The snug warmth of him behind her granted her sleep. She hadn’t known how desperately she needed the sleep of trusting someone. Her hair spread out across the pillow behind her. She woke to him gently touching the strands. She shivered at the sweet intimacy of someone playing with her hair. It centered her in a way she did not realize she had been missing.
He leaned in to whisper to her, a game both of them loved playing. “I figured out the line you need to start your book,” he softly whispered. No one else could hear them. The absurdity of whispering amused them both. Now that they started the game, they wanted to play it out for a thousand innings.
“There are no tiny paragraphs. The smallest increment of spoken intimacy is the phrase ‘I love you.’ Yet it can contain the volume of a lifetime if spoken.”
She turned slightly toward him. “Aren’t you romantic? It’s barely six, and you’re already turning the page.” He laughed.
“I got a head start, watching you this morning.” He leaned in, kissed her quickly on the lips, and then sprang from the bed with his customary energy. He briefly touched her dress from the day before. It hung on the armoire. “Thanks,” he whispered as his fingers caressed the hem.
As he neared the bathroom door, he heard a subtle whisper. He turned. She had pulled the cover off.
“We have more to talk about if you’re interested.” She winked and smiled at him. He jumped to the bed from where he was standing. She howled with laughter and surprise as his landing bounced her off the bed and back.
Another typical day and another neither one of them would take for granted.
I’ve written about a range of topics on this blog. I started it to share my life and to give anyone interested a chance to see me. (I’ll skip over the revisionists for now.) I’m not a great writer, but I am a constant one.
Instead of jumping in with a post that follows the course of this post, I’ll start with this one as a ‘heads up’ for everyone.
We all have thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that might not withstand scrutiny. It’s a rarity to find someone who can dish it out without regard to where it lands. That’s in part because we find ourselves trapped by the lives we lead. Words we say can leave love and understanding. They can also leave confusion and hurt. The best writers with the best intentions often wound the people they love. Imagine being a hack like me and wanting to express what feels like eloquence only to discover that I’ve scattered sand into someone’s eyes or clouded their heart.
We all do this in the course of our day. Usually though, it’s spoken and fleeting. Writing this way solidifies the reality of whatever is being expressed.
I know I harm often already. I know I do. I apologize. It’s safer to say nothing, to leave no trail behind, and to play it safe. Much of our lives is predicated on doing this each day. It’s part of the social construct. It’s folly to argue otherwise. It is also why so much of our lives get lost; we’re afraid for people to know us intimately or beyond the limits we impose on ourselves. While many people might know slivers of us, there’s just no way we’re going to be enlightened enough to feel unburdened.
I am going to venture out onto a few limbs. A few of them are going to break. I don’t bend them with malice or arrows designed to hit targets. People are not targets. They have their complexity. I don’t try to wound those on my overlaps. It still remains that my story is mine to tell.
Before venturing further, remember that you’re reading voluntarily. Something I’ve written must interest you because you come back to read more as I share it. I value the idea of you, whoever you are, in my head by consuming these words. You’re likely going to get uncomfortable with some things I write – and maybe get an unfamiliar feeling associating the words I’ll write with who I am. I understand.
And so it begins.
In the future, you’ll read a wider breadth of things about me. I will provide adequate warning on each post so that you easily avoid being uncomfortable, if such things are uncomfortable.
Marilyn asked me to memorialize one of her beloved Dad’s favorite sayings.
I told her I was making supper and she said she was about to go shower.
“I smell like a keg of buttholes,” she wrote, citing her dad, who was a poet in the truest sense of the word.
It is impossible to imagine what a keg of buttholes might smell like without immediately arriving at a conclusion.
Though he’s now departed, let’s remember his contribution to the English language by incorporating, “Smells like a keg of buttholes” into our vocabulary.
I routinely go through my colossal draft lists and discard troves of ideas and actual stories. I’d discard the computer, but they get expensive. When I was writing several of my Elm Springs stories, I kept skipping over the “Man Parked In Pond” account due to the incongruous absurdity of the title.
