Sorting

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When you're recuperating from an illness, you find yourself with time on your hands. If you're like me, you begin to clean and organize things. Photos and receipts and greeting cards pile up over the months and years, and it's nice to go through them once in a while.

Receipts and greeting cards are easy to throw away, but photos are a little more difficult. I find that I've taken too many overexposed photos of Beautiful Scenery over the years, and it's easy to toss most of them in the trash. When there are people in the photos, however, I hesitate, as if they exert some magical hold on me. Might some hypothetical future descendant muse over these photos, wondering at how distant and mysterious we were?

Well, hm. First of all: what descendants? Apart from a few mangy stuffed animals, I have no kids. I keep in touch with a few members of the next generation of my family, but none of them seems impassioned about family history.

Also, the sad truth is that objects like photos are not generally magical. I pull out old theater stubs and concert programs, examine them with regret, and toss them in the trash. They may have been magical for a little when then they were new, but time has taken their magic away. Photos are a little different, but even they lose their immediacy after a few decades.

How do you react when you see a photo of a distant ancestor? Curiosity, maybe; regret that you will never get to know them; sadness that things pass and people die. I think always of those family-reunion photos in which the kids are lying on the floor up front, clowning for the camera, and the older generations stand ranked behind them, with the oldest of all scrunched against the wall in back. I realized some years ago that (without ever quite realizing it) I had suddenly become one of those pale oldsters in the back of the photo - some forgotten great-uncle, what's-his-name, the one who moved to Rhode Island and lived with another man and had no kids.

Forgotten.

Well, hm.

Get to work sorting and labeling those photos, kids!

Maybe someone will remember you after you're gone.

---

Teddy bears

A Tumblr acquaintance, Wooferstl, posted recently that his childhood teddy bear was lost sometime in the 1990s. In its memory, he bought alife-size Costco teddy bear. He posted this photo of himself with CostcoBearrecently:

I know the feeling.

I had a hideously ugly teddy bear when I was a kid. He was stout and had a strange just-been-strangled expression, but I loved him beyond measure.

He lived in my mother’s house for a long time after I left home in the 1970s, but I brought him back to live with me again after her death, and now he sits high up on a bookshelf in my bedroom (with his very own stuffed animal to play with), looking down on the passing scene:

He spent a lot of years in my mother’s basement, seeing nothing but her doing the laundry once in a while. Now he sees me getting ready for work, and coming home and changing clothes. This is at least more interesting for him, I hope.

He is full of something like sawdust. He is not cuddly. But he’s my childhood friend. (I think he belonged to one of my siblings, but I’m not sure. He certainly looks ancient.) He was with me in my childhood – he played with me and slept with me – and now he’s with me again, in my twilight years.

I’d like to pass him along to another child, but he’s not much of a toy; he smells funny, and he’s not cuddly (as I said).

He’s aging, just as I am.

I hope that, when my time comes (not anytime soon, I hope), he'll want to go with me.

I’d like to have him along for the ride.

---

The Old Man of the Mountain

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In 2000, the US Mint issued the New Hampshire quarter. The image on the back shows the Old Man of the Mountain: a cliff hanging off Cannon Mountain that looked like a bearded man’s profile:

Well, on May 3, 2003, the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.

What now? Naturally a state committee was formed to decide.

Did they decide to reassemble it? No. (Wise decision.)

Did they decide to commemorate it? Yes, of course. They’ve put up viewscopes that show what it looks like now (not much), and what it used to look like. (Excellent decision.)

But the stupid thing persists. New Hampshire uses it on its highway signs; if you’re on a state road, you see something like this:

And it’s still on all those quarters, which will be in circulation until Doomsday.

There’s a lesson here somewhere.

Washington is “the evergreen state.” Probably there will be evergreens growing there – some of them, somewhere – even if there’s a catastrophic event. Rhode Island is “the ocean state,” and the ocean ain’t going anywhere.

Here’s an old song (sung by Frank Sinatra) which should have been heeded by the state leaders of New Hampshire:

In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

They’re only made of clay . . . .

