Death Takes a Holiday

No I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away
Oh little darling of mine.

I can't for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
But it just don't work out that way
And the course of the lifetime runs
Over and over again. 

                                      --Paul Simon

I attended mass the other day for probably the first time in 20 years. Catholic mass appears not to have changed much during that time, or even since my days as an altar boy.

***

As a young child, probably 4 or 5 years old, I stood with my mother in the kitchen of our house and told her I would want to die if she died. By the time I grew into adolescence, I wanted to kill her. I've straddled the line between those opposing forces ever since, though not at such extremes.
Those feelings tugged at each other as I made war with myself heading to the hospital a few weeks ago. She had suffered her second stroke, though I only knew as I ventured there that she had fallen and hit her head and lay comatose. Three years had passed since her first stroke, just before Thanksgiving. This time, she died, six days before Thanksgiving, and death took that holiday. Christmas will be different, too, as I don't think I've been apart from her on either Christmas Day or Christmas Eve my entire life.
So memories of past Christmases and Thanksgiving inevitably intrude. I recall a snowy Christmas Eve about 35 years ago when I sat and did my Miami Dolphins puzzle, a gift received early. And the Thanksgiving when I threw a fit and stormed away from the table, to which my mother coaxed me back by saying that Thanksgiving likely would be the last with grandfather. Cheer up and enjoy the holiday, son, Gramps is going to die soon. I never got much for Christmas, so it was a monumental occasion when I received the 12-inch black-and-white TV. Cable hadn't yet happened on the scene, so I got to watch the network news, I guess, fuzzy as it was. We once had a Christmas tree that shed so many needles we found them for years afterward, tucked contentedly in the crack between the baseboard-heat radiators--the kind through which hot water coursed and occasionally woke me in the night--and the wall. As a single parent with five kids and no spousal support, I guess she didn't have much to spread around.
With respect to stockings, the ones that we hung by the chimney with care, people apparently have different notions of their utility. I've since come to learn that stockings can contain an array of gifts, even wrapped ones, a veritable bounty. I always got a candy cane that was about a foot long and an inch and a half thick. But I also got such sundries as deodorant. Or a pair of underwear. Or a handkerchief. What kid doesn't covet a handkerchief? My grandfather always walked around with one of those snot-filled rags in his pocket.
The highlight of Christmas Eve arrived when Santa rode down the street atop a fire engine, complete with sirens piercing the night and a red light swirling across his bright-red suit and making his white hair and beard stand out in relief. The tradition continues today and momentarily transports me to those bittersweet days. A time of more innocence, but not much more.
I've often reflected on the nature of a parent's relationship with a child. I lived into my teen years hewing to my mother's worldview. Belief in God and church attendance stood out among her  priorities. For Catholics, the weekend offered a window in which you needed to go to mass. Allegedly, if you went earlier than 4 p.m. on a Saturday, that didn't count. At least that's what my mother said. And I believed it. The Catholic Church apparently stipulated that one must attend mass during a specified time frame or it didn't count. Does God tally up church attendance? Maybe the priests do. The priests were infallible to her, so maybe they did track us. Certainly they gauged the collection envelopes. And they were the people who had no relationship experience and no kids of their own yet somehow possessed the qualifications to provide family guidance.And to help shape young minds. But I digress.
I used to be terrified when I traveled for soccer trips that if I missed mass, God--or worse, my mother--would at least be disappointed or perhaps take more severe punitive measures. Not wanting to disappoint my mother hung over me like a pall. For I gave her a reason to live. She told me so. She asked God why he sent her this child, chronologically so far removed from her other children, and then it became clear: God sent me to her so that she would have a reason to live. That thinking appeared to guide her parenting of me. The objective never appeared to be for me to become self-sufficient and independent. When I angered her by reneging on my agreement to attend a particular college, she told me I was the one who would be disappointed because she "had big plans" for my girlfriend and me. She had it mapped out. Therein lay the source of some friction. I think she once characterized my kids as her "little playthings." Telling. "The Prophet," by Kahlil Gibran, ranked among the books she cited.  That book reads, in part:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