What might amuse you more is that I’ve seen several cars in ponds in my lifetime. Both stupidity and drinking were involved in all cases. I think there’s a universal truth to that last sentence. I can proudly say that I was in the car on separate occasions while BOTH my Mom and Dad drove into ponds, ditches, or swamps. It’s one thing to go into a small pond, but if you’ve ever seen how deep and snake-filled some irrigation ditches and swamps can be, you’re not enthusiastic about getting into one. At night. Snakes do not like to cuddle.
I am not afraid of snakes until they get into my underwear. Call it a phobia if you have to.
When I first worked at a nursing home in Springdale after high school, I often ran home before I got my second car. My first car, a great one given to me by my brother Mike as he shockingly went into the Army, was stolen by my Dad and sold on my cousin’s car lot. The irony is that I worked on the side at my cousin’s garage to earn credit toward the next car.
It was only 7-8 miles home from work. Those runs were interesting as hell at times, just as they were when I started from home and ran elsewhere. It was different back in the day. People drove drunk a LOT. Country roads were littered with cars at night. Saturday morning and Sunday morning was a great time to see the places on the road where people were probably driving too fast. Or drunk. One of the neighbors near where I lived often stopped and “borrowed” things from the cars he found on the side of the road at night. Thinking back on it, it was impossible for him to get caught. This is in part due to the visibility of approaching lights and the failure of most drunks to inventory their possessions, much less know for certain that they are driving their own car home at night.
Note to civil engineers: if you want to reduce unsafe and drunk driving, put a buttload of stupidly sharp curves in the road. Or a five-mile stretch of road that is 100% roundabouts. The Arkansas educational system didn’t adequately prepare most people for sensible traffic devices.
If you’ve driven the side roads from Springdale to Elm Springs, you’re aware of the sharp turns everywhere. Many of those turns sit next to barbed wire fencing. Or worse, ponds. While I didn’t see the accident when it happened, I was running home when I heard brakes and skidding, followed by sounds that didn’t make sense to me. It was after midnight, so I couldn’t imagine who or what had crashed. As I ran along a sloping S-curve, I saw taillights. As I neared, I could see that the barbed wire fencing had been torn open. The truck that went through the fence went a few feet into the pond. While I was sure I was going to try to help, I didn’t know how exactly. I heard someone drunkenly mumbling. In today’s terms, it sounded a lot like Kenny Chesney singing any of his Top 40 hits.
I remember being glad it wasn’t my Dad. He’d traversed many a fenceline while driving drunk. More than once, with me in the vehicle. Good times! After one particularly bad accident through a cow field, he kept repeating the same joke: “I was looking for a good steak.” His sense of humor was legendary when he wasn’t trying to kill someone.
The man in the truck managed to get the door open. He was cursing in drunk language at that point. Though I couldn’t see much, I realized he was trying to get into the truck’s bed from the cab so he wouldn’t step into the shallow water. I waited. Sure enough, a huge splash followed as he fell off trying to get over the side of the truck. He set the world record for putting the lord’s name in vain for the next couple of minutes. He staggered out of the pond.
“Who the f### are you?” he asked me.
“The ghost of drunks future,” I quipped. I wasn’t scared at all to mock any drunk I didn’t know.
This tendency got me into some precarious predicaments through the years, including one incident when a drunk tried to throw a mostly-empty pitcher of beer on me, and I yelled, “Ball 4!.” My shout made him angry when it dawned on him that people in the bar laughed. I had reluctantly accompanied my roommate Ray to go shoot pool at a bar that now no longer exists in the Midway area. When the drunk acted as if he would chase me, I dashed to the back door, opened it, and then slammed it. I stepped out of sight into the filthy supply closet near the back door. The drunk ran outside, thinking I went out first. We laughed our asses off about that for a long time. The best part of this story is that he didn’t remember getting mad or running out the back to chase me upon his return.
