Mori and Vitae Mementoed

written by Rich Konrad mainly for Ann

© 2011 by Ann Konrad, all rights reserved

 

. . . See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.  — T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”)

 

* * *

 

Two important hypnagogic visions at Ft. Campbell, KY during Basic Training in 1971

 

Darkness undifferentiated and silence, interrupted by the sound of pouring water.  As if from a struck rock, a small stream grows out of the darkness to become a torrent.  From the foam atop rocks and branches arises the waterborne lidless fetus, gazing at me.

 

I am at the rifle range looking toward the targets before dawn; the horizon is tinged with deep pink.  The air hums with what seems the expectant roar of cicadas.  Then, wheeling through the distant air comes the ouroboros, churning overhead and disappearing behind me with the sound.

 

* * *

 

Four interviews with an old man who took me seriously when I was a boy

 

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. . . . The moment you follow someone you cease to follow truth. — J. Krishnamurti (Speech dissolving the Order of the Star, August 3, 1929)

 

I was beginning Junior High School, and before training sometimes the old man would invite me for a chat, both of us sitting facing each other in the formal posture.  The talks were usually about ordinary things, but the dialog was direct and lively.  Today, after pleasantries, he hands me a short piece of rope with an overhand knot and asks me to remove the knot.  I am trying to look ahead to see the purpose of this exercise while untying the simple knot and handing the rope back to him.  He laughs and puts the rope in his hands behind his back.  In a few seconds he brings the rope with a new knot back to the space between us.  “I asked you to remove the knot.”  Again I untie the knot and give the rope to him.  He repeats the process, this time reminding me more sharply that I am to remove the knot.  Again, I untie the knot.  After two more repetitions, in frustration and some anger I tell him that I cannot remove the knot because he can retie it endlessly; his efforts were beyond my control.  He shrugged.  “Yes,” he was saying without speaking, “Part of the rope’s nature contains potential if not actual knots.  You cannot change its nature; just try not to let your attention fail!”   Bashō used a wild duck instead of a rope and poor Hyakujo only had his nose tweaked.

 

The old man had given me a movement to practice.  He told me to come back to him when the technique had yielded everything to me.  After a week of practice, I came to him and told him I was ready for the next movement.  He was shocked and told me to see one of the other teachers.  For two weeks, when I approached him, he was deferential and asked me to seek out one of the other teachers.  Missing our talks, I finally asked if he was angry with me.  “Oh no,” he said, “I am startled at your progress.  I have nothing to teach someone who has squeezed everything from a posture.  In sixty years I have never managed such insight.”   I told him that I was sure that I could learn more from the posture he had given me, but I had become bored with it and wanted to move on.  Relief spread across his face along with a wide smile.  “Let’s do some work.”

 

I was disappointed with my progress.  I tried to imitate the old man.  At one of our talks, he shared tea and asked what was troubling me.  I told him that no matter how I worked, I was not as smooth and centered as he was.  “How old are you?”  “Thirteen.”  “How old am I?”  “Old, maybe sixty.”  “How long have you been practicing?”  “Three years.”  “How long have I been practicing?”  “Fifty years, maybe.”  “So, who thinks we should look the same?”

 

One day during teisho, the old man recounted Okazaki Teruyuki’s definition of the relationship between teacher and student.  Okazaki said, “Student here (indicating his knees), teacher here (indicating his head), no steps in between.”  I told the old man that I had no notion that I could reach his level of skill, and that I imagined that he had been a prodigy.  He told me that many of his fellow students were more talented, but some had died of illness, some had died in the war, and some had become distracted and left.  I said that he undoubtedly worked very hard.  He told me that many of his fellow students worked harder than he did, but some had died of illness, some had died in the war, and some had become distracted and left.  He told me that he was dogged, practicing every day as long as he could and that he had not died of illness, or died in the war, or become distracted and left.

 

I soon figured out that I’m not the product of my teachers or cultural-religious avatars; I’m responsible for me.  Every time I asked about wisdom transmission, the old man would break into laughter.  I experienced many teachers who interposed themselves between the truth and me and then, after exacting some price, leapt aside, proudly pointing to it.  The old man never stood between the truth and me, but always, in any way he could and as directly as possible, pointed.

 

* * *

 

The Gift (which way to turn or why I don’t need to undertake the search Plato had Aristophanes describe)

 

Of all you learn here, remember this the best:

Don't hurt each other, and clean up your mess.

Take a nap everyday, wash before you eat.

Hold hands, stick together, look before you cross the street.

And remember the seed in the little paper cup:

First the root goes down, and then the plant grows up! — John McCutcheon (“Kindergarten Wall”)

 

The inner well of my sexuality is as inseparable from my essence as the quality of knotting is inseparable from the rope.  No choices here, just a dawning perception of what has been there since the beginning.  When I was ten and masturbation, recently discovered, was becoming a favorite pastime, I remember watching a Tarzan movie with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.  Which one would I blaze with?  Both.  In fact, being the meat in a T and J sandwich or sharing T with J were the fantasies that brought the most satisfying self-induced orgasms.  And then when Boy came along, a remarkable vista of possible combinations presented.  Haley Mills (from The Parent Trap) was another player in those early fantasies, and although intimacy, not only sex, with the male players was prominent, my first real crush was on Haley.  Once when eleven, thinking of her, I sat on my bed and wept.  I could arrange the cast any way I chose, but please note that no actual actors were importuned or had any idea of what I scripted for them.  I’m sure they would have been mortified!  The rarity of desire for boys and girls together as sexual partners is what placed me in a small, lightly inhabited circle.   When I hear the term switch-hitter used to describe me, I know that some monosexuals cannot imagine batting from both sides of the plate at once.  They see me as a pendulum, but I’m more like the quantum mechanics notion of the electron.  We all look at each other through the lenses of our own natures (but seriously, some of my best friends are monosexuals).

 

This never seemed strange to me because my root system was well nurtured, although I did absorb the standard fifties and sixties take on being queer—not a great idea.  I want to be clear that, while I didn’t see anything wrong with me, I clearly knew that others would.  Anxiety about discovery, leading to hiding such a wonderful part of my nature, produced a wound.  As the son of divorced parents raised by a mostly single mother, the Freudian explanation for my semi-queerness would have been clear in everyone’s, including my mother’s, eyes.  To her credit, whenever she knew that I had heard people trying to demean “queers,” she reminded me that during the war she had worked with a lot of homosexuals and that like all people they were worthy of respect and freedom from fear and like all groups they consisted of both the admirable and otherwise.  She had no idea how profoundly that message affected me.  Had my fantasies been public, my poor mother would have been the scapegoat for my nature.

 

I never met a young boy comfortable discussing sex with his mother, so mine had given me a very thorough book about sex, including puberty, and told me to ask if I had any questions.  That wasn’t going to happen.  The book said that youthful experimentation among boys was normal so long as it was followed by the equally normal change to adult heterosexuality.  How comforting to someone not quite bent at a right angle but certainly not straight.  Now, I was happy with Kinsey’s suggestion that sexuality occurred on a continuum.  In adolescence I imagined not a one-dimensional linear scale, but a bell curve where I lived dead in the middle, attraction- and behavior-wise.  I didn’t feel odd so maybe this is normal and the others just haven’t waked to their true natures yet!  I learned later that I live in the center of a bimodal curve with the very unequal modes at both extremes of the distribution, bobbing in a very shallow trough between two waves, both of which I see cresting above me.

 

In America you can recover from almost any defect, but suck one cock and you’re a cocksucker ever after.  Recent social research seems to indicate that for younger men that attitude may be waning.  For me, I’m happy to say they were like Lays™ although I would have preferred to share them with a girl. But then, as far as I could see, it didn’t matter that I lusted after Mary or Sandi or any of the others.  As long as I also lusted after Johnny or Dean, the deal as to my real nature was apparently sealed.  My stigma bonded me in a narrow way to others stigmatized.

 

I remember one poor effeminate boy in elementary school who took unending shit about being queer despite lack of any clear evidence.  Fifty/fifty chance he was straight and late to puberty, and if so, certainly straighter than the martial arts student that I was at the time.  Gender fluidity may incite homophobia more than gay sexuality.  Gender was never my issue, and my clear affinity for girls protected me from derision from many of the jocks with whom I played (I don’t mean baseball).  When I heard girls or boys ragging on him I asked them, “Why does he frighten you so much?”  The old man was helping me to see fear beneath churlish behavior and bravado.  The fearful, above all, crave power, and men, though not above all, long for and fear intimacy with other men.  I saw their fear and usually they lowered their gaze.  I still do not suffer impoliteness gladly.  Gay, straight, in between, transgendered, whatever, I hope you made your way, Jimmie.

 

I was never confused, as many people think bisexuals are.  I liked to eat pussy as much as I liked to suck dick (both at the same time is the sweetest spot).  I liked to fuck girls and boys and be fucked by both.  I wish that the lack of confusion about what I was extended to how to live what I was, but that clarity was dearly won.  I would have benefited from models.  Either sex could set me aflutter and I suspect that I could have made a life journey with one of either sex. The intimacy I have shared with Ann, surging with the physical and the spiritual, was born in early explorations, lessons in trust and ease of caring in the midst of fear, with boys and girls.  With all of them, I learned that sex was only one door to intimacy and not always the end of a chase.  I also learned that people are anxious to be themselves with someone who listens and won’t punish them for asking uncomfortable questions.  I loved people of both sexes, but I have only been interested in marrying one person, because I feel the tug of a fundamental disposition to pair bonding.  Just that simple.

 

I was to learn later that I was liminal, at a threshold and just beyond reach from either side, seen as betraying both by many heterosexuals who thought people like me could only be gay and deceiving and by many gays who thought I could only be gay and in denial or passing (no one thought I was straight and just kidding).  Sometimes I felt as if I aroused more fear in both camps than did members of either in the other’s camp.  I remember meeting Jon’s friends in St. Louis.  Jon is my brother-in-law, who along with many other fine qualities is gay and to whom we were out.  They looked at me like an accidentally caught coelacanth; they couldn’t quite see what use I had in the modern ecosystem.  This is hollow complaining for someone who looked so straight from the outside and was never bashed or bullied (well, I guess if you’re breaking bricks with your bare hands a certain deterrent factor exists).  When you are a kid and the other, you feel isolation.  You hide and only in the shadow you show yourself. If bisexuals can be out, we’re now out to the people who matter.  People’s usual reaction, before they talk to her, is to worry about Ann.  Unlike Diogenes, over a lifetime my lamp discovered a few bisexuals like me, out to wives and in happy heterosexual marriages.  Even coelacanths stumble on each other.  When I finally talked to my dearest male cousin about my sexuality, he told me he had known a long time and loved me.

 

Still, everyone has secrets.  I like to think that the ease people have talking to me results from their lack of fear of what would happen if they revealed their secrets in an unguarded moment.  The energy used in hiding is considerable.  People can’t always tell if you are dangerous to them if you learn a secret, so they have to risk.  Reasonable risk should be rewarded, not punished.  Sensitivity to what others believe they hide is one of the gifts of living at the limen (I use the term to describe a psychological state, not a physiological one).  I love my place in the world, even though I’m not normal!

 

* * *

 

The family motto chosen

 

Mens fortissima sine mens fanatica  (dedication without fanaticism).  Years of studying Latin pay off!

 

* * *

 

Love the one who will take the long journey with you (turning to a girl)

 

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang.  — Wallace Stevens (“The Idea of Order at Key West”)

 

I grew out of adolescence only ten years before the dawn of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.   Loving one girl saved me from a near certain death of the kind suffered by some of my friends who followed their hormones and staked their lives on sexual freedom as the gay rights movement sputtered into existence.  By the time the plague was in full swing, I was nine years a husband and six years a father.  After I met my boon companion, soon to be wife and best friend, our attraction quieted my desire for other guys (maybe my homoerotic attractions were just a long phase) and we found what we needed in each other.  She had no idea what she was getting into.  She came from very conventional and racist parents, and how she became the open and accepting person she did is a testament to her courage.  She tended the twin wounds of abandonment and sexuality.

 

We met when I was a sophomore in college and she was in the last year of high school.  We were married after I graduated and returned from Basic and Advanced Training for the Army Reserves.  She continued her undergraduate studies and I went off to teach English in a public school.  From the beginning, the marriage was a joy and a test for both of us.  I was busy enjoying grown-up status and failed to notice that for her the situation was fraught.  She began a lifelong work of disentangling herself from her parents and from me, until she found herself.  The process involved suffering through a destroyed idealization of marriage and her responsibilities in it and a dire car crash that threatened life and limb, requiring reconstructive surgery and long rehabilitation.  Then, she had to face the fact that her husband was bent and that his behavior in the shadows revealed him as wounded and selfish.

 

As she worked all these puzzles, she remade herself to a point at which she felt that to keep what she wanted she had to move away from her moorings again and again.  I feared that she would be repulsed by my revealed nature, but she was not.  What followed was a negotiation not about what I was, but about the ground rules with which she could live.  This negotiation along with a clear commitment not to cede primacy in our relationship to anyone else is the key to what we have become.  We would not tear at the thread of integrity that kept us from parting, emotionally or physically.  She became a loving and remarkable physician for my wounds, still occasionally suppurating after all these years, and a fierce defender of the lovability of my nature.

 

She came out as much as I did.  If you imagine that people had trouble with my sexuality, you can guess that a lot of people thought she was naïve at best and nuts at worst to stay with me.  She saved my life and discovered that rather than occasioning loathing, my affinities struck an erotic chord in her.  In fact, we share the same taste in men.  I’m sure strangers would be confounded if they overheard her, out on the trail or on a walk along the river, point out some particularly attractive guy so I wouldn’t miss him.  Somehow she saw that what she loved in me was inseparable from my core.  How does such a relationship last the decades?  Luck in the first choice, forgiveness, and reinvention of the stronger, more conscious self.  She has done the majority of the fresh underpinning of our love.  I know who got the better part of the bargain of our life together.  The sacred whispering of a lifetime with her liberated my soul.

 

* * *

 

I imagine Ann’s internal dialogue about whether or not I am gay

 

Checks against stereotype:

 

Look at how he dresses!

