I thought of Ben Sweet today.
Lovely, irascible, erudite, puckish, Ben Sweet.
Ben--no one I knew called him "Professor Sweet"--was a wonderful portly professor who taught for a time out at what was then called Community College of Denver, Red Rocks Campus. I know little else about his life or his death. He was in theater, I know, but where I knew him from was his classes out at Red Rocks.
He taught several classes on British history, and British Literature, I believe.
One of my proudest achievements in all my academic career was a comment that Ben Sweet made on a poem I had turned in to him. I was consciously mimicking the delicious over-the-top euphony of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I still remember this ancient poem of mine word-for-word. . .but would not, I'm sure, save for Sweet's delicious critique.
You have to understand that Sweet was an exacting critic. He was not mean--anything but--but he wore a flinty, no-nonsense exterior when it came to the subjects he loved. Here the subject was the English language. More than that: Poetry. Here he did not kid around. . .though that flinty mask always held a gaily glinting eye beneath a bushy eyebrow.
I had labored on the poem, working hard to get the sounds just right. It was short and not very deep, but stuffed with sound.
I waited for it to come back from the teacher. Ben Sweet was one whose opinion really mattered.
The single note-book paper sheet came back with Ben's comment at the top. "Almost good," it said.
From this man, those two words meant more to me than any number of facile As on papers from other teachers. It still thrills me, and I think of it often: "Almost good." Wow.
In addition to his British History and Literature classes, Ben taught his own invented course, one that was personally important to him. It was called "Jesus and the Challenge of Being Human."
Sweet's idea of Jesus was very particular and often at odds with popular images, and he spent the first class period making that very clear. His Jesus was muscular, bold, radical, and above all, socialist. Ben Sweet told us in that first class that he embraced socialism to begin with because Jesus was so deeply a commited socialist.
This afternoon I sat in a bar. Since I don't drink, I don't often sit in bars. But this place is right across the street from where I live, and it is a pleasant little place. Suddenly something Ben Sweet once said came back to me, and, thinking about it, slowly the whole amazing man appeared in my imagination.
He said it in that first class period of his Jesus class. It was a quote I so loved that I immediately wrote it down, repeated it often, and have never forgotten it.
Ben was in a fine fury about Jesus and who he really was. He was dissing most popular conceptions. With his feet planted wide, arms gesticulating, he said with rascally hellfire, "He's not just some bleedin' heart, hangin' on the cross, telling you not to have a beer or say damn!"
Sleep peacefully, Ben Sweet.
04 January 2010
11 October 2009
Two-Headed Monster
Talking to my brother, Roger, on the phone earlier this evening, I had another weirdly humorous reminder of the deep and sometimes strange connection between us.
I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.
You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.
To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.
First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.
It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.
That's what I gather, anyway.
So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.
These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.
But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.
Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.
On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.
Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."
So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.
When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.
But inevitably, the similarities return:
We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.
To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.
These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.
The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.
Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.
There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.
I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.
But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!
So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.
In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:
Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.
Roger: Grabbed already!
So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.
But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.
Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.
And here came the occurrence that amazed me.
Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.
This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.
Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.
And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.
I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.
But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.
Perfectly.
I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.
You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.
To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.
First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.
It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.
That's what I gather, anyway.
So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.
These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.
But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.
Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.
On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.
Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."
So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.
When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.
But inevitably, the similarities return:
We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.
To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.
These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.
The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.
Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.
There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.
I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.
But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!
So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.
In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:
Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.
Roger: Grabbed already!
So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.
But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.
Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.
And here came the occurrence that amazed me.
Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.
This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.
Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.
And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.
I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.
But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.
Perfectly.
02 September 2009
Denver's Last Drive-In
One recent Monday night, Jon, Donna, and I went to Denver's last remaining drive-in movie theater.
Since the unstoppable juggernaut of soulless urban real estate deals rolled across the northwest corner of Hampden and Santa Fe and razed our beautiful, always-packed Cinderella Twin Drive-In after the 2007 season, Denver has been left with only one drive-in.