I guess this was good in theory, because practice was a different matter. So God sent me for her. For her to shape to her specifications. For her to control. For her to make all the decisions for. For her to turn the cold shoulder to when she disapproved of something I did. For her to make threats in her exasperation that she was going to run away. Her favorite. The baby. He sent the wrong guy.
Frugality also occupied a space in her hierarchy of ideas. Shaped by the Depression, she seemed to wear frugality like a badge of honor. Like the notion that bread bags and cardboard boxes were perfectly suitable repositories for the leaves I raked.We had hedges, but no hedge trimmer. Likewise with trees. So I always had to borrow for such maintenance. She wanted to keep that house at all costs and even became offended at the manner in which subsequent residents decorated it. A woman who gave a eulogy of sorts at the funeral home--which upon entering, by the way, would sadden anyone, even in the absence of a death, with its water-stained drop ceiling and other signs of disrepair--said entering my mother's home was like "walking into a big hug." For me that house became an albatross, its demands weighing upon me as I tried to keep up with school and sports and just not being a disappointment. I would have burned it down, but, of course, not wanting to disappoint, I didn't. The hospital in which she lay near death provided a "comfort cart" for our family, with bananas, water, coffee, fig newtons and mini pretzels. Nothing takes the sting out of imminent death like pretzels. At any rate, upon leaving the room one day, I stocked up on water and pretzels and told her not to worry, I was making her proud.
My mother and parents of her ilk hailed from a different generation. She and a close friend with whom we spent a lot of time, my "aunt," used to tell us kids to "go play in traffic" when we bothered them. She similarly dismissed other concerns if they didn't fit in with her interests. Sort of a hands-on, hands-off approach. Coupled with the desire for control was the disinterest in entertaining anything with her children that could be unsettling. People stopped visiting my mother the last few years because of one of my brothers. Because she would turn the subject to him and ask people to be responsible for him after her death. She wanted to exert her influence from beyond the grave and ensure that another enabler would emerge for my alcoholic brother, he who apparently called his siblings idiots because they hold jobs. Not only did she alienate people and make it difficult to get her settled over the last three years, but she failed to persuade anyone to take care of my brother. The control has vanished. My mother idolized her parents to such unnatural lengths that it made me wonder, if I could have peeled back the layers, what I would have found lurking in the dark. She said on more than one occasion that she would have given up part of her life to spend a day with her mother. She often said that her mother never refused a beggar during the Depression, because you never know who's at that door. The implication being that God could be there incognito to test you out, and He could be wrathful. Now she's a pile of ashes in a box buried on top of them. So they are reunited, in a manner of speaking.

* * *

My mother and brother and our former house have lately been populating my dreams, which at any rate never have been a source of peace. I had more exposure to their interactions than anyone, and her death and his presence have sparked something that has made the brain form involuntary connections. After having spent decades trying to find some resolution to my ambivalence concerning my upbringing and time with them, I believe I've made scant progress. And sleep provides no respite. They come to me, these people, and haunt my waking and sleeping hours.
A letter from my mother arrived in a package in the mail recently. In it, she addresses her children and acknowledges that she made mistakes and hurt us, though she also strikes a somewhat-defiant tone. I guess she figured there would be no reprisals. A certain candor also comes through, the likes of which I would have preferred to see while she was alive. But I think my mother feared candor, because when you strip away the facade, you become more vulnerable to whatever lies under the veneer.  Perhaps honesty isn't always the best policy, because honesty can bring pain, and maybe creating your own reality has merit. But it can also bring pain to others, and there's a certain selfish aspect to it. I think my mother and I would both have benefited had she recognized and accepted my flaws, since maybe then I wouldn't have taken as long as I did to accept them myself. That would have eased the pressure of not wanting to disappoint.
I do believe my mother could have gotten more out of life and relationships had she not been scared. She had conviction, or at least feigned conviction, that she knew the right approach, and that created conflict and worked to her detriment. She stubbornly continued to enable my brother to drink and to go through life without a job and, in so doing, deprived herself of what she claimed to enjoy. Aside from the people who stopped coming around because of him, she didn't see her grandchildren as much as she might have. So what was more important? I don't know that she ever really considered that she might have been alienating anyone by the way of life to which she clung. It was her life, though, and she wouldn't be told how to live. There's a certain nobility in that, but the heartbreak arises when others suffer.
The drug dealing, violence and all-night indulgences to which I received exposure as a preadolescent child created my reality, one that I've since come to learn differed greatly from people with whom I've come in contact. Wondering what might have been different offers nothing constructive, though I at least have been able to ensure that my kids haven't been exposed to a life quite so ludicrous. I don't know that it matters, though. Maybe we are just wired how we're wired, nature triumphs over nurture. I don't like to look at pictures of myself as a child, because I see someone whose innocence didn't have to evaporate as quickly as it did. I wanted to please but always felt like the elusive brass ring remained out of reach.
In one of my dreams, my mother and I conversed. We didn't discuss anything monumental, just likes and dislikes with respect to ordinary subjects, like TV shows. And I thought to myself that the conversation amounted to a pleasant exchange. My mother and I never had such a conversation while she was alive. Maybe some things really can only happen in our dreams.

