SCENE 2 MORNING IN YARDLEY, PA MAIN STREET CAMERA SLOWLY PASSES HOMETOWN HEROES FLAGS ON LIGHT POLES DOWN BOTH SIDES. CAMERA COMES TO 21 YEAR OLD LEAH’S HOUSE AT DAWN, July 2, 2034.
Leah: Grandpa, Grandpa, Wake up! You were twitching and yelling. (Gently rocks him awake)
78 year old Frank: Leah Bedeah. It’s still dark. What are you doing?
Leah: We’re going to Clearfield today, and we’ve got to get to the turnpike before traffic backs up around Philly.
Grandpa: Oh. Why are we going to Clearfield?
Leah: Ugh! Grandpa, it’s the 4th of July weekend, remember? And I want to capture it in a memory book before it changes too much. It can’t stay frozen in time forever. You even told me that. Then I’m gonna’ make a memory book like Grandma used to make for me and Max and Cambo. And you wanted to see it again, to reminisce, you said. Uhhh, Nostalgia Tour, those were your exact words.
Grandpa: Oh, yes. Thanks, Honey. I was lost in a dream, my dear glow worm, a very delicious sticky bun of a dream. I’m with you now. I’m present and accounted for. I’d like B lunch, if you don’t mind. Give me five minutes, girlie girl, and I’ll be ready to roll.
Leah: Okay, it’s supposed to be a good day, maybe 80 degrees. It will be cooler in Clearfield, though. Maybe bring a sweater.
Grandpa: Okay, you’re driving, right?
Leah: Uh, yeah. Mom would kill me if I let you even sit behind the wheel in the driveway.
Grandpa: Ask Mrs. Grazel Bird who taught her to drive.
Leah: I know, I know. But she’s the boss now.
Grandpa: Really? I thought I was the boss.
Leah: You were never the boss, Grandpa. Unless Grandma left you home alone.
Chuckle together.
Leahexits.
Grandpa stares hauntingly at his deceased wife’s photo on the wall.
Grandpa: I wasn’t beaten enough as a kid, Boss. You loved to tell me that, Hope. Some folks were beaten too much, so I guess I caught a break. Luck beats talent in Ireland, I guess. God, I miss waking up next to you. [Deep sigh]
5 teens sit under the late summer night sky at the edge of a graveyard in Clearfield, PA, 1967. Sam, Mark the Shark, Stevie, Hope, and Frank (later known as Grandpa).
Hope: I wish you could stay past the summer, Frankie. It would be so cool if you could do your senior year here instead of Yardley. We’d have so much fun, and a little trouble. (wink and smile)
Mark: Yeah, maybe for just a week, you know? Homecoming… you could finally get into Linda Magee’s pants. Wouldn’t that be a wet dream? Take her to the bonfire, the parade, Homecoming dance and then Come On Home. Ahhh!!! (grabs his crotch in exaggeration)
Laughs all around.
Frank: That’s crazy, Sammy.
Stevie: Way to bait the hook, Sharky. Always luring and leering with the purple worm of sex.
Mark: Hey, I’m horny, okay? That makes me normal. Don’t tell me you all don’t want in Linda’s panties.
Hope: Uh, Shark, I’m like one of the guys but I don’t want in Linda’s panties. They wouldn’t fit me anyhow.
All laugh.
Mark: Don’t worry, Hope. You’ll bloom out one of these centuries.
Hope: Bite me, Mark.
Mark: Okay, drop your shorts.
Hope: Shut up!!
Frank: Man, that would be a dream come true, even a week with you guys. You’re my best friends. I mean l have lots of casual friends in Yardley, but they’re a bit, I don’t know, stuck up. You know? Ivy League types.
Sam: I don’t know what league that is, but I’ll bet we can beat their asses off in football. We’ve got a great team this year. Goll, Craver, Evans, Riccio, and the Hurt twins. What a line, man!
Frank: Sammy, the Ivy League isn’t a sports league; it’s a group of elite colleges on the East Coast. Their buildings are so old that they’re covered in ivy. Get it? IVY league? Anyway, they play lacrosse.
Sam: What the hell is that?
Frank: It’s like soccer with these sticks that have nets on the end of them.
Sam: Commie football with sticks! That’s completely queer.
Stevie: The Indians played lacrosse, Sam. They invented it.
Sam: Where’d you come up with that shit, Stevie?
Stevie: I read, Sammy. You ought to try it sometime. Something called history.
Sam: Eat shit, Stevie. A year from now I’ll be reading the sign for Camp Lejeune Marine Boot Camp.
That’s all I need to read till I get to ‘Nam and start pickin’ off Gooks like groundhogs.
Frank: Sam, the war is not going so well from what I read and see on t.v. Every night on the news Walter Cronkite says so many of our boys were killed that day in some village I can’t even pronounce. I mean, it’s in the thousands, man.
Sam: Oh, I know. I’m not as stupid as you think. Eddie Carpenter’s brother got killed by some slant eyed monkey in the spring, and he hadn’t been in ‘Nam two damn weeks. Makes me sick!
Mark: So why do you want to go?
Sam: Righteous Vengeance, man. I want to make those jack off sons of bitches pay and pay some more. I’m gonna take target practice in the jungle with monkey heads. See, I think a lot of the guys who got drafted didn’t hunt, and they didn’t know their way around guns or the woods. But I do. I got a sixth sense like an Injun. And besides, my old man was a Marine. He says I’m a pussy if I don’t volunteer.
Stevie: So, if I don’t volunteer, I’m a pussy, huh?
Sam: No, you’re a pussy no matter what.
Stevie: Blow me, Sam!!