It took a year of mourning before Jon, Donna, and I could bring ourselves to make the pilgrimage to this other, last, unknown location. The only game in town.
Let me report that the 88 Drive-In is alive and sprockets clicking, its projector beam a literal beacon to the faithful in the urban dark of Commerce City, northeast of Denver.
Indeed, the darkness of the location is one of the big pluses of the 88 Drive-In. Unlike the old Cinderella Twin, this drive-in is situated in a little-traveled, dark corner of the metro area. Though 88th Avenue does lie right behind the screen, the lights of cars and trucks on the street do nothing to mar the drive-in experience. The 88's screen is mounted relatively high, and the car lights don't interfere at all. In fact, since the screen is surrounded with a pleasant blackness, the brightly-projected film image looks vibrant and clear, not bathed in murky grey, as was the case at the light-saturated Cinderella's Englewood location.
We found this drive-in relatively well-attended for a Monday night. I mean, who goes to the drive-in on a Monday night? Apparently enough people know about this one to give it that nice, communal drive-in feel.
I bet it is packed on weekends!
Setting foot in the no-frills snackbar part of the building that houses the projector was a kind of delightful nostalgia kick for me. It was just the perfect mixture of painted cinderblock walls, flourescent tube lighting, waist-high barrier walls topped with painted-pipe handrails, and gleaming chrome cafeteria-style serving fixtures. A kind of heaven.
The service at both the snack bar and the ticket booth was cheery and efficient. The projection of the film was crisp, clear, and bright, and even included the obligatory sentimental annoying announcement of the snack bar's closing cutting in over the second feature's soundtrack!
If you go, make sure your vehicle has a good, working FM radio to receive the movie sound. Jon and Donna's car had a radio problem at first and my heart sank, thinking they were going to miss the drive-in experience! But they moved to a different location and all was well. Loud and clear!
For some reason, I never went to the drive-in when I was a kid. My eldest brother, Bill, definitely remembers going, but maybe by the time I came along the thrill (for my parents!) was gone. I don't know. But I always feel this as a painful gap in my childhood experience. Other people talk about being bundled up as kids with blankets and food and heading for the drive-in. I just have to say, hunh, must have been fun.
So, people. I'm telling you. Bundle up those kids and head out there to Commerce City for a wonderful drive-in experience! Or go yourselves! Find some chintzy movie double-feature that might be painful to see in the theater, but which will be perfect to see in the drive-in, and go!
Go! Just go!!
Since the unstoppable juggernaut of soulless urban real estate deals rolled across the northwest corner of Hampden and Santa Fe and razed our beautiful, always-packed Cinderella Twin Drive-In after the 2007 season, Denver has been left with only one drive-in.
It took a year of mourning before Jon, Donna, and I could bring ourselves to make the pilgrimage to this other, last, unknown location. The only game in town.
Let me report that the 88 Drive-In is alive and sprockets clicking, its projector beam a literal beacon to the faithful in the urban dark of Commerce City, northeast of Denver.
Indeed, the darkness of the location is one of the big pluses of the 88 Drive-In. Unlike the old Cinderella Twin, this drive-in is situated in a little-traveled, dark corner of the metro area. Though 88th Avenue does lie right behind the screen, the lights of cars and trucks on the street do nothing to mar the drive-in experience. The 88's screen is mounted relatively high, and the car lights don't interfere at all. In fact, since the screen is surrounded with a pleasant blackness, the brightly-projected film image looks vibrant and clear, not bathed in murky grey, as was the case at the light-saturated Cinderella's Englewood location.
We found this drive-in relatively well-attended for a Monday night. I mean, who goes to the drive-in on a Monday night? Apparently enough people know about this one to give it that nice, communal drive-in feel.
I bet it is packed on weekends!
Setting foot in the no-frills snackbar part of the building that houses the projector was a kind of delightful nostalgia kick for me. It was just the perfect mixture of painted cinderblock walls, flourescent tube lighting, waist-high barrier walls topped with painted-pipe handrails, and gleaming chrome cafeteria-style serving fixtures. A kind of heaven.