Beautiful Mourning

Grief is necessarily, and obviously, personal. We can share some of the burden and maybe take solace from others during the initial grieving process, but then time's passage leaves us to cope as we must. As Conrad said, "We live as we dream, alone."
I've heard the cliche that time heals all wounds. Does it? Or does it change us as we adjust to whatever brought on the grief? I suppose the amount of time that has passed has a bearing on the extent to which we feel loss. I still remember gaffes I made as a soccer goalie 34 years ago. Strikeouts in baseball. Missed basketball opportunities. So time hasn't healed those, but I suspect I'm in the minority with respect to such issues. I react in a worse fashion to more profound events.
Nearly a year has passed since my friend Dave died. Hard to believe, but I'm a busy guy, which tends to make time appear to go more quickly. I don't think there ever was a time when I didn't see him for a year over the preceding three decades. There were stretches, as there naturally are in all relationships, during which we didn't see each other frequently. Lives take different trajectories at different times. Like when I was married and he wasn't, though he was around often then. Then he was married and I wasn't. Then I was married with kids, and he didn't have any, though he loved mine. When we didn't see one another or converse often, I took comfort in knowing he was out there. I've said it before, but I like knowing grizzly bears are out there, too, though I don't need to see them every day. So Dave's death left a void I can't fill and has affected me more deeply than I anticipated. I tend to have somewhat delayed reactions to trauma, and as time has passed, I've become more, not less, saddened.
My younger son has an affinity for a primitive dirt road along a lake in a wildlife-management area where we sometimes fish. I swing my SUV through the deep ruts, and the kids bounce off the back seat and nearly bang their heads on the roof of the truck. Dave and I fished there in our teens and more recently with my son. We once got the anchor stuck in that lake, and I had to jump out of the canoe, into the murky depths, to loosen it. He refused, which I considered ungracious, since I supplied the canoe and the anchor.
The dirt road borders a cornfield, and my son asked as we bounced along not too long ago how high corn grows. So I, naturally, broke into song, telling him the corn at a minimum grows as high as an elephant's eye. Asian or African elephant, I don't know. Female or male, don't know. Baby or mature, don't know. But I recalled the song from my elementary-school years, and my classmates and I performed it during a show.

Oh what a beautiful morning,

Oh what a beautiful day.

I have a wonderful feeling

Everything's going my way.

All the cattle are standing like statues,

All the cattle are standing like statues,

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye,

And it looks like it's climbing

Clear up to the sky. 

I've since considered that song and wondered who wrote it and what the fuck they could have been thinking. A beautiful morning and a wonderful feeling everything's going his way? In what life? I seemed to recall that the song came from "Oklahoma," where the wind goes sweeping down the plains. So I looked it up, and, yes, it is from "Oklahoma." I remember the lyrics to the title song, too. Apparently "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' " is the opening number in the Rodgers and Hammerstein play. Published in 1943. During WWII, no less. I guess the nation needed a pick-me-up. Here's Hugh Jackman singing it, joining such luminaries as Sinatra in belting out that classic. And it appears I slightly misremembered the sequence of the lyrics. I may have been remembering them in the sequence I would have used had I written that song. Perhaps I'd be better off if I didn't remember this kind of stuff at all. Or maybe I should wake up to that song each morning. Or go to bed with it playing on my iPod. Maybe I can reprogram my brain and buy into the system.
Anyway, the anniversary of Dave's death approaches, and his birthday, and I'm no more at peace with it as the day he died. Onward we go, down that bumpy dirt road.
 

Hail Mary

So, people have descended upon West New York, which is actually in New Jersey, because an image of the Virgin Mary has appeared on a tree. This must be the Descension, as opposed to the Ascension.
If, in fact, God, or Mary herself, created this image, why there? What makes West New York a prime place to install her likeness in tree bark? Perhaps one clue lies in Census figures, which indicate that West New York is a town of about 50,000 with a largely Hispanic population. They're devout people. So that could be a reason. Hey, West New Yorkers, Mary in a tree shall be your reward for your devotion.
But that raises other questions. Like why tree bark? Maybe it was the work of a pious squirrel. Or woodpecker. And why are extraterrestrial visitors so interested in people's rectums? Perhaps a person created this Mary image so people would flock to the town and spend money. Previous appearances by Mary, and Jesus, too, have involved food, which raises even more questions. Food is perishable. Or else people eat it and then digest it, dealing Mary a grim fate. Tree bark has more longevity, though bird droppings present their own challenge.
Sometimes the religious figures' images take the form of apparitions. So much so that the Vatican has issued rules regarding such sightings. They're called Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in the Discernment of Presumed Apparitions or Revelations. That's pithy. And would people really lie about something like that? Well, maybe not lie, but I guess the Vatican needs to lay down the law to make sure people saw what they thought they saw. Like a puddy tat.
Is God or Mary installing these images or appearing as apparitions to maintain an air of mystery? If so, why? Why can't God give us a sure sign he's there and not just, you know, appear in coffee milk or on the surface of an English muffin? Why must faith be the doctrine by which the Church guides its flock? Maybe people look for Mary in a tree because they need to see an outward sign of her existence. Maybe faith sometimes wears thin. Apparently we know what Mary looked, or looks, like because a guy in Mexico saw a vision. Ok, that seems pretty solid. I was worried we might not really know what she looked like.