Sam: No, you blow me, Stevie. I know you want to.
Frank: Stop!! Did you guys see that crazy Buddhist monk who lit himself on fire to stop the war?
Hope: How is that supposed to accomplish anything? That’s crazy!
Frank: That’s crazy, but me enrolling at Dacio County High for a week isn’t?
Hope: No, and I’ll tell you why. My Aunt Marge works there in the admin office, and she says they’re so screwed up that they don’t know if the staff is coming or going. Forget the students. Now I can probably hang out with her during lunches at band camp and snitch a few official forms that you can sort of forge, and before you know it, we’ll sneak you in.
Frank: And my folks? You think they’re just gonna go along with the charade. “Sure, Frankie, run back to Clearfield for a week, Frankie. Go to Dacio High with your friends. Stay with your Uncle Phil for an extra week so he can enroll you for a week.”
Hope: It’s tricky, but if we can work it out, will you come back for Homecoming then?
Frank: (big exhale and pause) Yeah, I guess. I just don’t see how it’s supposed to work.
Stevie: Tell them you’re doing a college visit at Penn State. Didn’t you say you applied?
Frank: Okay, so if my folks buy that load of crap, how am I supposed to fool Uncle Phil?
Mark: He was a teenager once. I bet he’d be on board with you going out after school, especially with Linda Hot Pants. Just tell him that you’re stuck in PSU all day doing that thing they do to get kids used to college
Frank: Orientation.
Mark: Yeah, that thing, and then you can ditch your car behind my house; and roll into Dacio with me every morning.
Frank: What if we, I mean I get caught?
Sam: We all go to ‘Nam a little earlier, Frankie.
Mark: Aren’t you dying to get with Linda? Think of that orange bikini at the town pool.
Stevie: You are such a hog, Sharky.
Mark: (gestures penis hand in Stevie’s face) Smile when you’ve had enough.
Stevie: (smiles)
Mark: See, you like it don’t you, Stevie?
Stevie: You don’t stop until someone else stops you, Shark.
Hope: Yeah, Mark, there’s more to life than sex.
Mark: Really? How would you know, Hope?
Hope: I know older girls, that’s how. And they tell me that sex is like the icing on the cake. If you don’t have the cake below it, the icing just clings to your throat and will make you sick.
Mark: Yeah? Sounds like a blow job to me. Besides, I like dessert first and my icing thick and gooey. And, besides the besides, how about a pineapple upside down cake, huh Hope?
Hope et all: Shut up, Sharky!! (She turns to look longingly at Frank who smiles back anxiously.)
All: You are hopeless, Shark.
Mark: Y’all are just jealous of my suave, deboner style.
Hope: No, Mark, we’re just dreamers not porn hounds.
FADE TO BLACK AS “CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU” PLAYS
Those two words have nothing to do with one another usually. It’s a forced juxtaposition that creates a near oxymoron. How can poison be sacred? How can anything sacred be poisonous? And yet that was the phrase that came to mind as I considered the disabling effect of work on a workaholic. His obsessional work ethic was literally killing him. Why? In a country built proudly on the Christian work ethic, how can a good activity become toxic to its actor?
Always and effortlessly, T.S. Eliot’s lines come back to me, paraphrased,
It is the ultimate treason
To do the right thing for the wrong reason
Again, you might ask, ‘How can working hard and being productive be done for a wrong reason?’ And that’s the critical point. Work is generally some purposeful form of labor that is rewarded with money or some other consideration. It’s a transaction: labor given for some consideration received.
work: activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
What can go wrong with this equation? The reason for working is the pretzel puzzle when the equation twists into tortured knots. Most folks work for the money, plain and simple… Lots of A = some B, where A is labor/work and B is reward/consideration. Some folks work because they are driven by ambition, boredom, or guilt, attempting to compensate for another issue in their lives… Lots of A +(hidden reasons) = lots of B. Some fortunate few find their purpose and meaning in their work, and it becomes the same as breathing for them, like swimming is to a fish. It’s living… they cannot not work, breathe, write, paint, sing, bake, sell, remodel, create, etc. Their equation is A=BBBB.
In my poisoned example, the laborer worked to prove his doubters wrong. To dispel shame, and gain power over those doubters, locking them out of his life. Hoping that they would die of envy while hopelessly knocking on his gilded door. Begging for his very presence. This sort of insane pride covers a very broken ego in a fragile entity.
Another example was a woman trapped in an endless cycle of seeking her abusive father’s approval, if only she could achieve more… she would (counter intuitively) become good enough. Finally, in her fantasy movie, she would be loved, if everyone lived long enough to be transformed according to her feckless script. Work is the ticket, the skeleton key to imagined happiness beyond the locked door. Unfortunately for the workaholic, other addictions are needed to fuel the frenzied work pace– cigarettes, caffeine, junk food, alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines. And then you have the workaholic plus at least one addiction.
What are the costs beyond one’s health? Time and emotional space to share with others. People are viewed as the problem that needs to be avoided or worked around. Work is the thing, the lord, and king. Hosannah in the highest.
Howard Hughes comes to mind. His work led to incredible wealth that is his legacy today– Raytheon Corporation and Hughes real estate have their roots in his work. And yet his work wealth allowed him to indulge his paranoid obsessions and compulsive rituals of germaphobia that eventually trapped him in isolation, at the mercy of grifters who wrote dueling wills for his riches. He died alone, worth less than who he was on many levels. For a man’s worth is not equal to his bank account; that simply shows what he is worth at a given moment in time.
