Drinking, Fast and Sloe

My father did me a disservice. Because of his absenteeism, and alcoholism, and death, he deprived me of the opportunity to have a relationship with a father and left me vulnerable to the predatory instincts of other males. As a result, I, to some extent, haven't taken full consideration of my value as a father or the potential for collateral damage because of my behavior. I try to keep it together, to do for my kids what nobody did for me, support the family, be present, all against a backdrop of battling the darkness, of wanting sometimes to collapse into myself and avoid it all.
Leonard Cohen has called depression "a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next." And this: "You don't have time for anybody else. It's time-consuming. And, although I think everyone lives their life as an emergency, the emergency is acute when you're just trying to figure out how to get from moment to moment and you don't know why, and there are no operative circumstances that seem to explain."
In other words, you feel like shit and there's no obvious reasons to account for it. You look for causality, until you realize that a reason might not exist, doesn't need to exist. This book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, talks about causality. I don't understand everything he says, and I'm going to have to go back over it, more slowly, but he breaks down thinking into System 1 and System 2. This guy provides a summary. System 1 processes quickly, often without our even realizing that it does so. For example, most people I know have had the sensation of thinking something wasn't right, without realizing why. That helps us survive and is an evolutionary trait, perhaps more valuable when our ancestors encountered mortal threats more consistently than we do today. System 1 sometimes calls on the allegedly rational System 2 to help it out. That can be beneficial, since System 1 can sometimes lead us astray. But Kahneman calls System 2 inherently lazy.
So this got me to thinking (slow thinking, I guess). Sometimes I mention something to people, and they're like, "Where did that come from?" And usually I ask if they really want to trace the thread. It generally requires too much energy for me to detail the multiple-step process that led me to say something seemingly out of left field. For example, from my seat on the train a few days ago, I spotted a limousine. The limo made me think of a friend of a friend, someone I haven't seen in maybe 20 years. This friend of a friend started a limousine business, and he had an improbably attractive girlfriend. Once at a gathering at my friend's house, she was on the couch in a short skirt and we all saw her underwear. She eventually left him for a fitness trainer. My friend's mother died recently. At the viewing, I saw his sister. She wore pants in college that had something written across the butt. So, I saw a limo, and the end result was me thinking about a friend's sister wearing sweatpants a few decades ago with something written across the butt. If someone had been with me, I might have said something about pants with writing across the butt. And that person might have thought, "What the fuck?" And I would have said something like, "Well, didn't you see that limo out there?" and then said that I didn't have the energy to trace the genesis of my thoughts to explain how I came to mention pants with butt writing. To take it a step further, her ex-husband's mother allegedly used to iron his underwear. So, I could have seen a limo and asked a companion for thoughts on ironing underwear. Alas, I had no companion, which was probably just as well, but who wouldn't think about ass-writing and ironing underwear after seeing a limo?
Then I wondered if my System 1 or System 2 was operating in that instance. Because all those thoughts came to me in about 45 seconds. But I'm guessing System 2 came into play, retrieving those stored associations. I get fatigued thinking about thinking.
Which circles me back to Leonard Cohen's notion that dealing with the mental violence consumes so much time and how you have to figure out how to make it from one moment to the next. That violence can descend swiftly, without notice, and interrupt rare calm moments. At other times, it's just there, the prevailing sentiment governing one's life. And it consumes so much energy trying to fend off, well, your own thoughts, consuming you from the inside. And then you don't have the energy to clean the house or cut the grass or brush your fucking teeth. But you know what helps? Alcohol. Not the Kinks' rendition. Get a buzz on and cut the grass. Much more tolerable, even if it does involve potentially dangerous machinery. In an episode of "Breaking Bad" I recently watched, a character said pot and chemotherapy go together like apple pie and Chevrolet. So, too, I think, do alcohol and depression. The problem, however, is that it's not sustainable and also carries the potential for that collateral damage. The argument I hear from some people, including my psychiatrist, is that maybe I'd feel better if I abstained. Perhaps, but back when I didn't drink, or not nearly to the extent that I do now, I didn't feel good. I've developed my own therapeutic regimen. But, unsustainable. Pity. Depression and alcohol, a parasitic co-dependency. I'm lucky just to be alive, it serves me right that I survive. That's Robert Earl Keen, taken out of context. But at some point, I'm going to have to give abstinence a shot, at least for a while, and see how it goes.
My mother had an oft-repeated, likely apocryphal, story about how Babe Ruth stopped drinking after a kid asked him why he drank. I couldn't find any evidence to support the claim that he stopped drinking at all. Now I'll have to read a Babe Ruth biography. Anyway, my kid has expressed a similar sentiment, through his mother. I guess he feels like he can't bring something like that to me directly. I wish he could, but sometimes I think he finds my personality overwhelming. So, the lack of an appropriate male role model for me and the absence of any bonding along those lines left me without much of an idea of how much a father, present, namely me, can have a bearing on a child. I know theories exist that say that it doesn't matter what we do as parents, that our kids will be who they will be. Bullshit. I think there's some truth to it, but it can't be taken unequivocally. We want to feel like we matter, and I believe we actually do. So I need to be even more attentive, because it doesn't come naturally, flowing from a positive frame of reference stemming from a relationship with my own father. I do hug my kids daily, though, and think what even that simple gesture could have done for me as an anxiety-riddled child, and the comfort I might have taken from a father saying goodnight to me as I lay in bed fearing the nocturnal onslaught from my own mind while asleep. The inverse can obviously be true, also, in which people who have shitty parents become equally shitty parents because they just repeat what they know.
Here's Kahneman's description in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"of our thinking processes:

Freely mixing metaphors, we have in our head a remarkably powerful computer, not fast by conventional hardware standards, but able to represent the structure of our world by various types of associative links in a vast network of various types of ideas. The spreading of activation in the associative machine is automatic, but we (System 2) have some ability to control the search of memory, and also to program it so that the detection of an event in the environment can attract attention.

What he's partially saying here, if I understand correctly, is that we've seen things before, so they're familiar and also associated with other things. We can't help but make such associations, so maybe it was all System 1 when I went from seeing a limo to pants with writing across the butt and ironing underwear. Dogs appear to have a similar system. They don't like surprises, and when something pops up that's alien to them, out of their comfort zone, they react. Same with us when a situation strikes us as different, even if we're not completely conscious of why. With depression, I'd guess triggers from System 1 cause System 2 to go into overdrive, and something seemingly innocuous can induce despair. An interesting question concerns why some people's Systems 1 seem to work so much more effectively than others' and the apparent differences in the Systems 2.     
Something else Kahnmena cites in his book:

The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic n 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that "we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls." The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die.

 This seems to say we're predisposed to believe in God. That would certainly appear to be true, considering religion's reach. I would think System 2 would be the one to say, "Wait a fucking second, you're telling me that this lady conceived without having intercourse and her son eventually rose from the dead? And this other guy parted the Red Sea and brought locusts and all manner of assorted shit?" But if we're wired to be religious, why? Maybe it's another survival mechanism. Common belief, common cause, strength in numbers. Bloom, an atheist, says belief in the divine stems from an evolutionary fluke. Or maybe it just helps people to feel ok and rationalize away all the fucked-up shit. 