 

He sure as shit can’t dance.

 

He doesn’t usually listen to show tunes.

 

Reality checks:

 

As Sir Elton and Bernie phrased it, when “rolling like thunder under the covers,” it’s clear to me.

 

Occasionally, when an attractive woman walks by, his eyes will wander, not obnoxiously but also not in a way that suggests he’s analyzing her fashion sense.

 

Conclusion:  as a one and a half dollar bill.

 

* * *

 

What you don’t know will help you sometimes

 

“Lay two in and throw off the soft supply.  We’ll lay two back.  Make a capacity hook-up and pump!”—Tom Kitchen (Tom Terrific), Captain (eventually District Chief), SPFD to me as I dismounted the tailboard at a hydrant a block from a raging commercial fire that had set the night sky alight for a mile around.

 

The first two fires I attended were in the rain.  After the Fire Academy and three weeks of department training I was a probie in the cab of a ladder truck, seated between the driver and the officer, headed to my first fire.  I experienced a little boy’s delight as I worked the electronic siren. As we approached, the single story house’s roof was collapsing, a dark hole spreading from the center of the fire’s first penetration through the shingles.  The engine companies had matters in hand, and we helped with salvage covers and overhaul.

 

The third fire was a night fire in a commercial row with a common cockloft where the fire was spreading.  I was on the second arriving engine and went in second on our first hand line.  When we went through the rear door into the narrow hallway, crouching low, I couldn’t see anything.  I could hear the sound of breathing through SCBAs.  I kept my hands on the line as we advanced in a world consisting only of sounds, including the failing wood and steel, and warmth.  The first guy on my line stopped, and I heard water flowing from a fog nozzle, but not ours.  The first due engine, having arrived just before us, had advanced from the front of the store, placed an attic ladder, and was darkening the fire.  I felt a hand on my shoulder and I heard my Lieutenant through his mask telling me to back out and take a break.  Moving around him, I followed the line out of the rear door and went to the tailboard of our engine.  After we wrapped up and reloaded the pre-connects and the supply line, the boss told me I did a hell of a job.  I thought, “If that was a hell of a job, I wonder when the real work begins.”

 

Much later in my career I had learned what he meant.  Even though I had no role in putting that fire out, I had gone into the hot darkness and stayed in the hot darkness with my crew.  They would have carried me out had I stumbled and I would have done as much for them.  I learned to trust most of them in the next many years, and learned that trust in your company when your ass is hanging out banishes paralyzing fear.  Even though the fire service was slightly more reactionary than a Southern Baptist church and most of them would have been appalled by my secrets, all that mattered was that we trusted each other to care when no other agent of care was present.  Among the finest compliments I received as I rose through the ranks was the recognition by my peers in blue shirts that I was a hell of a firefighter. I still love the memory of moving low in a dark building while flammable gasses overhead periodically ignited causing flames to roll over our heads until the vapors were temporarily exhausted as we looked for any in need of rescue, moving always to the seat of the fire.

 

* * *

 

A sample of who’s on his IPod (performers and writers mixed)

 

An Horse, Montserrat Caballé, Miriam Makeba, Linda Ronstadt, Ann Savoy, Fun., Rosalie Sorrels, Nina Simone, Beatles, Antony and the Johnsons, Steve Winwood, Ondar, Freddie Mercury, Howlin’ Wolf, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Si Khan, Tanita Tikaram, Annie Lennox, Duke Ellington, Warren Zevon, Miles Davis, Hank Jones (no, not that one), Bob Dylan, Jane Siberry, T S Eliot, Lou Reed (this son wasn’t killed), Wallace Stevens, W B Yeats, Vashti Bunyan, Joao Gilberto, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Cyndi Lauper, Stan Getz, Good Shoes, Janis Ian, Iris Dement, Carole King, Erik Satie, Louis Armstrong, Van Morrison, Richard P. Feynman, Nick Drake, Peter Holman, Nana Mouskouri, Malvina Reynolds, Grateful Dead, Laura Nyro, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, George Gershwin, Ray Charles, Queen, Vivaldi, Rush, Greg Brown, Glenn Gould, Roy Orbison, Eric Andersen, Toni Childs, Ornette Coleman, k. d. laing, R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant, Kenneth Patchen, Joan Osborne, Teena Marie, Cowboy Junkies, John McCutcheon, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Jennifer Warnes, John Fogerty, Tiger Lillies, Gary Lucas, John Coltrane, Lovin’ Spoonful, Rascals, Mavis Staples, Etta James, Bill Dixon, Eric Clapton, Rachel Podger, Odetta, assorted Bachs, Samite, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sunmay, Manassas, Suzanne Vega, Ralph McTell, Panic! at the Disco (thanks, Sierra), the Wombats, Elbow, The Parlotones, Gaslight Anthem, Imagine Dragons, AWOLNATION.

 

* * *

 

In the back of the ambulance

 

He was an old emaciated black man, going to the hospital to die of metastatic prostate cancer.  I knew little of prostate cancer then and could not imagine the pain from bone mets he was suffering.  I knew that probably he had been castrated.  I couldn’t know that he prefigured me.  I tried to tell him that I wanted to care for him on this short trip and tried to acknowledge his pain and uncertainty, but he answered each of my questions with one word; inadequacy is a constant companion in the back of an ambulance.  As with many of the dying I accompanied or those who died in my care, I looked at them through the small window of that short trip.

 

She was a beautiful infant whose skull was misshapen from her headfirst flight into the curb when she was shot from the vehicle her mother was driving in an intersection collision.  She was near death when I loaded her and we began the screaming ride.  Her breathing was too slow; I stopped the trip briefly, intubating her with an uncuffed tube, and my partner began mild hyperventilation.  Small ones can pour most of their blood into the container of their unfused skulls.  The recognition of futility passed between us when I glanced up at my partner.  When we arrived at the teaching hospital, the battle was short before the surrender.  I last saw her on an adult gurney with one white sheet pulled up to her chin and another covering her deformed crown, an image easily bidden today.  Awaiting her family and their pain, she looked like a wonderful small black full moon against a vast white sky.

 

* * *

 

Before the ambulance arrived

 

We went to a call for a woman in labor at an apartment complex.  We were met by a four year old at the bottom of the stairs to a second story apartment.  Silently, he led us through the open door of an apartment that was unfurnished except for a king size bed in the master bedroom.  We asked the police officer who trailed us to watch the boy.  In the middle of the bed was a young woman of remarkable composure given the circumstances.  She was pushing, and I asked her to try to stop until we were ready.  She was ready if we weren’t.  We learned that the family was just moving from out of state and that her husband was on the way with a moving van full of furniture.  I went to one side of the bed and Huffer went to the other.  I put a knee on the mattress to get closer to her and promptly sank to the bottom of the bed frame as the center of the bed was thrust upward carrying the woman atop it.  A moment later, Huffer kneeled on the other side and I was carried up on a wave as he bottomed and the woman came back down.   My first experience with a waterbed.  Finally, we gently eased her to the foot of the bed in time to make the catch.  The delivery of the little brother was, as most are, uncomplicated and joyous, and everybody did well except for a bit of seasickness.

 

* * *

 

What you don’t know will hurt you sometimes

 

Can't take the kid from the fight

Take the fight from the kid

Sit back, relax

Sit back, relapse again

Can't take the kid from the fight

Take the fight from the kid — Panic! at the Disco (“Comisado”)

 

My mother said that during the time she and my father were dating she had no idea he was an alcoholic, a lesson in how the addicted can manipulate loved ones when a goal is in sight.  Still, I wonder how hard she looked.  Dad was a charming guy, and on the few occasions I talked with him after the divorce, I was astonished at the similarities in our speech patterns.  His idea of quality father-son time was taking me to Schneider’s Bar, where he would sit at the bar and drink while I played a table game, sliding little pucks over the sawdust-lubricated wood.  Not much baseball; my mom taught me those skills.  No fishing; I didn’t have the patience for that anyway.

 

I learned later that, when drunk, he occasionally chased my mom around the house with a butcher knife.  She finally found the danger to me unacceptable and divorced him when I was seven or eight.  I was terrified and cried for a week.  She told me about his darker nature only when I was older and asked.  He was ashamed, but could never stop drinking.  I heard from him only two or three times after they split, and I developed the second wound, unworthiness coupled with abandonment.  She made the hard choice, major wound instead of fatal wound.

 

* * *

 

Protecting your family (safety is not an artifact of the weapon but of the mind wielding the weapon)

 

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives—unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. — T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”)

 

When I was in fifth grade, I started taking Judo lessons from instructors who worked for SAC.  Their teachers were revered, with deep lineages.  I found a number of great teachers over the years, American, Japanese, and Chinese.  I fell in among Buddhists and was taken with their commitment to non-violence.  My mother was a pistol marksman, having trained as a young woman with local police officers.  During World War II, working as a supervisor for the Red Cross in North Africa and Italy, she was always armed.  In Italy, she shot and wounded a drunken British soldier who had broken into her apartment.  She and her roommate had locked the bedroom door and hidden under the bed, warning him not to come through.  When he broke the door in, she relieved him of the use of his legs.

 

So, handguns were always present in our home, and I knew not to touch them.  During a discussion of non-violence, she asked me if I wouldn’t kill a man who broke in and was raping her.  I told her that I wouldn’t have to kill him; that I was skillful enough to stop the rape without resorting to lethal force.  She looked at me through the eyes of someone who has fought for life, as if I was lunatic.  Too theoretical, the old man would say.  When I was a weekend warrior, I was the armorer for my Military Police Company.  I repaired and fired everything we had, including the M1911A1, M14, M16A1, various Winchester and Mossberg tactical shotguns, and M60 machineguns.  I wonder what she would make of her son who now carries a handgun or two almost everywhere he goes.  I’m older and slower now.  Every day I consider the appropriate response to power and coercion.  We always live with the possibility that someone will kill us, but I won’t cooperate with someone using power to frighten and control before he or she kills, and unless I choose, I won’t trade my life or the lives of my family (I use the term generally) for anyone else’s.

 

* * *

 

Shankar and Allarakha

 

At the University of South Florida in the small gymnasium, on a platform draped with hand-woven rugs and supporting pots of burning incense, Shankar and Allarakha sat and began to play.   Lines of melody and percussion pierced me.  After a few minutes, the music stopped; the crowd applauded wildly.  Shankar smiled toward Allarakha and said, “Thank you.  If you liked the tuning so much, we hope you enjoy the concert.”  The tabla playing that evening was virtuous and like lightning striking.

 

Try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joyk_EMtzn0

 

* * *

 

The fate of the body as imagined by an autistic child character

 

“But Mother was cremated.  This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke.  I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn’t ask at the crematorium because I didn’t go to the funeral.  But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”—Mark Haddon (The curious incident of the dog in the night-time)

 

I’m not worried about the fate of the body.  One day soon, perhaps four or five billion years from now, all its atoms will join with every other atom on and in the planet to be seeds in the outer regions of our star’s bloating carcass and eventually beyond.

 

* * *

 

Water from another time

 

It don’t take much, but you gotta have some.

The old ways help the new ways come.

Just leave a little extra for the next in line.

They’re gonna need a little water from another time. —John McCutcheon (“Water From Another Time”)

 

In the mid-1950s when I was seven or eight, we lived on a dead end street that stopped at a creek bed.  The garbage trucks would head down the street nose-in and then turn around in the driveway of the last house before heading out.  The crews were made up of a white supervisor who drove and two black men who handled the garbage.  In the hot Florida summers, they often waited after turning around and took a short break in the shade.  The driver would remain in the cab with its fan while the others would stay outside.  One day, my mother suggested that I take a bottle of cold water and a couple of cups down and see if they were thirsty.  They were and appreciated the water.  This trip became a weekly ritual.  After a few times, the black men and I learned each other’s names and we began conversations about their families and homes.  The ritual deference they had first showed me dropped away, and I learned that they were no different than I except that their children still had two parents at home.  Later, I had to learn the hard lesson that empathy is limited by experience, and that I could never, with any depth, understand the evils that a whole community endured.  Eventually their schedule changed; no more instruction.

 

* * *

 

Alcohol

 

I don’t drink alcohol because I am afraid of the third cup of saké drinking me; the genetic influence is too well established.  I must say that I have always had trouble dealing with the inebriated, even as a paramedic.  My partners had to hold the hands of the drunk drivers who had just killed other men, women, or children.  When I was in Basic Training at Ft. Campbell, KY in 1971, I noticed that many in the NCO cadre had drinking problems.  Occasional wandering diatribes and hungover demeanors disgusted the son of an alcoholic father.  Later, I realized that training cannon fodder for Southeast Asia may have led them to drink.

 

* * *

 

Conscience

 

I had done something forbidden and should have known better.  When my mother discovered the misdeed, she looked down at me and asked, “Don’t you have a little voice in your head that tells you that you shouldn’t do things you’ve been told not to do?”  I said, “No.  Do you?”  She paused and, in a trust-defining moment, said, “No, but I’m supposed to.”  Fear of disappointing her, not a bad substitute for that little voice, became an important curb on my immature frontal lobes.

 

* * *

 

Points of View

 

But we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

—Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace).

 

So it is that we are ephemera, arising and subsiding, precariously cobbled together.  Yet, the barely glimpsed portion through the loved one’s mostly opaque sphere, apprehended only when we glance at it indirectly, is enough to reassure us, filling us with a love near tears.  Faith is the release from anxiety leading to quiet, found in the indirect evidence of other whole conceptions of the universe untouched by the gravity of our own.  Nor can we wish the physics of those other conceptions away.

 

Other spheres contain monsters that we will never understand and for whom we have no adequate response.

 

* * *

 

Visions perhaps hypnagogic, perhaps not

 

My mother told me that when her youngest brother, Billy, died on Iwo Jima and before the official notification, he came to her while she slept.  Waking her, he said that he was all right and that she should not worry.

 

When our dear friend of blessed memory, Marion, was deep in a coma and at first expected by most of his physicians to die and then, after failing to cooperate, to remain in a “persistent vigilant coma,” Ann woke feeling as if looking out through his eyes and hearing him.  He left his hospital bed and stood beside us when we married.