Work, by itself, is neither good nor bad. Example: in a bizarre ironic twist, the discovery of potassium cyanide led to both the ethereal Prussian Blue paint pigment that had been so rare and expensive until 1782, and the Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps to exterminate Jews efficiently. And the banner over these camps? Arbeit Macht Frei, (in English, Work sets you free.) The discovery was made in the name of art and beauty; but a century later it was militarized as a weapon of mass destruction. I’m sure you can think of other good works that wound up being used to gain power or wealth. Gun powder, nuclear power, airplanes, and wooden ships that conveyed both pilgrims and slaves to the shores of this country. Even if their welcome signs were painted in Prussian Blue, their poison could not be neutralized.
And what sort of freedom does work deliver? Again, it depends on the reason. In the Nazi camps the reason set Aryan Supremacy as the numerator, and Jewish Genocide as the denominator. The goal being to shrink the denominator daily and eradicate all Jews, leaving only the pure Aryan race in whole numbers. I suppose one could joltingly call it Holy Murder or Homicidal Holiness in search of some bizarre wholeness.
Hurt
I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole The old familiar sting Try to kill it all away But I remember everything
What have I become? My sweetest friend Everyone I know goes away In the end
And you could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt
I wear this crown of thorns Upon my liar’s chair Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time The feelings disappear You are someone else I’m still right here
What have I become? My sweetest friend Everyone I know goes away In the end
And you could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt
If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way
The workaholic shoots up work in his syringe or cigarette. The buzz keeps the haunting echoes of dead relationships and skeletalized dreams covered up. To borrow with apologies from John Prine, “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the time, money, and relationships go… Jesus Christ died for nothing, dontcha know?”
The death certificate reads “cause of death”. The coroner writes “work”. In the explain further box, the coroner continues “when a man divides himself by ten thousand tasks, he disintegrates into dust particles, a deadly gas, nothingness.”
It’s midnight on a Tuesday in July. He signs the certificate and knows it is his own.
Just when I thought it was safe to go outside… well, you know what went down. A mere ten days ago life was pretty zippy and skippy and gay. We went to the bar and grille for Karaoke night on Sunday. Had a hootin’ good time with friends, sang a couple of songs, and began the next week, suspecting nothing but more sunny days and cool nights here in Sun City. Tuesday night we had our neighbor Joyce over for dinner and drinks as the sun set behind the Tortolita Mountains. I made plans to fix her leaking kitchen faucet on Thursday morning. Ordered the part on Amazon. It was my wife’s birthday on Friday, so we had plans to see a dance band on Thursday; dinner and a sunset ceremony on Friday; and another musical venue on Saturday. Good mundane times lay ahead beyond our now stale worries about Covid.
On Wednesday, however, Covid struck her like lightning. She went down in a puddle of sneezes, coughs, aches, pains, and fever. We canceled our plans and got the rapid test to confirm her virus. Two lines on some virus reader the size of a thermometer said positive. I went to the store and picked up Mucinex, zinc tablets, throat lozenges, and vitamin D3. We had an arsenal of Tylenol 500 mg on hand already. Amazingly, she took a Tylenol, which is quite the exception for her. It’s also exceptional that my bride lay coma-like for the next three days. Her normal is ferret speed.
Meanwhile, I felt fine and continued doing my usual activities. “You’re likely positive too”, she posited. But I had no symptoms. In fact, I took the rapid test on Saturday just to be sure. One line, negative. “Good, you can get your last booster today.” I proceeded to get boosted, and I felt special enough to install our last bathroom faucet that day. Like all my home projects, it turned into a much longer ordeal that included a trip to Home Depot to replace an old shut off valve as well as replacing the faucet set. I was aching in the usual old man ways with which I have become acquainted. Knees, ankles, hips, shoulders, wrists, all flaring with painful inflammation just because I used them for work again. I went to bed at 8 pm thinking I’d go to the hot tub in the morning and soak out the aches. Fat chance. My mind played Tom Waitts songs in a loop, “Barreling down the boulevard, Looking for the heart of Saturday night.”
That night I had the sweats and chills that I’d experienced with my first vaccine. ‘Okay’, I thought, ‘that’s just proof of a healthy immune system fighting the vaccine booster. No problem.’ By 3:30 a.m. I could sleep no more. I got up and watched the sun rise slowly over the Santa Catalina ridge to the east. Other than the joint and muscle aches I felt fine. I decided to take a hike in the wash nearby and look for God on Sunday morning. Also, my wife was sleeping soundly and I did not wish to disturb her deep slumber.
Off I went with walking stick, knife, hat, water, and cell phone at 7:00 a.m. The aches seemed to exit my body as I walked in the thick sand of the wash. I was startled by an owl, the moon-faced type who flew low and circled around. I was too slow to get a picture. Further up the wash I had a brief glimpse of two mule deer soundlessly scurrying by. Another owl, darker than the first, flew down and away, silently. My anticipation was more than met several times on my one hour adventure. I guess I was cipated, or taken away. I measured my hike by the water in my thermos; halfway through the water, one should turn around so say the desert hike survivors. The skeletal jury is out on the non-survivors, or maybe not; they’re just speechless, tongueless too. So I did. I passed the moon-faced owl twice more as I walked across his domain again. No picture, but I did find a feather that I’m sure belonged to him. It was a fine use of an hour and I went home to check in with my wife, pretty certain that God had seen me if I had not seen Him. I counted my blessings like a Dickensian accountant.