---

Called home

---

I’ve had a lot of vivid dreams lately. Almost all of them involve travel in one way or another: airplanes, buses, trains.

And my mother is in almost all of them, and so is my sister Susan, both of whom are long dead.

What’s going on here?

I miss them both. Mom was angry and difficult, but I loved her, and I know I’m very like her. Susan was probably very much like Mom (to be honest), and we fought terribly when we were young, but by the time we were adults we were good friends.

So it’s very natural that I dream of them.

Mom died in 1999; Susan died in 1995. Susan told me, a few months before she died, that she looked forward to seeing our father in heaven when she got there. “But,” she said ominously, “you know who won’t be there.”

I knew whom she meant. “Susan,” I said, “I know. But I’m just as bad as Mom. I’m going where she’s going. Look for me there.”

“Okay,” she said.

I only hear from Mom and Susan through my dreams nowadays. Susan is very loving, and always hugs me (she’s still a little plump, even in heaven). Mom often looks and acts cranky when I encounter her in Dreamland.

I used to see them in my dreams once in a while. Now I see them all the time. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen them almost every night.

Are Mom and Susan trying to tell me something? Are they calling me home?

I wonder.

If this blog suddenly stops, you’ll know that something has happened.

---

Wake

---

A childhood friend of Partner’s passed away recently. We went to the wake.

 

 

I’d met a lot of the people before, as a brother of the deceased had passed away some years ago, and we’d gone to that wake too. But I was amazed that everyone seemed to remember me. “Are you kidding?” Partner said later. “Of course they remembered you. We were the talk of the place the first time. We were the only gay couple there.”

 

 

The deceased was in his coffin, looking as if he’d just drowsed off. His daughter told us: “We made sure he was wearing his casual clothes. We wanted him to be comfortable.” Partner touched his arm as we knelt by the coffin, to say goodbye. A few weeks before, when we’d visited him, the deceased told Partner: “You were my first friend.” I thought that was an extraordinarily wonderful thing to say to someone.

 

 

The family (there were five living siblings, and some spouses, and children, and cousins) were all very warm, and glad to see Partner, and very nice to me. The funeral home was full of laughter: people reminiscing, people telling stories (about the deceased and about all kinds of other things), people reconnecting with one another.

 

 

“We never see each other except at funerals!” people say.

 

 

Ain’t it the truth.

 

 

Wakes and funerals always make me realize how important my friends are.

 

 

Have you said hello to your friends lately? Email, snail mail, Facebook, telephone?

 

 

Get on it.

 

 

Life is shorter than you think.

---

 

Famous last words

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Funny how someone’s always hanging around to jot down the last words of well-known people. 

 

 

These last words fall into (many) categories:

 

 

Incomprehensible: “Moose Indian” (Thoreau).

 

 

Moral / religious: “See in what peace a Christian can die!” (Addison).

 

 

Visionary: “Mozart . . .” (Gustav Mahler).

 

 

Egotistical: “What an artist dies with me!” (Nero).

 

 

Mysterious: “More light!” (Goethe).

 

 

Sardonic: “Are they lighting the fires already?” (Voltaire).

 

 

Stoic: “Livia, remember the days of our married life” (Augustus Caesar).

 

 

But let’s face it: the moment of death is probably very scary.

 

 

So let’s think of the boxer Buddy Baer, who sat up in bed a moment before he died, and said, simply:

 

 

“Oh my god, here I go!”

---

 

 

 

Never, never, never, never, never

---

I made contact with an old friend recently, and she informed me that she intends to climb Kilimanjaro in 2013. Imagine!

 

 

My first thought was: I’d love to do that.

 

 

My second thought was: I’ll never do that.

 

 

And, for the first time in my life, the word “never” suddenly took on a new and terrible meaning.

 

 

I will never use up those stupid greeting cards I bought six years ago.

 

 

I will never see Timbuktu (though I certainly had the chance a long time ago), or Nepal, or Kazakhstan.

 

 

I will never conduct a real symphony orchestra, or win a Nobel Prize, or even a Pulitzer Prize.

 

 

Never, never, never.

 

 

Awful.