 

Ramakrishna said that he saw Rama at the burning ghat, bending over corpses and liberating souls by sacred whispering.

 

* * *

 

Speaking of Ramakrishna (an unlettered man who presented the heart of a teacher)

 

One of his boys came before him proudly claiming that on the boat ride over a man had reviled Ramakrishna’s name.  The boy said that he had become angry and stood in the boat, rocking it from side to side, demanding that the man recant.  Finally, fearing for his life, the man recanted.  Ramakrishna chastised the boy in front of the others, saying that the opinion of the ignorant was not worth endangering the lives of all on the boat.  Did the boy believe that such an opinion should control his behavior?

 

A few weeks later, one of those present at that exchange told Ramakrishna that on the boat trip that day one of the passengers had vilified Ramakrishna, but the boy said that he had listened with equanimity and made no fuss.  Ramakrishna flew into a rage, asking how the boy could have tolerated such insults to his Master without vigorous rebuke.

 

Not too intellectual and the right medicine for the right patient.

 

* * *

 

Submission and joining

 

Growing up, I attended church services of many protestant sects, as well as Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish services.  When I encountered Hinduism and Buddhism, I was impressed by a significant difference from my earlier experience—the difference between submission and joining.  Why so much controversy about God?  The male “my god has a bigger penis than your god” posturing is tiresome.  Kenneth Patchen said, “To hell with power and hate and war.”  Much of contemporary religion seems besotted with those idols.

 

* * *

 

Subtle emanations

 

When I learned taiji exercises, the old man always began facing the North.  When I asked why, he told me that he was able to feel the interaction of the subtle emanations of Earth’s magnetic field and the field of his own chi. I have never felt this interaction, but since the old man never lied to me, I begin the exercises facing North.  Who knows?  One day . . .

 

* * *

 

I can’t feel it growing

 

In its last moment the whole of my life will last only a moment. —Antonio Porchia (Voices)

 

Before the cancer diagnosis my hair was long and usually tied back in a ponytail.  On a trip to visit my son in California we stopped at a salon on the way back from the Monterey Aquarium, and I had my hair cut quite short, sort of a battle do.  Ann buzzes my hair now and did so last night.  The only reason I know when it’s time for the cut is the calendar—every two weeks, or if I pass by a mirror a couple of weeks after the last cut.  I have the same sense for when my nails need trimming.  Hair and nails aren’t really subject to ownership.  They are inseparable from me, and unless I pay them special attention, in the short term I am unaware of their conditions.  The tumor is the same, a wild part of me (Gleason 4+3 post-surgery).  I don’t usually pay attention to it and don’t feel it growing.  But, it is growing at a pace governed by all the rest of me.  Not seeing the interactions does not mean that there are no interactions, only that I don’t have the proper instrument or the proper place to stand to detect them.

 

Currently, the predominant tumor cells are fueled by testosterone in my extracellular soup, but that will change. Since my tumor produces PSA, the PSA test result has become a surrogate for rate of tumor growth.  If my PSA had not remained stubbornly high after I delivered the offending gland through a birth canal over my navel and if I hadn’t seen the bone scan and the ProstaScint® scan showing bone and lymph node metastases, I might think myself a poster boy for screening and the surgical cure.  Until its hasty growth crumbles my bones and replaces my marrow, I’ll have to look very carefully to detect this wondrous part of me at work.

 

To discourage rapid tumor growth I spent a couple of years with deeply depressed testosterone production, enjoying the same therapy as Level 3 sex offenders.  The Levitical irony is not lost on me.  A side effect of the treatment was the almost total disconnection of sex drive from any part of my body save the brain.  Images that would normally have tugged at both brain and genitals produced only a vague memory of sexual stimulation, an intellectual appreciation that didn’t deserve to be called lust.  I also suffered experiences usually associated with female menopause, like hot flashes, which were treated with a now rarely used female contraceptive.  My appetite for food rather than sex flourished, I gained weight, was deeply fatigued (a common complaint of sufferers of cancer of all stripes, suggesting the question, “Is it the cancer or the treatment?”), and sleep disturbed.  A bone density study a year into treatment showed normal bone density, so I had escaped osteoporosis, a common side effect.  Another side effect is increased risk of cardiovascular disease.  I may get a tattoo that says, “If I died of a heart attack, it was the fucking cancer!” All of these experiences were tolerable choices defining a middle way.  Since chemotherapy buys little in this cancer, that decision when the wildness really gets going is a no-brainer.

 

What we’re trying to do is produce a disease history in which the run-up to the final disorganization is, if thought of as a curve, one with a long fairly gradual ascending leg followed by a sharp and rapid up-sweep.  Treatment will not change the total time described by the curve and its length is definitely unpredictable, but this curve is preferable to a more diagonal one that represents the natural history of the disease.

 

The urologist has been rigorously honest about my situation.  He seems moved by the change from what we had thought a great surgical success story with clean margins and no seminal vesicle invasion to an incurable disease story.  He operated through an intermediary robot, and I was one of his first one hundred such cases.  I like him.  The medical oncologist I saw early on, who told me that when the decline became precipitous he would be there by my side described in detail what I could expect from my death course.

 

I have been off the testosterone suppressing medication for almost a year, and just now I am finishing the gradual return to pre-castrate sex hormone levels.  Although the neurology of erections is still thoroughly confused, I have a more familiar relationship with sexual triggers.  My reaction to Ann as well as images of other women and men is more than a vague memory of stimulation now.  My appetite for food is returning to normal and I feel a little less tired.  PSA tests are mirrors in which I see that the tumor is growing again, although slowly now and perhaps for a long time.  We cannot know where I am on the curve.  I shall see if not feel its growth, if I look in the right ways and hard enough.

 

* * *

 

Helplessness

 

Even on the road to hell, flowers can make you smile. — Taoist expression

 

How many parents have seen their children die or wives their husbands without being able to pull them back from disappearing?  I see that anxiety of helplessness in Ann, who has always been my fierce protector, when she looks at me through the lens of the disease.  Sometimes all you can do is walk beside your partner and occasionally stop to sit on the pathway and cry.

 

* * *

 

The dying problem

 

For I myself once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.” — Gaius Petronius Arbiter (Satyricon)

 

Dying is much easier than remaining.

 

* * *

 

Paroxysmal vasomotor rhinitis

 

A sudden dampening of the nose with an incipient trigger for a sneeze occurs; then a paroxysm of exaggerated sneezing lasting five or ten minutes begins along with copious nasal secretion of clear watery fluid.  Everyone near me is startled by the explosive sneezes.  Near the end of the paroxysm, nasal passages swell and there is a sensation like histamine release that dulls mentation.  This condition disqualified me for work in the clandestine services and is a maddening inconvenience.

 

* * *

 

Always and never leaving

 

I am troubled by a peripatetic history.  I seem always to be leaving.  This might suggest narcissism, but since I know that people who have come to rely on me can do quite nicely without me, I think it’s more a feeling of failed responsibility.  Failing responsibility is the worst failure.  One’s nature and one’s responsibility often war.  Leaving people I should accompany to their end is painful, like leaving your brother or sister or wife in the fire or like being left as I was.  Happily, she never left though many would have thought she had good reason.

 

 

* * *

 

Separation and strength

 

Ann and I knew early on that we would marry (no more radical living arrangement occurred to us).  In the three-year relationship between meeting and marriage we were apart for long chunks of time.  For some of the time I was at Athens for school.  Before I left, I gave Ann a vinyl copy of the soundtrack of the musical, Hair.  Her parents, seeing how upset she was, let her keep it despite the song “Sodomy/Holy Orgy” containing references to fellatio and cunnilingus.  Either her parents didn’t understand the terms or didn’t look at the album carefully.  We wrote letters to each other almost every day, letters now stored in a carved wood box.  I wonder that now I am a very poor correspondent.  We had a formal engagement just before I went to six months of training for the Army Reserve.  I bought our wedding bands at a PX in Augusta. The brief reunions during these times of separation were fiery and sweet by turn.  I suspect that our determination to work at a life together was nurtured in those absences.  You know how looped you are in the loops of her hair during the times away.

 

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon. — W. B. Yeats (“Brown Penny”)

 

* * *

 

Holding on and letting go (we live on the brink of acidosis)

 

Now I look for her always, I’m lost in this calling

I’m tied to the threads of some prayer

Saying, “When will she summon me, when will she come to me

What must I do to prepare?”

. . . .

And the night came on

It was very calm

I wanted the night to go on and on

But she said Go back to the World — Leonard Cohen (“The Night Comes On”)

 

As my mother’s health deteriorated, we built an addition to our house for her, almost another house.  Over the years, she had breast cancer treated with radical mastectomy and survived the cancer.  She suffered peripheral artery disease that ultimately resulted in a below-the-knee amputation of one leg.  One day, Ann came home to find a note on the door from our family room to her home.  The note, in her fairly steady hand, said that she had awakened with a slight stroke and had gone to the hospital.  Later, we learned that she had realized she was having a stroke when she noticed left side hemiplegia and had tried to say, “Shit!”  What she heard was incomprehensible.  She had managed to transfer to her wheelchair and call her physician’s office.  They couldn’t understand her, but, realizing she was suffering a stroke, stayed on the phone with her until they figured out who she was and called an ambulance. She tried to tell them to delay the ambulance so that she could get dressed.  They did not, but when the ambulance arrived, she was dressed and waiting outside the entrance to her home in her wheelchair.  She eventually recovered most of her ability to move and speak.

 

She had told us of what she felt as digestive pain, but we knew she was having cardiac chest pain.  She was treated for atrial fibrillation and angina.  We installed an intercom between her bedroom and ours.  She and I had long talks about how to handle her decline.  She would go to the hospital again only if she had severe pain and then only if she might recover.  Her voice in the night over the intercom asked me to come over.  I dressed and hurried over to find her sitting on her couch, her wheel chair in front of her facing the couch.  She had shrunken from the formidable woman I had known as a child and young man, but her determination was still like steel.  I sat in the wheel chair and noticed her labored breathing.  I asked what had waked her.  Pain in her chest, she said.  I asked her if the pain was bad enough to go out into the night to the hospital.  No, and I could tell that she had made the decision.  I could now hear the bubbling of pulmonary edema as she breathed, so I moved to sit beside her on the couch and put my arm around her shoulders.  She leaned into me and I again asked if she wanted to go to the hospital.  She shook her head no because talking was too much work.  Over forty-five minutes she became unresponsive and finally stopped breathing.  My pain floated on joy that she had died as she had wished, at home and in my arms, free of technicians.

 

* * *

 

Flash and depth

 

I studied modern poetry with excellent scholars: Eliot, Pound, and Yeats with Joe Bentley and Dylan Thomas with Myron Ochshorn who had heard him read at the 92nd Street New York YMCA.   The university I attended was ideally placed to be a last home for distinguished academics near the end of their careers.  Two professors in the College of Education became mentors.  One was William West who had come from Syracuse; the other was Charlie Weingartner from NYU.

 

Weingartner, with Neil Postman, had just written Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and was a media darling but also a man of discernment.  He would attend formal academic processions wearing sandals and a T-shirt and shorts under his doctoral robes.  He was acerbic and kept a file of strange events reported in newspapers.  My colleagues and I were quite taken with the new approach to language education in a dawning age of multi-media information channels.

 

West was a World War II paratrooper who had jumped during the European invasion.  He was a genial, conventional guy in all but his approach to teaching writing.  He had authored many textbooks and a book in which he asked well-known writers, including one Nobel laureate, to tell of how they became good writers.  Almost all of them said that regular and near constant writing was the key.   West proposed that if you wanted to teach secondary school students to write, they should spend most of their time in class writing.  When I took his writing program, we wrote for the greater part of every class day.  What he returned was a revelation.

 

On a single page he had typed comments on the content of my writing.  The comments were made by someone who had taken the time to read carefully and to think about what I had written, comments that made me feel that my voice had been heard.  Then, a small, numbered section at the end contained technical comments about usage, spelling, and grammar keyed to numbers he had used to annotate the original text.   Write back to your students in a way that shows them how to be concise, clear, and encourage them to write fictional characters’ use of all the senses on each page.  When I used this method in teaching writing to kids in the first school at which I worked, the time it took almost killed me, but the kids ended up writing and writing much better than when they came to me because they knew someone was hearing their voices.

 

Weingartner was the enjoyable confection; West was my hero.

 

* * *

 

Differentiation (an unprosodic ode to the Na+-K+ pump)

 

Normal cells are well differentiated and orderly.  Prostate cancer cells are less so, especially wildly aggressive PCa cells.  They look like a bloated, chaotic mish-mash.

 

The fluid inside my cells is markedly different from the fluid outside my cells, fluids separated by cell membranes that are semi-permeable.  Keeping the character of these differences requires energy, which is why I need to eat, drink, digest, and excrete.  Death, when it comes, will be preceded by a short time when energy is inadequate to support the difference (although I am aware that the Gibbs free energy of the ecosystem will not change noticeably).  The fluids will come to resemble each other more and more.  As cells die their membranes will rupture, breaching the borders in which the pumps that worked to maintain the differences reside.  Death is uniformity incompatible with life.  When enough of my cells die, I will die. The cancer cells in their wild imperfection will go down with the rest, their immortality lost in life lost.

 

* * *

 

Post Script (calm before the storm?)

 

I am happily voyaging past the median survival time for my diagnosis.  I hope I make it to the land of the distant outliers.  Since I have no bone pain, minimal disease severity, and relatively low PSA, I may well arrive there.  Perhaps I will be able to append the description, manageable though chronic, to the term, incurable.  Unfortunately, after three years of ADT and a year’s vacation from testosterone deprivation, the tumor has not learned to behave.  The PSA is doubling about every four months.  The urologist and I have decided to resume the androgen deprivation therapy.  In four months, we’ll see how sensitive to androgens the tumor remains.  The therapy is as I remembered, a bugger to begin and then insomnia, mild confusion, and fatigue.

 

* * *

 

What to do, and who will be doing it?

