Hello, I’m Bill. This is my picture, and yes, you’re on solid ground in thinking I can’t type. But I am on very good terms with my mister. He’s going to speak for us both.
November 7, 2009
February 9, 2010
REVENGE OF THE TUITION BANKRUPTS #4: WHAT I SAW AT THE ANACHRONISM
Revealing an eerie capacity for internal displacement during sleep, the following morning you wake shamefully hungry. Your wife is still unconscious. So completely you almost check for vital signs.
No, she’s just exhausted. Showered and dressed, off you go alone to that timeless place of excess below decks—for kippers, eggs Benedict, more pastries.
Then to the sundeck.
Oddly, in the case of you and your wife, this is what you’ve paid for but must guard against. More than one vacation has ended with both of you packed in ice and unguents. Later in the week, hearing cheers from a tanning competition, your wife will suggest somewhat peevishly an award for the whitest person on board.
But judging from your vantage point above the stern’s sundeck, solar collecting will be this crowd’s main concern. Even the Christians, in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts are basking. The Italians and Brazilians are already dark, and many are sporting shoelace swimwear. In some instances, portions of the body have engorged the suit fore and aft. A remarkable pride in breasts seems the only explanation for women proffering cleavage well below the waistline—in some cases, below the waterline.
Oh but there are goddesses, too. Especially the Brazilians. Women so anatomically breathtaking that you see one of the older Christian males pop an extra nitroglycerine under his tongue before tearing himself away for the next prayer session.
Eventually, the pulse regulates and you focus on the shoreline. Three hundred yards to starboard is Key Best, the first port of call. Last night you and your wife agreed to skip this one. You watch the tenders shuttling passengers back to the ship before noon.
Why go ashore? You spend all your time there. This simple discovery—that there is no reason to leave the ship—is strongly exhilarating. You don’t have to see anything! The two remaining ports of call are just nonstop souvenir shops. This isn’t Europe or Africa or China—not a place where you feel obliged to use your time well. That, you now realize, is the whole point of cruising: you aren’t going anywhere
* * * *
“I first saw him as a foot, a highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock–”
You’ve opened Peggy Noonan’s book on her years as a speechwriter in the Reagan Whitehouse. What I Saw at the Revolution. Already you know you’re going to like it. The awful truth is that, as a college English teacher, most of what you read is written by freshmen and sophomores. Truth to tell, you don’t read many freely chosen books. The reviews of Noonan’s book convinced you to buy it for the trip. By chance, it turns out there’s a nice congruity to your choice: the ship’s history says the Reagans sailed on the Britanis in the Sixties.
By now, your wife has found you. She has her own book, P.D. James’ latest. Together, swathed against the sun and looking more like Bedouins than fun seekers, neither of you notices when the ship weighs anchor and begins its passage for the Yucatan Peninsula.
Later that day, you make a second wonderful discovery.
Two levels below the sun troops, horse-racing, bathing-beauty contest, bingo, swimming pool, strolling mariachi players and Christian gentlemen mainlining nitro, you find a deserted deck.
Fittingly, it lies outside the ship’s vacant library. Here are rows of deck chairs, all empty save for one reader. Visibly alarmed when she looks up from Bonfire of the Vanities, soon she understands you have no maracas, playing cards, or cassette player. At a tactful distance you settle in under the mahogany canopy.
An anachronism from the ship’s salad days—a deck for readers. If the new neon-and-glass-elevator cruise ships have libraries at all, they offer videos. Here, there is only the glister of ocean, the fanning wake and pleasing thud of turbines generating 29,000 horsepower that will steam you over the northern Caribbean.
Not exactly a “wild surmise” on seeing the Pacific for the first time (Keats thought Cortez was the first European to do this, but it was Balboa), just “our deck.” But until it gets discovered, you, your wife and the Bonfires lady have the best of possible worlds: a private cruise ship.