 

 

That’s from “King Lear,” isn’t it? The lines that Lear speaks, holding the dead Cordelia in his arms:

 

 

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

 

 

 

I will never return to the house I grew up in; it’s been sold and belongs to strangers now, who have almost certainly changed it beyond recognition.

 

 

I can never revisit my old elementary school; it  burned down a few years ago.

 

 

I will never speak to my late mother or father again, nor to my late sister Darlene from whom I was estranged at the time of her death, nor to my late sister Susan of whom I was very fond.

 

 

Never, never, never, never, never.

 

 

When we’re young, we are full of hope.

 

 

Later, we come to terrible realizations.

---

 

 

The inevitability of mortality

---

I realized, around the age of seven, that I was going to die someday. I spent some awful sleepless nights around that time. I assured myself that, by the time I was an adult, I’d have figured out a way around it.

 

 

Well, I’m fifty-five years old, and I still haven’t figured out a damned thing.

 

 

What a pity that we have to die. What? You don’t like me mentioning it? I know. I don’t like thinking about it.

 

 

But I think it bears thinking about.

 

 

Here are some important philosophers on the topic of the inevitability of death:

 

 

From “Through The Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll:

 

 

 

`Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), `you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.'  

 

 

`And what does it live on?'  

 

 

`Weak tea with cream in it.'  

 

 

A new difficulty came into Alice's head. `Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested.  

 

 

`Then it would die, of course.' 

 

 

`But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully. 

 

 

`It always happens,' said the Gnat. 

 

 

 

Then there’s Bart Simpson: “You gotta get murdered someday.”

 

 

 

But here’s my very favorite, which actually comforts me a little, taken from Ogden Nash’s “Carnival of the Animals”:

 

 

 

At midnight in the museum hall,
The fossils gathered for a ball.
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
A rolling, rattling carefree circus,
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas.
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses.
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil.
“Cheer up, sad world,” he said, and winked.
“It’s kind of fun to be extinct.”

 

 

 

I certainly hope so. I expect to be extinct for a very long time.

---

 

 

Caen

---

Partner and I stayed in the city of Caen, in lower Normandy, while we toured northern France. In the four days we stayed there, we both fell in love with the city. It is modest and charming, and has wonderful medieval structures still standing – the Abbaye aux Hommes and Abbaye aux Dames and Palais Ducal, all built by William the Conqueror, and the St. Pierre church built by William’s grandfather.

 

 

Caen has streets full of shops and bakeries and bistros. We had our best French meal in Caen, at Le Bouchon du Vaugueux.

 

 

Ah, we thought: a real French town, unchanged since the Merovingians.

 

 

But then we talked to the concierge of our hotel.

 

 

It was at the Hotel Kyriad on the Place de la Republique, which I highly recommend to you if you’re ever staying in Caen. It was charming, and it had a wonderful breakfast buffet, and some really nice concierges. Our first was a funny skinny dark-haired guy with glasses, very French, very animated and helpful. Then, after a day or two, he was replaced with a tall blondish Norman-looking fellow with a doleful/cheerful expression.

 

 

On the day we were checking out to go to Paris, I noted a postcard behind the counter, a picture of the hotel in days gone by: LE VILLA DES CLOCHERS, the Belltower Building. The building has no belltowers now, so I asked the tall blond Norman concierge, in my (still halting) French: “Is this a picture of this hotel?”

 

 

He smiled sadly. “Yes and no. Look –“

 

 

It turns out that he was something of a history buff. He pulled out some old photos, from the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. He even had an aerial view of Caen in August of 1944. In it, you could see that the city had been almost completely flattened. “You see,” he said very calmly, “a lot of the old churches survived. Medieval stone – who knows? It stood up. Maybe you saw the Church of St. Etienne-le-Vieux?

 

 

“Across from L’Abbaye aux Hommes?” I said. “We thought it was a ruin -”

 

 

He nodded sadly. “Yes. From World War II. It was left unrepaired, as a reminder of the war. But most of the rest of the city has been rebuilt.”

 

 

“What about the bombs?” I asked.