 

I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies. —Antonio Porchia (Voices)

 

Ann:  When you have watched me die, the muddle will fall out—anger, grief, fear, helplessness, loss of identity.  No one will be able to understand, but they will try clumsily.  Understanding the loss will be impossible, but another job awaits you.  That more work lies ahead may seem deeply unfair, but life is defined by suffering and our reaction to it.  We work as we breathe, unaware of the effort until the work rises to a level that startles us at our fatigue.  You will eventually dive deep into the dark pool covering the roots of your past work.  Who will help you? The help will come from unexpected sources.  I know you will not give up or flee from the work.  I know that you will not waste precious energy on constructing a myth about us.  The reality is complex and wondrous enough.  The work is all we have, and you don’t have to rush.  You will find quiet spaces in which you see clearly for moments and noisy ones filled with uncertainty and rage.  Following along roots from the depths you will break the surface to find the lotus blossom, the new possibilities and the new person to realize them.  Don’t fear that new person; we worked hard to enable her birth, and her every act will contain part of me living in her.

 

* * *

 

The arrow of time (with apologies to Stephen Hawking)

 

Time is not even a vector.  Like the universe building itself out of some undetectable everywhere crack, spreading like the sea floor but not recycling anything, all that has and is happening to me is a stretched connection to everything else in my field.  The problem is the organs of perception, the ways they perceive, and the interpreter—one thing after another although the speed with which I perceive them fools me into missing the step-wise character of my reality and the notion of time it assembles.  In the silence I suspect the compound nature of all my events and their connections until I cannot and need not turn my head to see behind, left, right, or ahead.   What if the stretch is not elastic, but described by the discomfiter of physicists, infinity?

 

* * *

 

Prayer

 

It has been a long time since I asked heaven for anything, and my arms haven’t come down yet. —Antonio Porchia (Voices)

 

In youth I suspected prayer, because the gods, conjured for each prayer, recommended by the clerics were reflections of their own desires.  A god who knows every secret of my heart is a god used as a bludgeon.  So, I did not pray for much of my life.  Now, I pray.  The prayers are expressions that erupt for no particular audience and await no answers or gifts.

 

* * *

 

Fritz and the others

 

The front door had jalousie windows, and he would sit on his rump with his hind legs facing forward and his tail behind, balancing.  In this posture his height was nearly two feet, not bad for a longhair dachshund.  We thought all dogs were natural swimmers, and one hot Florida day we gently pushed him into a swimming pool so he could enjoy a cool swim.  He was unmoving at the surface for a few seconds and then as his long hair streamed out on all sides from water pressure like wind, he slowly sank to the bottom like an angel descending.  We dove in and carried him to the surface where he seemed unruffled.  I knew him all but a few weeks of his life.  He was the first of several family pets that I held at life’s end as the pentobarbital and Potassium chloride produced the last rattle before apnea, deep unconsciousness, and cardiac arrest.

 

* * *

 

Crosswords and life

 

Sundays, Ann and I do the NYT crossword together.  She does most of the work, usually nearly finishing before I look at the few remaining empty squares and complete the puzzle (rarely the reverse occurs).  As in much of our life, he who finishes the work is accorded the admiration although the finish is easy because of the work she has done before.

 

* * *

 

Mentoring

 

No real father, but Mother, the old men, and my uncle were there.  My every act may mentor any of those around me—bosses, colleagues, students, wife, and friends.  Once in a while I find a kindred spirit that arouses in me the energy to consciously invest in her or him.  That investment requires trust, respect, and honesty.  It also forms a relationship in which the mentor benefits as much as the mentee.  Long ago, the old man talked to me about reincarnation.  He asked me to imagine a line of candles.  Light the first and with it light the second and then extinguish the first.  Continue through the line until only the last candle burns.  Is it the same flame?  We live in others this way, for good or bad, like fragments of mysterious DNA incorporated in their skin, or flesh, or if we are worthy, their bones.

 

* * *

 

The pencil mogul

 

When our son was born, Harvey Levin put him on Ann’s belly and began clamping and cutting the cord.  Aaron promptly peed all over Harvey as he tried to block the oscillating stream with one hand while steadying Aaron with the other.  I thought, “That’s an attitude that will stand you in good stead throughout your life.”  Aaron taught me a lot.  Once, when I watched him play in the front yard, he was looking at an insect when a breeze came up, rustling the leaves.  Without looking up, he said to the leaves, “Shhhhhh!”  When Aaron was in elementary school, Ann was called to a meeting with the principal.  Apparently, Aaron had been buying all the pencils from the school store at the beginning of the week and then reselling them at a profit to other students who needed pencils.  Aaron’s first entrepreneurial enterprise had to end.  Aaron, an adult now, has wonderful values and a good heart.  Through all his struggles, even when frustrated, I have been proud of him.

 

Aaron was the reason for all the pets that shared our family life, but he was directly responsible for two.  We already had a wonderful dog when he found a stray black puppy that he thought was a black Labrador.  He thought he could fix it up and sell it.  It was not a black Lab and had a rare form of mange.  That was a very expensive dog, and she lived with us for a long while before going to live with my cousin.  A kitten came to our home when Aaron ran away while Ann and I were out of town and friends were watching him.  As Aaron rode his bike down a road on which he was forbidden to travel, he shredded his tires.  He found a place that let him call home, and my mother came out to get him.  While he waited, he found a stray almost pure white kitten and secreted it in the Cannondale pack on his bicycle.  Eventually the cat lived hidden in our house, eating dog food and using towels in Aaron’s closet for a litter box.  The strain of hiding and caring for his charge soon overwhelmed him.  We ended up with the second “Aaron” pet, which we named Quicksilver.

 

Aaron had grandparents from both sides of the family.  My mother was Just Grandma because she was not married and Ann’s parents were Grandma and Granddad.  Margaret Mead, among others, observed that parents and children are natural adversaries and grandparents and children are natural allies.  I’m very happy that Aaron heard many tales about my childhood exploits, tales that counterbalanced any self-righteousness I may have projected.

 

* * *

 

What is that strange creature?

 

A mating pair of Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis pratensis) lived part of the year at the back of our lot, which butted up against an old orange grove.  Cranes represented long life and prosperity in old China.  I have had long life and know the difference between wealth and prosperity.  Each year we looked forward to seeing them move across our back yard, at first alone and then with a pair of youngsters. They were tall birds with grayish feathers and heads that, capped in bright red, came up almost to my shoulder. They treated us warily, never getting too close.  Early weekend mornings I practiced Yang’s form of taijiquan in the back yard.  One Sunday as I slowly moved through the postures I turned to see them approaching.  The exercise takes about forty-five minutes to complete.  During that time they moved to within ten feet of me, stood still, and stared.  Then their wings spread, and they began some instinctual silent dance of greeting, circling around me.  They did not mistake me for another crane, but were drawn to reach out to a strange dancing creature waving hands like clouds.

 

* * *

 

 

Jnana and bhakti (wisdom or devotion?)

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”)

 

I am embarrassed when I see deeply emotional displays of religious devotion (that’s my problem, not the devotees’).  It’s the performance aspect that puts me off, but maybe the displays occur in solitude as well as assembly. Of these two paths, I’ve taken the one of jnana, finally arriving at devotion in silence where I’m unable to tell the difference.  I’m sure others have reached wisdom in silence by the other route.

 

* * *

 

Beside myself

 

Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny. — John Oliver Hobbes (The tales of John Oliver Hobbes)

 

Usually I’m pretty well controlled, but the most unimportant problems, like computer issues (I solved most of them by switching to Apple™), gravity, or memory lapses, and some more important ones can produce a sudden eruption of the deepest anger.  I’m sure these episodes make everyone around me uncomfortable and probably frighten Ann and frightened Aaron when he was young.  I think I’ve gotten better at spotting these eruptions on the horizon and short-circuiting them, but they happen more often than I’d like.  When I’m having a fit I feel like I’m beside myself looking on and waiting for a pressure gradient to equalize.  I am ashamed of my inability to avoid them altogether.  They are the tip of an iceberg of a whiny, self-pitying aspect, anger inaccurately aimed and the imagined affect of a distant father.  Equanimity is different than control.  Perhaps I live too close to an edge.

 

* * *

 

Misidentified as a law-giver

 

Before we moved to the Northwest, we visited regularly, staying with Cosette and Jonnie.  On one trip, I had long hair and a full beard, both graying.  We were coming down from a trail in Tryon Creek State Park.  As I strode along with my tall walking stick, I passed an older man and a young girl near the park entrance.  She pointed at me and excitedly cried, “Look, Grandpa.  It’s Moses!”

 

* * *

 

The finest compliment

 

I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. – Song of Solomon 6:3

 

Ann and I were at a wedding reception on the roof of a downtown Portland building.  We didn’t know most of the people, many much younger than we.  As we sat with a few guests near our age, Ann chatted about her career with a tablemate.  When Ann left to get a glass of wine, another woman at the table told me that she loved the way I looked at Ann as she spoke.  She thought my attention showed deep love and respect.  Someone had glimpsed the joy, and I was happy that the joy wasn’t hidden.  How else do you respond when your beloved is speaking?

 

* * *

 

Dramatis persona

 

The allure of slipping into a grand drama in which I am the dying hero is strong.  I am dying, but then we’re all dying.  My schedule may be a little accelerated, but I have no monopoly on the journey.  Am I the fair damsel, pure and chaste, tied to the tracks?  Really now, I can’t pull that off.  If this is the calm before the storm, I should find it more than an interruption in the narrative.  Patton felt useless except in battle.  I am a reluctant admirer of one aspect of Georgie – the warrior who, heedless of the bloodshed, should be kept in a glass case broken only for the “we’re fucked” emergency.  I detest the nostalgia, choking me like bile, and I don’t want to want the role.

 

* * *

 

Good!

 

That’s the word used by my physician reporting the results of my latest PSA test, the first after resuming androgen deprivation therapy.  Still, the therapy has not resulted in my PSA level dropping to an undetectable level as it did the first time around.  So, the therapy apparently is not as effective as it was originally.  This probably means that the tumor is doing what all these tumors do, gradually adapting to life without testosterone.  We’ve had to adapt to that together.  Eventually we’ll see a tipping point at which most of the tumor cells will flourish without testosterone.   How soon we arrive there, I can’t know.  Good news?  Yes, in that we’re not at the tipping point, but not the best news possible.  The initial plan is working, and I’ll take it.

 

* * *

 

A dream of death

 

Last night I dreamt I died alone.

Through all my talk of self-defeat

A fearful bomb ticks underneath.

— The Wombats [Matthew Edward Murphy, Daniel Joseph Haggis, Tord Øverland-Knudsen] (“Last night I Dreamt . . .”)

 

When I was very young I dreamed a terrifying dream in which I was the only player.  I was alone on a small, distant, cold planet.  I saw a clock that had stopped.  I knew I was dead.  Everything about life was bound to time, and for me time had stopped.  Other lives went on, but I was isolated, out of time’s wash.  I waked shaking in anxiety and breathless.

 

* * *

 

Aching love

 

I hope that over your life you continue to feel the aching, forlorn, ecstatic love you felt toward your beloved in the beginning.  If you are lucky enough to be loved by that person, no circumstance will undo you.  The quickening pulse and dilation of pupils travel to you from a fundament.  Friendship, care, lust, laughter and growth from conflict, pain, forgiveness, and fragility, accrete forever.  I long for the eternal only when in silence I see Ann.

 

* * *

 

Exquisite sensitivity to changes in the climate

 

I seem to have traded hot flashes for emotional lability on this go-round of therapy.  I am not usually prone to depression, and this doesn’t quite seem like depression.  My affect is just oscillating more wildly than usual.  This is a ride I can’t stop.

 

* * *

 

Ple-ize, stop!

 

. . . the short words are the best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.  — Winston Churchill (Speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award, November 2, 1949, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches)

 

Use use, do not utilize utilize.

 

* * *

 

A constellation

 

Teach the gifted children

The way of men and animals

Teach them about cities

The history of the mysteries

Their vices and their virtues

About branches that blow in the wind

On the wages of their sins

Teach them of forgiveness

Teach them about mercy

Teach them about music

And the cool and cleansing waters — Lou Reed (“Teach the Gifted Children”)

 

I spent one semester teaching in a public high school.  I wasn’t fired, but I wasn’t asked back either.  A colleague from university and I had been recruited to work in a school system with very few male English teachers.  We were to be the vanguard.  I ended up teaching “basic” students, code words for poor and black.  David taught advanced classes to wealthier or gifted white students.  Our classrooms were next door to each other.  During lunch hours, we opened both our rooms up, rearranged the furniture and had a lunch period tea and literary society where a lot of reading and talking went on.  Occasionally, we would switch classes, and I would work with the advanced kids while he worked with my crowd.  We didn’t advertise and we never heard from administration.

 

One sophomore girl in my class always slept.  I could see that she tried to stay awake, but just couldn’t.  I asked her friends what was going on.  She was pregnant, lived in a dangerous place where she could never get a night’s sleep on the couch she used for a bed.  She had little to eat.  I saw the sweep of her life and decided that if she could get an hour sleep in my class, she should be left in peace.   At the end of one period, I tried as usual to gently wake her, but she wouldn’t rouse.  She was breathing and had a regular pulse, so I called the office on the intercom.  One of the assistant principals came with a wheelchair and told me that an ambulance was on the way.  He rolled the chair beside her desk and just looked at her.  I asked if he needed help getting her into the chair, and he told me that he wasn’t going to touch her.  I scooped her out from her desk and sat her in the chair.  He wheeled her out of the room.  I never saw her again.

 

At the end of the semester and before summer break, David and I turned in our grades.  Mine looked just about like his, because I wasn’t aware of the social dimension of grading.  Summoned to the principal’s office, I had to defend my grades to the former football coach.  He reminded me that I taught “basic” students, and that “basic” students didn’t get these grades.  He suggested that I needed to adjust my grades a bit lower.  I told him if he wanted lower grades, he would have to lower them.  Maybe that’s why I wasn’t asked back.