In the Company of Friends

The CBS morning news show this past Sunday aired a segment on the value of friendship. The segment focused on a group of women in Wisconsin, I think, but also reported on psychological studies that demonstrated how friendships help to ease burdens, even change people's perceptions about the relative difficulty of certain tasks. For example, in one experiment, a researcher asked a person laden with a heavy backpack to estimate the severity of a hill in front of which they stood.. When unaccompanied by friends, people perceived the slope as more severe than when accompanied by friends. The presence of friends helped to alter the perceptions so that the task appeared less arduous.
So I, in bed on a Sunday morning, got blindsided to the verge of tears by thinking about my lost friend Dave and my mother, whom I also miss. The fact that I miss my mother demonstrates the power of such attachments, considering the uneven nature of our relationship. I didn't start to crack at my mother's viewing until my friends showed up in a pack. Perhaps I then felt like I had the permission to let the facade of stoicism slip a bit, in the presence of people I had known for so long and who knew the dirt and who still continued to be there. Like when you pick the toddler up from daycare and he breaks down upon seeing you after holding it together all day. Like me, keeping it together at work all day and then coming unhinged when I get out.
The day before my Sunday morning near-meltdown in bed, I spent a few hours cleaning up around the Little League complex. Mandatory cleanup duty for for parents. I told my wife I didn't mind it so much, since I mostly spent the time by myself with a rake, tidying up while the snow fell progressively more heavily. Her response consisted of something like, "Yeah, you, by yourself on a gloomy day," meaning of course I would like that. I have to say, the activity contained a certain measure of peace. Simplicity. Just a rake and me and snow and the myriad of shit that arises in areas frequented so consistently by young people.
So the Sunday morning segment got me to ruminating somewhat on the nature of friendship and the loss thereof, and I thought that maybe the appropriate time had arrived for me to revisit a post I started months ago, one in a series reflecting on friendship and specifically my relationship with my late friend Dave.
Often I write myself notes, meant to form the foundation of the next post, the next chapter in the story. And sometimes when I return to these notes, hours or days or weeks or months later, I don't know what I meant. The urge to write something has gnawed at me for the last few weeks, sort of like a baby alligator struggling to break through the eggshell and take on the big, bad ecosystem, but nothing crystallized. So here I return to notes initially rendered in a staccato style, trying to make sense of the mess. These function more like snapshots in the scrapbook of my mind, as opposed to a narrative with a theme.
To wit, when we were in high school, we drove around in my multicolored 1969 Chevy Nova with beers between our legs and smoking Swisher Sweets flavored cigars. Or joints if we had any. We survived, though Dave appeared to be on the verge of passing out one time when the fumes from the burning engine in that same car made their way into the back seat. Burning. Literally. The car did not survive.
We fished and drank all night in the surf at the Jersey shore, not leaving until dawn. For Dave's bachelor party, we went out fishing in the cold Atlantic on a party boat. I abstained from the 7 a.m. alcohol.
Dave and I urinated under the streetlight outside the bar following my college-graduation party.
When Dave was pursuing a job as a corporate recruiter, he and I went to some kind of Native American festival because his ostensible boss had an interest in Native Americans. This guy also employed such techniques as calling a prospective recruit's mother in an effort to exert pressure on the prospective recruit to accept a certain position. I disagreed with such a tactic, but Dave didn't. Until he did, and his career as a recruiter came to an end.
The Jimmy Buffett concerts. I grew out of that phase before my friends, but there was a time when I would attend those shows, stoked on beer, and fantasize about a life that represented the polar opposite of the one I was living. Dave and I took a train to Manhattan to see Buffett at Madison Square Garden once. Dave has gotten off this train.
At the bar with the front painted like a giant American flag, hanging out with our state-trooper friends, we sang karaoke. And I sang pretty fucking well, and Dave rode my goddamned Bob Dylan-singing karaoke coattails. They'll stone you when you're walking down the street...but I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned.
I still wear Dave's New York Jets sweatshirt that he left at my place aroud 20 years ago. On balance, he made off with more of my clothes than I with his. In his later years, his taste in fashion skewed to the eccentric, and his shirts on me would have resembled kimonos, anyway.
We waded and fished the Delaware River with my son. We fished for stripers and we fished for pickerel in the pines and we fished for steelhead near Lake Erie and we fly-fished for trout and we caught herring and cut them up on the spot for catfish bait.
We golfed. I hate golf.
We celebrated Halloween at Dave's house, with the kids trolling the closed-off street for candy
We got stoned at my mother's house and Dave put the Cheez Whiz nozzle right in his mouth and squirted away.
We didn't always drink, but why do alcohol and drugs exist? Because people want to escape actual life's drudgery and monotony. Admittedly, such indulgences can be destructive, as well.
But here's what the late writer Christopher Hitchens said about alcohol:

What the soothing people at Alco­hol­ics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink. We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case. Those who see this keenly, or who register the blues intently, are not to be simplistically written off as “dysfunctional” cynics or lushes. Winston Chur­chill put it very squarely when he defined the issue as, essentially, a wager. He was a lifelong suf­ferer from the depression that he nicknamed his “black dog,” but he could rouse himself to action and commitment and inspiration, and the brandy bottle was often a crucial prop. I have taken more out of alcohol, he said simply, than it has taken out of me. His chief antagonist, Adolf Hitler, was, I need hardly add, a fanatical teetotaler (though with a shorter and less wholesome life span). The most lethal and fascistic of our current enemies, the purist murderers of the Islamic jihad, despise our society for, among other things, its tolerance of alcohol. We should perhaps do more to earn this hatred and contempt, and less to emulate it.

Moments such as those here recounted help to sustain us when confronted with life's less interesting, and more common, offerings. We felt good during those times, mostly, in the company of friends. We snatched pockets of pleasure from the mundane. After the cancer, we mostly approached our endeavors in the same fashion. I now wish I had more opportunities for those moments.Memories don't sustain as much as I would like. It pains me to think, in particular, of the last few months of his life, when, in retrospect, he appears to have been desperate. And no matter who is there, you're alone. The last days we spent at the hospital, generally dismal places outside of maternity wards.
Gone too soon, my friend. I miss you, and I love you, which, as is often the wont of men, I didn't tell you enough while you were here.