 

 

He shook his head and smiled. “They estimate that maybe two out of ten are still unexploded. People find them all the time when they excavate or build new foundations for buildings. They have ‘controlled explosions.’”

 

 

Partner and I left Caen about half an hour later via train to Paris, but as we left, we saw the city through new eyes.

 

 

We’d seen Caen as a clean beautiful city, nicely preserved. We hadn’t realized that it had rebuilt so completely.

 

 

How very frail we human beings are, and how frail our creations are: our cities, our civilizations.

 

 

But sometimes, even if they’re destroyed, they can be rebuilt.

 

 

(Somehow this gives me hope. I don’t know.)

---

 

 

Jinx Falkenburg

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The Providence Public Library is full of old unhappy-looking books which obviously haven’t seen the light of day in decades. I like to take them out into the sunshine, and wipe the dust off their covers, and sometimes even peek inside them, to see what people were reading during the Van Buren administration.

 

 

For example: I was strolling down the biography / autobiography aisle the other day when I saw the word JINX on the spine of an oldish-looking book.

 

 

I took it down, and sure enough: it was the autobiography of Jinx Falkenburg.

 

 

What? You’ve never heard of Jinx Falkenburg?

 

 

Jinx was a model in the 1930s. She was Miss Rheingold Beer, and a sort of actress, and a tennis star. She did a lot of USO work during World War II. She married a journalist, Tex McCrary, and after the war, they had a radio show which was broadcast from their very own home. Also they had a TV show for a while in the early 1950s.

 

 

She was very popular in her day. She was pretty in a Rita Hayworth way. She was a raconteur, and told endless stories at a breathless pace, one tumbling on top of the next. The book (whether she wrote it, or whether it was ghostwritten for her) tries to echo her chatty cheerfulness; now, after sixty years, it feels like cocktail conversation that wasn’t really very interesting at the time, and is definitely not very interesting nowadays.

 

 

Also, Jinx knew everyone: Rise Stevens, Bernard Baruch, Paulette Goddard, Pat O’Brien, the Ritz Brothers, the Paleys . . . .

 

 

Yes, I know. Who are these people?

 

 

It’s bad enough that Jinx was a name-dropper. It’s worse now, all these years later, when most of Jinx’s famous friends are just as forgotten as Jinx herself. This is my favorite passage along these lines: “Tex asked a whole group over to “21” for dinner – the Jack Strauses, Joanne Sayres and Tony Bliss, Carl Whimore, the Howard Twins.” I like to think I know who was who in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, and I have no idea who she’s talking about here.

 

 

(But this is a lesson in ephemerality. These were celebrities, not so long ago. And now they’re gone, and forgotten: Jinx, and Tex, and Paulette Goddard, and the Howard Twins.)

 

 

Everyone gets forgotten. Even Jinx and Tex. Even you and me.

 

 

It is a lesson to us all.

---

 

 

In memoriam: Adrienne Rich and Earl Scruggs

---

I’m having a John Berryman moment.

 

 

Berryman, in his archival “Dream Songs,” chronicled the deaths of other poets and writers: William Empson, Delmore Schwartz. 

 

 

Well, two of the poets of my youth have just passed away.

 

 

Adrienne Rich was a feminist confessional poet and essayist. Her writing was rich and powerful, and she inspired legions of other writers.

 

 

Earl Scruggs was a “banjo pioneer,” and partnered with guitarist Lester Flatt to create the early hillbilly / country sound from which just about all modern country music flows. 

 

 

I still remember when Jack Benny died.  I was a senior in high school.  I felt very solemn.  I realized that he was an old man, but (as happens when we think about celebrities) I felt that he was someone I knew and liked.  And I had a very funny feeling about this whole death business.

 

 

Now, all these years later, I know what I was feeling. 

 

 

I was feeling for myself.

 

 

Here’s Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”:

 

 

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you,

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! As the heart grows older

It shall come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, nor no mind, expressed,

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

---

 

 

For a departed friend

---

A few months ago, a friend, someone I’d known for almost twenty-five years, suddenly passed away. 