 

Florida Statutes, Title XXXVI, Chapter 623.02, The Private School Corporation Law of 1959; the year of enactment betrays its purpose.  After Brown v Board of Education was decided, almost all southern states tried to enable easy flight from public schools for white families.  In 1972, while training as a teacher, I read A. S. Neill’s biography, Neill, Neill, Orange Peel.  As I began working in a public secondary school, like Jonathan Holt and a number of other theorists, I was stunned at the lack of humanity toward and the servitude of students where I worked.  The Summerhill experiment had been going on since 1960, and in Neill’s book, Freedom not License, he spoke to a balance I could hope for in the education of children.  About the same time, I read Krishnamurti’s text, Education and the Significance of Life, and the pieces fell into, what seemed at the time, order.

 

I wasn’t the only disaffected member of the faculty and the sixties were still visible in the rearview mirror.  My colleagues and I had been talking since the middle of the previous semester.  We had an idea and certified teachers in math, social studies, English, and science who were already used to penury.  All we needed was a place and a mechanism.  We discovered the Private School Corporation Law of 1959 and the St. Petersburg Junior Chamber of Commerce.  The law allowed us to incorporate a school by having twenty-five registered voters sign the incorporation petition, which could be signed by any circuit court judge.  The Jaycees were looking for a community project to enter in their national contest.  More to the point, they had a facility at the southeast corner of the city across the street from a park bordering on Tampa Bay.

 

We filed for 501 c (3) status after advertising our non-discrimination policy in the St. Petersburg Times.  The application was the size of a small telephone book, and we were stunned when the IRS approved the application the first time we submitted.  That was all the Jaycees needed, and we had our building.  We placed a small ad in the Times, barely describing the school and asking interested parents to attend at the Jaycee building.   Forty-five parents or couples, some with the potential students, showed up to hear the pitch.  We were gob-smacked when we had commitments and tuition checks from parents of thirty students by the end of the evening.

 

During the intermission between recruitment and the start of the school year, we worked with a group dynamics expert who studied at the National Training Laboratories.  We determined to create a compact for members of our school.  Once everyone was in agreement, the compact was signed and we all, faculty included, stepped forward into equality in all decisions about the school, except those of law, health, and safety.  These exceptions were clearly described in the compact.  The compact also described the expectation of behavior toward one another.  We were surprised as the enterprise progressed at how conservative the students were regarding fiscal matters and discipline.

 

Our students were three sorts of refugees: from disciplinary processes at public schools; from some social alienation at public and private schools; and, from a stifling academic situation at public school.  Part of our process was to work out how kids and adults of varying experience could understand each other and work together to create a learning community that nurtured us all.  Over the years, students developed political skills and, as Weingartner described, crap detecting skills.

 

Rather than duplicating community facilities on the campus, we used libraries and sports facilities in the community.  Guest faculty, who heard in one way or another about the experiment, appeared.  Once when Joanne was conducting a history seminar in the gazebo at the end of the dock in the park across from our building, she noticed an elderly woman walk from the condos across the way to hover at the periphery of the group.  Eventually, the woman stopped Joanne as the group concluded one day and asked what was going on.  The woman came to the building during a few days.  She was a retired professor of South American Studies with three doctorates, who had last taught in Brazil.  She eventually planned a class on South American culture and history for four of the students who drew up the curriculum.  This is how many courses developed.  Some courses were taught by faculty, others by consultants or guests, and many by students.  I worked with one student, who eventually attended Evergreen State College, on Eliot’s poetry.  Before the experiment ended, largely due to a decreasing tolerance of the faculty for penury, we discovered that our academically gifted students often received favorable consideration at elite schools.

 

One of the community organizers invited by a group of students spoke about attitudes toward gay people, saying that sexuality is one piece of a person’s character, not the whole of it.  I was never out to my colleagues or the students; that revelation didn’t seem safe at the time, as you could lose your teaching certificate under a moral turpitude clause in the statute.  The Jaycees won their national contest.

 

* * *

 

Mickey and Roger, and, oh yeah, Yogi

 

Before I moved to Florida, I once saw Mantle, Maris, and Berra at the old Yankee Stadium.  In the last MLB game I saw, Suzuki Ichiro was in right field.  One of the great joys of my life has been to see excellence born of talent, craft, and persistence in performance on the diamond.

 

* * *

 

What Jung and The Tibetan Book of the Dead taught me

 

I am every character in my dreams.

 

* * *

 

Impotence

 

After being shot in the neck and suffering at least partial severing of his spinal cord, a paralyzed John Wilkes Booth asked one of his captors to raise his hands before his face so that he could see them.  His last words were “Useless, useless.”  Sometimes I look downward and think the same thing.  But then, J. W. couldn’t pee through his thumbs.

 

* * *

 

Happo no kuzushi

 

The mind, if slackened even a little, will cause defeat the same as fearing the opponent will make you unable to use full strength. If you are in a hurry to win the match, you will not grasp the truth of the moment. Truth is a free factor, not planned but found when the mind is in its natural state. It can be said that everybody is always with truth but your sincerity will enable you to get it without labor. — Mifune Kyuzo, Judan (“Essential Principles of Judo”)

 

I saw film of Mifune Kyuzo, in his seventies, demonstrating nage waza (throwing techniques).  He held his opponent’s judogi with thumb and forefinger.  One American woman who practiced with him said that when she tried to throw him, he was never there.  When I was learning tenjinshinyōryū (school of the willow heart) jujutsu and later judo, we practiced kuzushi always.  Defeating the opponent is easy if you achieve his imbalance.  Most people try to throw before they have imbalanced the opponent.  The old man once told me, “It’s like spilling water.  First, the bucket tips, then the water flows out.” He taught me to move like that in Tai Chi, and that’s how to manage physical conflict.  Otherwise, the contest is just a shoving match.  When your opponent pulls on an arm or a shoulder, he should also pull on your pelvis.  He may have all of you, but not part of you.  You should always lead the assailant’s force to emptiness.

 

* * *

 

Looking forward

Love is most nearly itself

 

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

 

Here or there does not matter

 

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

 

For a further union, a deeper communion

 

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

 

Of the petrel and the porpoise.

In my end is my beginning. — T. S. Eliot (“East Coker”)

 

The reminiscence reeks of elegy.  I don’t spend most of my time considering the past or contemplating death, but I admit to using more energy than usual waiting for the other shoe to fall.  I am yet consumed with making a life with Ann, each new day a new challenge.  How will we manage the problems and the joy?  I have so many nuts left to crack, and I wish for the energy to keep squeezing them, adjusting their positions in the grip of the cracker.  Giving up the struggle would be a shame.

 

* * *

 

Achievement (the practice is all I have)

 

When Baso was practicing zazen (seated meditation), Nangaku, who was passing by, asked him, "What are you doing?"

"I am practicing zazen," Baso answered.

"Why do you practice zazen?" Nangaku then asked.

"I want to attain Buddhahood."

Nangaku did not say anything, but he picked up a tile and started to polish it. Now Baso started wondering what Nangaku was doing and asked him, "What are you doing?"

"I am polishing a tile into a mirror," Nangaku answered.

Baso asked, “How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?”

Nangaku observed, “And, how can you make a Buddha with zazen?  When a cart does not go, which do you whip, the cart or the ox?” — Old Zen story

 

When I was learning taijiquan, I asked the old man why there were no colored belts or rankings among the students.   I was used to jujutsu and karate.  He asked me what the need would be.  I said that they would be goals and proofs of achievement.  He said, “The practice is all we have.  A fancy oxcart does no good without a decent ox.”  Then he told me an old Zen story.  Afterward he said, “But, be careful that the practice doesn’t kill you.”  He was a bit of a charlatan.

 

* * *

 

Butcher Block

 

And the night comes on

It’s very calm

I want to cross over, I want to go home

But she says Go back, go back to the World. — Leonard Cohen (“Night Comes On”)

 

I thought KP was punishment.  When I finally was, for a very short time, a soldier, I learned that in Basic Training recruits occasionally had to pull that duty.  So, at 0430 I was in the Training Brigade kitchens.  No potato peeling for me, they had machines that did that.  I was assigned to clean the large butcher-block table on which the meat had been prepared.  The table was about fifteen feet long and six feet wide.  I washed the table first and then used holystones to wear the top layer.  The job took almost three hours.

 

For the first hour, I thought randomly of how I came to be there, Ann, and the men in my platoon.  I was a squad leader, probably because the Army somehow equated a degree and leadership skill.  In 1971, the Viet Nam conflict, a euphemism for as bloody war as ever there was, was in full swing.  The draft was on and there were few deferments for graduate school.  The draft was administered by a lottery in which birthdays were assigned randomly an order for call-up, producing three hundred sixty-five slots.  The lower the number assigned to your birthday, the quicker you went.  My birthday was in the twenties, so I was going.  I thought about Canada, but that would have killed my mother.  I’m not certain that moral objection to the prosecution of this war was the main reason I chose this route, but I do not believe the reason was fear.  I had learned with the old man that I could be afraid and still act.  The only other way was to find a Reserve or National Guard unit.  I don’t remember how I found my way to the 320th Military Police Company in the 81st ARCOM, but I was sworn in just two days before I was to report to Jacksonville for my induction physical.  I found my way to the fire service through friends I made in that unit.

 

My training company was roughly half reservists and half regular army guys, most of whom were young and black.  Through the whole two months of training, the reservists knew that the others would be on the way to Southeast Asia while we would be going home.  The experience was a little like seeing dead men walking.  I knew quite a few guys who fought there and some who died there.  Of the ones who came back, many were changed for the worse and a few came back mostly unscathed.  I was revolted by the treatment that many of the returning received from anti-war activists who I believe had no empathy.

 

After the first hour, I began to pay close attention to the table and the work.  The sounds in the mess hall kitchen, the vibrations as I stoned the surface with its grain, the smells, and the sights became a world from which I required no distraction.  Then, I finished.  The practice is all we have.

 

* * *

 

The attack

 

The right use of the sword is that it should subdue the barbarians while lying gleaming in its scabbard. If it leaves its sheath it cannot be said to be used rightly.  — Tokugawa Ieyasu

 

The first semester I was in Athens, I lived in a duplex near the Navy Quartermaster School, not far from the campus.  I was already entangled with Ann, and her parents had invited me to join them on their annual vacation in the Smokies.  They were driving up after the semester ended, and I would follow them in my car.  I can’t even remember if Ann rode with me.  I had not taken much with me: a small TV on which I had watched Aldrin and Lovell mark up the moon a month earlier, clothes, books, a fan.  I had no Chinese blade with me, but had carried an old World War II vintage and undistinguished katana (long sword).  In the evenings I would don my gi and hakama and practice kata and work with the blade in the back yard.  None of my neighbors ever spoke to me.

 

The day Ann was to arrive, early in the morning, I had gathered my meager trove in a small collection in the living room and then decided to nap briefly in the one bedroom.  I was in my underwear, and the only clothing I had in the bedroom was what I would wear on the journey and my gi top.  The sword was also with me.  I had fallen into a light sleep when I heard the front door handle jiggle and the door open.  I regrettably concluded that someone had seen my stuff on the living room floor and believing no one home, had broken in to steal all that I had.  I quietly dismounted the bed, threw the gi top on and unsheathed the sword.  Moving quietly toward the bedroom door, I heard voices in the living area.  I leapt into the hall and, shouting a loud kiai, I ran to the living room, the sword in the chudan position, at the ready in front of me.

 

The real estate agent and the elderly couple in the living room saw a lunatic in jockey shorts and a gi running toward them with a giant sword.  The panic and fear on their faces made me ashamed.  As the old couple quickly exited, I put the sword behind me and asked her what they were doing.  The Realtor said she was showing the place.  I explained that I was still using it.  She looked at the paperwork and found that mistakenly she had picked up a list of the next day’s vacancies.  She was apologetic; I was apologetic.  I wonder whether or not the old couple rented the place.

 

* * *

 

Jizō in the wind

 

So graciously takes he pity on the infants.

To those who cannot walk he stretches forth his strong shakujô,

And he pets the little ones, caresses them, takes them to his loving bosom.

So graciously he takes pity on the infants.

Namu Amida Butsu! — Lafcadio Hearn (translation of “The Legend of the Humming of the Sai-no-Kawara”)

 

In Japan, Ojizō-sama is believed to be the protector of firefighters.  He is mainly regarded as the protector of children, especially those who die before their parents.  He also protects souls in the underworld.  The Buddhist notion of hell and purgatory is quite different than the Christian.  He is believed to be one of the eight great bodhisattvas (bosatsu) of the Mahayana tradition.  These are enlightened men who deny themselves the experience of nirvana until all sentient beings are enlightened.

 

I have cared for many dying children in this life, some of whom died in my care.  Some died of disease while their parents did the best that could be done, but others died of abuse or neglect.  Sealing your mouth over the face of a dying child and breathing for him is like prayer, and I have done so in circumstances where respiratory care equipment was unavailable.  Sometimes, good cannot wait to be done.  I urge you to be always mindful of your responsibility to all children.

 

We have a sculpture of Jizō on the mantle.  This figure is a modern interpretation by the Oregon sculptor Sugiyama Wataru.  We purchased the piece, not because of any religious significance but because of its form.  Jizō looks upward, his arms in the robe curving upwards as well with palms, on either side of his head, facing each other as my hands are during much of my taiji practice.

 

When children die before parents, the mother buys a small woodcut of Jizō and inscribes the child’s name on a hundred small papers with an image from the woodcut.  Usually on the forty-ninth day following the burial, the mother drops the folded papers one by one into running water while chanting with each release the phrase:

Namu Jizō Dai Bosatsu.

 

* * *

 

Change

 

Death is part of the life process; everyone goes through it.  It is very reassuring in itself. — Daniel Servan-Schreiber

 

I’ve had several colleagues who died of different cancers, from blood to brain.  I was able to visit one very shortly before he died.  A couple died with frightening velocity, and sadly they were much younger than I.  I am thankful that what grows in me has a brake and that the brake has been applied.  Every day I spend with Ann doing the usual things is a gift.  Eventually the brake will fail, but its use has allowed me to consider my life and my death.  I’ve also been able to consider and talk with Ann about what not to do to in futile attempts to postpone the inevitable.  If my path is as I suspect it will be, I’ll have time to observe the process for a while before the observer and the observed vanish.  I’m like the frog in the pot of slowly heating water, except that I know where I am and the burner can’t be turned off.

