of his bicoastal work jaunts), Ginny (at the Prix Fixe dinner at 21! and a joyous two hours with the "Jersey Boys" at the August Wilson Theatre), Gary and Noreen at Planet Hollywood, Times Square (prior to their Broadway sojourn seeing "Come Fly Away"), and a special lunch at the Time Warner Center with my oostess Sophia. And there was even the Metro North experience as I road the rails to New Rochelle to see my aged aunt, my father's elder sister, no2 97, at a nursing home. That perhaps was the most bittersweet experience of the New York adventure. I saw her five years ago when she was in a more assisted living environment. She was just losing some of her memory, but there was enough, and still the recognition of family. But now, after some health issues, and the passage of time, she knows no one. My family here had me bring pictures and a cryptic childhood message that, if there was something still to access in her mind, would have surely triggered a memory of her brother, Steve. But it was not to be. She was not feeling well, with an abcess, but some laughter and appeal to the vestige of her former self, still residing within, brought a twinkle of the eye and a bit of her old expression. She had a comfort with the holding of her hand clearly becoming more physically affectionate than she or any other member of the family of seven siblings had ever demonstrated in my memory. It was hard to leave her, knowing that it is likely the last time I'll see her given her age and condition. I left feeling a sense of loss, but also a sense of pride at her well lived life. Not that she'd see it that way, having lived in the Bronx her whole life, a late in life wife, no children. But she is a testament to family loyalty, she who took care of her mother, and her younger (he never knew that, officially anyway) husband when he developed Alzheimer's disease, fighting the pain of a broken hip of her own. She was the family historian. She was the source of help for many of the cousins. I could still sense in her, even with the debilitation of her mind's erosion, a wistfulness she always seemed to exhibit.

Yes, nothing would have prevented me from this segment of my trip.

The next leg was really the raison d'etre for my having gotten on a plane in the first place and beginning my East Coast visit in New York. A high school graduation in Kingston, Massachusetts of a lovely young woman (who, like her brother, soon to follow her) I still see as a 7 year old nascent gymnast, all legs and litheness. doing the Macarena with her red haired then friend, Eva.
Arriving at the Fairview Inn in Marshfield (actually Brant Rock) well after my Estimate Time of Arrival due to holiday (Memorial Day) traffic and accidents, I was greeted by the meditative sight of the Atlantic outside my room's window, followed by a most agreeable dinner at the home of friends of the graduate's mother and fiance, right on the water. A new quiet vibe to replace the frenetic one of the prior several days. I think now of a con about the East, the persistent humidity of spring and summer. I was wet behind the neck most of my trip, except for the blessed breezes of the oceans and bays to relieve it. A small thing certainly, but a reminder of the love I have for the Southern California weather that primarily, keeps me here. For I cannot say I did not, do not, miss the East. But for the extremes in weather, I would be back more often and stay longer.

The graduation escaped predicted thunderstorms by minutes. The child-woman that is Cait radiated even more her natural beauty. Her brother was an usher, straining in his suit and tie (but looking most handsome) opining with amazing logic that suits really were not a meaningful necessity of life, even for special occasions. And then another gathering to celebrate at the waterside home in Hull.

I have seen her college, small, Catholic and on the most amazing ocean bluff in Newport, Rhode Island. Her dad, whose grave I visited briefly, with his wife and in-laws, during the weekend in Cudworth Cemetery in Scituate, would have been smiling broadly at his sweet child and saying "Life is Grand" which he so surely believed and cultivated the belief in us more guarded souls.

And so it was. And is. I guess it turns out that the skies were not even somewhat unfriendly, when you consider what I would have missed had I not boarded.

Cruelty Starts Young

I picked up one of those quick read magazines today, my interest piqued by the photograph of a young girl, who will never grow old. Phoebe Prince. She was bullied to death. Beautiful. Irish transplant. The glory of life before her. And now, nothing. Because other teenagers could not, would not curb that kernel of evil within all of us. After being taunted, publicly, over and over again and called words that teenagers should not even know (and didn't know in days gone by), she went to her mother's rented home and hung herself.