At first it seemed the walk had pushed the aches out of my body along with my fast drying sweat, but I was wrong. An armada of new pirates of pain swelled up inside my bones. They fired on my ship and boarded with torches of fever, taking me prisoner without a fight. I felt my heart thumping and my body trembling in reply. “I need to lie down, boys. Take what you like, but please be gone by morning light.” That’s when time stopped making any impact on me. In fact, intellectual activity seemed like something far away done by other people I once knew as I lay in my darkened bedroom– Tylenoled, Mucinexed, and vitamin D’d out. I slipped into unpleasant pugilistic dreams…sponsored by steady commercials from Covid 19, like a narcotic hand pushing my face into the pillows. “Just take what you need and leave the rest, but they should never have taken the very best.”
On Sunday I dreamed I was locked in a phone booth with Mike Tyson who beat me with a pipe wrench and a three pound sledge hammer. I tried to defend myself with a single serving bag of hot chocolate that included freeze dried mini-marshmallows. I lost that fight. Like the night before, I went to bed for good at 8 p.m., knowing I’d awake on Monday at 3:30 a.m. By then it was Joe Frazier with a pair of ball peen hammers who punched the clock where the phone should have been. “Hi, Mike.” “Hey, Joe.” I heard them greet one another. Joe beat me in places that Tiger Mike had missed, like the inside of my ear lobes and under my eyelids, way up in my arm pits. The metaphorical thumping turned into an air mattress that inflated inside me. I floated unconscious on a sweaty puddle of warm brie cheese, with a layer of oil oozing on top. Springsteen’s Philadelphia was the soundtrack to my black and white video dreams.
Muhammad Ali showed up that night as my congestion broke and nasal drippage arrived. Did I want to lie in a puddle of mucus or get up and blow it all out? That was my existential question after 50 hours in the ring with Covid. Ali ropa doped me in the distance from my bed to the tissues in the bathroom. At least his punches broke through the bubble head I’d been trapped in. “Thanks for the upper cut, Bro.”
Now I know that over a million other Americans have died directly and indirectly from Covid over the past two years. My case was/is nothing in comparison, and yet it was a keyhole view of their suffering and eventual deaths. I could still breathe and move. No IV or O2 needed. And I was not alone, shrink wrapped under a plastic tent in a hospital ICU, an unzipped body bag waiting. Two vaccines and two boosters were on my side. Plus, my wife recovered in a few days and tended to me instead of those bully boxers. She does not hit nearly as hard as they did… as I floated in the tunnel of fever dreams.
Slowly the symptoms dropped off– the aches relented; the dry cough relaxed; the congestion broke. Fever and fatigue hung on like Super Glue, though. Then it was just fatigue, endless hours in my darkened bedroom spent swimming in strange pools of psychedelic plasma. Brief respites of consciousness to eat, watch some television, and report in to my concerned but powerless wife. Day 5, 6, 7 moved at iceberg speed. That’s the speed of iceberg lettuce dying in a drought. All one can do is sink into the root system and wait for another day. And so I do, root down into my body’s root cellar… and wait for the fatigue nado to spin itself out while Billie Holiday moans the lyrics of Solitude.
Now at day 8 I feel safe to exhale and believe in a return to something like normalcy, though that place no longer exists. These past few years have felt like an Indiana Jones movie: he’s being chased by villains across a rope suspension bridge, above a bottomless gorge, where the treads of the bridge collapse just as his feet lift onto the next tread. There’s a war, a political revolution, a pandemic, and an economic meltdown in the background. Indy does not make it out this time. This time his empty hat blows away on a dusty street of forgetfulness. The big screen theatre is empty, silent. Closed until further notice, covidating. Mel Blanc’s voice as Porky Pig stutters at the threshold of the street, “Tha-, tha-, that’s all, folks.”
There comes a time for rain, even in a desert. Otherwise all organic matter would desiccate and blow away, leaving a Martian landscape of sand dunes of dry river beds. With just a bit of water, however small, everything across the desert is transformed from a waiting time, as if the desert were holding her breath, to a soundless exhale of pollen and scents, seed pods, flowers atop cactuses, and a palette of semiprecious colors– vermillion, chalky purple, canary yellow, ripe peach, Mardi Gras orange, satin jade green, and oceans of pale teal. The smells, oh the smells of mesquite blooms, palo verdes golden clusters, creosote bushes pungent tanginess, seductive honeysuckle… and orange blossoms so concentrated one only needs to walk by a blood orange tree to be perfumed by a mist of microscopic nectar kisses. On a cool evening breeze these herbal bouquets float into lusty nostrils above trembling moist lips. The abundance of floral breaths, colors, and shapes overwhelms and plumps my wrinkled soul. I imagine fragrant molecules passing across my lungs into my bloodstream, into every cell of my tired body.
The dry waiting comes to an end, and fruition begins again. Buds, leaves, and a riot of desert flowers pop out in the most surprising ways– pink coronets on a long spine of red yucca; orange trumpet vines; Mexican Bird of Paradise explosions; pomegranate pom-poms; Fuchsia crepe myrtle bursts; luxurious climbing magenta bougainvillea. Oh, if they could only paint sound the way they paint the desert landscape! What a symphony of colors that would be, embarrassing Debussy or Mahler, Vivaldi or Haydn. Diaphanous desert lily blossoms dizzily descend into a lilac carpet below them. Mighty ants haul the helpless petals away into their subterranean colonies. Honeybees vibrate the hot air while daylight lasts so it sounds like water is running steadily in an unseen artery. Liberace inspired hummingbirds flit back and forth from bush to flower to trees, ignoring their sugar water mannequin stand.
It’s a feast from dawn till twilight, when the nighthawks and owls surveil the ground, and bats patrol the air with their batty radar. The quail have sequestered their golf ball babies in the draping cholla for the night. In the morning hours sparrows, finches, doves, warblers, and the occasional oriole plunder the thistle seed tray and bully one another for front row seats at the fountain or feeder tube. Mockingbirds swoop by boldly, and then begin their cacophony on a dead branch. Vivacious, audacious, and unstoppable. So full of life that they thanklessly sing other birds’ songs.