 

 

Justice

 

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.  And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146)

 

I want the final act that levels all scores and ends all games.  I want justice to fall like rain.  For every problem, I need an act that brings its resolution and end.  Unfortunately, justice is but another imperfect conception, like religion, that I invent to soothe deceptively my soul, an excuse for my attention to fail.  From silence, I see that every act I may devise as just and final sends ripples that produce the future.  Modern God is devised as an instrument of the end.  I am wary of soldiers in any god’s army, because they act for the general they promoted and they never question orders.  I am incapable of seeing many of the distant consequences of just acts.  If I cannot be trusted to bring justice, who can?  My justice would rain down like acid.  But, I cannot just retire from the field.  Chaos theory?  No, just the way things work.  The old man was always telling me to do the best I could, that he would trust to the uncertain future produced by the acts of people who at least looked as far out as they could and felt responsible.  Even perfect justice may unsettle the next moment.  The practice is all we have.

 

* * *

 

How did a guy with your proclivities get hired by a fire department in the seventies?

 

The story of how I was hired at my first fire department begins at Ft. Gordon, Georgia.  The reason I applied for a job in the fire service began at my Reserve unit, the 320th MP Company.  Ann was pregnant with our son, and I, like any good sixties and seventies dad to be, wanted a job that allowed me to be at home to help out with the child rearing adventure.  The firefighters in my unit told me about the twenty-four hours on, forty-eight hours off schedule and suggested that I apply.  To get the job I was interviewed, background checked, and polygraphed.  One of the questions on the polygraph asked whether I had ever had sexual contact with men.  Others asked about easy topics like theft from employers and drug use.  Those I could answer truthfully.  The one about sex with men was a little touchier.

 

When I was at Military Police School at Ft. Gordon in Augusta, I spent a couple of weeks at the polygraph training program as a test subject.  My job was to try to fool men in training to be polygraphers.  I talked at length with the instructors about the process.  Polygraphs are nothing more than records from sensors that record physiologic data, respiratory rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, etc.  The instructors in the program tried to help me fool the trainees, telling me that the only way the device could be beaten was if the subject believed an untruthful answer to be truthful.  One instructor opined that psychopaths and sociopaths were the most difficult to graph.

 

The process of being polygraphed begins with a brief introduction by the operator in which the subject is told about the process, and then told that in order to reduce surprises all the questions to be asked with the machine on would be asked ahead of time.  In reality, this has little to do with fairness and is about sensitizing the subject to the questions so that when they are asked a second time they will produce a heightened physiologic response.  The only answers permitted when the machine is running are yes or no.  Here, I learned the strategy for defeating the polygraph.

 

When I appeared for my pre-employment polygraph, I casually asked the operator where he had been trained.  He looked at me with a little hesitation and said, “At Augusta, Ft. Gordon.”  Why, he asked, was I interested?  I told him that I had been there recently and was a test subject for trainees for a couple of weeks.  He muttered, “Oh, great.”  Then he began the first interview.  I answered all the questions save one truthfully, including the pens and paper clips I had taken when I was teaching school.  I answered, “No,” to the long list of drug use questions.  When he asked about sexual contact with men, my plan unfolded.  I concocted a story that would upset the operator and, were it true, should upset me.  I told him that when I was ten a man had sat next to me in a movie theater and had fondled me, concluding by asking, “Is that what you mean?”  He said he was sorry that had happened and he was glad I had mentioned it.

 

During the second interview, with the machine running, the questions were altered only to include details I had revealed in the first interview.  “Other than the office supplies you mentioned earlier, have you ever stolen anything from an employer?”  “Other than the incident in the movie theater you mentioned earlier, have you ever had sexual contact with another man?”

 

At the end of the interview we talked a bit about the training center in Augusta.  He told me that I was the only person he had graphed who was truthful when answering, “No,” to the drug use questions.  I was hired, probably because he attributed any physiologic response to the sex question as resulting from a normal reaction to a traumatic experience.  They never asked if I had sex with a goat or anything.  I could have answered that one truthfully without a fiction.  Why they wondered about boys never made sense to me.  And, I must say that I was never tempted to have a sexual interlude with any of my fellow firefighters, even the ones I found attractive.  That would have been impolite and presumptuous, disturbing familial relationships.  The perception that bisexual men are promiscuous by definition is, I believe, still current.  I lost no sleep over my use of the ruse.

 

 

* * *

 

A battle?

 

If I die from the effects of the cancer, death will not be the end of a great battle.  Like most of life, death will come as the end of a complex biochemical negotiation, almost an exercise in project management over a span of years.  The final milestone of the project, seen by observers, will be death.  The building of the project’s many parts, involving internal and external resources, love, anger, self, and other is an evanescent wave.

 

* * *

 

Meeting Ann

 

The details seem lost in a mist of almost prehistory.  Ann was working on a high school play as the property mistress.  I was taking theater courses at university and came back to help design a particularly complex lighting plan.  We talked a bit now and then.  I was immediately smitten; if I have a type, she’s it — blonde, blue eyes, curious, and unafraid to talk about important things.  During one of our talks I mentioned that I taught jujutsu to a small group of students.  She said that she would ask her parents and let me know.  They absolutely opposed the possibility.  When she called to let me know that she wouldn’t be training with me, I was a little pleased, because there are ethical constraints on relationships between students and teachers.  Somehow we ended the call by talking about an upcoming football game, and I suggested that she take me, as I knew little about football.  She agreed.

 

* * *

 

Tsuki no usagi

 

In old China they thought a rabbit lived on the moon.  The rabbit constantly crushed herbs for the immortals.  In Japan the rabbit crushes rice for moshi (rice cakes).   The moon’s rabbit provides long life.  Usagi sits on our TV stand; every life, even the short, is long.

 

* * *

 

What’s in a name?

 

Two of the old men, one Chinese and one Japanese, gave me names.  Receiving a name is to acknowledge a gift of respect.  The old men saw something essential before bestowing the gift.  The Chinese name was Kan Li Cha, meaning to discover by experience and perseverance.  The Japanese name was Mizu-no-te, meaning water’s hand.  The experience of being named was one of being born again, an orphan becoming family.  The senior students began to act like bothers.  When addressed, I was always Richard because the given names are carried in the heart.

 

* * *

 

Aren’t you special?!

 

The day after I arrived at my basic training company, I asked to see the First Sergeant who was the administrative noncommissioned officer for the company.  He was standing in his office.  I had appropriately removed my cover; no hats indoors unless you were under arms.  He barely looked up and said, “Trainee?”  I was eating vegetarian then, a good little Buddhist.  I explained that the recruiter had told me that the Army would accommodate my dietary needs and that I was wondering how to make the request.  The question stopped him in his tracks.

 

He looked at me and said, “Konrad, is it?  I’d be happy to go over to the mess hall and tell them that you require a special diet.  Would you like me to do that, to tell them that you’re special?”

 

This was my first lesson in not being special in the Army.  Don’t raise your hand or someone will surely call on you.  “No, First Sergeant,” I said.  “That won’t be necessary.”

 

“Good!” he said.  “Now don’t you have somewhere to be?”

 

“Yes, First Sergeant.”  But I wondered if I did.

 

* * *

 

Nostalgia for what didn’t happen

 

Here’s a precipice.  I’m overcome by dislocation.  If my attention fails here, I am lost.  There, I’ve turned back.  The old man and I talked occasionally about thinking you should have everything you want.  “Shhhhhhhh!” he would say when I tried to think my way back from a precipice.  The emotion I can summon for experiences not experienced teaches me about the lure of self-deception or, more safely, the fictive.

 

* * *

 

Harmless old man

 

I have known her for a couple of years, and we see each other once a week when I drop off or pick up dry cleaning and laundry.  Today, when she asked, as she usually does, about my week, I thought a moment and told her that any week you survive is a good week.  She said, “Oh, too much partying?”  I said that I was too old to party much.  She said, “I can see you as a party animal.”  I realized that she was flirting in the way young women do with safe and harmless old men.  Ann and I laughed a while about this, because Ann has always told me that throughout our relationship I have been oblivious to women flirting with me.

 

* * *

 

Love

 

This is more like tiptoeing through a life by means of eruptions than explicating one.  Whether about mother’s love, lovers’ loves, companions’ loves, or sex and love, the story of a considered death is about leaving love, which is to say leaving learning about one’s self.  Death is the end of surprise.  I cannot untangle the conflicts between neurobiologists and psychoanalysts.  I suppose that my parents’ divorce led to the adversary for my mother’s affection retiring from the field too early.  Sons from mothers and daughters from fathers individuate in struggle when competitors remain on the field.  An asymmetrical struggle is more complicated.

 

I became aware gradually of my mother’s struggle to please a dismissive father, a father who died without telling her he valued her as much as he did her brothers.  Ann’s understanding of her father’s place in her mother’s family became clear, and her picture of our relationship, absorbed at dinners, vacations, and bridge games, had to be overthrown at a cost.  We tried to help each other become separate conceptions of the universe without seriously wounding each other while struggling to get there ourselves.  I can’t say if Ann had a similar experience, but the change from recipient of care to giver of care as my mother’s infirmity took hold seemed the natural shedding of armor donned for a contest with an absent father.  Fortunately, my complication helped us to figure out how to disentangle ourselves.  Nothing forces you to find your own way more than seeing disconnection between you and the normal.  For us, new definitions of monogamy, love, and family were the practice.

 

The fact that I loved Ann from the moment I met her probably speaks to the biochemical underpinning of love.  The surprising ease of not acting on every urge of my cerebro-genital system shows that more than the biochemical underpins our love.  Yet, we had to accommodate the biochemical.  We are proud of our unconventional relationship.  We found that these issues couldn’t be decided and forgotten, that they had to be decided again and again with the risk that we might injure each other.  This is what conceptions of the universe do in relation to each other.  I do not believe that this process can succeed if people do not like and respect each other or if they do not trust each other.  Wondrously, this practice is all I have, and I am sorry that it will end.

 

Feeling loved, by a parent but most by Ann, is a unique gift, and it’s just plain fun, smile when you look at her fun.

 

* * *

 

Unguarded

 

When one gets what one deserves, it’s a wonderful thing. — Samuel Menashe (On receiving the Poetry Foundation Neglected Masters Award and Prize)

 

When I left the fire service, I went back to work at a community college and with a couple of excellent colleagues led the instruction and training of paramedic students.   We had male and female students, and a lot of the young men were there on their fire departments’ nickels.  I was trained in airway management by top-drawer anesthesiologists, and I was able be in the operating theater to observe and practice frequently.  I became obsessive about airway management to the extent that I had a large sign in the main laboratory stating, “It’s the airway, stupid!”  I also had genuine skill in managing difficult airway problems, especially in children.  This is a story of two gifts I received from one of the best classes I led.  One was a trophy they hand-made with an endotracheal tube at its top.  The whole thing was painted silver with a plaque inscribed to “an airway Jedi Master,” a reference to my insistence that by the time we were through, they would each be an airway Jedi.  The students were receptive because their mentors at various fire departments told them about how I worked.

 

The story of the second gift requires a bit of background.  The fire service was then generally homophobic, and we were just achieving standards for personal protective equipment to protect against bloodborne pathogens.  Getting up close and personal with someone’s airway is an invitation to exposure.  By homophobic, I mean flat out fear, although bigotry was also there.  I repeatedly told these kids in very certain terms that if they weren’t willing to treat every patient in their care with the same respect and the same standards, then they needed to find other work.  We talked consistently about stereotypes and HIV/AIDS, and I reminded them that we all were notoriously poor judges of other people’s sexuality.  I hammered at them about privacy and confidentiality, telling them that if I ever found that any of them had discussed cases at the fire station that I would make it my life’s work to deprive him or her of certification.

 

I liked working on a college campus.  I attended a number of Pride events and rallies, and worked to raise money for research.  So, I guess I wasn’t hiding.  Now, my son, at that time quite young, used to visit the class to help teach pediatric assessment and IV therapy, and students knew I was married because I talked about Ann now and then.  Her hand surgeon had taken some very graphic pictures of her left hand and arm during initial procedures following the car crash that I used in discussions of wound management.  At the end of the class, the second gift I received was a pen-holder designed by Jac Zagoory for my desk.  The pen-holder is called Atlas and is a seated nude male figure with legs crossed and arms straining rearward to support the pen.  This gift was presented by the biggest jock firefighter in the group.  He was the one who had the most difficulty getting comfortable checking femoral pulses on the other guys.  He looked me straight in the eyes and smiled a generous smile when he handed it to me. When Ann saw the gift, she said that they were more perceptive than I gave them credit for being.  But, maybe that’s just how they saw an airway Jedi Master.

 

* * *

 

Always trying to find the way

 

Our normal method of walking is precarious; we throw ourselves forward into space with the absolute conviction that we will land on the leg in front of us.  A whole shtick in physical comedy was born of that conviction thwarted by a banana peel.  In taijiquan, we move without that conviction, only shifting weight to an unweighted foot when we find the ground with it and feel somewhat safe.  That’s my life, few certainties and limited supposition.  The old man showed me how to pay attention and find my way, but I discovered the paucity of guarantees that creates the nature of living, taking one step at a time.  I know so very little and will always be discovering the next step.

 

* * *

 

Rule number 7

 

At a call, when dismounting the fire apparatus, never walk to the work area without your hands full of tools or hose.   Even if you carry tools you will not yourself use.

 

* * *

 

Cyril Richard Rescorla (1939-2001)

 

I mean, “Damn!”  I think about him most days.  But, the transformation of the event, smoothing all the sharp edges and confusion and usurping private grief, has created public sentiment that has been fodder for political hucksters, profiteers, and the fearful.  We crave safety instead of being quietly alert.

 

* * *

 

Limitations of vision

 

If I should die tonight,

May I first just say I’m sorry

For I never felt like anybody.