The service at both the snack bar and the ticket booth was cheery and efficient. The projection of the film was crisp, clear, and bright, and even included the obligatory sentimental annoying announcement of the snack bar's closing cutting in over the second feature's soundtrack!
If you go, make sure your vehicle has a good, working FM radio to receive the movie sound. Jon and Donna's car had a radio problem at first and my heart sank, thinking they were going to miss the drive-in experience! But they moved to a different location and all was well. Loud and clear!
For some reason, I never went to the drive-in when I was a kid. My eldest brother, Bill, definitely remembers going, but maybe by the time I came along the thrill (for my parents!) was gone. I don't know. But I always feel this as a painful gap in my childhood experience. Other people talk about being bundled up as kids with blankets and food and heading for the drive-in. I just have to say, hunh, must have been fun.
So, people. I'm telling you. Bundle up those kids and head out there to Commerce City for a wonderful drive-in experience! Or go yourselves! Find some chintzy movie double-feature that might be painful to see in the theater, but which will be perfect to see in the drive-in, and go!
Go! Just go!!
08 August 2009
"His block is knocked off??!"
A real favorite commercial from when I was a kid. Unless there is an alternate version, I had misremembered the line as "He knocked his block off!" which is much better, actually, than the strange passive construction used here. Gotta love these kids, though. Their enthusiasm really sells what looks like a pretty limited toy. How long could you play with this before growing bored??
What My Father Said
In December of 2000, my father was in the hospital. He was there for nearly the entire month, accompanied the whole time by his devoted second wife, Amy. I visited nearly every day after work.
Those were to be some of the last weeks of his life.
One afternoon, during this time, my dad said something I will never forget. It was a broken-brained formulation of a short-circuited head, and it was absolutely brilliant.
My dad was living with a couple of kinds of cancer. He had, in fact, been diagnosed with prostate cancer over ten years earlier, so, according to the statistics, he had beat that disease. But, after the bypass surgery he'd managed to avoid for 30 years, with his immune system compromised, things began to pop up. A small mark on his leg, next to the scar where the cardiac surgeons removed the vein, turned out to be melanoma.
What really sent him to the hospital there near the end, though, was a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been driving with Amy one day, when, suddenly as he turned left at an intersection, he complained of being disoriented.
The disorientation continued at home, and eventually he was taken to the hospital.
It took some time to determine the cause of his problem. There were many things going wrong with him at this time. He was actively taking a regimen of chemotherapy for the cancer. And it was a question, should he continue the chemo, now that he was in the hospital for something quite else?
I remember standing by his bed as his oncologist asked this very question. I remember being amazed when Dad confidently and cheerily insisted that the chemo should continue.
At this time, and for weeks, his affect was disarmingly sunny, enthusiastic, attentive, and quite normal. His blue eyes were bright and sharply focused. If anything, he was happier than normal.
He had the TV on in his room most of the times I visited. He loved watching Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And we all viewed with disquiet and jokes and growing alarm the election news that grew stranger and more tangled each day.
For this was December of 2000, and the presidential election of over a month before was still up for grabs. The two sides faced off across an unbridgeable constitutional canyon. New nomenclature clogged the airwaves, tutoring us in the differences between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads.
Dad had been a lifelong Republican, but the events of recent years had sometimes severely tested his political faith. He had a hard, pragmatic side much stronger than any mere political affiliation and, in the right circumstances, he'd look toward Washington and label the entire crew there a pack of scoundrels.
I visited him every day, if I could, at least for a short time. Amy, bless her heart forever, was essentially living at the hospital, so that eventually the staff offered her a bed of her own to sleep in so she would not have to crash out every night on the room's recliner.
And for a while it was hard to tell that there was anything really wrong with my father. As I said, he seemed bright and chipper, following conversation and his TV game shows with alertness and seemingly normal humor. And his eye seemed just as jaundiced and cynical as ever when the interminable election news wrangled on and on.