Good Heavens

I tweeted this stuff already (@tfhofmann), mostly as notes to myself. And the 11-year-old follows me on Twitter, so I have to be judicious with respect to tweets. Anyway, the conversation after baseball practice, at which teammates annoyed son No. 2, went something like this:

8-year-old: If someone annoys you in Heaven, you can't hurt them, right?

Parent (thinking he means because you have to be nice in Heaven): Why?

8-year-old: Because it's just their soul, and you can't punch a soul. Where is your soul?

Parent: It's not something physical.

8-year-old: But where is it in your body?

Parent: I don't know.

8-year-old: From Heaven you could look down on school and laugh because you'd have tons of flat-screen TVs.

Liar

So Lance Armstrong lied. And I recently read an Associated Press article that consults "experts" on deception--college professors--and they say everybody lies. I didn't consider myself a liar, but they gave examples of parents lying by pretending the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy exist. And, I suppose, Santa Claus. House says everybody lies, too, and he's a doctor. Is maintaining the Easter Bunny myth lying? I like to characterize it as pretending, but maybe no difference exists. Pretending just sounds more benign. Kids get to the point at which they know the truth soon enough.
I have had people lie to me. Who hasn't? I don't know if my mother thought she was lying or if she lied to herself so much that she actually came to believe what she said. Still lies, though, whether or not she considered it so. In this biography of Leonard Cohen, his friend, the poet Irving Layton, is quoted as saying that genius is "the ability--a very rare ability--to see things as they actually are. You are not fooled." But maybe the real genius lies in bending what is to what you want it to be.
Perhaps there are good lies and bad lies: "No, you don't look fat. Yes, I like that haircut," as opposed to "Yes, I really am a physician" and "No, I didn't murder that bitch."
Some of this stems from another book I recently read, "Fooling Houdini," about magicians.and mentalists. Those people take pride in lying, or using trickery, and maybe no harm arises, in the absence of victims. Such trickery can be entertaining. But street hustlers basically deploy magic tricks to take people's money, demonstrating the fine line between this form of entertainment and thievery. The author mentions that tracing the history of magic produces persuasive evidence that Jesus might have been a magician and that turning water into wine and multiplying loaves constituted trickery. He also cites similarities between gospel rites and Egyptian spells and rituals and says they suggest that Jesus may have studied under Egyptian wizards during his missing years.  As John Prince describes it: "One of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of mankind, and nobody knew where he was for 18 years." Might Christianity be predicated on a lie, even though one of the Ten Commandments says not to lie? I find that more intriguing than just buying into the notion of actual burning bushes and and parting seas.
Some betrayals leave scars that influence future perceptions by making people more prone to cynicism. An avalanche of lies that buries good faith and trust. Being fundamentally lied to as a child, even if the architect of such lies didn't consider herself to be lying, can take an especially harsh toll, with lies in adulthood rekindling memories of such early deceptions.    
A self-preservation instinct seems to kick in for children when the potential for trouble exists, and they instinctively lie. Not me. When the priest asked me if I had smoked pot on the seventh-grade school trip to the amusement park, I said well, yes indeed. Then he psychologically tortured me for weeks by hanging over my head the notion that he would tell my mother, whom I couldn't disappoint. The priest mind-fucked me, as opposed to actually fucking me. I should get damages for that, just like the kids who endured physical molestation. I again find it baffling that adults do that to kids, mind or physical. We don't really grow up. We lie, therefore we are. Maybe one of the most nefarious aspects of lying concerns the toll it takes on the person lied to, who then questions the value of ever telling the truth in the first place. Funny how my mother lied but nevertheless stressed to me that I shouldn't.
At any rate, kids lie because they think they won't be found out and therefore won't get into trouble with their parents. (My kids face more severe punishment for lying to me than for whatever the actual transgression is.) This tendency to lie for self-preservation appears to carry over into adulthood for, in my experience, most people. If you want an example of some epic lying, check out Jodi Arias. Guilty or not, she has recanted two tales of what transpired. From what I have seen, the people who step up and take responsibility and say they did it make up the minority. When confronted with incontrovertible evidence, they break out the justifications and rationalizations. I can understand that, since most people care more about themselves than anyone else, sometimes with the exception of their own children. And I don't know which does more harm, betraying oneself or confronting the sorrow head-on. My mother seemed to fare better throughout her life than I have in some respects, primary psychologically, though nobody can know what really goes on in another's head. Many prevarications seem to stem less from malice than self-interest, and, hey, everybody lies. Maybe even Jesus.