I am a man of many hats although I

Never mastered anything. — Panic! at the Disco and Fun. [Brendon Urie, Spencer Smith, Nate Ruess, Jack Antonoff, and Andrew Dost] (“C’mon”)

 

One day in the summer of my thirteenth year I am sitting alone on a seawall on the north end of Clearwater Beach.  This one is like most hot days in Clearwater when the heating air convects clouds until upper level winds shear them off into anvil shapes.  As the clouds approach, the air suddenly cools as the lightning tastes the water.  The effect is most striking when the storms rush in from the Gulf.  As the darkness and coolness approach, I cannot see the horizon, and when I am quiet, looking as deeply as I can into the heart of it, the door opens and I fly from my perch into a maelstrom.  The fire-tongues around me are inconsequential, and I feel that every part of me will be blasted and washed away.  I am calm and happy.

 

* * *

 

Peacefully in his sleep

 

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

. . . .

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. — Wallace Stevens (“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”)

 

Other than its opacity to the dying and the people around him, nothing about death is peaceful.  Only people gripped by inattention see it that way, because they insist on believing a fiction, that human consciousness is the emperor of living.  If they were quiet, they would sense the multitudes they are.  We have been so fearful of that realization that most religions equate it with possession.  The fractious movement to increasing entropy shows us the naked emperor and, with all respect to Lazarians, is unlikely to run in the opposite direction.  Except on the body farms, we put the evidence away so quickly or burn it so that we won’t have to deal with the oozing molecular violence of the seemingly peaceful death of the cohort.

 

* * *

 

Tiptoe through the  . . .

 

I have picked my way, usually discretely, through hundreds of broken lives, some barely bruised and cracked and others gaping open and irreparable.  What sort of person intrudes, even with angelic intentions, and then is off to the next disaster?  How and why did I forget most of the devastation, children without parents, parents without children, spouses without spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends without boyfriends or girlfriends?  Was I running away from an approaching wave of grief before my ankles were wet?  Perhaps the real intrusion would have been to be too involved in private loss.  Yet, how much more intimate can a relationship be?  What did the dying want me to say when they asked if they would die?  Surely more than my hope and my skill.  I am fortunate that experiences did not seize me by the heart and produce a religious conversion.  Still, I can summon them now, one at a time so they don’t overwhelm me, and grieve.

 

* * *

 

Receiving guidance subtly

 

To a man, the old men understood that even absent fathers couldn’t be replaced.   But, I addressed the old Chinese men by a title (sifu) that connotes teacher and father.  They were teachers (sensei or sifu) who were too serious about life and its joy to demand anything less than the same seriousness from their descendants. Seriousness for them was a quality of attention not of pretension, and they never confused attention with perfection.  Students paying a servant for a service came and went, but descendants abided.  I learned from many great technicians who could not carry the shoes of the old men.  The fortunate transparent reaction of the old men to a kid that opened an incomplete heart to them helped save me.  They live in my bones, and I bow deeply to them every day.  I think that old men are out there still, but today, how would a ten or eleven-year-old find them?  The same way I did, by knocking on many doors.

 

* * *

 

Human Being

 

A few times on my off-days, I worked as a medic in a hospital-run urgent care clinic.  One of the Docs had a nametag that gave his name and, where M.D. would normally be, he had “Human Being.”   Joe, I hope your surgery and ophthalmology residencies didn’t relieve you of your quirky humanity.

 

* * *

 

Refuge

 

I was born in Pennsylvania, and before I moved to Florida at age five, the wrestling coach at Lehigh University, a private coed school in Bethlehem, the town of my birth (all right, let’s not go there!), lived directly behind us. Gerry had a daughter my age named Jerilou.  Jerilou and I were pretty much best buds.  When I got pissed at obeying the rules in my house, I would pack a few clothes in a little paper bag and cross the backyards to Gerry’s place.  The first time I used the strategy, I threatened my parents with the possibility.  They asked where I would go.  I said that I’d go to live with Jerilou.  They called the bluff and said that they were sorry to see me go but if I had to, to go ahead.  Then they called to let Gerry know I was on the way.  Thereafter, on more than a few occasions, Gerry would call my parents and tell them, “Richard’s run away; he’s over here.  I’ll let you know when he’s on his way home.”  After a day or two, I would remember that Gerry’s household had the same rules that my parents’ did and I’d head home.  Jerilou did the same.  When you’re so young, even a little control seems immense, and learning to try to change your situation is a worthwhile lesson.

 

* * *

 

The model

 

When working, the model in our culture is one in which someone cares for you when you are at your weakest.  Not a moment of temptation to take advantage flickers.  The model does not often work.  To be loved is the heartiest nourishment of all, especially to be loved not in spite of but because of your unconformity.  I have received that kind of love from a number of people, but most from Ann.  I have returned the gift without any labor required.  So, love and trust love; care and be willing to be cared for.  Teach and be taught.  I wonder at how lucky I have been.

 

* * *

 

Twain’s comet and deep time

 

In 1986, Ann, Aaron, and I decamped to Barbados because we read that Halley’s comet would be brighter closer to the equator.  For a few nights we saw with unaided eyes a little smudge of light in the eastern sky before dawn.  Field glasses showed the herald a little better.  Once, before I left home to make a new one with Ann, meteorologists were testing aerosol dispersal patterns by sending rockets with exploding canisters of dye into the upper atmosphere.  The announcement, buried somewhere in the Times, had escaped me.  I looked into the early night sky to see a large spreading cloud of iridescence.  The shimmering cloud, falling earthward, was like a DeMille special effect.  I couldn’t find a ready rational explanation, and for a moment, I felt the visceral fear that Halley’s comet once produced before science explained the fear into nothing.

 

* * *

 

Type A

 

The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter: ‘Paralysis.’—Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume IV: The Hinge of Fate (1951), Appendix C

 

When I trained with Jeff Mitchell, he said that everyone thinks that competent emergency workers have Type A personalities.  Mitchell didn’t agree, but said that they shared the skill of focusing in high demand situations.  For me, focus leads to quietude in which any action is possible.  This state is free of argument, but has a fundament of attention.  Recognition primed decision making is possible in this state, but action isn’t about finding perfection in response.  Action from this state is about successively responding, narrowing the choices until the solution is possible.  Constant entanglement with hindsight discourages action; honest evaluation of action does not.  The old man told me not to get distracted by fear of loss.

 

* * *

 

Leaves falling

 

So, here I am, ear to the ground, trying to detect the oncoming negotiation.  Meanwhile, emails tell me of so many colleagues winking out.  This situation is unremarkable, and when I die, I hope people will realize, from a certain viewpoint, how unremarkable the event is.  The old man would shrug.

 

* * *

 

Memorable kisses

 

First:  Sandi and John.

Best all-time:  Ann.

 

* * *

 

Incoming

 

Ann and I used to drive way out in the country to uninhabited land for al fresco trysts.  A couple of times, when we came up for air, bullets were whirring overhead, ripping through the tree canopy.  We heard no reports, so they were probably rifle shots from a great distance.  Carrying on, given the distraction, was impossible, which says a lot about the priority of self-preservation against procreation.

 

* * *

 

Someone always wants you dead

 

A number of people want me dead.  I think the number has decreased over my lifetime, but still, quite a few people are in that company.  They don’t just want to make my life miserable; they would really prefer I suffer a painful death.  I don’t have enough economic value as a possession to warrant keeping me in servitude.   Death is the solution because I may be a vector.  Many of them wouldn’t publicly condemn me to death or directly participate in the killing because of vestigial moral ambiguity about who deserves that ultimate penalty, but, given the right circumstances, they would look the other way or consign me to a re-education camp or to electroshock therapy.  Since the invention of writing, a record of those who should be killed has been available, and the list is impressive.  Most of those bound with me for the place where blood spills have run afoul of religious prohibitions or judgments.  You might be listed at any moment.  I’m on a list because of how I conduct my love life (it’s a very long list, and most major monotheistic traditions seem in agreement that I should be on it).  The people who want me dead don’t yet have the legal means to allow them to act or have someone act for them, but that could change, and then there are some who would act anyway.  Young people don’t seem as anxious to kill me, but they don’t seem interested in keeping me alive by voting either.

 

As in most of life, my situation is a little off center.   I am a man married to a woman.  I must have had sex with her at least once, because we conceived and raised a child.  Under oath, she would have to admit that we had a lot of sex over a forty-three year relationship.  We went to PTA meetings.  But, there’s also the complication; I’ve had a fair amount of sex with other men.  I want to ask the moral jurists whether the acts cancel each other one for one.  Or, does one act with a man put me on the list?  If I lusted after or loved another man, would that be enough to get me listed even if I had never followed through?  Did I pollute any true believers I pulled out of burning buildings?  Since we took the “’til death do us part” thing seriously and I have married only once while many of those who want me dead are serial marriers, do I get some slack?  Or, is bisexuality the most wicked betrayal because my life looked much like theirs, so that I should be exterminated before my monosexual gay brethren?  Does the fact that they may have known me and even liked me, disturb them more deeply?  Does it deeply anger them that I lived unnoticed among them or that I may have taught their children?  I think this issue should be addressed in the Tea Party platform.  God has been largely silent on the issue.  People have written on his/her/its behalf, but I haven’t been eliminated in direct divine supernatural cataclysm.  I think of the cancer as a perfectly natural process.

 

How should I feel about the fact that some people think I should be killed?  I don’t think I’ll cooperate.

 

* * *

 

What’s the point?

 

The point of living is to make mistakes.  We are fortunate if they don’t kill us, and more fortunate if they don’t injure anyone else.  If our mistakes cause us to stop trying, we stunt the practice, and the practice is all we have.  You can’t see the ripples in the pond if you stop casting pebbles.

 

* * *

 

Combat

 

I think what I have written about the old men and my work with them has painted an incomplete picture.  I find that filling the spaces is difficult because the language doesn’t exist to complete the picture.  The practice is not about eastern philosophical mumbo-jumbo or moral education, yet both happen.  The practice is about combat.  When I practiced with the old men, no confusion or internal argument clouded their actions.  These compassionate and loving men would destroy in an instant.  Here was the example experienced.  Avoid combat, but once joined, someone dies.  If your partner in this dance disengages or can no longer dance, then combat avoided.  But, while joined, the roles were set; they were the killers and their partners were dying.  I don’t mean that they hurt me during practice unless I misstepped, which I did often enough.  Their relentless motiveless actions, falling like sea waves and not engendered by fear or selfishness, came from nothing.  Disparity of skill wasn’t the issue; they had no purchase onto which I could grasp.  Like the pristine note of a violin sounding in a bell jar, their response would transfix me.  As if my death had been destined, I could not escape, and I knew that if they perished in the process we would leave no hole in the world.

 

They taught me that fearing loss and the attendant debate clouds action.  By the time I graduated from high school, I had seen what everyone thought was mysterious and should be feared most.  I had learned that suicide is superfluous and a quiet mind allows better decisions.  This was a good lesson for an abnormal kid, one that let me look anyone in the eye.

 

* * *

 

Crying

 

I am surprised that crying is the most difficult matter for me to write about.  If you’ve read this, you know that sex and love are pretty easy for me.  When you’re wounded as a kid, you become very careful about crying.  When I was adolescent, one guy I was involved with cried when we were together once.  I was stunned and pleased that he trusted me that much.  He was embarrassed and worried that he had given me power because he thought he appeared weak.  I had learned a lesson that I have fortunately replaced, that you should cry alone.  I think I was worried that if I started, I could never stop.  Now, crying is like a Leviathan that breaks the surface occasionally.  No, more than occasionally now that, as Ann says, hormone manipulation has made me a woman in some ways.  I can’t just let it slip beneath after it’s taken a great breath.  I have to follow it down, coax it back up until it spends all its capacity.  I never worry that I’ve killed it; it will grow again.

 

* * *

 

Don’t be showin’ off

 

When I was at UGA, I helped coach at a debate workshop for high school students.  My partner on the college varsity debate team, Bob, and I had been paired because we sat out when judging a debate the semester before.  All the judges went one way, and although we didn’t confer, Bob and I went the other.  The workshop was an annual affair, and every one had a talent show one evening during the two weeks.  Bob knew I practiced, so he thought it would be cool if I broke some bricks with my hands during the talent show.  I wasn’t sanguine about that, but I let him talk me into it.

 

We went out to a local brickyard to buy some pavers.  The guy at the brickyard asked why we needed them.  Bob immediately told him that I was going to break them with my hand.  The guy said that if I could break one, he’d give us a few free of charge.  Bob smiled and said that would be fine.  I somewhat sheepishly followed Bob and the guy back to a pile of bricks where the guy handed me one and told me to go for it.  I knelt and, using a technique of holding the brick in the palm of my left hand palm-up so that the right side of the brick was a little off the pavement, I struck the brick with knife hand.  The blow forced the brick into contact with the ground and it snapped near the center.  The brick guy was stunned and asked me to do it again, so I broke another one.  After voicing amazement, he gave us a couple of bricks.

 

The evening of the show, we were in a ballroom in Franklin Hall.  When my turn came I went to the center of the dance floor and carefully held the brick before delivering a wicked blow.  Nothing.  I just about beat my hand into ground meat with no success while Bob was saying, “No, no, he can really do it.  He broke two of them at the brickyard.  Really!”  Everyone was skeptical.  Later, I discovered that the dance floor had a layer of cork.  The cork had absorbed most of the energy of my strikes.  I could hear the old men laughing.

 

* * *

 

So, I’m pissed again

 

Another kid killed himself, this one after coming out on Facebook.  Apparently, there is no safe place for these kids talk to each other or adults who won’t look the other way.  This one was seeing counselors and had supportive parents.  The school authorities are like aquarium keepers who think they can tame sharks with moral pronouncements and part-time policies.  This irritates a raw nerve in me in the way all power plays do.  It’s one thing to want me dead, but quite another to wish a fourteen year-old dead.  I want to scream at them to come after me; I want to issue invitations to an up-close and personal dance.  I want them to face the old men.  We had better stop focusing on how kids express their sexual identities, which can be quite fluid at that age, and address the real issue.  Skin color, ethnicity, sexuality, costuming, economic inequity, physical differences, learning disabilities, they’re all lightning rods for anonymous, empty, scared kids to do what they’ve been taught—plan someone else’s misery so that they don’t have to confront their own terror.  Now, all we need is a place where a lot of kids are forced to gather.  Oh, wait, that’s school.  Instead of whining about test scores while letting the mayhem roll, why not use the opportunity to stop the killing by guiding them in learning about how to live with each other?  Sorry, I forgot that god’s minions won’t let anyone remotely suggest that being gay or bisexual isn’t unnatural, and we all know what you do with the unnatural.  If you can’t sell it, kill it.