I first discovered that things were not as they should be on one visit when Dad wanted to talk about some household business. As long as I was talking to him, as I said, he seemed at ease and attentive. It was when he had to speak to me that he had problems. Big problems. The concepts were there, but he could not find the words. He would stop in mid-sentence. He'd twist his hands in the air in a frustrated search. He'd hold his head, as if the effort hurt him. If Amy or I prompted him with words ("Treasury bills", "file folders", "interest,") his eyes would light up and he would leap on it, his whole being saying "yes, that's it!" But when he tried to formulate these concepts into words himself, it was a big struggle. There was something terribly wrong.
And he knew there was something terribly wrong, and would express it by saying something like "Oh, I am in big trouble now!" He knew his brain was having problems when it came to finding words, and he was understandably scared.
That his ability to turn ideas and pictures in his head into words was badly impaired became more and more obvious now with each visit. It was especially true in the case of more abstract notions. But even concrete nouns, like the Treasury Bills he was desperate to tell us about, were elusive. As soon as Amy or I supplied the word for him, he would say "Yeah!" with a rising inflection that carried a heartbreaking combination of embarassment and bemused anger at himself: "well of course! I know that. Isn't that obvious!"
The more I visited, day after day, the more I saw that my father's brain was deeply affected by what the doctors by this time labeled a cerebral hemorrhage. His problem with words began to seem simple and easily definable compared to other, stranger manifestations.
For instance, I began to think that Dad's brain was often carrying two concepts together at once in a way that the rest of us would find either an effort of will or a scary intrusion. I thought about those times that our brains are slipping into sleep or rising from sleep to full daytime consciousness that psychologists call hypnagogia or threshold consciousness.
We all have experienced--and might even experience nightly--these strange states of mind. For me, they often overlay or blend two types of thought: first, a mechanical operation, like enumerating, or sorting by colors, or making a list, or the like. But at the same time, the colored beads I am sliding along wires, say, are also people's feelings, or worries about tasks left undone, or maybe things I have to do in a certain order before getting out of bed. I often feel frustrated, sliding those beads around, knowing I can never really get them in the right order.
It began to seem, or I began to imagine, that my father's head as he lay there in his hospital bed, was locked in such a state of double-mindedness. Things he said sometimes pointed toward this. He would connect an abstract concept with a concrete one in an alarming shift.
It was during this time when he came out with a statement that still amazes me and fills me with a strange joy.
I had arrived for my daily visit just on the tail end of Dad's meal time. He still had dessert to come, and wanted to see if he could share some with me. Both Amy and he had ordered pieces of pie, and they quickly decided to offer me a piece, instead. I would get Amy's slice.
"Have a piece of apple pie!" said Dad. The pie had not arrived yet. Amy said it was cherry, not apple.
Up in the corner of the room, the TV news was a tangle of move and counter-move in the election crisis. Recounts proposed and challenged, chads flying every which way, lawyers and politicos squaring off.
Dad was gazing at it and shaking his head.
"Those so-n-sos!" he exclaimed.
An orderly arrived with two pieces of cherry pie in styrofoam bowls.
"What. . .chicanery!" Dad continued. Such an interesting word came out of his mouth. It wasn't one I would think of. I looked closely at him.
Dad made a fuss of offering me some "apple pie," handing me one of the bowls as he held the other. He kept looking back up at the TV while fussing with the pie.
"Apple pie!. . .apple pie!" he urged, pushing it at me.
"Chicanery?" I asked, still delighted with the word.
"Yeah!" said my father, gesturing up at the TV with his fork, "Apple pie chicanery!" And laughed.
I laughed too.
I looked at him with wonder, and laughed! He had come out with this amazing statement, this piece of crack-brained poetry, and it delighted me. But had he known what he had said, really?
As if reading my mind, he repeated, "Yeah! Apple Pie Chicanery!"
It was the last, best thing I heard my father say.
Those were to be some of the last weeks of his life.
One afternoon, during this time, my dad said something I will never forget. It was a broken-brained formulation of a short-circuited head, and it was absolutely brilliant.
