AUTUMN GHOSTS

GHOSTS

I see ghosts. Not everywhere
But here and there. I know them
By their peculiarly beseeching
Watch – eyes longing for the
Familiar, the aura pulse of
Warmth in the air around
Children, the crystals of
Laughter around young
Women.

Wednesday morning, the corner
Of my eye caught a ghost
Grasping the chainlinks around
Corte Madera’s tennis courts.
Looking in, longing, watching
The yellow-green blur of
Life flying from racquet to
Racquet. He is a recurring
Ectoplasm, a Senior who can’t
Afford the forty dollar key to
Tennis playground, but always
Hopes to hit a few with players
Whose partners are stuck in
101 traffic, just a few rallies,
A bit of rhythm between the two
Sets of taut strings. Longing for
Connection.

I have been a ghost
And will be again, longing
For connection.

I am a Senior by Actual Count,
Experiencing the tidal suck
Of life from old marrow, the
Invisibility and inconsequential
Station accorded by the young
To creatures from the dark ages
Before Universal Access and
iPhone intrusion in toilet
Stalls and crosstown busses.
We invented youth! Sixties’ hippies,
Trust no one over thirties,
We declared holy the noble
Naïf, unspoiled by ancient letters
Dusty romance, pro patria poems.
We cooked insouciance
With a side dish of Scorn.
Now we antic, pacifist warriors are
Over Thirty and we see ourselves.
It is us, grasping the
Chain links of years, looking,
Longing, into the playground,
Wheedling connection, response,
Rhythm, a few rallies. At length
We recognize how dead we’ve
Become. Marley’s Ghost, did he
Wander familiar streets unseen?
Sit too deep in familiar chairs?
Weep dry tears as the living
Passed unseeing? Did his
Agent never call, his lovers
Forget his scent, his children
Refigure their lives without
Reference to Marley?

We ghosts cobble up our own
Walhalla, where the young, straight
Men of the tribe come to our tents
To seek wisdom and poetry,
Advice on taxes and women,
To hear elders discuss with
Authority the game paths and
Planting cycles, to plan
Intelligently, soberly, with the
Stabilizing feathers near the
Arrow’s nock, giving the tribe
Its wise spin of continuum.

Like all Walhallas, ours is a
Fraud, a coffee klatch of
Old men complaining in
Comfortable lies.
Ghosts stay until
Transparency becomes
Tedious, then fade
Gladly like dew in
Sunshine.



BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself is not fading. He's between books, eating compulsively, exercising infrequently, looking for a consort without fangs, and generally making a nuisance of himself. But there is a slight up-tick in his demeanor, a few new stories, and some hope for his heart, even as the light dims too, too early. This is a dangerous season for the old Depressive. I'll be attentive.

MARCHING BEHIND THE SAINTS, WITH PARASOL

I DON'T GET INTO THE CITY, MUCH. True, I often scuttle in on Tuesday nights to cook for the Dolphin Club but that’s boats, an obsession that overrides my obsession with staying put. But last Sunday afternoon I took a special excursion.

I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.

Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.

It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.

We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.

I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.

And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.

Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.

It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.

This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.

This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.

There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.

Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.

It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!

Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.

CHICKEN ART

My dear old friend Dean Torges, whom I met when I was about twelve, is a master woodworker, a philosopher, one of the most intelligent and most thoughtful men I've ever met. He's a world-famous bowyer, and (this is a compliment from the era of Theodore Roosevelt) a woodsman and hunter of consummate skill. But presently he's building a chicken house. It's a mobile chicken house. A chicken's need for new vistas is something I simply never considered. Still, Dean knows chickens. He's raised them on his little Ohio farmlet for donkey's years and enjoys his own eggs, broilers, and smoked whole chickens. I suppose he knows chickens better than most and if a mobile chicken house will help his fowl, who am I to quibble? He's even built mobile outbuildings, mesh-covered bomb-shelter frames that roll on old lawnmower wheels to keep his chicks out of hawks' talons. Fowlopolis.

He's endured a large ration of kidding about the time he's spent with his elaborate, over-built, fanciful main chicken house. It's a wonder, the Colossus For Rhode Island Reds. I admit to being part of the ridicule: I designed an elaborate windvane for a mythical cupola, as a joke. The cupola is in place and he's cutting the windvane out of sheet-copper presently.

After all the jokes and fun, I find that Dean's chicken house approaches the sublime. I would enjoy sitting on his porch and simply watching his busy Fowlopolis. As an antidote to the ribbing he's getting, I sent him this post:

Dean:

There are burghers and builders who would criticize and even ridicule you for occupying weeks of work with this project. Your project would delight them as an opportunity to prove their superiority in the only game they know: appropriate response. Your response is impractical, disproportionate, questionable because it could be done so much simpler and with less expense. Buy a Home Depot shed, have it delivered, cut some holes, you're done. All this farting around with special shingles and overbuilt framing … who needs it? Get 'er done! Don't sweat the small stuff, and don't try for some high-falutin perfect solution because chickens is chickens and they just don't matter that much. And do the chickens care? Hell, no. This Torges guy is just showing off, making a mountain out of a molehill.