We didn’t have cell phones back then. There was a payphone at a small store a couple of bends of the road away from the pond. But I wasn’t going to accompany a drunk for that kind of walk. “Go knock on that door,” I told him and pointed to a brown house a couple of hundred feet away. “They’ll help you.” I waited, and eventually, he stumbled his way in that direction. I left out here that the owners of the pond and the house were the same people. I ran the rest of the way home, amused at my cleverness. I found out that the owners made the driver completely fix their fence and make restitution. Had I not run by that night, I don’t think he would have. And I wouldn’t be able to brag I watched a grown man drunkenly try to climb over the edge of his truck and then fall into a pond.
And so, I leave you with “Man Parked In a Pond.” It’s not Faulkner or Conroy, but it amuses me.
Judy’s eyes opened to see the projector clock on the opposite wall indicating 4:45 a.m. Before going to bed, she set the bedroom alarm for 5:00 a.m. and her automatic coffee pot in the kitchen for 5:15 a.m. Since it was Christmas morning, she needed to complete her to-do list before Jake scrambled out of his pillow fort. They spent at least thirty minutes last night, carefully building his sleeping fort to his precise specifications. He wanted to ensure that Santa wouldn’t find him awake in the dark. After getting Jake to stop chatting and to try to sleep, Judy pulled the presents for Jake from the trunk of her car and tucked them under the tree. It would be an austere Christmas this year. She hoped Jake wouldn’t mind.
Judy succumbed to the warmth of the bed; she pulled the comforter tightly under her neck.
The last year was beyond difficult. Judy’s ex-husband Richard spent the first four months of the year denying he had abused her. When he discovered that Judy’s decision to flee him was going to last, he turned his efforts to the court to take Jake from her. Even Judy’s mom testified against her. For reasons she still didn’t understand, the judge awarded her sole custody and granted her permission to move away. By September, she had a new apartment, a new job, and a new list of fears. Judy and Jake were on their own in every sense of the word. For ten years old, Jake somehow avoided the anguish others kids might have experienced through such a traumatic year. Judy found herself holding her breath tensely, waiting to see Jake act out. He never did.
At 4:50, Judy imagined she could smell coffee. If she overslept the alarm, the coffee always roused her from the bed. Single parents had to use a bit of creativity to keep their lives manageable. Imagining her first cup of coffee, she realized that she needed to pee. She pulled the comforter over her head as if doing so would erase the imaginary scent of coffee from her nose and the need to go to the bathroom. When she got the edge of the comforter tucked behind her head, she heard the soft melodies of “All I Want For Christmas” by Celine Dion. Most people preferred Mariah Carey, but not Judy. Celine was the voice of her angel. Deciding that she wasn’t going to quiet her mind or rest, Judy crawled from her warm bed and walked through the small dark bedroom to the tiny bathroom attached to it. As soon as she sat, she distinctly heard the music volume increase dramatically. Without a doubt, Celine’s voice played in the living room. Judy tried to finish more quickly, which only increased her need to go longer. As most moms discover, there is no such thing as quiet time, even in the bathroom. There’s always a bang on the door or an immediate need to address.
Judy quickly put on her Santa pajama bottoms and walked out into the living room. Inexplicably, the small tree next to the front window was fully lit and twinkling. The stereo next to the small television was on. Celine’s voice streamed from it. Judy walked across the narrow living room to Jake’s room. Opening the door, she went to the pillow fort and peered inside. Jake wasn’t there.
Judy quickly backed out of the room and peeked into the front bathroom. Also empty.
She turned and slid the sliding door to the kitchen open.
Jake sat at the small plain wood table. A cup of coffee sat in front of him. Next to that, a simple red box tied with twine.
“Merry Christmas, Mom!” Jake shouted as he ran over and hugged Judy around the waist. Surprised, Judy stood and rubbed her son’s hair back from his face. After a few seconds, he pulled away and reached over to grab the cup to hand to Judy. “I made this just the way you like it, Mom!”
“When did you learn to make coffee, Jake?” she asked.
“Oh Mom. That’s what YouTube is for! Plus, this is your Christmas!” Jake’s smile was as big as Judy had ever seen it. Though doubtful, Judy sipped the coffee. It was perfect. She laughed, realizing that Jake just volunteered to make coffee for her for the next ten years. “It’s delicious and so much better when someone else makes it!” She winked at him in the way that he loved.