I Love a Parade

The movie "Blue Velvet," if I remember correctly, opens with a sort of surrealistic parade scene (and a severed left ear). It's a bizarre movie, and capturing the spectacle of a parade sets the tone, since parades are some the strangest fucking things I've ever seen.
I recently attender a Memorial Day parade. People in passing vehicles distributed candy, and my kids raked it in like it was Halloween. What's better than a lollipop that has just rolled across the street?
Participants in the parade included people who were trying to sell cars; people who were trying to get you to adopt dogs; people who were trying to get you to send your kids to summer camp; fire trucks; more fire trucks; cheerleaders; high-school marching bands, in full regalia in the wilting heat; cops (waving); firemen in kilts playing bagpipes; gymnasts, who had attendants walking alongside them spraying them with, I guess, water, but it was in one those pump sprayers used to put weedkiller on the lawn, so maybe they were actually spraying the kids with poison (now that would be a parade); baton twirlers; people riding bikes, including one that looked suitable for a circus clown (meanwhile, the guy who owns the local bike shop did handstands on his skateboard); my kids' friends from little league, riding in a truck while their fathers walked behind; old guys, some of whom appeared to be veterans, riding in pickups and waving; politicians (waving); and my personal favorite, the guys and gals who looked like Hell's Angels, riding their Harley Davidsons too fast, vests adorned with MIA patches and something like "Bikers for Christ" stitched across the back. God has Hell's Angels in his corner. I still don't understand why they were there or what they have to do with Memorial Day or whatever. But I suppose you have to populate a parade somehow. Sometime early in the parade a 12-foot guy dressed like Uncle Sam zigged to one curb and zagged to the other. I'm guessing he had stilts under that patriotic outfit.
We even got one of those things you use to secure a better grip on a hard-to-open jar, except this one contained some sort of religious message. Not sure about the thought process involved there. "Hmm, let's quorum up and figure out how to spread the word. I got it: The things people use to get a better grip on lids." Maybe some people use them frequently and, as such, will see the word a lot. Maybe the plan is ingenious.  They should have handed out toilet paper with Bible verses.
Our bounty also inluded, I think, seven Frisbees. What the hell, it was Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, and nothing says summer like a Frisbee. And nothing reminds me more of our fallen service members than a Frisbee.The kids use these for bases while playing baseball, then the dog bites them in half.
The kids also seemed to think there was nothing unusual about it all; why not have motorcycle guys proselytizing and the high-school marching band and the girls in their gymnastics outfits and the car-dealer sales pitches? It's capitalism and God and candy and gymnasts and veterans and motorcycles and dogs. It's America. If I couldn't embrace God, catch a Frisbee, eat candy, dodge motorcycles and listen to marching bands, I might be distraught.

Why

Recently I wondered how a friend, a Catholic laywoman who teaches religious-education classes, can reconcile being divorced and having a boyfriend with her faith. My wife said there wouldn't be any Catholics if they had to follow the rules. Yet I remember as a boy Father O'Keefe saying you couldn't have it both ways, and the pope seems to echo that message.
I had a recent conversation with another friend in which we discussed educational options for our children, and I asked her whether she believed in God, because I know she doesn't attend church services. She said believed in God and that it was important for her husband that their two kids receive the sacraments, like first communion and confirmation. She said they had to be better about their religious practices.
I don't attend church, either, but I didn't exactly tell her that I don't believe in God. Having grown up with Catholic indoctrination, I naturally turned to prayer for relief from the crippling anxiety I experienced as a younger man. Suicide seemed like a logical solution, but the Church forbade it; logic and the Church don't especially walk hand in hand.
So I told this friend I had prayed for relief, persistently, from certain burdens, but no relief arrived. That shook my faith and set me off on a path of seriously questioning what up to that point had remained gospel, so to speak. Getting out from under an upbringing in which religion played an outsize role can be tortuous and protracted. Especially when believing brings comfort. It's nice to think that a beneficent higher power watches over mankind and has our interests at heart and will cradle us in his arms when we die. It's just that experience indicates otherwise. And if you don't believe in our God, we'll kill you, motherfucker. Perhaps life is a trial and eternal reward awaits. Probably not for me, I guess, since I've had the temerity to pose questions, such as:

Why do people kill their children? Are they nuts? If so, why did God allow these nuts to be born, let alone have children? Free will, my mother would say. God gave us free will, so we can kill at will.