Blue bellied lizards do pushups on warm rocks, while shiny five-striped skinks skitter in and out of ground cover. All living things are so busy just being alive; their constant motion spirals out from one drop of rain that feeds the root of a honeysuckle; that attracts the bees; that pollinate every flower they investigate, trading fertility for sips of nectar. Even in a single saguaro bloom a village of bees, flies, and gnats suck out their sustenance while the silent sentry saguaro smiles blissfully, hoping for an arm to grow one day from the fecund footsteps of the insects. It’s a dance of reciprocal need meeting. I’m left with open mouthed awe.
Yes, even deserts breathe… and change comes. Despite years of drought and searing high temperatures, the inevitable change comes with the monsoon rains that will sustain this glorious tapestry of wild shapes, colors, sounds, and scents. But you dare not touch any desert thing. Even the tiniest weed will pierce your skin. Some cactus or bougainvillea will pierce the sole of your shoes. Don’t touch. Just be touched by the sight of a bobcat below the window sill; coyotes in the cross walk; or a herd of smelly, snorting javelinas crunching prickly pear cactus on the other side of your wall.
In life also, there are times of humid transitions where, in the moment it takes a silk vested hummingbird to tilt and zoom away, you are suddenly standing at the end of an airport escalator with your suitcases glued to the terrazzo floor. The icy freedom of choice returns with a jolt. Life on the level treadmill is safe and secure, however narrow it may be. When life explodes again in all its overwhelming phantasmagoric wonder, breathe in reciprocal gratitude for the gift… and step into the tapestry one heartbeat at a time.
I often read a couple of books intermittently due to being a member of two book-based peer groups– one that is comprised of retired mental health professionals, and the other a group of friends from high school and college days. On top of that “semi-required reading” I usually have a novel or some other book that holds my interest more than the drone of the evening news. Now, it’s not too surprising when a piece of one book echoes a piece of the others; however, in the most recent overlapping reads I have found an echo of an echo of a treasure trove of truths.
The three books that have woven an apologetic tapestry together in my receptive brain are these–
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (non fiction)
How Do You Live?, by Genzaburo Yohino (fiction)
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey (mostly non fiction).
The faith they defend is the essence of what being human is.
I’ve posted on Braiding Sweetgrass previously. It’s the longest of the three and the most detailed interweaving of Indigenous culture, botany, existentialism, politics and poetry. It teeters on the edge of dystopia as our Western materialistic/capitalistic consumerism devours the planet; the planet given to us by Mother Earth. The author first paints an idyllic picture of Native American life before the intrusion of Westerners and their avaricious value system, based on private property and greed. Like many other books I’ve read about the tragedies foisted upon Native Americans, the author describes the disrespect and destruction of Native culture, and the attempts to disappear the First People by force, coercion, neglect, and government manipulations. You know, the treaties that were never honored? The Trail of Tears. The Indian schools. The denial of citizenship until 1929. The ridiculous, debasing caricatures in films and media. The fractional measure of a full-blooded and thus entitled Native person; primarily used to deduct the total number of rightful Native people and diminish their numbers and power. AKA, genocide light.
Native knowledge and wisdom were discredited and overrun by European scientism and Christian religion. Instead of planting in mounds of three complementary seeds, known as the three sisters– corn, squash, beans– Europeans planted in straight, monoculture rows that deplete the land over time. Instead of taking only what was needed and never more than half of a natural resource, Europeans depleted forest, stream, soil, and water. Instead of being stewards of other living things imbued with spirits, Europeans exploited the objectified natural world with their manifest destiny philosophy. “What is ours is ours, and what is yours is ours.” Once land was declared private property, then individual owners could buy, sell, rape, pillage, pollute, and obliterate “their” land with no regard to any moral obligations or future needs. The Europeans’ highest good was the greatest commodity output of a pasture or forest, that is, until it was wasted. Commodified natural resources were extracted until there were no more.
Kimmerer gives beautiful example after example of how Indigenous people did things in their environments and contrasts those examples with the devouring of environments by the White invaders who had God, guns, and the law on their side. A law and God who conveniently disenfranchised the original stewards of the land. The capitalist commodification of animals, plants, water, woodlands led to depletion and destruction of these very things. In my mind at least, the Western obsession with possession destroyed the very object of their desire. It would be comparable to cutting a Rembrandt from its museum frame in order to possess it exclusively; thus, no one else can see the cultural treasure. The Native people had a mythical monster named Windigo who symbolized this insatiable human trait of avarice. By any name, truly Windigo is alive and well in our times… strip mines, coal slurry ponds, toxic land fills, industrial pollution, climate change due to man’s monstrous carbon foot prints, and more.
In How Do You Live? Yohino focuses more on human nature and social interactions than on the nonhuman landscape. Still, powerful lessons emerge as echoes of Braiding Sweetgrass. The main character, seventh grader Copper, interacts with his wise uncle, who tries to teach him how to be a great man. Beginning with astronomy and physics, he points out that early people incorrectly thought the sun revolved around the earth, an early example of anthropomorphic reasoning.
“Human beings have a natural tendency to look at and think of things as if they were always at the center.” In a larger context, he goes on to say, “In this way we learn to consider all sorts of things with our home at the center.” And inevitably people choose that “… which betters their own circumstances“.
“When people judge their own affairs with only themselves at the center, they end up unable to know the true nature of society.“
Ultimately, Copper is put to the test that requires integrity, courage, and action. He fails due to his fear and weakness… but he is still a boy in training for manhood.