The idea of it is baleful. The authorities are prosecuting, this the new way to deal with behavior that should be within the purview of parent and social anathema before the destruction, not legalism after, too late.

Suddenly, a poem, I think by Edna St. Vincent Millay, suddenly and somewhat comes to mind. "I understand, I do not approve, and I am not resigned". But is it something to be understood, the drive by the still unformed human being to kill the soul of another, to isolate, to cast off?

Do you know what that young girl felt? I think you do, if ever you were bullied, as I suspect so many of you were. I was. And I remember as if it were yesterday the feeling.

I was also about 15, the same age as this late child. My best neigborhood friend, Fern, was going to go to a day summer camp. And she wanted me to come too. The only thing I did not count on was that, she being a year younger, we'd be placed into different groups. I hardly, if ever, saw Fern that summer.

What was it about me they did not like? I still don't know. I was in the full throes of pubescent transformation into something but not quite yet a woman. I was never one of the pretty ones. Not fat at that point, but definitely not skinny. Was that it? I did not smoke, and the girls smoked like chimneys. My not joining might have seemed rather uppity. I did have a tendency to disapprove of violations of rules. Given my line of work for the last 25 years, that apparently hasn't changed much. But then, I did not have the tools to deal with the infliction of utter abrogation. They excommunicated me. Literally. No one talked to me, even if I were in a group with them. Oh, there was one girl, who came after the season started. She liked me, at first. She was the relative of the art counselor. I thought, "No problem. One person. That's enough". But the word went down. "Don't talk to her." And she stopped. Some people's personal items were placed in my locker and then I was accused of stealing. I demurred. Nothing happened to me; I guess there wasn't enough actualy evidence, despite the plant. I was not fired as a camper, except that one counselor was convinced I was the culprit and sided with the girls.

I told my parents. They said I could leave there if I wanted. But something seemed so awful about what they were doing that I could not let them win by getting rid of me. I look back now and think what an idiot I was. I was going to make them see they were wrong. As if that were the issue, right or wrong. Well, I guess it was, but only to me.

I know what that girl felt. The girl who used to have bright eyes and a bright future. I do, although for me it was only eight weeks, not months as it was for Phoebe. I feel it now. An anger so deep, so raw, that was trapped inside her. She couldn't let them see it, because, if they did, it would only get worse. It would mean they were getting to her. As they were. She could beg them to stop, but that too was only fuel. The more pain they saw; the more they would seek to cause. Lies. Taunts. With laughter and smug smiles. I have often thought that such behavior is truly the incarnation of the devil.

There was no place for Phoebe to go. No one to understand. No one probably even to believe. Maybe she thought, "I deserve it." The impulse of escape was the impulse to kill, herself if she could not stop them.

God rest her soul. There but for the Grace of that same God go I. Go you. Remember her. If you pray, pray for her. And, if you have more virtue than I do, pray for those nine teenagers who killed her with unrelenting cruelty.

The Piano of Townsend Avenue

When I was about 4, someone gave me a pint sized baby grand. I mean, it looked like a baby grand, had a little stool to match, but it was for a child. I don't recall that I played it much. I do recall that at kindergarten about a year later, Mother Anna, already probably well past 80 years old, helped me learn "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a real sized piano, although only an upright, in our one room school house. (The rest of the school was in the main building up the hill; suddenly I think of the crab apple trees that surrounded the kindergarten house, now long gone, probably both the classroom and the trees). Somewhere between the ages of 4 and 5 then, the idea of playing a piano, for real, took hold of me.