Why do people suffer from depression? Not the blues because, say, the Steelers lost (I have seen some crestfallen Steelers fans, and domestic violence has been documented to increase on Super Sunday). But debilitating depression, the kind that makes you submit to having electricity course through your skull.

Why do other diseases exist, like cancer and Alzheimer's and the like? 

Why do people text and drive? Or walk and text? Maybe, and this appears to be pervasive, because they're inconsiderate. They have the right to impose on others.

Why do people lie? Usually self-interest, I'd wager, which begs the question about why people are selfish. And inconsiderate.


Why do human beings wage war? Again, self-interest could be the likely culprit. With war comes suffering and death.

Why do people rape? Sure, psychologists have explanations, but why did God allow for the psychological conditions that motivate rape? If, in fact, they are the reasons.

Why do some people have excessive wealth while others sit on the streets in tattered clothes and ask for money?

Why was I born today, Life is useless like Ecclesiastes say? That's Pete Townshend, so I can't take credit. 

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Why are some people ugly and others attractive?

Why do imbeciles proliferate?

Why didn't I hit the lottery? I played. If I had prayed, might I have won? If I had done the St. Theresa thing or the Prayer to Saint Joseph? I used those prayers as a younger man, and not for anything material, but just to feel all right. They're supposed to get you what you want, goddamnit.

Why does free will make some people self-destructive? That's probably the pain.

So why do we hurt?

And why did my best friend die?

Why can't I get past myself to surrender to religion? I might feel better if I could.

John Doe

Mary Chapin Carpenter has a song called "John Doe No. 24," which I thought about when I received notification that someone carrying my brother's wallet was found unconscious on the street and lay in a medically induced coma in the hospital. John Doe #12. They needed someone to identify him, and I agreed. He wasn't easily recognizable, but there my brother was, a ventilator handling the bulk of his breathing.
Not too long before this incident I considered how my sons, separated by three years, fight like this brother and I did growing up. The difference being that eight years separates us. He always wanted to watch "The Flintstones," while I preferred "Ultraman." I loved "Ultraman."
This brother never appeared to give much thought to the fact that he was wrestling someone eight years his junior when he would kneel on my arms and rock his knees back and forth across my biceps. Perhaps because an intellectual gap didn't exist  And by the time I hit 7th grade, the physical playing field at least had leveled. I think I was in 8th grade when he grabbed our mother and I had to physically intervene. Sometimes when he knelt on top of me he would encourage me to break free by exhorting me to treat him like a "nigger." Of course his rationale for remaining on unemployment and then receiving public assistance was that the niggers did it, so why shouldn't he? This coming from the same person who wouldn't try an antidepressant because he didn't want to be a drug addict. Sometimes he would pull up my shirt and swing his long red hair on my stomach because it tickled, and not in a good way. I once had a schnauzer given to me by my mother's co-worker. I won Gretel over by feeding her peanuts or something like that, and she would attempt to bite my brother at my command. I still derive satisfaction from the memory of him leaping onto the couch in an effort to get away from her. Eventually we had to surrender Gretel because she bit a neighborhood kid.      
My brother used to consider it cool to come into our shared bedroom and fall over drunk. When he was about 14, my mother had to roust me from bed one night to go pick him up at the police station in a nearby township because the police had corralled him wandering down the street drunk. I lay in my bed after we returned home listening to her crying and slapping him. They never have relinquished the creepy dynamic between them. She as an octogenarian and he as a middle-aged man have behaved very much like during his teen years. And they attempted to draw other family members into their destructive orbit. But I don't suppose they even knew they were doing it.
 He didn't seem to experience remorse when he drove into the detective's parked car and then hightailed it home and hid in our basement and I had to run interference. Or when he got arrested for driving the wrong way on the interstate, or smashing into the guardrail. Or when the music would rattle the walls of my adjoining bedroom at all hours when we grew a little older and he would sell drugs to a parade of unfamiliar comers and goers.
I don't think he ever possessed the intellectual capability to process that he had done something wrong. He always has appeared not to have the capacity for guilt. I used to marvel at his resilience in that respect. Not only was he born with a predisposition to alcoholism, he seemingly exited the womb predisposed to never feel guilt. Self-interest has driven his nearly every act.
He and a friend once destroyed the neighbor kid's metal fire engine, the kind you would sit in and pedal, and I lied to cover it up. Just like I lied when the detective whose car he hit came to our door. He spent time in jail for stealing, but that didn't stop him from stealing again. He let my psychologically compromised mother wander off in the rain and in fact would allow her to shelter and feed him for as long as she would. And he stole from her simultaneously. He, brimming with pride, once kicked the side of our car in with his new steel-toe construction boots.
All the while he considered himself smarter than everyone. And all the while our mother served as his apologist. Our father poked him with a fork at dinner so that he would remove his elbows from the table. He had dyslexia. He wasn't as good at sports as our other two brothers and me. He was used to getting attention and then I came along. She never ran out of excuses. She blamed others for his transgressions.  And were she to discover the current state of affairs, she likely would blame the rest of us for that, since we separated them by having her enter assisted living. Nothing lies beyond their potential.  
He endangered my life more than once. On a river in a small boat that he made highly unstable because he couldn't remain upright. On a motorcycle when I was in grade school, going so fast that the wind blurred my vision. When we used to go bowling on Sunday mornings and he would get the Dodge Duster up to its maximum potential before shifting into neutral and coasting.
So his recent descent created a quandary. Sad? Yes. As selfish as he has been, did he deserve to have someone identify him and ask questions about his predicament? I did it, so obviously I thought so. Should anyone be in such circumstances alone and anonymous? And he was John Doe No. 12. There are 11 others there. Someone's son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother? I think my father died under similar circumstances, alone in a hospital, his liver shot.  I can't help but wonder to what extent the hospital should expend resources on my brother now. A lot of cost and effort are involved for someone who is not a productive member of society, a drainer of resources rather that a contributor. 
My brother has since awakened, though they describe him as incoherent. I harbor no illusion that he will have had a revelation and change his ways if he recovers. I also harbor no illusion that he he would do for me what I have done for him, modest as that may be.