 

 

Friend?  No, it was a far more complex relationship than that.  We were co-workers first; we shared an office back in the late 1980s; there was a big partition between our desks, but we both smoked, so we could each see the smoke rising from the other side of the office, and we could listen to one another’s completely fascinating telephone conversations.

 

 

Then, for about two years, I actually worked for her.  She was irritable and finicky, but we actually got along pretty well; once, however, she refused to speak to me for three days because she thought I’d neglected to say “good morning” to her. 

 

 

It was one of those relationships.

 

 

After that, we were just friends.  We always talked in the hallway.  I used to run into her in the market frequently; her stories were endless, but I enjoyed them anyway.  She was smart, and extremely opinionated, and completely fearless about telling you what she thought.  (My new boss told me several times that he’d like to be rid of her.  I never had the nerve to say it out loud, but I always thought: Good luck.  You will never be rid of her. And good for her.)

 

 

Partner knew her too, because we ran into her in the local grocery store with some regularity.  Sometimes she’d stop and give me a ride, especially in the wintertime. 

 

 

She was intelligent, and very sure of herself, and very stubborn.

 

 

And now she’s gone.

 

 

As always, when someone I care about passes away, I keep wanting it to be a mistake or a joke.  I think: It’s not real.  She’s still around somewhere.  She’ll walk through the door in a moment, and we’ll have a good laugh about all of this.

 

 

(Now, a few months later, I keep seeing her in the street, or going in the door ahead of me.  Naturally it’s just my failing eyesight.  But I think my brain wants it to be her.)

 

 

Hey, you, upstairs, whoever’s in charge of this stuff: this has got to stop.  This has gone a little bit beyond a joke.

 

 

Stop killing off my friends and family.

 

 

I rely on them for so much.

---

 

The reception after the memorial

---

I went to a memorial service a few months ago, for a person I’d known pretty well for over twenty years.  It was solemn, mostly, though there were a few moments of levity.


Then there was a reception afterward.


It’s nice to see people you haven’t seen for a while; the mood is always lighter at these things, and people always seem to be laughing.  It’s probably just relief after the sobriety of the service.


But now and then you get this soaring sense of vertigo: you know who would have really enjoyed this?  The deceased.  She really would have liked this.


And then you wonder what kind of reception you’ll get when your time comes.  And then you think about people laughing and eating, and beginning the long road toward forgetting you.


Now how do you feel?


Creepy, that’s how. 


I made my excuses and left.


Rest in peace, dear heart.  You have my love.  I’ll keep your birthday on my calendar.  Your family will remember you, and your friends, and I am proud to call myself one of your friends.  


And we will all miss you.

---

Why I should learn to swim

---

I don’t think anyone in my family really knows how to swim.  I think my brother Leonard can swim a little, but that’s it.

 

 

We didn’t have a pool when I was a kid.  Nor did we live near placid clean bodies of water.  The local swimmin’ holes – the Lewis River, the Columbia River, Battle Ground Lake – were either too brisk or rocky for swimming, or big bowls of tepid water and bacteria. 

 

 

During Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico, I tried to learn.  There were fifteen of us in the training group: twelve other guys going to Morocco, and two women going to the Turks and Caicos Islands.  One of the women was a very nice happy lesbian and didn’t care about the guys at all, except as friends; the other was straight and moderately attractive and was being peppered on all sides by offers of sexual congress from fellow trainees.  She and I liked each other, and I think she found my company peaceful, as I wasn’t trying to get her into bed.  Anyway, she tried to teach me to swim in the Caribbean, with the barracudas darting around our feet, and the straight guys in our group were very envious of me as I was being held in the water by my ladyfriend.

 

 

But I can’t really swim, to this day.  (They tried to teach me to float.  Depending on what I happen to be wearing on any particular day, I may be able to float.)

 

 

Years ago, when I was a kid, my family went to Copalis, Washington, to dig clams and play on the beach.  I was left alone to play.  Apparently the tide came in very rapidly.  I remember (vividly) playing in the sand.  I remember the water coming in rapidly, but I wasn’t worried about it.  Then I heard screaming, and my family ran through the rapidly-deepening water and scooped me up – and then I was concerned. 