I told my parents. I even insisted. I don't know for certain, but I think they figured it was a passing fancy of their only child, but by the time I was 9, and still talking of lessons, apparently, they relented. For two dollars a week I could take classes in the music corridor (there were about four or five rooms) taught by another nun, was it Mother Regina, hmmmm, so long ago my memory is sadly fading, who herself was a prodigious talent, at least to my ears. I don't recall if I asked for an actual piano of my own, but, in order to practice regularly, I suppose, one was called for. And so, the piano, a mahogany Hardman and Peck, came to the one bedroom apartment on Townsend Avenue. It came to the bedroom. My bedroom, as my parents by then were sharing a Castro Convertible in the living room.

This was 1963. The piano was One Thousand Dollars, quite a sum for those days. I think Dad paid for it, "on time", one hundred dollars a month. It sat in front of the wall that was covered in full size mirrors. There are several photographs of me, ones in which I appear to be grimacing at the idea of being forced to pose on the piano stool, pretending to play in one dress up outfit or another. While that piano sat in my bedroom, I grew up into a teenager of 16. The piano moved with us to Giles Place, a far larger apartment, two bedrooms, and a living room that could easily house it as a kind of centerpiece amid similarly red and brown colored decor and, even more full sized mirrors. By this time, my enthusiam for music, but more particularly, practice, had diminished in direct proportion to the requests for public performances when I felt unready for them.

After an embarrassing last recital in which I forgot the piece I was playing requiring that the music be brought to me (I can still hear the click click of the heels of the classmate whose long walk to me enhanced the shame of my not having practiced enough to have fully memorized the music and the remonstration of the teacher, who had long before replaced Mother Regina, of the consequences of a lack of practice), the Piano of Townsend Aveneue and Giles Place was touched infrequently. I was 17.

After my mother died, while I was in college, the piano took on a nostalgic aspect. It came into my life when we were an intact family. She had no doubt been a key instigator in the original purchase as she wanted for me access to education and opportunity she had not been given. It resonated their hopes and wishes. I don't think I had any thought of any of that, but, when it came to my decision to move to Los Angeles some years later, I knew for certain that the piano had to come with me. My father could not quite understand it since I played so little, what need had I of it. But it was the one and only thing that moved cross country after me, courtesy of my father given my penurious state at the age of 27 taking a stab at living across the country.

Dad moved here shortly after I did, and when he'd stop by he'd play portions of a couple of dance like phrases on it. His instrument of choice was primarily the mandolin. We were so much the same he and I, both of us playing after a fashion, but neither really able to commit to the time and patience practice requires.

The piano was a repository for phones, lamps, photographs, papers over the years. It was overwaxed and scratched and dented. The dust gathered in various crevices. The music holder fell off. One of the connections to the bench broke.

About a year and a half after dad died, I looked around my cluttered apartment, which included the poster board of pictures used at his funeral I hadn't moved. It hadn't been a morbid thing, just maybe a kind of an unrealistic and illusory stopping of time. I knew that as time moved on, despite my feeble efforts, so must I. I decided to stay in this apartment but to purge all but the essential. It came to me that the piano of Townsend Avenue, now nearly fifty years old, was an essential. I treated it to renovation, outside and inside. It has been repaired and sanded and restained. And tuned to concert pitch. I know it is the same piano because I see just a soupcon of an old nail polish stain from one of my perfunctory ticklings of the ivory over the adult years.

And, I have begun to play it again. A circle closing.

The Object of Ridicule

Until last night, I had never seen the movie "MASH".

That deficit in my entertainment life has a small, digressive story attached to it. When I was 15, in Monticello, New York, spending the summer with my aunt, uncle and two cousins on Sackett Lake Road, each of us cousins had an age appropriate counterpart living up the hill in a large New England mansion. Stephanie was 5, like my cousin Carol, Tony was 12, like my cousin Barbara, and James, who played the loudest rock music to the fields and blueberry bushes surrounding their property, was 14 plus, just a little younger than me.

All the neighborhood kids preferred playing at my aunt's less expansive (but still about half or two thirds an acre big enough) house, and Stephi and Tony were always among them. But James the aloof eldest tended to come down less frequently. Until one day he seemed to be hanging about. It never occurred to me why since from my perspective, the awkward age was in full swing, and things were happening to my body that made me feel more like Quasimodo than the object of anyone's desire.