 

* * *

 

Style

 

Robin Ochs has said that, while many think of heterosexual people as having lives, they describe sexual minorities as having lifestyles.  Ann suggests that any word containing style can never be applied to me.  I have to agree, but Ann and I have a life, albeit an unconventional one.  The people who would characterize us as having a meager lifestyle do so because, while they are impelled to defend human life, they can safely refrain from defending my existence because mine is only a lifestyle.  Questionable fashion sense aside, my approach to love and sex cannot be discarded like last year’s jacket or disconnected like Peter’s shadow.  I have lived with heterosexuals for over sixty years and none has been tempted to don my particular orientation to life. I have known many gay men over the years, and sharing with them has never disconnected my desire for women.  Assuming that I can change my spots is glib, like assuming that heterosexuals can transmute into bisexuals.  People who spout that glibness believe that I can be an alchemist while their natures are immutable.  Then, the business of religion in the West is to dehumanize non-believers the way war propaganda dehumanizes the State’s enemies.  We’re really talking about power, conformity, and fear.  Perhaps, they should worry more about my deplorable fashion sense than my life.

 

* * *

 

The secret

 

This, which is the heart, is mind also. Concept and will and analysis and wisdom and intellect and vision and continuity of purpose and feeling and understanding, pain and memory and volition and operation of thought and vitality and desire and passion, all these, yea all, are but names of the Eternal Wisdom. — Sri Aurobindo, trans. (Aitareya Upanishad)

 

I shudder to tell this, but now I won’t have much time to answer questions about it.  When I was fifteen, during training, one of the old men asked me a question.  After part of a second, as thoughts arose and I considered an answer, the old man uttered a powerful kiai, and the mental process deflated.  The beginning, the middle, the end, all of it at once, was there without any reflection or internal comment.  The first thought recreated the world and me, but I was no longer trapped.  He looked at me for a few seconds and then struck me with a closed fist lightly over my sternum, like putting a period at the end of a story.  Then, he turned and went away.  We never spoke about this.

 

* * *

 

Someone always wants you alive

 

It does get better, but hold the euphoria.  I’m reading Pinker’s book on the trend in decreasing violence, and just finished Bruni’s Op Ed in the NYT on Portugal.  The situation is trembling on a cusp.  Yet, I look around at my colleagues, and realize how unguarded I am among them.  The region I now call my home seems to have a little political will to ostracize the maniacs, a will present even in the religious.  I suspect that the way I have conducted my life just isn’t a big deal.  The strident voices of hatred are a quieter strain here.  I think we can have some hope that the silliness will diminish, and people will turn to solving problems other than those around whom people love, marry, and rub genitals with.  I heard one of the old men silence a religio-fascist once by saying, after patiently listening to a doctrinaire attack on Buddhism, “Without invoking any text you have read or referring to any statement you have heard, show me your faith.”  Every time the man started to speak, the old man held up his hand because the man had nothing original to say.  The old man wanted everyone alive; he wanted me alive.

 

* * *

 

Living in a magical world

 

The recent Task Force recommendation on PSA screening is contentious.  Once diagnosed, I found myself looking over my shoulder a bit.  I’m like the reality-TV psychic investigators I ridicule.  Every creek of a floorboard, every draft or temperature change is the action of spirits.  Are the little pains, headaches (although brain mets are rare), forgetfulness, fatigue, and weight gain or loss possible communications from the wild side or side effects of the treatment or nothing?  Before, I wouldn’t have given them a second thought.  A diagnosis hasn’t always made life easier for Ann or me.  I try to balance reality and magic.

 

* * *

 

Fried Chicken

 

Shift change was at 0800.  At 0700, an all-station call on the ring-down lines would wake any of the off-going shift who weren’t already up.  Then they would perform ablutions and get ready to leave, finishing paperwork or having a brief breakfast.  The members of the on-coming shift would begin to arrive and change into uniforms.  Tradition dictated that once a replacement from the on-coming shift was present and dressed and had placed his bunker gear next to the apparatus, the off-going shift member could change out of uniform and leave.  The decision belonged to the off-going shift, because a late alarm could result in a couple of hours of overtime.  Usually, guys wanted to get home.

 

One weekday, at Station 4, which housed an engine, a ladder truck, and a rescue car, I had dressed and placed my gear by the right jump seat of the engine and the guy I was replacing was in the locker room changing.  We were now in that strange limbo where about half the crew was from B-shift and half from my C-shift.  At 0756 the ring-down line rang.  In the basement of the Police Department HQ, a call taker had received a call for help, noted the address on a run card and sent the card by a conveyer to one of the fire dispatchers.  Fire dispatchers were a unique crew in the Comm Center, and were acutely tuned to the needs of fire officers.  We knew them by their voices over the radio, and occasionally the guys from Rescue 1 would visit them in their cave.  The first time I went, I discovered that their forms conjured by my imagination were wildly inaccurate.  They had no Computer Aided Dispatch; everything was manual.  The dispatcher noted the address and nature of the call, flipped to a chart that told him what the assignment was, and pushed the station buttons on his PLAR ring-down console and lifted the handset.  This was a call for a fire in a fried chicken restaurant on the edge of the downtown area.  So, our ring-down phone bell was ringing loudly, as were the phones in Station 2, and Station 1.   The first alarm assignment for a commercial fire in this area was three engines, two ladder trucks, a rescue car, a power truck, a battalion chief and a division chief.  Our whole station was on the assignment.  An engine, a ladder truck, and a power truck were coming from Station 1, and the third engine was coming from Station 2.

 

After the watchman answered the phone, the dispatcher waited until the other stations were on the line, and then gave the alarm both over the phone and over the radio.   Smitty, a full-blooded Seminole Indian, called the assignment, “Station 4, Engine 1, Engine 2, Truck 1, Power 1, Battalion 2, Division 1, commercial fire at the fried chicken restaurant at  .  .  .  .”  By then we were mounting the vehicles, as C-shifters tried to jump on in place of B-shifters who wanted to leave.  There was so much noise in the bay that we never caught the address.  Now, there were three fried chicken restaurants in our first due area.  Our station was on 4th Street, a main North-South road that ran the length of the city.  The Engine pulled out and turned left on 4th, the Truck pulled out a few seconds later and turned right on 4th, the Rescue pulled out and jogged right on 4th and turned left onto a crossing avenue.  We were all going to a different restaurant.   I wonder what the people stopped on 4th Street by our sirens thought as we headed to different destinations.  The Rescue went to the correct address and quickly reported no fire.  By the time the Rescue arrived, we had all straightened out the address and were wheeling around to get there.  A passing motorist had mistaken condensation on the inside of the restaurant windows for smoke and called in the alarm.

 

* * *

 

Conceptions of the universe and each other

 

And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. — Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

 

Advice for the young on love: get ready for the struggle.  You can’t take care of anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself.  Don’t let the strong winds born of identification with your beloved extinguish the small flame of your ego.  Don’t let your ego grow to the extent that it tries to encompass your beloved.  Welcome a companion.  And, as important, this work is fun even when painful, so let your souls laugh.  The practice is all we have.

 

* * *

 

Boring

 

I am thankful for my problems.  These are boring, mundane, unspecial problems that arise with me.   I am thankful for obscurity and powerlessness.  I am thankful that I learned the limitations of my vision and reach, lessons that allow silence, broken when choices then arise to reinvent the world and me.  I am thankful that, once, I saw the end, and that I can’t be frightened into thinking that I’m worth throwing everyone overboard to save myself.  I am thankful that the course is, lacking attention, excruciating and with attention, ephemeral.  I am thankful that eventually the silence will be unbroken.

 

* * *

 

Schrödinger’s Cat (For the physicists in the crowd, I know the analogy is worse than imperfect)

 

Moral ambiguity exists until the moment of decision.

 

* * *

 

Judy Blue Eyes at 70

 

You can have Mitchell and Cohen, though I admire them.  I was stirred to my core when Yeats was her lyricist.

 

* * *

 

Restless Minds

 

Saint and demon, I share a shard of their restless minds, minds that make the world interesting in all the horrific and excellent ways.

 

* * *

 

Neuroscience and me

 

Until recently psychology was a special branch of philosophy, but now we are coming to something that Nietzsche foresaw—the rise of psychology in its own right, so much so that it is even threatening to swallow philosophy. — C. G. Jung (“Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology,” CW, Volume 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche)

 

I have sustained many enquiries over this life.  One still as puzzling as when I began it is what advantage my attraction to men and women confers.   Jung thought that the notion of the psyche as an epiphenomenon of the brain was as weird as the obverse notion, although he was not sanguine about the objective existence of a soul that survives brain death.  So, assuming, as modern neuroscience seems to, that my brain offers to me a finite number of selections [I do not imply personal choices] regarding the development of sexual attraction, why should one of them be sexual attraction to men as well as women?   I’m not curious about my individual case, but about where in the depths of the evolutionary past such a selection became possible and why.  Perhaps the availability of this selection is recent.  After all, evolutionary pressures aren’t confused.

 

* * *

 

You have my full attention

 

I’ve decided to use email only in the most extreme instances of inability to communicate with someone by other means.  I have taken to walking down the corridors in the prairie dog warren where I work.  Three or four minutes of attention and conversation between a colleague and me are both more satisfying and more effective than a chain of emails.   Mind you, email is still a choice for conversing with those at a distance or those not where I expect to find them.  I am taking this step because I found myself emailing colleagues in my own program who live seven feet away from my desk.  I have also taken to inviting colleagues to a relatively quiet space with plush chairs in the fourth floor lobby, which invites wonderfully digressive conversation lost to emails.

 

* * *

 

Poet for the dying days

 

Sometimes the river

becomes a river in the mind

or of the mind

or in and of the mind. — William Carlos Williams (“The Mind Hesitant” from The Clouds, 1948)

 

Eliot was the poet

for my formative years.

Yeats remains the poet

for my life.

 

Williams still holding

out both hands one to

Whitman and Poe the

other to Roethke and Stevens

a bridge will be the poet

for my dying days.

 

* * *

 

Pain at the Aladdin

 

With Ann a continent away, I went with loved ones to hear Greg Brown.  I left the theater shaken, barely able to breathe.  No more live music until she was at my side again.

 

* * *

 

The urge to risk

 

When trapped by unconsidered behavior, something in me impels risk, risk foolish enough to stop and freeze me, and to make me consider the behavior.   The ritual of risk is as prayer.

 

* * *

 

Keep your friends closer

 

I will sing then the song, long in the making—

When the stress of youth is put away from me. — William Carlos Williams (“To Wish Myself Courage”)

 

I wonder if long and intimate association with violence and tragedy makes happiness harder now.  The weight of those encounters seems to increase as my velocity increases, dragging me back toward a standstill.  Only the most powerful counterbalance of normalcy keeps me streaming outward, only Ann.

 

* * *

 

Marriage

 

. . . there would always be other people who would hate and revile me—or even try to cause me physical harm. — John Irving (In One Person)

 

I am so fucking weary of the priggish whining of the religious about men marrying other men or women marrying other women.  The utter stupidity of their arguments is already well catalogued; no need to repeat them.  What I want to know is what they think of my marriage.

 

I want the religious arbiters to say plainly that a bisexual man with constitutional sexual attraction to both men and women may marry, as I have, a heterosexual woman without any condemnation.  Heterosexual male adulterers are, by fucking around, apparently not breaking any of God’s contraventions about who can marry whom; their marriages are sanctified.  So if Ann is perfectly all right with a husband who lusts after other men as well as her and who has perhaps more than occasionally fucked them, the marriage can be sanctioned?

I want the priests of sexual fear to say plainly that my nature doesn’t matter because I’m a human being with a penis who has married a human being with a vagina.  Or, is the problem one of nature?  I am old enough to remember some of my neighbors telling me, “I have nothing against Negroes; I just don’t want one marrying my sister.”

 

I suspect that most inquisitors believe that bisexual equals gay—that my nature is a sham. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s so.  If I am a gay man and I marry a woman, have I broken God’s law?  I’m not speaking of the “don’t lie with a man” law. The heterosexual adulterer is apparently allowed to fuck or marry serially as many women as will have him.  Is that true for me as well regarding men, even if I fuck a dozen men?  I suppose in their view I’ll roast for fucking them, but apparently God is perfectly willing to sanctify my marriage after checking the genital situation.

 

If my marriage is ecclesiastically sound, then they must utter the falsehood that says my nature has nothing to do with marriage strictures, only my genitals and those of my mate.  Or, let them plainly say that they are inimical to my nature and that it is my nature that offends them and not my marriage.  Let them be plain that I am the danger from which they seek protections and not my marriage.

 

* * *

 

Bassui’s message to me

 

“The essence of your mind is not born, so it will never die. It is not an existence, which is perishable. It is not an emptiness, which is a mere void. It has neither color nor form. It enjoys no pleasures and suffers no pains.

 

“I know you are very ill. Like a good Zen student, you are facing that sickness squarely. You may not know exactly who is suffering, but question yourself: What is the essence of this mind? Think only of this. You will need no more. Covet nothing. Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air.”

 

Another translation:

 

"The wondrous mind-nature is not born and doesn’t die. It neither exists nor is it nonexistent. It is neither formless nor does it have form. It feels neither pain nor pleasure. Though you want to know what it is that suffers now, in this way, it is something that can’t be known.

 

“If you just question what is this mind-body that suffers, thinking of nothing else, like a cloud disappearing from the sky, your mind will empty and you will cease transgressing the world of life and death and be immediately liberated.”

 

* * *

 

Essay

 

I think I've tried hard, but not hard enough.