As He Lay Dying-4

Time's passage allows for grief to recede slightly and the preceding years' shared experiences to come more sharply into focus. Life proceeds, and for those of us with children, it proceeds apace.
And then, in the midst of the hectic nature of life, events long past creep through, carrying along on their currents a mixture of amusement and sadness and lives lived and offering, however fleeting, moments of reflection.
For Dave and me, I've often used fishing as a prism through which to view our relationship. That's not unique; I think other people have covered that ground, that of the bond between those who fish. We fished consistently, sometimes quietly, other times boisterously, sometimes conversing, sometimes not and sometimes drinking. Partying might be an equally valid window through which to view our shared experiences. We fished, we drank, we smoked, and sometimes we did all of them at once.
But in a relationship covering roughly 30 years, we did other stuff too. Like the time we went to J.C. Penney so Dave could get suitable clothes for a job interview? The blind leading the sartorially blind. Yes, that looks quite respectable, I offered, as a 24-year-old whose taste in clothes was fashioned by a product of the Depression mother, she who allowed me to attend school sporting desert boots through which my toes poked. 
And the job to which those clothes, so carefully selected, led him somehow involved us going to an Indian, as in Native American, ceremony. To break it down, he somehow hitched on to a sort-of headhunter firm (based on his management degree), and the guy to whom he was assigned fancied Indians. So off we trekked, into the wilds of New Jersey, to experience the rain dance and the hawkers of turquoise jewelry. During the course of that trip, we discussed the responsibilities required of such a job. The guy who liked Indians also happened to manipulate people for whom he found jobs by appealing to their parents if they, the job seekers, balked: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jones, your son's not there? Can you please tell him that the people who offered the $80,000-a-year job would like an answer?" I, maybe  idealistically, objected to the tactics, while Dave objected to my objection. But, eventually, he came around and saw things my way.

Somewhere around that time we took a New Year's Eve trip to the Poconos to visit our friends who had rented a cabin for the occasion. The most memorable part of the night was when Kevin, who I didn't know and perhaps have seen once since, ran from one room to the next, jumped, arms spread, and farted in his unsuspecting girlfriend's face as she sat on the couch. To which she replied, memorably: "Kevin, that was most vile." Dave pointed him out to me on subsequent occasions through reference to the flying fart.
On the way home from that trip, on New Year's Day, we detoured to a small airport and subsequently found ourselves in a small plane circling the mountains. When I asked the pilot about his qualifications, as we were coming in for a landing, he said he received his training right there at that little airfield. And later, Dave said to me that I expected him to say he received his training in Vietnam. He was correct, I expected his credentials to extend beyond the community airfield. But as we floated above those mountains, we transcended for a while the trials that awaited us upon our return. We lived through it, as we did so many other circumstances...