Then it happened, a breaking of the teen age silence, when James and I happened to be alone amid the other children playing. "Would you like to go to see MASH?" Instead of thinking hormonally, I thought more politically, a la, the disapproval of my conservative dad who thought MASH was a sign of the doom of our civilization, and said a too quick no. As I floated in the family pool on the hill a day or so later, all by myself (we were always invited), James' mother came out and made it clear that I had said no to my first ever date request. "James" she said, "likes older women."

My feeble efforts at dating, when I realized that was what was being requested of me, are a story for another entry, if ever there be one. But as to MASH, I find myself concurring with dad, having seen it last night at the AERO theatre, with Elliott Gould and Sally Kellerman there, live, forty years after the introduction of Trapper John, Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan into the popular culture. The doom of our society, incipient i 1969, has come nearly to fruition. We are just beginning to experience the death rattle.

To me, although in a relativistic society of opinion, mine has no meaning, the easy ridicule of Christianity, in particular Catholicism, was particularly disturbing. I found myself surprised that it was so blatant in a main stream movie of a time that was only just becoming cavalier about everything, particularly God and authority in any form. I knew of course, from the television series, that the featured Catholic priest was a fully realized caricature.

But in the movie, when the dentist soldier, Painless, decides that he wants to kill himself because of his failed prowess with a lady (all the more problematic for him because of the prodigious size of his appendage), the good ole boys of progressiveness, Trapper and Hawkeye, stage a "last supper" for Painless. Painless would appear to be cast in the center role of well, you know. The buffonish Fr. Mulcahy, peers in, and only vaguely seems to recognize the scene and toddles off, presumably to his bible, already previously the source of amusement as read by another caricature character, Frank Burns, the religious hippocrite. (You see, he has been sleeping with the strict miltary Major Houlihan). Painless receives communion from one of the stars and goes off to take his suicide pill in an open coffin nearby the "supper" table. Of course, he is, in a somewhat compromised drugged state, rescued from his suicidal malaise by a visit from Lt. Dish, so no one actually dies. The audience laughed at the shot by the progressive and therefore more credible than thousands of years of theology and philosophy, Robert Altman taken at one of the most sacred moments in Christian history. It was forty years ago, and it remains today, an acceptible ridicule. It is perhaps fortunate that Christians believe in turning the other cheek rather than the Fatwahs, for example. For unto today, and with even more brazenness, the Church is one of the last remaining acceptable targets for vicious humor in the name of Freedom of Speech. No such speech is acceptable for other certain religions or New Age thinking, except maybe Judaism, as the ugly head of Anti-Semitism is raising itself again in the 21st century. Which puts me to mind of an ad for a cable show, "Nurse Jackie" that is splattered on virtually every City Bus I must be next to as I drive to work. The pill popping, philandering Nurse is pictured in what appears to be a halo, a la, for example, the Lord Himself, or His Mother. The halo turns out to be a series of pills, and hypodermics. Our healer has her hand in one of those iconic (I mean as in actual Icons) poses of thumb out and two fingers up in a kind of blessing. She is holding a bottle of pills and superimposed over this respectful picture is the phrase "Holy Shift". Oh, cool, got those Catholics (because Catholics favor holy pictures of that sort) again!

Now, I am told this is part of free speech. Ok. I buy that. Except I don't see free speech being applied to Christians or Jews as they express opposite opinions. "Getting in their face" is apparently only encouraged by certain high placed individuals of our social democracy if the face being gotten into to is religious or conservative. But free speech means the religious and conservative get to do the same, right? But, therein lies the rub, that isn't the deal. Free speech is only the acceptable progressive speech, which includes making fun of any people who believe strongly in that silly God thing. Or like keeping America with its founding emblems of Liberty, E Pluribus Unum and In God We Trust. (With acknowledgment to Dennis Prager).

We better start building catacombs cause we are going to need them again.