Unlike the clash of cultures in Braiding Sweetgrass, all of the characters in How Do You Live? are Japanese, but they differ in their socioeconomic status. Here again is the artificial distinction of superiority, but this time it is within one’s own supposedly homogenous ethnicity. Higher status upper classmen bully lower status underclassmen, and Copper learns about real and false value, based on true and false assumptions. His philosophical uncle teaches him how to think more clearly, to follow the evidence toward what makes humans human. The ultimate lesson in both of these books, I suppose, is the idea that humanity flows in a current of progress; that the present and future rest on the shoulders of the past, the elders, the spirits. Satisfaction and harmony do not come from consuming but from stewarding one’s gifts with gratitude and reciprocation. The same lessons apply to human nature and nonhuman nature. Life is a gift to be given, not a possession to be hoarded.
Then there is the curmudgeonly Edward Abbey. His conflict is between human nature and the pristine wilderness. He was a park ranger in the Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Desert Solitaire is a chronicle of his interactions with pure water, wind, fire, animals, snakes, and the vast desert area of southern Utah. His is a harsh cautionary tale, though. He clearly dislikes the course of so called human progress and “Industrial Tourism”. He knows a lot about everything– weather, geology, botany, history, politics, music, art, foreign language, philosophy. The rough and crude stories he tells of ranchers and tourists and cowboys are seasoned with all of his literate references. He is a highly educated man who, rather ironically, rails against the society that educated him. Like the two previous reads, Abbey makes a distinction between culture and civilization.
“Civilization is the wild river; culture, 592,000 tons of cement. Civilization flows; culture, thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.“
With a great deal of cynicism and anger Abbey rails against institutions and organizations that “accumulate and tend to drag down the advance of life.” This same sentiment is expressed by Copper’s uncle in How Do You Live? as he explains the essence of greatness in mankind, with Napoleon as the object lesson. “In the course of history, many people arise and do many different things, but ultimately, if what they do is not consistent with the flow of that current (progress), all the accomplishments of any one person will, finally and fleetingly, fall to ruin.“
Though I did not read them in this order, I would suggest reading How Do You Live? first; Desert Solitaire second; and finish with Braiding Sweetgrass. Why, you ask? Well, the first posits the critical question; the second gives cautionary tales of the loss of the natural world due to man’s ignorance and insatiable greed; the last braids these two threads together and offers a sliver of hope and restoration. Kimmerer puts a name to the horrible monster that consumes and destroys, only to grow hungrier and more desolate. It is Windigo. This mythical Native monster is still raging today in Ukraine, Yemen, the Koreas, China, Russia, Haiti, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and your home town as well.
Metaphorically only, Kimmerer’s Native stories tell that the antidote to Windigo is to feed it buckthorn tea, which causes it to purge up all that it devoured– “coins, coal slurry, clumps of sawdust from my woods, clots of tar sand, and the little bones of birds. He spews Solvay waste, gags on an entire oil slick. When he’s done, his stomach continues to heave but all that comes up is the thin liquid of loneliness.” And you might be tempted to cheer for the defeat of this monster, but the myth continues. The narrator gives Windigo willow tea and strawberries to mend its heart and soothe its wretchedness with all the gifts of nature of the natural world that he destroyed– pine, pecans, spruce roots, witch hazel, cedars, silverbells, and maple. In the final act of mercy and compassion, the narrator retells the origin story to Windigo, and restoration seems possible.
Finally, know that these are not merely book club suggestions. Rather, they are a portal to another way of living. Not road signs or GPS directions. No. More an irresistible melody in the woods, a birdsong that one follows with hope and joy pulsing toward the true current, the Way of reciprocal giving and gratitude. Kimmerer’s final thought is this: “Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.“
We’ve had a bit of company over the past three weeks or so. It’s refreshing to share the abundant beauty and blessings of Tucson with others who appreciate them. I am reminded of the big lesson that Chris McCandless learned too late in the biographical tale Into The Wild. At the end of his existential haj, and near the end of his young life, he came to realize that happiness is not real unless it is shared. If you’ve read the book or watched the movie, you know he wound up poisoning himself accidentally in an abandoned city bus that functioned as a hunting cabin in Denali Park, Alaska. His luck ran out when spring rains trapped him away from the society he fled. Ironic, tragic, epic cautionary tale for the ages. When his coma of idealism broke, he wanted to come home to the comfort of human nature; but the harsh realities of nature cut him off.
He had run away from the pain and hypocrisy that he perceived in his own parents and their society. Seems his father felt entitled to have two families at the same time. McCandless’ story is an inverse telling of The Prodigal Son parable. In this version it is the Father who is prodigal, and it’s the pure hearted young man who seeks moral truth and beauty. Upon graduation from Emory University, he gave away his trust fund and burned what cash he had left when he abandoned his car in the desert. Transformed, shriven from his upper middle class privilege, he took on the name Alexander Supertramp, and began a pure pursuit… of what he didn’t know. Perhaps his genuine self as he hitchhiked around the U.S.A., following the north star like an almost wise man in the wilderness; he finally arrived in the wilderness of Alaska. Though wherever he had visited, he was well regarded and folks wanted him to stay. They warned him of the risks in the wilderness. However, he seemed to have an appointment with ice cold destiny. In many ways, he gave himself away to idealism, the kind that is eventually deadly.
Idealism is great until it isn’t. The isn’t part begins at the edges where the ideal, which does not exist, rubs against the real, which does; the line between what we wish for and that which we can never possess. Chris naively miscalculated the perils of hermit survival life in the wilderness. Even when he was fortunate enough to shoot big game, flies covered its bloody corpse, denying him the harvest.