“What are you doing up so early, son? It’s barely five.”
“Mom, I asked Santa to give you a good Christmas. He told me that I should give you a good one. I got you a gift.” Jake reached for the box on the table and pushed it toward Judy.
“How did you manage this, Jake? Do you even have money?” Judy laughed. She pulled the top bow loose to work the lid off the box.
“It was easy. I took out the trash every day for Mr. Johnson and agreed to help the building manager for a few months next year. I got Ken’s mom to get the gift at Target. Ken brought me the surprise to school, and I sneaked it home in my backpack. Simple.” He smiled. Judy knew that it had been anything but simple. Such planning for a ten-year-old was impressive. She was going to act delighted no matter what the box contained. It’s a ritual that Moms do instinctively.
Judy lifted the top off the box. She gasped. Inside the box at the bottom was a single ruby earring. Her eyes welled up as she looked at Jake. He sat, watching her, a smile on his face.
“Mom, do you like it?”
She swallowed hard to avoid crying. “Yes, of course!”
“I know that Dad took your Grandma’s ruby earrings and hid them. I could only afford one this year. I’ll get you the other one next year, I promise.”
Judy abandoned all pretense and started sobbing. She sat down hard on the chair across from Jake. Her coffee sloshed and spilled a little as she did so. Jake came around the table and hugged Judy from the side. She grabbed him and squeezed him hard against her.
“I love it, Jake! I love you.” She fumbled to pick up the single ruby earring and put it into her right earlobe. She smiled at Jake.
“Merry Christmas, Mom!”
As Celine continued to soar in the clouds in the background, Jake and Judy, mom and son, sat at the kitchen table laughing. It was a long time coming. In the living room, beneath the tree, Jake’s presents waited.
Love and Christmas were drowning them both. They swam in it.
*
*
Wherever you are and whoever you are, the season is inside you if you’ll permit it to overwhelm you.
J.C. smelled more smoke in the air. He shifted in the porch swing and then flicked the cigarette butt from his left hand out into the yard, where it landed a couple of feet unceremoniously from the empty bean field at the edge of the yard. It was his first cigarette in 50 years. J.C. loved the idea that it would be his last. He remembered his first cigarette when he went to Korea.
Giving up smoking at the request of his beautiful wife Mary was no sacrifice at all. When he met her, she was finishing high school. Her hair was short, as was the fashion in the early 50s. Her nose and elegant profile called to him like the face of no other girl had. They went on four dates even though her father thought J.C. was a delinquent. J.C. indeed dropped out of school in the 9th grade to work. Every penny went to his mom. When J.C. signed up to go to Korea, Mary’s dad Thomas decided that J.C. was good enough for his daughter after all. Before he shipped out, he asked Mary to marry him, with her dad’s blessing. In part due to shrapnel in his leg, J.C. returned sooner than expected. They were married in August 1952, fifty years ago today.
Even though it was over ninety degrees today, J.C. didn’t feel the heat around him. The loose tie around his neck didn’t even feel moist with sweat. It was the second time he wore a tie this year, after swearing he would never put on another one until Hell froze over. He wasn’t sure if he’d been sitting on the swing for five minutes or an hour. Time always played tricks on the porch. He and Mary spent many afternoons there, often just sitting and listening to the insects and the ice cubes dwindle inside the Mason jars Mary loved using as glasses. All of those glasses sat in the cupboard, unused since she passed.
The smoke was getting thicker now. J.C. felt it in his lungs a bit. He continued to look out across the empty field and wonder about the years passing by. Last week, he leafed through the family photo albums with his only daughter Debbie. When she asked if she could copy all the pictures, J.C. laughed. “Lord no, Debbie. Take them and share the stories. I’ll look at them when I come to visit you and the kids.” Debbie heard a catch in his voice but failed to see the tears coalescing at the corners of his eyes. If she had, things might have ended differently. “I’ve got the wedding photo to keep me company.” He pointed across the living room at the black and white wedding picture from the day they were married. It was a beautiful photo. Mary was pointing at the Reverend out of frame and laughing. J.C. stood nearby, worshipping her with his eyes. They had a traditional photograph of them both standing and smiling at the camera. It sat in the bottom of the blanket trunk in the extra bedroom.