Cacophony

Much rattles through my head. Organize! It'll be a couple of days and only then will I successfully orchestrate this entry. I begin with a quote I saved, and forgot, and found again. It is one of Thomas Merton, writer, priest, monk, contemplative, describing his peace. "Because today, it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one's hunger and sleep, one's cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else's. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice."


Funny how within a day perspective changes. It is the day after I began this entry. Too often for me, though I think I am getting better, sometimes, it tends to go from good to less than good. On the weekend, where there was no pressure on my mind or soul I could enjoy the warming sunfilled days, reclining in my back yard, cat purring on my chest and praying with near intention on Palm Sunday at two Masses at which I assisted, one in which I distributed the Eucharist, a rare and awesome service to perform. But as soon as any regular life, work, demands of an unhappy consumer, requirements of the day interposed themselves, I felt the wall come up and the need to defend overtook. It was not sufficient to be, to do, move on to the next thing without fear and resistance. Merton's simple recipe seemed impossible, available only to someone who only visits the daily grind occasionally. In this world, to survive, it seems, one must make an assertion and develop both program and artifice. He was in his monastery and hermitage, protected against the jostlings of the day. Wasn't he?


Could he find peace faster than I because of where he lived and prayed, where prayer was the grist of is every day? Then I remember that every action and thought is to be a prayer and praying may not, does not, depend on where one lives or works. On the other hand, a lovely field and the vocalizations of bluejays or mockingbirds would seem to make prayer more readily accessible. In my office, bristling at the arch tone of a caller who feels, perhaps with justification in some objective sense, that I should account to her, the only thing readily coming to mind are endless cuss words I have to restrain myself from uttering. And I feel the moments of clarity I thought finally vouchsafed to me dissipating into a diaphanous haze as I watch a young colleague grapple traumatically with the palpable evil of the world reposing in a prosecution to which I have assigned her.


The ordinary human mode is sometimes too much to take; it offers no peace. But then, suddenly, I remember the week that it is, when the Extraordinary One took on the ordinary human mode right down to a violent death in a miraculous joining to His beings--we with the cacaphony in our heads that all too often pours out and destroys anything within range of us.


I live my life as my ancestors did, plodding from day to day, only if I just stop I have that which heals the cacaphony, a saving like no other, by One like no other. If only I would stop and realize and be thankful, before there are no more tomorrows.

Refeathering the Nest

After my father died, I must have run a million plans for my future through my head. I ran across some notes the other day in which I wrote that a three bedroom home was one of my "must haves" in a new direction. Then, I thought, I'd move into my dad's condo. Then I thought, "no, it's too small". Then I was back to the larger house which would have to be in the boonies in that I could not afford what is available in my current neighborhood, notwithstanding the economic downturn nationwide.

Then I was back to the little apartment, particularly as it is never easy for me to let go of something that has sentimental value. It was the last place my father lived, and relatively comfortably for the last six years of his 90 years.

Then I tried to sell it, and ran into the reality of a condo association with no reserves such that lenders were concerned about funding potential buyers. And, oh, there was the roof which the association said is mighty fine, while the buyer's inspectors said, "oh, no". Of course, if I had been less disclosing, I might have avoided that part of their inspection, but then, unlike the people who sold to my dad and I, I revealed all. Yes, it's the law, but you'd be surprised at how most folks fail to abid by it. Shocking, I know. . .

After a year plus on and off trying to sell, I gave up. And then hit a period of mind freeze. And then, in December 2009, a friend, able to cover my mortgage and HOA, mostly, though not the ever increasing taxes, needed a place and I needed someone that I knew looking after the place and it all seemed just synchronicitous. I rented it out in March. By then I was thinking on things again, and decided, given the fact that I am at upper middle age, unmarried and childless, expanding my material life, bigger house (that I would be no better at housekeeping) and more stuff, made no sense. This is the time of life for purgation, for reflection, not for more conspicuous consumption.