I, for one, admire any wizard who can make a mountain out of a molehill. It's not just a great trick, it's Art. Let's admit right up front that the Sistine Ceiling could have been done with rollers and a nice Benjamin Moore bone white in a sliver of the time it took that greaseball to tart up the place. Who looks at ceilings, anyway? They keep the rain off and there's an end to it.

Some folks would call your chicken house as a quixotic task, but that would be a misuse of the word's original sense. What our jolly wild-and-crazy-guy era doesn't recall is that Don Quixote was a psychopath. He was mad, delusionary, senile. The beauty of the Don was that, even in his madness, he saw goodness and beauty around him. The heroes of that story were Sancho Panza, for sticking with the old fellah and caring for him, about him, and the son-in-law, for going to such lengths to bring the old guy home. You're not mad, Dean. You don't hear the chickens talking to you. (Is there something you're not telling me?) You're not creating a portal in time or constructing an elaborate reliquary. You're building something just-so. My hero, Mr. Rogers, reassured his audience of children that it was fine to "take your time and do it the way you want to." You're expressing the essence of art, Dean: choices beyond practicality that address larger, subtler, sometimes indefinable issues. Your chicken house is not practical but, damn, it will be interesting and in its inimitable way, beautiful.

You know I don't have much truck with organized religions but recently I've been reviewing my peevish, self-obsessed elitism about the church. Like the burghers and builders criticizing your chicken house, I've using bits and bobs of religion to prove my own superiority: I pretend that I'm the logical thinker, the spiritually practical guy, and God loves me more because I don't bullshit Him. But the (broad, many-factioned) church has cherished our myths and stories, has maintained our spiritual culture, and for all its pedophiles and anti-intellectual Bible-thumpers and derelict Popes, it's kept our cultural heritage of love and forgiveness as ideals alive. These aren't practical values. They don't get 'er done when we're assailed by bad guys. They're dangerously impractical ideals. At a glance we might say they've been ignored more often than practiced. They've been subverted thousands of times, marginalized, and redefined to suit. Even so, they're still with us. Not even Dirty Harry could blow them away. The church has, probably unwittingly, been a culturally integrating force.

Now that I have Max and Luc to consider, I wonder how I can frame a set of ideals and values so they can carry them early and make them part of their character later. One oversimplified, gross solution is to say that God wants them to be good, and this is what we think is good. Why? Because God told us. Honestly, one can't sell love and forgiveness on practical grounds. They're like your chicken house: who would buy them? They're too costly and too quirky and they don't fit the observed data. The only way to sell them might be magic thinking, which I avoid. "Why?" Because God said so, that's why.

It's a beginning. And it's a continuum. "We hold these truths to be self-evident …" Do we? Is truth self-evident? Was independence self-evident as anything more than personal convenience for our Founding Fathers? It's an article of faith with us that truth is simple and understandable but this isn't always a workable assumption. I suppose that's the catch with ideals: they often confute practicality.

What good accrued to the Samaritan who comforted the waylaid traveler in the parable? Nothing practical. He lost money on the deal and went on his way. The Samaritan's ideals – impractical chicken houses of the heart – obliged him to act in an unexpected, illogical, impractical manner. Qui bono? The waylaid traveler. The Samaritan received, we hope, some thanks but not even bragging rights.

Bless your ridiculous chicken house, Dean. It's impractical and a massive waste of time. But it's just so. It's a work of art like one of those kinetic sculptures at Boston's Logan Airport: they endlessly lift tennis balls to a height and let them follow a rolling random course down a mechanically changeable path. What does it do? Nuthin'. It beguiles. Those sculptures have given me hours of pleasure and contemplation. Bless you and the kinetic sculpture guy and your chicken house and all who sail in her.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

I worry when Himself waxes poetic about impracticality. It's like an habitual gambler extolling the graphic and mathematical beauty of poker or craps. His connection to the practical world is already too tenuous. Would I recommend that he tilt at even more windmills with the mad Don? I think not.

MY BOYO

Today is my grandson's birthday: Max is three years old, a remarkable human being.

Any grampa would say the same thing. Perhaps we'd all be right. But I hold that Maxwell Ulysses Burger is, on his third birthday, an astonishingly well-spoken and thoughtful person, the beginnings of a citizen and a raconteuer. He has phrase and grace in his speech and he plays with language. He displays an enjoyment with saying something just so, the way he wants it. He reminds me of the cautionary definition of my own profession from the Irish: "A writer is a failed conversationalist."

His early gifts were mechanical. Things in my daughter's household were retro-engineered by Max.

The kid was and is preternaturally diagnostic. He takes stuff apart. Most often, he puts them back together as well.

He sat on my lap when he was just turned two and plucked a ballpoint pen out of my pocket. He looked at it solemnly and set to work. He took it apart, disassembled it into its component parts – barrel, cap, spring, refill laid out on the counter in front of us – then reassembled it. Once he’d screwed it together, he tested it to make sure it worked, click, click, click, click, then put it back into my pocket.