My dad was living with a couple of kinds of cancer. He had, in fact, been diagnosed with prostate cancer over ten years earlier, so, according to the statistics, he had beat that disease. But, after the bypass surgery he'd managed to avoid for 30 years, with his immune system compromised, things began to pop up. A small mark on his leg, next to the scar where the cardiac surgeons removed the vein, turned out to be melanoma.
What really sent him to the hospital there near the end, though, was a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been driving with Amy one day, when, suddenly as he turned left at an intersection, he complained of being disoriented.
The disorientation continued at home, and eventually he was taken to the hospital.
It took some time to determine the cause of his problem. There were many things going wrong with him at this time. He was actively taking a regimen of chemotherapy for the cancer. And it was a question, should he continue the chemo, now that he was in the hospital for something quite else?
I remember standing by his bed as his oncologist asked this very question. I remember being amazed when Dad confidently and cheerily insisted that the chemo should continue.
At this time, and for weeks, his affect was disarmingly sunny, enthusiastic, attentive, and quite normal. His blue eyes were bright and sharply focused. If anything, he was happier than normal.
He had the TV on in his room most of the times I visited. He loved watching Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And we all viewed with disquiet and jokes and growing alarm the election news that grew stranger and more tangled each day.
For this was December of 2000, and the presidential election of over a month before was still up for grabs. The two sides faced off across an unbridgeable constitutional canyon. New nomenclature clogged the airwaves, tutoring us in the differences between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads.
Dad had been a lifelong Republican, but the events of recent years had sometimes severely tested his political faith. He had a hard, pragmatic side much stronger than any mere political affiliation and, in the right circumstances, he'd look toward Washington and label the entire crew there a pack of scoundrels.
I visited him every day, if I could, at least for a short time. Amy, bless her heart forever, was essentially living at the hospital, so that eventually the staff offered her a bed of her own to sleep in so she would not have to crash out every night on the room's recliner.
And for a while it was hard to tell that there was anything really wrong with my father. As I said, he seemed bright and chipper, following conversation and his TV game shows with alertness and seemingly normal humor. And his eye seemed just as jaundiced and cynical as ever when the interminable election news wrangled on and on.
I first discovered that things were not as they should be on one visit when Dad wanted to talk about some household business. As long as I was talking to him, as I said, he seemed at ease and attentive. It was when he had to speak to me that he had problems. Big problems. The concepts were there, but he could not find the words. He would stop in mid-sentence. He'd twist his hands in the air in a frustrated search. He'd hold his head, as if the effort hurt him. If Amy or I prompted him with words ("Treasury bills", "file folders", "interest,") his eyes would light up and he would leap on it, his whole being saying "yes, that's it!" But when he tried to formulate these concepts into words himself, it was a big struggle. There was something terribly wrong.
And he knew there was something terribly wrong, and would express it by saying something like "Oh, I am in big trouble now!" He knew his brain was having problems when it came to finding words, and he was understandably scared.
That his ability to turn ideas and pictures in his head into words was badly impaired became more and more obvious now with each visit. It was especially true in the case of more abstract notions. But even concrete nouns, like the Treasury Bills he was desperate to tell us about, were elusive. As soon as Amy or I supplied the word for him, he would say "Yeah!" with a rising inflection that carried a heartbreaking combination of embarassment and bemused anger at himself: "well of course! I know that. Isn't that obvious!"
The more I visited, day after day, the more I saw that my father's brain was deeply affected by what the doctors by this time labeled a cerebral hemorrhage. His problem with words began to seem simple and easily definable compared to other, stranger manifestations.
For instance, I began to think that Dad's brain was often carrying two concepts together at once in a way that the rest of us would find either an effort of will or a scary intrusion. I thought about those times that our brains are slipping into sleep or rising from sleep to full daytime consciousness that psychologists call hypnagogia or threshold consciousness.
We all have experienced--and might even experience nightly--these strange states of mind. For me, they often overlay or blend two types of thought: first, a mechanical operation, like enumerating, or sorting by colors, or making a list, or the like. But at the same time, the colored beads I am sliding along wires, say, are also people's feelings, or worries about tasks left undone, or maybe things I have to do in a certain order before getting out of bed. I often feel frustrated, sliding those beads around, knowing I can never really get them in the right order.