 

 

My memory is in black-and-white, but very sharp.  I wasn’t scared until I heard the screams and the people running toward me.

 

 

Ah well. Here I am today.

 

 

Let the chips fall where they may, kids. 

 

 

Here’s to another hundred years of foolish heedless living.

 

---

 

 

George M. Cohan

---

Providence, in case you didn’t know, is the birthplace of vaudeville legend George M. Cohan.  He never really lived here; his parents were entertainers and happened to be here in Providence when he was born, on the third of July, 1878.  (Not the fourth of July, please note.  Please get that song out of your head.)

 

 

It’s amazing how prolific he was: he performed, composed, wrote shows.  We still know his songs: “Give My Regards To Broadway.”  “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”  “Mary Is A Grand Old Name.”  “You’re A Grand Old Flag.”  “Over There.”

 

 

There is a perfectly hideous statue of George down in Fox Point, a block away from George M. Cohan Boulevard.  It’s just the top half of him, from the waist up; he’s got his hat in his hand, and is (I think) supposed to be singing.  Why did the sculptor lop him off at the waist?  And why does he have that horrible grin on his face?

 

 

Much better is the living monument that James Cagney created for him.  In 1942’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and later when he reprised the role in 1955’s “The Seven Little Foys,” Cagney is a delight.  He is tough and funny and energetic, and he dances like a demon.

 

 

Funny what we know about people.  George M. Cohan was enormously famous in his time; then he became – what? – just a name.  Then he was revived by someone great like Cagney, who transformed the image brilliantly.  (I hope the real George M. was only half as entertaining as Cagney’s portrayal of him.  The story goes that Cohan, dying of cancer, saw Cagney’s performance in the 1942 movie, and said, “What an act to follow!)

 

 

Few now living probably remember Cohan as a performer.  Many of us know his songs.  Many of us have also seen Cagney as Cohan.

 

 

So what do we really know of him?

 

 

I ask myself this question a lot lately.  I think about what remains of us after we’re gone, and how we remember people who have died, and how those people are remembered after we’ve died.

 

 

It fades, children.  You end up with grotesque statues and strangely twisted stories.

 

 

But sometimes it flickers to life: you hear a good song, and see a good performance, and think: this guy must have been terrific.

 

 

Something inside me rejoiced when, recently, I watched “The Seven Little Foys,” with Cagney dancing down the table in his wonderful eccentric way.

 

 

Maybe good things, and important things, survive after all.

 

 

Let’s hope so.

 

---

 

Burning down the school

---

I do not make efficient use of Facebook, I think; I just sort of mooch around and look at this and that.  I only have about thirty friends, which (my student employees tell me) is completely pathetic.

 

 

The other day I was looking through my various Facebook affiliations, and I noticed that, a long time ago, I’d joined a group called “Battle Ground High School Alumni.”  I looked in, and learned that –

 

 

That they just burned down my old elementary school.

 

 

It was on purpose.  The school was an old building, very dilapidated, and completely unused for a number of years.  All the local fire departments got together and used it, this past December 10, for a training exercise.  

 

 

Why am I so strangely saddened by this?

 

 

I remember the building vividly.  I remember how enormous the front steps seemed to me, and how vast the playground; I remember lining up two by two to go to recess and to come back inside, and I remember buying little red tickets for two cents each, to redeem for half-pint cartons of milk.  I remember Miss Plowman, and Miss Marvin, and Mister Ellertson.  (All of these memories are drenched in bright sunlight, for some reason, which seems odd, considering that it rains a lot in Battle Ground.  Could it be that my memory isn’t perfectly accurate?  Hmm.)

 

 

Back in 2008, Partner and I walked through Battle Ground one quiet afternoon and explored the school grounds.  The building was there – see above picture (drenched in bright sunlight) – but it was so small!  It was much bigger when I was a kid.  We played on the swings for a while (I will spare you those photos), and I took pictures and felt somehow comforted that this small piece of my childhood still remained.

 

 

And now it’s gone. 