Educated adolescents aren’t the only idealists in the world. Around the globe we see nationalism, tribalism, and religious zealotry carving up the planet, one apostate at a time. A recent editorial by Nicole Hemmer nails this bizarre nostalgia for an ideal that never was, based on Soviet style history. As she describes her experience within the retirement community in Florida known as The Villages…like Disney World, built on fantasy…
“This is a two-step historical fantasy: first creating a false past and then evoking a deep longing to return to it. And of course, it is not just an elaborate fantasy meant to sell real estate — it’s the political fantasy neatly encapsulated in the phrase, Make America Great Again. It is both manufactured and weaponized nostalgia.“
In the passionate pursuit of what never did exist, this cult of nostalgia gulps down gallons of the latest reactionary political Kool Aid theories.
Referencing John Hodgman, Hemmer sums up,
From Greek roots that translate to “return home” and “pain,” nostalgia is an ache for something you cannot have — a return to the past — made more acute by the knowledge that you once had it. It is not a memory fondly recalled but a sense of loss and grief that can easily curdle into resentment and bitterness — particularly if you believe that what you lost was unjustly taken from you and that you deserve to have it back.
Notice the spices that energize this complex emotion called nostalgia– loss, grief, resentment, bitterness, and injustice. Bosnia, Russia, Germany, Iran, our own Civil War and Indian massacres, Yemen, North Korea, and the list goes on and on. Someone somewhere wants to Make Islam Great Again, or Russia, or fill in the blank. Corrupting history and controlling mass education prepares the way for the Great Deception. Limiting the media to only state run outlets actuates the state or tribe for emotional cloud seeding, where the leaders sow confusion and disinformation until toxic actions rain down on desperate souls. The harvest is a highly energized, even manic, cult following that is ready to die for false ideas, or better yet, ready to exterminate those who are not true believers. Global warming seems to coincide with global intolerance and accompanying incendiary rhetoric, spilling over in hot and sticky bloodshed. Together these forces will bring the flaming whirlwind of apocalypse.
The Rubicon that is crossed, so it seems to me, is the devaluing of the lives of the other groups. In Mynamar it was/is the Rohingyas. Today it’s the Ukrainians and Palestinians. In the past it was native people around the globe, and the Jews of course. Just Google genocides and you will find the top 30+ mass murders in history. Russia has the gold medal in this sport by a long shot, just so you know. Pure hearted folks have tried to expose and end genocides along the bloody way. They have often been mocked, jailed, poisoned, and martyred because they did not gargle with a craven state’s nostalgia speech wash and spew the fantasy tales of the state.
Hemmer continues in her editorial…
The fiction of nostalgia is politically important because it disguises a desire for power as a longing for the past. It creates a justification: We have a right to power because it was ours before. And that justification excuses all kinds of behavior. What’s a few illicit votes, or an insurrection, if they set the world right again?
The glorious end justifies the wicked means, dontcha know?
Refusing the invitation to sleepwalk with lemmings becomes dangerous, especially when one considers 82% of White Americans are gun owners. I know that many folks have the old .22 caliber rifle they shot squirrels with in their youth. Or they have great grandpa’s black powder rifle over the mantle. That’s not what concerns me. I have a .22 magnum rifle with a scope that hangs on a rack in my garage. Like the golf clubs below it, only dust touches them both. Nope, it’s the AK’s and high volume clips for 9mm guns in the hands of hot headed cultists that concern me. Folks filled with fear who live by conspiracies, beyond reason, cannot be stable actors. I fear that 2020 was simply the dress rehearsal for this next election cycle’s turmoil and tyranny, where bullets supersede all ballots. “Weaponized nostalgia”, what a term.
It’s tempting to consider going into the wild– New Zealand, Switzerland, some remote island in Micronesia, way off the grid. However, every human is on the grid when it comes to nuclear and chemical weapons, as well as global warming. Our communal fate hangs instead on coming out of the wild, the wasteland wilderness where Cain wandered. Though every human being can play a tired victim card to justify their cruelty to others, ultimately our victory, if it comes at all, will come through forgiveness and grace. The answer does not lie in a return to some mythical past. Rather, it can only exist in the ugly, imperfect, messy future where courage and compassion intersect, and we come out of the wild.
Sometimes the topic is just staring you in the face. In this case the very number of this post is also the topic. Some memories are laced with trauma and so become seared into the witness’s psyche– scars, tattoos, gnarly burls. I have a few of these “Worstest Hits”. Many happened while I was in school somehow, which figures since I spent most of forty years either as a student or a teacher or both. Let me crank up the WABAC machine, and make sure that Mr. Peabody and Sherman are on board for this time trek.
1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Air raid sirens went off that year, my first grade. I wore a card on my white shirt that stated which bus I rode back and forth to St. Louis Catholic School in Groveton. It had the letter F on it. However, some adult put me on Bus E by mistake on my first day of school. One of my older brothers had to gather me up and get me on Mrs. Harris’s Bus F to Virginia Hills. That was not the trauma, no. It was just typical scary stuff for a six year old who had never been away from home before. By October of that year, however, we little lambs were practicing air raid drills in the hallway. Older boys called these exercises the “kiss your ass goodbye” drills because we had to curl up in little balls against an interior hallway wall, and then cover up our heads with our hands. Yep, that was the plan against nuclear warheads in Cuba, aimed at nearby D.C. Fortunately, the Crisis ended without the world being destroyed. No more ear piercing air raid sirens… but you never forget their blaring sonic booms.