It began to seem, or I began to imagine, that my father's head as he lay there in his hospital bed, was locked in such a state of double-mindedness. Things he said sometimes pointed toward this. He would connect an abstract concept with a concrete one in an alarming shift.
It was during this time when he came out with a statement that still amazes me and fills me with a strange joy.
I had arrived for my daily visit just on the tail end of Dad's meal time. He still had dessert to come, and wanted to see if he could share some with me. Both Amy and he had ordered pieces of pie, and they quickly decided to offer me a piece, instead. I would get Amy's slice.
"Have a piece of apple pie!" said Dad. The pie had not arrived yet. Amy said it was cherry, not apple.
Up in the corner of the room, the TV news was a tangle of move and counter-move in the election crisis. Recounts proposed and challenged, chads flying every which way, lawyers and politicos squaring off.
Dad was gazing at it and shaking his head.
"Those so-n-sos!" he exclaimed.
An orderly arrived with two pieces of cherry pie in styrofoam bowls.
"What. . .chicanery!" Dad continued. Such an interesting word came out of his mouth. It wasn't one I would think of. I looked closely at him.
Dad made a fuss of offering me some "apple pie," handing me one of the bowls as he held the other. He kept looking back up at the TV while fussing with the pie.
"Apple pie!. . .apple pie!" he urged, pushing it at me.
"Chicanery?" I asked, still delighted with the word.
"Yeah!" said my father, gesturing up at the TV with his fork, "Apple pie chicanery!" And laughed.
I laughed too.
I looked at him with wonder, and laughed! He had come out with this amazing statement, this piece of crack-brained poetry, and it delighted me. But had he known what he had said, really?
As if reading my mind, he repeated, "Yeah! Apple Pie Chicanery!"
It was the last, best thing I heard my father say.
29 July 2009
5-year-old boy plays "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash
Here is a delightful and hilarious video. I hope it makes your day. While you are at it, see also my entry "O Albele Panchhi. . ."
18 July 2009
Sic Transit Gloria Sticker
Two hundred sixty-two days.
That is 262 days.
Or 8 months and 21 days, depending on how you figure it.
That is how long my "Obama/Biden '08" circular magnetic sticker lasted on the driver's door of my car.
The numbers here are approximate, since I do not remember the exact date I put it on, but it was about a week before election day last November.
Strange thing, this magnetic sign. It looks just like a sticker, but is, in fact, a sign with a magnetic backing. In other words, anyone could have taken it off my car at any time.
It was handsome, mostly blue, with lettering in white. There may have been some tiny details in red, also.
I tried putting it on the back of my Ford Focus. But there was not a single flat space big enough for the circular emblem. So then I decided to put it on the driver's side door.
More than one person remarked that it looked like I was driving the Obama/Biden staff car.
Because it was just a magnetic sign, I thought from the beginning that someone would swipe it. In the few days before the election, I thought it might fall victim to some zealous John McCain supporter.
So, whenever I came back to my car, I wondered if the sign would still be there. It always was.
I remember parking at my polling place on election day. Surely this would be the day when some wise guy would take the sticker. Or maybe it would disappear in the hands of a too-enthusiastic Obama voter? But no! When I returned to my car, there it was, as always.
And so it has been, ever since.
Or had been.
My car lives out on the street in front of my place at night. And I live by a popular corner bar. There is lots of foot traffic all day and all evening, and many happy or disgruntled drunken people issue from the bar every morning just after 2am. And they all walk very close to my car.
Granted, most of these giddy or angry drunks are on the sidewalk, with the Obama/Biden sticker necessarily facing the street, instead.
But in any case, the sticker had lasted all this time. That's something like 8.69 months, depending.
Last week I was sitting in the front window of Whole Foods, with a good view of my car, which was parked right there in the first row of spaces. As I sat there eating my dinner and computing, a car pulled into the space right next to mine. I had backed into my space, so as the blond woman got out of her car, she was facing my driver's side door.