 

 

The first house I lived in as a child was torn down years ago.  The other house I lived in was sold in 2000, and has been so completely renovated that, even on Google Earth, it’s almost unrecognizable.  Partner’s childhood home was sold a few years ago.  The restaurant in which Partner and I shared our first dinner burned down in 2006.

 

 

From the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:

 

 

"Monks, everything is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Burning, I tell you, with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs.

 

"Seeing this, the disciple grows disenchanted with the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, disenchanted with tactile sensations, disenchanted with consciousness at the body, disenchanted with contact at the body. He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect.

 

"Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he discerns that 'Birth is depleted, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.' " 

 

 

So there is a lesson here.

 

 

But it is a painful one.

 

 

Goodbye, school.

 

---

 

 

All my (useless) gadgets

---

I have a box – no, two boxes – of cords and connections belonging to various computing devices. 

 

 

The devices themselves are long gone.

 

 

How does this happen?

 

 

Last year I bought a cheap ($40) Kobo Literati e-reader at Bed Bath & Beyond.  I liked it, but it was slow and balky.  Barnes & Noble had an online sale for reconditioned Nooks, so I bought one ($80), and loved it, until it started acting wonky.  Then, a few months ago, my office granted me an iPad, and the Nook joined the Literati on the unused-gadget shelf.

 

 

Goodbye and good luck, my one hundred and twenty dollars.

 

 

I’ve always been very conscientious about backing up my computer. Some years ago I heard of this great new backup system: the Jazz drive.  I bought one on eBay, for maybe $40, and a bunch of Jazz disks (which are like cassettes on steroids) for maybe $25.  I used it probably four times.  It was clunky and noisy and difficult to set up.  I now own a smooth little candy-bar sized storage device that plugs into my laptop with a USB connection, and which slurps up all my data effortlessly.

 

 

Another sixty-five bucks down the tube.

 

 

I could go on forever.  I am too cheap to buy a proper iPod, so I have purchased at least three cheap imitations, none of which works right, total cost (estimated) sixty bucks.  Then there was the reconditioned laptop, which was wonderful and lasted for about a year, until it actually had a nervous breakdown, complete with beeping and booping sound effects.  Two hundred dollars down the drain.  (Moral, if you haven’t been keeping track: don’t buy reconditioned items.)  The next laptop lasted quite a while – four years, maybe – but it became painfully slow and difficult to use during its last year of active service.  It was around four hundred bucks, I think.

 

 

(My current Dell Inspiron laptop also cost around four hundred bucks; I think I bought it in early 2009, and it is going strong almost three years later.  It has some quirks – it often refuses to recharge its battery – but it is light and easy to use, and I am partial to it.  I had a whirlwind love affair with the iPad when I first got it a few months ago, but – as someone online wisely stated not long ago – the iPad is not a laptop.  Laptops are far more powerful and speedier, and much easier to use for word processing (it is not pleasant to type on a smooth glass surface).  I just bought one of those fancy iPad cases with a built-in Bluetooth keyboard, which makes it a bit nicer to use, but iPads are mostly for travel, I think: it was a godsend on our last two trips, to Orlando and to Cape Cod.  At home, my laptop is (as Eloise said of Nanny) my mostly companion.

 

 

But I still visualize all that money flown out the window, for all those lovely glittering gadgets I bought, thinking they would change my life. 

 

 

A few of them did. 

 

 

But I should have chosen more carefully. 

 

 

Let’s face it.  I’m an idiot.

---

 

The Providence Public Library

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The Providence Public Library is a grandiose pile of masonry on the corner of Empire and Washington downtown.  I went in a few times in the late 1970s, but it seemed very hoi polloi to me. (What a nasty little snob I was in those days!)

 

 

Also, I was entering that phase in my life in which it was important that I own books rather than just borrow them.

 

 

Thirty-five years have passed, and my home bookshelves are groaning with books, loved and unloved, read and unread.

 

 

And a few months ago, for some reason, I don’t know why, I went back to the Providence Public Library.

 

 

And I fell in love with the place.

