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.