Behind him, the smoke was billowing out through the screen door. J.C. heard a window crack from the heat. Time was running short.
He stood up, turned, and pushed the porch swing gently. It rocked back and forth, empty. It would do for a witness.
He walked toward the screen door, opened it, and went inside.
Had you been standing in the yard, you would have seen the heavy front door close behind him. Within a minute, the flames began to consume the house. J.C. was no more. In reality, he hadn’t been since Mary died.
If you are looking for a deep, profane, and funny show that takes a single life and amplifies it to include everyone and everything, “How To With John Wilson” will be a show you need to try. I used the word “profane” so that those who have a problem with a full range of language and visual storytelling will know they will have to grimace a few times. As for me, the juxtaposition of the possibility of everything and anything being said or seen is precisely one of the reasons why I love this show.
While it is rooted in New York City, the delight of this show is in the random connections. I laughed at several strange moments.
Each short episode is allegedly centered on a single topic, but only inasmuch as John Wilson wishes it to be. The fringes are what make the show sublime. The last episode, the one decidedly at the beginning of the epidemic, feels like ancient history and yesterday.
You’ll learn something interesting. You’ll also learn something about yourself.
In a nutshell, it is a show worth watching because it slams the boring pieces of life against a curious eye. We live in a boring, mundane, fascinating, and complicated world.
P.J. O’Rourke said, “Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.”
* Instead of “Hello,” or “How are you?” why not ask this question instead: “Are you happy?” If someone calls you out for it, tell them you recently adjusted your medications. Only brave souls and people who would be awesome at parties will linger after that justification.
The obvious “is happiness the goal of life” nonsense aside, anything that catches a person’s ear beats the usual boring salutation. (Even yodeling, if you like that sort of thing. Just don’t take lessons if the instructor accepts coupons for his tutelage.)
Those who know me hear me say “Terrible!” frequently when someone asks, “How are you?” I often get a genuine laugh from it, especially if I ham it up in tone or volume. Hell, to be honest, I usually laugh first. It’s a spoiler alert at that point. Indeed, many people don’t notice the content of my response. That’s okay. It’s unreasonable to expect most people to notice anything unusual in the scope of an otherwise fill-in-the-blank moment. There’s probably a generalized indictment of society in there somewhere – but you won’t see me making it. (And not just because I detest the word “indictment.” Put the ‘dite’ in there, already.) We’re busy people, on the way to do essential things and argue on the internet about things that don’t affect us in any meaningful way.
By way of experiment, you should try it for yourself. “Terrible!” should be your response. Make it exaggerated. Enough people will laugh for you to be able to say, “I made you laugh.”
Only a real asshole resents a laugh. Lucky for us, most of them work retail.
(I wrote the above quote as a marketing ploy. It seems to be accurate, much in the same way that no matter how many times you nibble on someone’s ear, it is always one time too few.)
Also, if my day, year, or life is temporarily or permanently terrible, it’s unwise to unload that fact onto others needlessly. You’re supposed to save those moments to inflict on your close personal friends and family. That’s what they get for staying inside your orbit. If you read that without realizing it was peckishly funny, you need to switch to decaffeinated coffee.
If you’re feeling adventurous, use “Not hello” in place of “Goodbye” and “Not goodbye” for “Hello.” Other languages have words that mean both “goodbye” and “hello.” If you’re a fan of the phrase, “Good day” can mean both in modern English, even if no one will immediately understand it in both contexts.
If none of those methods suit you, I propose that all your salutations use ONLY consonants. (Sorry, Finland.) If you think that would be hard to do, imagine the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, which has 820 living languages.
If you don’t believe words can work magic and light your mind with fire, consider this: “The problem with sex in the movies is that the popcorn usually spills.”