Survive

Survive, stay alive
Through the thick and the thin
Survive, stay alive
Until it all ends

                                                 --Jimmy Buffett

My mother survived some ordeals. She survived the Great Depression; getting hit by a car; driving her own car into a house; walking into a bank window; being a passenger on a plane that had engine trouble over the ocean and had to return to Spain; an assault in Bermuda; an operation in which the doctors apparently didn't expect her to survive when I was a small child; an alcoholic, abusive husband who abandoned her and five kids; and drug- and alcohol-abusing sons. She possessed a certain grit and passed that along. My cousin once said that side of the family had longevity, if you took even reasonable care of yourself. In the end, she couldn't outlive herself, but my mother was testimony to human beings' capacity for survival.Maybe DNA uses us as tools to pass itself on, but some DNA has more success than others. I suppose I have that to thank her for, and, now that I have kids, I am grateful for possessing the capacity to survive.
Survival, and not just survival, but also being at least somewhat productive, takes stamina, even for people who don't battle demons to the extent that some of us do. I think that's why some people end up killing themselves--they just get too tired to summon the resources necessary to continue. I wasn't familiar with this guy, George Saunders, until I read a piece in the New York Times. The article also mentions David Foster Wallace, about whom I also didn't know anything. So I did a little digging. David Foster Wallace apparently was an unusually intelligent person and writer. He also apparently suffered from depression for years, couldn't handle the side effects of the medicine that helped him, stopped taking the medicine and hanged himself. Maybe he just got tired of it. Tired of living in his own head and unable to get out. Tired of trying to summon the energy just to live with himself. Tired of being tired. I'm speculating, but I do have some insight.
I suspect my mother survived even more than I know. Perhaps their family dynamics were just so foreign to me that I'm way off base, but something compelled my mother to construct an alternate reality. I witnessed my grandfather doing things that belied her contention that he had the qualities of a saint. As a younger man, though, I didn't consider my mother's actions, or those of her siblings, unusual. I guess when you're young, things are what they are. I didn't know any different. But then a friend gave me a reality check when I related to him an anecdote: My uncle arrived at our house, and my golden retriever reacted somewhat overzealously, so my uncle did what anybody else would do--he reached around and started masturbating the dog. Jerking off the golden retriever. I considered it funny as a 14-year-old at the time, though that friend told me it was fucked up. Another time, while getting our pictures taken at my cousin's wedding, the goofy photographer was setting us up and said "let's do something different." My uncle's response? "How about if I blow my son, would that be different?" The photographer said it would be the strangest thing he ever saw.
My mother had an unusually strong attachment to her siblings. She frequently consulted me about decisions, such as when buying a new car or even a dishwasher. Or investment advice. Then she would ignore whatever guidance I gave, generally after I had done some legwork, and often did what her siblings suggested. I recall lashing out at her when I was an adolescent and she was considering new cars. She had told me how she valued my input, since I would be traveling in the car with her frequently, and then she went out with her brother and bought something without affording me the opportunity to have any say. I felt important and then, suddenly, small.
So what went on in their house, the house at which I spent so much time as a child? I distinctly remember the sensation of floating while at my grandfather's house. Floating down the cellar stairs. More than once. I chalked it all up to dreams, since these episodes occurred while I was in the bedroom. Then somewhere along the line I recalled having read that victims of abuse can have out-of-body experiences as a coping mechanism. So I put into Google what I considered a few relevant search terms, and discovered dissociation. I have no memory of abuse at my grandparents' house, though I vividly recall what could have been dissociation and the strange sensation that accompanied it. Was I sleeping, and was it a dream? Or was I seeking sanctuary in a safer place? And I do have distinct memories of other abuse, by a teacher and my cousin's boyfriend, with whom I was in bed in a trailer. With the teacher, it was in a bed in a hotel room. And, again, either I cut out before the abuse escalated to the point of genitalia involvement or it never got that far. But those incidents did involve unwanted physical contact. I wish I could remember. I wish I could go back in time and bear witness. I wish I could have retribution. but most of all, I wish I survived the way my mother did, by creating my own alternate reality.

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.