She looked down at the sticker. She reacted with her whole body, even out to her frizzy, pouffy hair, with some kind of shuddery disapproval. She looked around her for a moment, looked down at the sign on my door again.
I was watching her from maybe 30 feet away, and she did not see me. I really wondered if she was going to peel off the sign. For just a moment her whole body seemed to say "I'm gonna peel off this sign! How easy it would be!"
And what would I do? Would I run out and confront her? Follow her around the store and nail her that way? Intercept her as she checked out? Or just let the incident go as a piece of fascinating quotidian drama?
All this ran through my mind in somewhere like 0.476 seconds. And then the lady turned and came into the store.
So once again, the sign was safe.
Over the months of living with my sign I had come to realize that most people are not going to even think of removing such a thing. Many people would not give it a second thought. Many others take it for a sticker, and so the idea of removing it is even further away from their minds. Who is going to remove a sticker? And of the people who actually know it is an easily-removed magnetic slap-on sign, how many would think of taking it off. . .and for what reason?
Imagining who might actually go to the lengths of reaching down and taking a magnetic sign off of another person's property becomes an exercise in one's personal definitions of values. It is an odd thing to think about. Right off hand, I would rule out 99 out of 100 people. Maybe even a higher percentage than that. It just seems so unlikely. Would you do it, reader? Under any circumstances??
You'd think it would be taken, if taken at all, by an Obama hater. Some deeply teeth-grinding individual who cannot stand to even see our president's name displayed in public. Someone who, further, feels they have a mission, and that that mission makes it alright for them to cross the line of another person's property.
But I can see it being taken by an Obama devotee, as well. Just an Obama devotee who is a collector, and one who has a rather cavalier conception of boundaries.
Or maybe just a drunk from the bar across the street who comes out and says "Hey, look! This comes off!!"
Whatever their political affiliation, personal values, and blood alcohol content, this person by chance or design encountered my car sometime Friday.
I had spent a few hours at the Central Library, with my car in the Cultural Facilities Parking Garage. When I got back to my car, I did not notice if the sticker was there or not. The garage is dark, and I possibly could have missed its absence. I had long since given up obsessively checking to see if it was still there.
From there, I drove home for a brief stop. I parked a few spaces down from my place, right across from the bar. I was inside no longer than 15 minutes.
And when I came out, the sign was gone. The silver door showed some dirt circles where it had been for so many months, moved slightly a couple of times.
I did not look for it around the car or in the street, where one hypothetical type of person might have sullenly hurled it. I did not go over to the bar and ask the patio patrons if they saw anything.
I did wonder, of course, what very specific type of person would have done such a thing.
And I did entertain some half-baked wonderings about where the Obama presidency is at this particular point that someone would unceremoniously rip the emblem off my car.
But the world is a big and hugely multifaceted place. Things happen for any number of complex intersecting reasons, or for no reasons at all, or for ones we might not be able to figure out.
I liked my sign, and I'll miss it.
Sic Transit Gloria My Obama/Biden Circular Magnetic Sign!!
That is 262 days.
Or 8 months and 21 days, depending on how you figure it.
That is how long my "Obama/Biden '08" circular magnetic sticker lasted on the driver's door of my car.
The numbers here are approximate, since I do not remember the exact date I put it on, but it was about a week before election day last November.
Strange thing, this magnetic sign. It looks just like a sticker, but is, in fact, a sign with a magnetic backing. In other words, anyone could have taken it off my car at any time.
It was handsome, mostly blue, with lettering in white. There may have been some tiny details in red, also.
I tried putting it on the back of my Ford Focus. But there was not a single flat space big enough for the circular emblem. So then I decided to put it on the driver's side door.
More than one person remarked that it looked like I was driving the Obama/Biden staff car.
Because it was just a magnetic sign, I thought from the beginning that someone would swipe it. In the few days before the election, I thought it might fall victim to some zealous John McCain supporter.