My Brave Face

Reading this book has prompted me to examine more intently a particular time in my life and reflect upon the similarities I now behold. Not that melancholia ever ventures far, though sometimes, briefly, it may lie dormant.
In the book, William Styron's daughter Alexandra recounts her father's battle with depression and how he eventually seemed to succumb to it. In this book, William Styron himself addressed his first attempt to come to terms with the depression. I've read William Styron's book more than once, but most particularly around the time when I underwent electroconvulsive therapy. I thought then that William Styron hadn't suffered enough to have been driven to a state desperate enough to contemplate taking his own life. Having read more, and gained more insight into his behavior, though, I think perhaps he had. Alcohol served as his drug of choice before he delved into doctor-prescribed treatments.
Alexandra Styron tells of her father having to cope with a severe descent into depression 15 years after the first flirtation with the thin line between madness and whatever isn't madness. I find myself now 18 years past the ECT, and I wonder if circumstances aren't threatening to come full circle. A priest once told me that wars come along about every 20 years, at least before W., and ECT is a bomb intended to incapacitate the enemy when one fights against himself.
Alexandra Styron's book also says studies have revealed that most major depressive episodes occur during the spring. My most comprehensive breakdown straddled the seasons, between winter and spring, just as I straddled the metaphorical line on one side of which lay the promise of life grounded and to the other an abyss of unknown proportions.
I commiserated with William Styron through his book. Right around the time of its publication, I also began to seek a pharmacological remedy. About 20 years later, I struggle to find a way forward within the chemical universe or to find a way out. Perhaps this place. Perhaps not.
The search for a remedy has consumed much of my adult life, and even sub-adult life, at least those moments when I wasn't resigned to the notion that no remedy existed. The quest began in high school, when I first sought a therapist's assistance, but the self-medication began in middle school, with the alcohol and marijuana.
With cognitive therapy alone offering no respite, eventually I came to a point at which I considered medication to be helpful, my life held together by chemical bonds. But now my mainstay, Effexor, doesn't really work anymore. Coming off of it, though, can be worse than staying on, and worse than depression alone, and that's where I find myself. Trying to wade through quicksand, with a lead weight in my stomach and a fire hose squirting around inside my skull. The withdrawal drives some people back to the medication itself, the vicious cycle in which one finds the cure has induced an infirmity of its own that holds an equally tight grip.
I try to conceal the pain, especially from the children, and turn to words to convey what essentially defies description, except for the apparent minority who have undergone similar experiences. The kids don't need anything else to worry about, or anything at all. I won't accept, though, any kind of stigma attached to depression. My brave face stems either from a desire to spare the feelings of those ill-equipped to handle the infirmity.
Now, though, perhaps a new avenue of research holds promise. Therein lies one of depression's dilemmas, the perpetual hope-disappointment cycle. The prospect that this treatment will cure what ails me or you. As John Hiatt says, "It's always somewhere else, you're gonna fix yourself...but you can't get away from the nagging dark." The Devil's greatest trick is making you think he doesn't exist. Maybe depression's greatest trick involves making those in its grips think a way out exists.
So, while depressives can be realists, which some people think might bring about the melancholia in the first place, they too employ tactics that fly in the face of experience. The survival mechanism, believing that something better could lie in wait. And what if it isn't just a mind game? If the next cure is the cure? How would someone who has lived a life of depression and so much time in search of the cure react to a cure's existence? Maybe I'll find out.
To that end, the avenues of research that recently have opened differ from the standard treatments of the past 30-odd years. A consensus seems to exist among psychiatric researchers that we need a better treatment. Ketamine and scopolamine, which work on the glutamate system, have become subjects of clinical trials. Their methods of action in particular appear to intrigue those involved with the research, especially because they differ starkly from Prozac and its ilk.
The promise of an effective treatment also frustrates, which people with any number of maladies experience. They work great, but you can't get them. Only those involved in the trials themselves, which, after all, do hold a risk/reward aspect. You might feel great, and the additional appendage you have spawned might not even bother you. Drugs are good. Health-care providers, however, already use ketamine and scopolamine, for anesthesia and motion sickness, respectively. Different treatment regimens likely would exist for say, car sickness and depression, but the safety profile has been established to some extent. Shouldn't people who already suffer from potentially life-threatening maladies be able to accept the risk for the potential reward? So, researchers, let's get moving. I await the next big disappointment. Except maybe, just maybe....And, if nothing else, the promise of something better will have consumed another undetermined number of years, bringing me one step closer to being a survivor.

Strange Bedfellows

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Credit for this quote widely goes to Charles Dudley Warner, a writer and friend of Mark Twain, who himself never said anything pithy.
In keeping with the spirit of strange bedfellows, what about Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum? This, according to his website:

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 at the age of 32, and from 1995 to 2007, served in the US Senate. In 2000, he was elected by his peers to the position of Senate Republican Conference Chairman.