At least my time of life. I don't speak for others.,

And I like where I live, even if I am a renter. I like the apartment, which is spacious for a one bedroom, and cheerful. I can walk to shopping. I have access to everything I need. It is a lively neighborhood, but quiet in my little space. There is even a new Italian place down the block. And a good one.

Quite simply, if I left here, it would be in response to some "ought" of others, with good intention, but not of mine.

A decision. No easy thing to come by for me. I decided to paint, with the help of my father's brother, still quite the handy man despite his advancing age of 85. I decided to put most of my stuff in the garage to be sifted later for possible garage sale. It was hard. Everything I have, kitschy and otherwise, has memory, has a story. Not an easy thing to let go. But, it was essential. It is essential. I decided to refinish and tune my childhood piano, itself nearly half a century old. And maybe go back to playing. A new rug. And only a few pieces of furniture, and not particle board, which has been my past wont. That would be my concession to adult decor and materialism. So, I have a couple of Chinese antigue like cabinets, one I am using as a console. And i am about to have a Jeffersonian highboy in my bedroom, that despite the difference in culture, I think will work with the Chinese cabinet in here. And today I got a flip flop Futon, a really cool couch that doesn't look like the Castro Convertible of old, and will be comfortable and functional. Oh, and the cellular shades on their way soon. The place is more open, and fresh. It is going to be my hub for the last part of my life, that I hope is many years to come, trying new experiences, something I have been loath to do far too long. A place to write. A place to study. A place to have wonderful conversations with a few good friends at a time. A place to cuddle with my cats. A place to think about life, and God, and salvation. A place to reshape and grow.

I could just about chirp!

Moments of Transfiguration

Today's gospel featured the Transfiguation of Christ. Before some of the terrified apostles, the Divine Christ shines through the human Chirst. "This is my Son Whom I love" speaks God the Father. "Listen to Him." These ordinary men are vouchsafed a peek at what awaits all men if only we do listen.

Father Lopez was the celebrant at today's Mass at St. Victor's, Los Angeles. He suggested that we, too, experience Transfiguring moments, where the Presence of God Himself, in all Three Persons is manifest. Our priest said that his experience, this week of Transfiguration,was seeing a new grandfather embrace his new grandchild at a hospital. Think" he suggested, "of your experiences of Transfiguration." You have had them.

Funny he should say that. We have had much needed rain these last days. My bed is in the living room for I have been making improvements to my apartment, beginning with what seems endless plastering and painting, with the help of my father's brother, my uncle Steve. The bedroom was the second, and so I moved the heavy tempurpedic, in pieces into the living room, already painted in a lovely "orange confection" as the color is called courtesy of Home Depot. This morning the day dawned with a pristine sunshine that glanced off the walls and lit the new color. On the way to Mass, touched by breeze and the sight of after rain blue and cotton clouds, I felt particularly free and oddly safe. I actually thanked God for the day and for my experience of it, pointing out to him, in disclaimer, that I realized that by tomorrow, my gratefulness of today could easily dissipate into the internal gloom of tomorrow. But for that time, on the way to Church, in Church hearing my priest describe his moment that resonated with my moment, and driving down to Long Beach for a long delayed color (there were three inches of gray!) and trim, I was glanced by the Divine. It was change. It was change I begged to be made permanent. And though I know that in this life, such moments are transient, they give me such hope for the future, actually the eternal which has no past, present or future. To experience the Divine Presence can only be exponentially the feeling of today.

One of Yesterday's People

I have spent virtually the whole last week inside, except for a pre-scheduled foray to the doctor to check up on my blood pressure and cholesterol. Once he determined the horrible cold had NOT, happily, travelled to my lungs, he became disinterested in that medical aspect of things, and rushed me to blood letting, a brief uninformative here's what's next on the list of things to do to control the aforementioned blood pressure and cholesterol and out the door. I returned to my nose blowing and coughing and sleeping as soon as I got home and put on a new less ill used pair of jammies.