So, whenever I came back to my car, I wondered if the sign would still be there. It always was.
I remember parking at my polling place on election day. Surely this would be the day when some wise guy would take the sticker. Or maybe it would disappear in the hands of a too-enthusiastic Obama voter? But no! When I returned to my car, there it was, as always.
And so it has been, ever since.
Or had been.
My car lives out on the street in front of my place at night. And I live by a popular corner bar. There is lots of foot traffic all day and all evening, and many happy or disgruntled drunken people issue from the bar every morning just after 2am. And they all walk very close to my car.
Granted, most of these giddy or angry drunks are on the sidewalk, with the Obama/Biden sticker necessarily facing the street, instead.
But in any case, the sticker had lasted all this time. That's something like 8.69 months, depending.
Last week I was sitting in the front window of Whole Foods, with a good view of my car, which was parked right there in the first row of spaces. As I sat there eating my dinner and computing, a car pulled into the space right next to mine. I had backed into my space, so as the blond woman got out of her car, she was facing my driver's side door.
She looked down at the sticker. She reacted with her whole body, even out to her frizzy, pouffy hair, with some kind of shuddery disapproval. She looked around her for a moment, looked down at the sign on my door again.
I was watching her from maybe 30 feet away, and she did not see me. I really wondered if she was going to peel off the sign. For just a moment her whole body seemed to say "I'm gonna peel off this sign! How easy it would be!"
And what would I do? Would I run out and confront her? Follow her around the store and nail her that way? Intercept her as she checked out? Or just let the incident go as a piece of fascinating quotidian drama?
All this ran through my mind in somewhere like 0.476 seconds. And then the lady turned and came into the store.
So once again, the sign was safe.
Over the months of living with my sign I had come to realize that most people are not going to even think of removing such a thing. Many people would not give it a second thought. Many others take it for a sticker, and so the idea of removing it is even further away from their minds. Who is going to remove a sticker? And of the people who actually know it is an easily-removed magnetic slap-on sign, how many would think of taking it off. . .and for what reason?
Imagining who might actually go to the lengths of reaching down and taking a magnetic sign off of another person's property becomes an exercise in one's personal definitions of values. It is an odd thing to think about. Right off hand, I would rule out 99 out of 100 people. Maybe even a higher percentage than that. It just seems so unlikely. Would you do it, reader? Under any circumstances??
You'd think it would be taken, if taken at all, by an Obama hater. Some deeply teeth-grinding individual who cannot stand to even see our president's name displayed in public. Someone who, further, feels they have a mission, and that that mission makes it alright for them to cross the line of another person's property.
But I can see it being taken by an Obama devotee, as well. Just an Obama devotee who is a collector, and one who has a rather cavalier conception of boundaries.
Or maybe just a drunk from the bar across the street who comes out and says "Hey, look! This comes off!!"
Whatever their political affiliation, personal values, and blood alcohol content, this person by chance or design encountered my car sometime Friday.
I had spent a few hours at the Central Library, with my car in the Cultural Facilities Parking Garage. When I got back to my car, I did not notice if the sticker was there or not. The garage is dark, and I possibly could have missed its absence. I had long since given up obsessively checking to see if it was still there.
From there, I drove home for a brief stop. I parked a few spaces down from my place, right across from the bar. I was inside no longer than 15 minutes.
And when I came out, the sign was gone. The silver door showed some dirt circles where it had been for so many months, moved slightly a couple of times.
I did not look for it around the car or in the street, where one hypothetical type of person might have sullenly hurled it. I did not go over to the bar and ask the patio patrons if they saw anything.
I did wonder, of course, what very specific type of person would have done such a thing.
And I did entertain some half-baked wonderings about where the Obama presidency is at this particular point that someone would unceremoniously rip the emblem off my car.
But the world is a big and hugely multifaceted place. Things happen for any number of complex intersecting reasons, or for no reasons at all, or for ones we might not be able to figure out.
I liked my sign, and I'll miss it.
Sic Transit Gloria My Obama/Biden Circular Magnetic Sign!!
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