Eventually, he got walloped in a Senate re-election bid. Mr. Santorum fancies himself "A Champion of Traditional American Values." That's actually the title of a PDF you can download on his site. He advocates fiscal sanity and wrote a book called "It Takes a Family." To that end, he and his wife have seven kids. The youngest, Isabella, 3 years old, is in the hospital with something called Trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality tha can cause developmental and cardiac problems. Apparently about 90% of children with this problem die before birth or result in a stillbirth. For those who survive, fewer than 1% reach age 10. A horrible situation for a little girl and her family.
The difficulties the Santorums face and his recently elevated profile bring to mind another incident involving one of their children. Their son, whom they called Gabriel, died at 20 weeks gestation in 1996. Again, tragic. And under such a circumstance, parents could have unusual reactions. But they took the dead fetus home and allowed their other children to hold it. Before that, the couple apparently spent the night in a hospital bed with the dead baby. He's against embryonic-stem-cell research but finds it acceptable to sleep with the dead baby. Truly a strange bedfellow. People of faith, if you were to poke around the Internet, seemingly find inspiration in the Santorum family's embrace of the fetus and willingness to channel its grief in such a fashion. Wouldn't anyone not caught up in religious zealotry find it troubling, not to mention sleep-disruptive, to have a fetus in bed? If he were really pro-life, perhaps Mr. Santorum would support stem-cell research, which has the potential to save other lives.
Aside from which, you, as an adult, bringing a dead child home to your other children are either forcing them to retreat further into your religion to rationalize such behavior or fucking them up forever. Or both.
This guy is running for the Republican nomination? Seriously?

***

Speaking of people running for the Republican nomination (again, seriously?). Newt Gingrich, Mr. Conservative, the one who trumpets himself as the true standard bearer. One of his ex-wives recently did a television interview in which she said Newt wanted to, basically, fuck another woman but not necessarily separate. She called it an open marriage. and Newt isn't unique in that respect.
That was his second wife. He currently is married to #3. I might be wrong, but that kind of track record doesn't seem fitting for one who campaigns on such a platform. When the CNN guy, John King, hosted a subsequent debate and asked him about the open-marriage issue, Newt responded quite testily that he was appalled the moderator would broach such a subject during a presidential debate. Indignant self-righteousness, that's the way to go. Bully the guy because you're so far off-base you have no cogent argument to provide. With his campaign platform relying on conservative values, people do have a right to question whether he advocates, at least for himself, a guilt-free piece on the side. Even more amazing is that at least three women have been willing to fuck him.

Pissed Off

Were you here, we might be discussing these subjects:

Some Marine have caused an uproar by urinating on their vanquished foes, apparently some Taliban guys. I believe the video went viral, as they say (they being the people who talk about stuff like videos going viral). The U.S., doing damage control, has concerns that it might appear to be disrespectful to Muslims. I guess the part where they killed them wasn't disrespectful. Somehow it seems like wartime bestows some sort of nobility on killing.

This book talks about how some Japanese soldiers admired the fighting spirit of some U.S. soldiers during World War II. So much so that one Japanese guy, right after killing an American, thought he must look that guy's family up after the war and tell them how bravely he fought. Hell, I admire the guy who toughs it out to the end, but I'm not sure pissing on these men was as bad as killing them. Out of respect for a worthy adversary, yeah, you might not want to urinate on them after the fact. But these guys have indiscriminately harmed civilians and might not be worthy of that respect. Anyhow, I digress. I guess the central question is whether it's worse to piss on somebody or kill somebody. Or piss on somebody after killing him. Or pissing on somebody before killing him. That's probably the worst, since then they're aware of being pissed on, which likely would really piss them off. 

***

I still don't understand why marijuana is illegal. at least not while alcohol is. A recent study found that marijuana smoke appears not to damage one's lungs.
So, with the tobacco industry bucking up against hard times, I may have arrived at a solution: Let Altria, formerly Philip Morris and still a purveyor of Marlboros, and its ilk get into the game. Some tobacco fields in North Carolina and Virginia could convert to growing marijuana, the big companies could harvest it and I could go to 7-Eleven for a few joints. The government could collect tax revenue, and we'd have fewer problems at the border. In addition, people wouldn't be taking over remote tracts of national forests to cultivate weed. Then, when people smoked, they'd get hungry and eat a bag of Doritos. So it would be good for the economy because of the food we'd have to buy. And in my experience, people tend to think shit's funny when they get stoned, which appears preferable to getting violent.
With the Super Bowl coming up, and the accompanying wife beating, now would be a good time to consider this policy. At parties, stoned people wouldn't even care that the vegetable dip sucked, or even that it had vegetables in it. And instead of engaging in fisticuffs, they'd chill, man, or maybe play some hacky sack or even fall asleep. Everybody would win.

***

This guy Haley Barbour, the outgoing Republican governor of Mississippi, recently decided to pardon a few people. Apparently working at the Governor's Mansion gives you a leg up if you eventually want a pardon for killing your wife or whatever, as eight of those who received pardons seem to have done. What was he thinking? Take this guy David Glenn Gatlin, for example, who apparently shot his estranged wife while she held their baby. Perhaps Haley thought, "Oh, David Glenn's a good guy. He cuts the grass around here and makes a mean whiskey sour."