Until today. Saturday I wanted to venture forth, but having missed several days of work, I decided caution was best and though I felt nearly fully recovered I stayed about the house. But today, I had my cup of coffee outside with the birds, and chatted comfortably (i.e. without too much sniffling) with a friend before going to Mass.

The two Monsignors, pastor and former pastor, who usually cover the five Sunday masses, have been having various and serious medical issues of their own, and while they try to make every service, it has just become extremely difficult. We have thus had several visiting priests, usually the most amiable Father Lopez from the Los Angeles Monastery of the Angels, with whom we have become very happy. But today, he was apparently not available and someone "new" came to cover. Not really new, in that he has been a priest since 1955, and long time was pastor at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, until retirement was required. Why required in a time when there are so few priests? That is a question for another day. Such priests really never do retire and do what this man, Fr. Colm O'Ryan, did today--help out when the needs of a parish demand it. He is pictured above, less white haired than the man I met, and perhaps more apparently outgoing than the man I met.

When asked by one of the servers how he wanted to do something during the service, father demurred. We servers of course are used to very different personalities as our replacement celebrants. More than a few, we have found, well, I shouldn't speak for my altar colleagues, but I think they'd agree, are somewhat authoritative, some because they came up at a time when priests were the fiat on all things spiritual (often creeping into the secular but we kids certainly wouldn't have pointed it out) and brooked no question, even mild question, and some because though raised at a much more permissive time discovered a wee bit of the power of the ministerial cloth that appeals to the lesser part of human nature. There have been those who are quietly happy in humility, and have no need to lead every detail,, but one never assumes. Martin said when Father was willing to proceed as this parish did on things like where the homily would be preached, or where the intentions would be read, "You're the boss, Father." Fr. O'Ryan said, no, not the boss, that he was to serve, always to serve.

We got to talking about his time as priest and things that had changed, among them, that Irish priests like himself, from Waterford (the place where the crystal was made until I sadly hear, last year) were rare in the modern church. He was, he said, "one of yesterday's people". He did not say it with bitterness. It was wistful. Perhaps it was that so few Irish men want to be priests today where in days gone by it was a thing of joy for a man to go to seminary, for himself and his family. I did not have time to ask. Although he had been called at the last minute, he had notes from a homily given earlier in the week, about having heard Victor Frankl, the Auschwitz survivor and philosopher, the writer of "Man's Search for Meaning", and about something that Frankl had said about happiness. It is not something to be pursued. It is something that ensues as a result of certain choices made, things not external. Is it the choice to love or to gather things from which happiness ensues? Fr. O'Ryan suggested we try the love, of God and man, from which our happiness would flow. "Try it," he said.

Perhaps there is something still to be learned from one of yesterday's people.

A Short, But Full Life: Erica Tabachnick

It was 1986. I was a young lawyer with a new job at a government office. Erica was not much older, but she was more experienced at the work of the place. She was one of a few who taught me. We became work friends. In our case, that meant we hung together when we were at work, lunch, consultations and complaints about the work we did, as well as her mentoring someone, me, still learning the ropes. We did not do much outside of work, so it wasn't as intimate a friendship as I have made with other such colleagues. No reason I think, except maybe she had a husband and two kids and our lives were on different paths.
It's always when such a person dies that you, I, wish it had developed into something more.
But the window of opportunity has passed. She is gone, too soon, what was it that someone said, "betrayed by the body she was so comfortable with", with an ovarian cancer, I understand, that spread finally too much for her to fight.
At the Hollywood Forever cemetery yesterday, packed with people in the little chapel, and overflowing, I heard things I did know, about how she was a bit of a hippie, how she loved to dress in color and quirky fashion, how untraditional were the decoration schemes of her office, which I myself had seen and loved, how she was a cover of calm for those other of us who tend toward the more impulsive and noisy. That she was a good lawyer, this I knew from being on both sides of the fence with her, when we were both prosecutors, and then after 1995 when she went to the defense side and quietly, persistently, argued for her clients. But I did not know about the belly dancing. I did not know she had a brother who viewed her as something of an "earth goddess". I did not know that the man she married was a childhood family friend. I knew she was fearless, but did not know that fearlessness failed to extend to trying cilantro. I did not know she was a gourmet. I knew she was liked, but not by this many people and as intensely. It is always humbling to see those few memorials where someone now gone is so much a loss for so many. I doubt I will ever have that honor, although I am somewhat ashamed that I would wish it, anyway.
She should not be gone, but there was no doubt of the impact she made right till the end, with humor, love, and courage.
I wish I had known her better. But I am glad I knew her at all.