1963, JFK’s assassination blew away the country. I was in second grade at St. Louis. The first Catholic U.S. president’s head was shattered by a whack job, who was himself assassinated by a cop dying of cancer. Murky waters indeed. Upheaval followed what had been 1,000 days of Camelot’s youthful promises. Whatever innocence the world possessed was irrevocably destroyed. The elite movie star first couple were replaced by a homely, drawling man who rarely read a book. LBJ lifted his beagles by their ears in affection. “My fellow Amurrricans…” he would intone at every speech. Even as a kid I thought of lifting LBJ by his deaf ears as he muddled around in the Vietnam War.
1968, the double play happened that spring of my sixth grade year. By then I was in the local public elementary school one block from my house. I had a paper route for The Evening Star newspaper. It was April and I was collecting for the month around supper time. A roar went up as I knocked on a customer’s door. Whooping and celebratory hollering rose up on the other side of the door. The man of the house opened the door with a PBR, a smile, and a wife beater tee shirt. “They finally got that nigger!” he exulted. I didn’t know what he meant until I got to my home, and found out that truly the world had gone mad. Vietnam raged; anti-war and anti-racism protests were common; and we were putting men into space. Maybe nukes in 1962 would have led to a better outcome after all. The new normal was still abnormal, never to return to the quiet, safe suburban life again.
No time to reset the psychological breakers, though. All over America cities were set on fire in reaction to MLK’s assassination. Curfews and the National Guard were installed in the streets of major U.S. cities. Meanwhile there was a presidential campaign going on. Humphrey, Bobbie Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and other Democrats were running because LBJ knew he could not be reelected and withdrew from consideration. Nixon waited in the fall of ’68, full of double talk on the war and the economy. The last week of school that year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the basement of a Los Angeles hotel. What? My class had been following the campaign, the first one that I had ever been aware of. Darkness covered my hope and faith. I knew I did not want to have anything to do with the so called “real world” of war, hate, riots, and murder. I did not know then that I was getting into the check out line of anti-authority.
1980, John Lennon was murdered the night before I drove to college classes at Shippensburg University. My wife and I had moved out of Northern Virginia to get away from the hyper-manic lifestyle of D.C. I heard the news on my A.M. radio in my 1970 square-back Volkswagen. I wept. Why were my heroes being murdered? And who was next? Ronald Reagan was nearly killed that same school year in D.C., surrounded by police and Secret Service officers. Uhh, how about the Pope?
1984, Lisa, my second child died at birth. No lungs due to a diaphragmatic hernia that could have been repaired in utero if anyone had an inkling. The darkness was unrelenting. The incomprehensible external world was seeping into my personal world like radioactive sewage.
1985, my dad died the same week we moved into our new house. It did not hit me for a couple of years. One night I was watching Field of Dreams on our old videotape player with my wife. The unconscious triggers kept piling up– baseball, Boston, father/son dynamics, the odd ball guy from elsewhere theme. A giant squid of repressed grief shot up my throat. I gagged and sobbed and vomited old pain by the gallon. I had no idea what was happening to me in this catharsis. Fortunately my wife did. “You never shed a tear for your dad. You’ve just held it in for two years now.” Of course she was right. But just to be certain that I was not crazy, I rented the video a week later and watched it again. I had the same reactions at the same moments in the movie, confirming to me that I was indeed triggered into old grottoes of grief.
1999, April 20, Hitler’s birthday, Columbine. Schools across the country began to harden their policies and lock their doors after the Trench Coat Mafia murdered their fellow students and a teacher in Colorado. In some ways it felt like the Middle Ages as we huddled together inside the walls of our school castles. Outrage and horror rushed out of politicians’ mouths until their bombastic balloons deflated. Nothing could change the NRA’s grip on guns and ammo. Nothing. Schools were locked down. What had been a routine for years– former students stopping in to visit from the high school–was done and over. The mindless war of chaos, hate, and murder had come to our public schools.
2001, September 11, a day of infamy. I recall it clearly. Second period, the reading teacher came in to tell me that two planes had hit the twin towers in Manhattan and there was absolute chaos across the television. Then it broke loose. The facts came in spurts and drips. These were hijacked planes used as missiles. We were under attack, yes, but from whom? Parents began to pick their children up as everyone sat mesmerized in front of a television or radio. The Pentagon plane crash was not all that far away, and Camp David was just over the mountain. Not to mention the underground Pentagon, Site R, near Fairfield. Students, parents, and teachers were stunned into numbness. This was like the JFK assassination all over again. I recall one reporter mentioning that Giuliani had ordered 10,000 body bags… but the bodies were vaporized. Numbly I looked up the death toll from Pearl Harbor. MMMMM, this attack would surpass that total easily.
Something odd lingered that entire school year. I believe the kids were scared and much more compliant and cooperative than previous years kids had been. Shock and horror continued to be just below the surface, so it seemed to me. Several parents were stranded at airports, unable to fly anywhere for at least two weeks. At my home the only sounds from the sky were the F16’s circling Camp David endlessly. Life was already in broken bits and shards. 9/11 ground those remains into powder, never to be restored or resurrected. I cried for the lost, for those left to grieve to the end of their lives, for my children and this age of horror.
2002, in the fall of the year The Beltway Sniper had his weeks of infamy. Once again, the fear in our students was palpable. Their world had already been shattered once. Mine was gone like volcanic ash that made for pretty sunsets in other lands. The thing about trauma is that is weighs so much more than other experiences. The usual days pop up like popcorn and fill up empty lives. But trauma is uranium that just won’t quit pulsing, silently and invisibly, as it passes through all defenses, melting its victims into the black ink of forgetfulness, the Greek underworld River Lethe, erasing their histories.
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