Since I always work this joke into these conversations, you can also adopt one I stole from a comedian. He says, “DiGiorno,” like the pizza brand, to say both “hello” and “goodbye.” Though the joke is old now, I still laugh most of the time when I use it. I said “DiGiorno” to a doctor this morning, much to my amusement. I’m not sure what he thought I said, but he replied, “Same to you!” with a grin. I’m hoping that it worked itself into his subconscious, and he later opted for pizza for lunch.
One of the things on my bucket list is to be on a ship that’s sinking. I’m going to run up to the Captain and ask him which lifeboat is the non-smoking one.
Back to the “Are you happy?” premise.
I think if you make eye contact and use it enough, you’ll eventually get an answer that is so honest that it surprises you. You might learn something about another person. For example, you might also learn that the person is nuts. But that’s something.
So, I ask you: Are you happy?
I’ll stop and listen either way. I’m hoping you are, and that ridiculous things like the one you’re reading can trigger a smile in your heart. That’s where you spend most of your day, anyway, listening to the narrative of your internal voice. Say “Not hello” to that voice and say something creative and ridiculous to those around you.
It’s 2020. Normal was evicted and displaced by whatever we choose to put there.
P.S. “The last thing I want to do is insult you. But it IS on the list.” – Anonymous
If you want to try a show that I think should be universally loved, this is the one. Each of us will discover something about what we think we know as we watch.
A few years ago, I watched a show that defied me to dislike it: Rectify. It’s still available on Netflix. As many said, it was the best tv show that no one was watching when it first aired.
“It’s the beauty, not the ugly, that hurts the most.” As wounding as this quote was, I laughed when I heard it again this week. Laughter emanates from the recognition of at least a kernel of truth. Though I was prepared for The Stranger scene in Rectify, the wallop it hit me with caught me off guard. If this quote seems strange to you, it is because you didn’t visit the emotional world created in this tv series.
When Daniel violently taught Teddy a lesson about his ignorance of assault, I laughed at that too, even though the lesson was graphic.
Like other shows such as Six Feet Under, Rectify tore through me like a tornado. It uses language and emotion so close to my own inner monologue that I felt like someone strip-mined me a bit to create this show. I learned more from SFU during the second viewing. Rewatching Season 1 of Rectify both amplified and soothed my past life for me. For those not exposed to brutality, it may seem counterintuitive to find redemption in seeing someone else suffer to find it.
Along with books like “The Prince of Tides” or “A Prayer For Owen Meany,” I add “Rectify” to the list of great works that line the perimeter of the sublime for me. If you watch “Rectify” with a keen eye, you will see bits of me hidden in there.
Watching the show again, I must admit that a couple of the scenes almost led me to burst into tears. I think it’s because I recognized the beauty in the struggle. We’re never the same person twice.
Here’s a link from something I wrote a few years ago:
A December moon at 4 a.m. is so substantially dissimilar and divergent from all others in part because we, as beholders at that hour, see ourselves differently. Our approaching day waits without burden, even if we’ve borrowed our troubles from the previous day and packed them inside today’s purse. This year, more than most, brought unwelcome problems and made somnambulists of us. Oddly, it also brought a duality for some of us, ushering in a fierce determination to be the person inside our own heads.
Someone possessed with an uncanny soul took the picture and shared it with me. That she was up at that hour surprised me. It was her first message to me for the day.
She stood in the kitchen and recognized something ethereal, authentic, and beautiful in the shadows that formed on the floor under her. Most might snap a picture of the moon itself; I think you might agree with me that the echoes and reflections of beauty in our lives often outshine the source. It is a gift to glimpse something previously unseen in the midst of the familiar. I’ve known a few people whose lives sparkle with the ability. They all radiate the same force that hides in the moonlight. Such radiance is difficult to discern by looking directly; we have to turn our heads and observe the consequences of their presence.
Whether she sometimes tries to control the radio or stomp the floorboards too often, she radiates.
She, of course, doesn’t see it.
I whisper words of grace for her, ones petitioning a clear mind and the kind of sleep that few of us find at our easy disposal. Meanwhile, I return these slivers of moonlight to her.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 