An Avatar Analysis

One of the definitions of an "avatar" is an "entity in human form". This interests me because one of the definitions or descriptions of "djinns" are creatures, more than human, but less than divine, which also take human form, often changelings, left in place of human children. I am a djinn in name only, I am glad to say, a gift of poetry from my parents. But the young man played by Sam Worthington of the movie of that name, "Avatar" steps into a body created by the DNA of human and Navi (the natives of the planet which has valuable minerals human beings want to mine), in some fashion that isn't quite explained, and learning the stories of their people (and of course falling in love) he becomes truly one of them, and fights for them against the corporate and military complex.

That aspect of the movie, the BAD BAD military and corporate hack and their minions against the pure people with their Tree of Souls--was typical of the political propaganda of the day, of my friends of the left. Life is so much more complex than secular religion allows for--but still much in the movie speaks to a greater, mythic consciousness, that it should not be discarded by ideologues on the right, who, I understand have had their critique of the film. And while God, that is the Supreme Creator of the World, is not acknowledged in favor of an Earth Mother of which all beings are a a part (the reason I completely understand, the Vatican had a problem with this film), I could take the latter and for myself make the Creator the umbrella of it all, that is, the idea of souls on earth and elsewhere (heaven for me) being interrconnected, and in a sense, intermediary for the living. But for me, God is the center of this all. He is "I AM". And while the film is correct that there ARE things more important than making money and garnering power, it is not because of Mother Earth, per se. Human beings trend toward religious thinking, even if god is remade into nature. Yes, as the caretakers of this planet, we have both dominion and obligation, but it is that which was given to us, by the Prime Mover. Where does earth otherwise garner her power?

My friend known as "momwards" on line instant mailed me that she wished she was sitting at the Tree of Souls in and during the movie. I am blessed in my faith, for in sitting before the Tabernacle, before the God of our Fathers, who saved all souls, I am with all who came before and who will come after me.

Blink, and It's 2010

So. Here we are. A fresh new year upon which to trod. Will we do better this year? I do not speculate. Today, at least. Today, I revel in the quietude of a civilization hushed by after party exhaustion. I went to Mass to set myself upon the right road to begin with, and then we shall see what Graces are proffered, and accepted by me. Pretty crowded even though New Year's is no longer a holy day of obligation! Then to the happily open Starbuck's for a Venti Mocha and sandwich, the paper and a call from a friend. I may be wending my way south this afternoon to touch base with friends literally on their way back east, although with more storms coming that leaving may be delayed.

As for last night's revelries for me and my friends--it was pleasant and rather sedate, dinner at a true favorite restaurant "Jar". Most of the gathered I did not know, two I did, but I found it engaging, particularly as the mood was good, the other customers were humming with anticipation, and the libation was sufficient to the occasion.

I have a new toy, courtesy of Len of "Len Speaks", a Flip video camera. Just about the size of a nano ipod, it takes about an hour's worth of activity that can be downloaded immediately to computer or cd or both. I took a fair amount of footage last night, for my first effort, and most of it was terrible, but the very beginning, while Len and I awaited the rest of the crew sets the tone for what was the rest of the lovely evening setting us forth upon the new decade, the clink of glasses (they were margaratini's) and good cheer was great. I tried to upload it here, but so far, no luck. Hopefully, upon the response from customer support, I'll be able to do it! Meanwhile, just imagine two frosty martini glass with salt thinly placed around the rim. Yum! Happy New Year to All!