 

 

Let me tell you first that it’s open for less than forty hours a week.  It opens at 12:30pm four days a week, which is a crime against humanity.  I didn’t know that when I first started going there; I got there around 12:15pm one day, and was surprised to see a line of people waiting to get in.  And do you know why most of them were there?  To use the small bank of public-use computers.  By the intense look on their faces, they were job-hunting.  What does that tell you about the usefulness of the public library?

 

 

The other sections of the library – the reference stacks, the reading rooms, the music rooms – are very quiet.  Well, maybe “quiet” is a stupid word to use about a library.  Let us say instead: deserted.

 

 

Which is itself a sin and a shame.

 

 

But I have to admit I enjoyed it.

 

 

I wandered into the fiction section as if by instinct.  I was the only person for miles, amid racks and racks of books, acres and acres of books, with that musty elementary-school smell all around me.  Do you remember those crackly plastic covers that library books always had when we were in school?  They still have them.

 

 

I got my bright blue library card that very first day.  I have been back at least once a week, and I get such pleasure out of it.  I return my last week’s reading in the little basket, and I wander light-headed through the stacks. 

 

 

And I’m borrowing them!  I’ve finally gotten away from the idea that I have to own books!  I used to love the idea that I owned them, they were mine, I could keep them on a shelf and pull them down anytime I wanted to . . .

 

 

Sometime around the ten-thousandth book, this stopped making sense.

 

 

Let’s face it: ultimately we own nothing, not our homes nor our cars, not even our precious books, not even ourselves.

 

 

We can only ever borrow things and use them for a while.

 

 

And maybe libraries are a perfect expression of that.

 

---

 

Final arrangements

---

Partner and I are both getting on in age, and have begun to talk about our final arrangements.  Naturally we want to be together, even after we’re both defunct.  (This is irrational, but we’re human, so naturally we’re irrational.)

 

 

We have, unfortunately, discovered that we have a little discrepancy in our final wishes.

 

 

Partner wants to be cremated (after he’s dead, I mean, not today) and have his ashes thrown into the water off the Pacific island of Maui.

 

 

I want to be buried in a proper wooden casket and put in the ground in Venersborg, Washington, close to where I grew up, in a grave facing Spotted Deer Mountain, in northern Clark County.

 

 

So, you see, we have some negotiating to do.

 

 

I think we will do a catch-as-catch-can scenario.  If I go first (which I think is very possible), I want him to take me with him wherever he goes.  It would be nice if some little part of me – even a keepsake – were put in the ground near my parents, but really, it doesn’t matter that much.  It matters much more to me that I be with Partner.  He can take me to Maui if he likes.  There’s enough of me in Venersborg already, I suppose, after having grown up there. 

 

 

And, if he takes me with him to Maui, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And if (God forbid) Partner goes first, I will carry out his wishes, and he will swim with the fishes off Maui.  But a little pinch of him is going to stay with me, and I will be buried in Venersborg with an envelope in my pocket, and that envelope will have some of Partner in it.

 

 

And, if I bring a little piece of him to Venersborg with me, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

 

---

 

All Souls' Day offering: Dia de los muertos

I used to do traditional American for Halloween: pumpkins, scarecrows, etc.

 

 

Then, some years ago, a very sophisticated friend gave me a set of Dia de los Muertos figurines: skeleton nuns playing musical instruments.  I didn’t take good care of them, and they lost limbs along the way; I don’t think any of them are whole anymore.

 

 

And then I found out that, if they were perfect, they would be very valuable.

 

 

Yeep!

 

 

Anyway, broken limbs and all, I started using them in a Day of the Dead display (see above photo).  I supplement it with all kinds of things: photos of my dead relatives and friends,  a business card from one of my dead bosses, the funeral notice from a friend who died last year, lots of little things that belonged to my parents while they were alive . . .

 

 

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now.  Every year there are more people to commemorate. 

 

 

Every night, through most of October and right up to November 2, I try to light my candle every night, and actually muster up a thought or two for the people who have gone ahead of me on the road.

 

 

It makes the prospect seem less lonely, somehow.

 

 

Happy Day of the Dead.