One morning Sally noticed that while she was cooking something he pushed his little kitchen dining table to a cabinet, climbed onto his chair, thence to the table top, thence to the counter top beside the refrigerator. He stood on the toaster oven and retrieved the sack of coffee beans from the refrigerator top. He dumped some beans into the grinder, fumbled the top on, ground some beans (more or less), pulled the top and dumped the ground beans into the filter of the coffee machine, which he carefully fit into its place. He turned it on (no water) and climbed down to his table. Arriving at floor level, he announced brew’s up casually, “Coffee!”

I asked Sally, “You didn’t stop him?”

“No, I was too fascinated. He watches Patrick make coffee every morning and he remembered the steps. For Max it was no big deal, but it floored me.”

Something that floored me was his cognizance of batteries. Nothing in the remote control line works in Max's house. Batteries gone, You can only detect the absence by the weight, since he generally replaces the battery cover. If you want to use the remote, you get Maxwell’s attention: “Max. Can you find the batteries for this remote control for me, please?” Immediate locomotion toward a chair or couch, a disruption of cushions and/or pillows, Max returns with the correct batteries without comment as if to say, “Here, dufous, why didn’t you get them yourself?”

When I was young there was a kind of string-tension toy. It was a dog or cat or horse made of hollow wooden beads (they probably don’t allow them today; choking hazard) strung together and attached to a spring-loaded base. When the string was tensioned, the animal stood upright, if a little silly. If you pushed the big button under the base, the string went slack and the creature fell into a pile of bead-parts. It was a great little toy because the animal stood there one moment, then fell into a pile.

I mention this because it’s the only way I can describe Max’s Terrible Two tantrums: a space of loud whining, no, no, no, he wants it the OTHER way, he doesn’t want THAT, he won’t eat (wear, carry, wash, drink) THAT, mommy, no, no, give me the OTHER, I want the OTHER. The Other is refused. Time Out is threatened. The count to five begins. “Max, I’m counting. One, two, three, four, five . . . Okay then, Time Out.”

Someone in a neighboring yard has eviscerated a swine or a panther: one hears a siren-loud screech. Max is creating a noise louder than any creature smaller than a city bus is capable of producing. It’s an unsettling howl, the noise of a desert djinn or a hurtling bomb. At this instant the boy we know as Max ceases to exist as a cohesive unit and falls into a pile of trunk, head and limbs in a liquid rush to the floor. This sudden dissolution is entertainingly like that string-toy, a complete collapse. The awful noise continues. Tantrum. Off to the Time Out Place of Penitence and Reflection: the stair landing, a place more barren and uninteresting than Devil’s Island or even Bayonne, New Jersey, the very seat of horrors. The bone-bag that was Max is poured onto the Chair of Correction and a timer is set for two, three, or even (life sentence) five minutes depending on the gravity of the offense.

Mutters and two-year-old curses (“Poopie, bad, booger, poopie!”), a diminishing wail, sobbing, cries for forgiveness, vows of being a good boy, now. Accusations of mommy’s impaired judgment, her mean and even wicked nature (“Bad mommy!”). Then a silence. Occasionally this is accompanied by inexpert creeping away scuffs and creaks but largely the time runs out and the timer bell rings.

“I’m done, mommy!” Reconciliation. Obligatory apologies, “I’m sorry that I _________,” fill in the blank. Order restored, authority maintained, chaos and the encroaching jungle held back another day.

Except that Max’s Time Outs were sometimes suspiciously short. Of course. The boyo was mechanically subverting justice. He’d determined the nature of the timer, climbed up onto the Dread Chair of Detention, retrieved the timer, and reset it to something under a minute. Ding! “I’m done, mommy!”

As the parent of a little person, you must be firm but open to friendly compromise. But remember: they’re all sea-lawyers. They’ll argue until hell freezes over, doggedly and energetically. Anyone who thinks that kids have no attention span has never argued with a two-year-old. Avoid negotiation. You always lose, one way or another, today or down the road.

But time off for good behavior – for inventive re-engineering, is only fair, yes?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Being close to Himself, I see how deeply and enthusiastically he loves Max and his little brother, Luc. He has a bushel of surrogate grandchildren in the Bay Area whom he loves – Hannah Rose, the Dread Pirate Davis, Julianna, Kent, Ainsley, Elizabeth, et als. But if he has learned anything from these surrogates and his joy at being close to them, it is that he needs family. He loves this place, this topography, this particular micro-climate. He loves his friends here. But it's become apparent to him that being a part of Max's and Luc's lives is essential to his heart. Being a part of his daughter's life is much more important than she acknowledges. The time has come for Himself to make a move away from Mt. Burdell and Indian Valley Road and the Pacific. How he'll relocate to Gainesville, Florida, is logistically nightmarish, especially for a man with a definite phobia about moving. It's a painful time, professionally and personally, for the Old Guy.