February 4, 2010
REVENGE OF THE TUITION BANKRUPTS #3:ID,EGO,SUPEREGO
By bedtime, you have a better sense of the Britanis’ eight decks, bars, disco, movie theater.
A printed history in your cabin details the ship’s colorful past. Launched by Bethlehem Shipbuilding at Quincy, Massachusetts in 1931 for the Matson Line, she was originally named the SS Monterey. The following year she made her maiden voyage from San Francisco, sailing first to Honolulu, then on to Australia. Through the thirties, she was popular with society—Gable and Lombard sailed with her, the Rockefellers. Like other pleasure ships, she was converted during the war for transport. With berths installed for half the number, she carried over six thousand troops at a time: “half slept by day and the other half by night.” In all during WW II, the Monterey steamed 328,490 miles, and transported more than 170,000 troops.
You like all that—a lady of a certain age with a past, not one of these latter-day floating malls. Refitted twice since then, with a change of name, “the Britanis has become a very special relic from the romantic pre-war days of cruising.”
Also, during Belle’s dinner monologue, Alvarez managed to fill you in on the ship’s passengers:
Italians.
Two hundred Turinese flew all night to Kennedy, then to Miami. During the afternoon, in passageways and public rooms, on deck or gunning aggressively up and down the stairwells, they’ve already convinced you Alavarez’s count is short buy four or five hundred. Some of the Turinese will be sleeping during the day.
Brazilians.
About eighty of them, Alvarez said. They, too, have come a long way to take the cruise. All seem to have been selected from a catalog of Beautiful People. They are seated in your dining room. Their gorgeous clothes, the heartstopping faces of their perfect children make you wonder how such beings could want to share a strange ship with mere mortals.
Christians.
Perhaps three hundred are travelling in a group. All wear conventioneer badges, and as with the Brazilians they seem out of place. Collectively, they strike you as painfully vigilant: it’s as though cruising represents an ordeal undertaken to test their resolve. You yourself are for Christians these days: they get a bad rap from journalists, filmmakers, TV comics. After the cartoon antics of televangelists, Christians have become cheap-shot material.
But what can you do? An hour after dinner, buttoned up and sipping mineral water in the ballroom, they watch the rest of us, looking to me like tourists at a leper colony. Everyone else is swilling huge Cerulean Blue Typhoons garnished with patio umbrellas. Ole!
From ten o’clock on, the ship’s id–college students on spring break–pulses beneath the ballroom in the strobe-lit disco. Seen from the stairwell, the students look like a single organism reacting to chemical reagents. You and your wife are the ego one floor up, drowsily shuffling to show tunes. You trust that the captain, the superego, is on the bridge maintaining rigorous navigational standards.
As you dance, now and then you look beyond your wife’s scented hair. Framed by observation windows is black, moon-glazed water. Just how far below all this flotsam lies the ocean floor?
You intend before bed to work off one or more layers of Black Forest tort. But barely have you begun a turn around the promenade deck when you confront the midnight buffet. Set up on the portside, trestle tables are laden with napoleons, cream puffs, tiers of meringue, all of it shining under colored lights. Once again you do your duty. At last you and your wife stumble back down strangely narrowed passages
February 2, 2010
REVENGE OF THE TUITION BANKRUPTS #2: LIBERATION THEOLOGY
The exit you seek comes quickly
This happens to be the week before winter break at the university where you teach. For the next two weeks, things will also be abnormally slow in your wife’s office. It’s almost against nature for both of you to be able to get away at the same time.
That’s why Mother Nature takes umbrage at such last-minute arrogance. The nerve of you, signing up for a cheap cruise and putting it on Visa. You have no right, Mother believes. You belong here, in the rustbelt under louring skies loaded with snow, among commuter loonies, and yuppies making deals over cell phones.
That’s why the year’s first real blizzard starts the day before you leave.
Oh but you know Mother Nature around here. William Butler Yeats, do you imagine Ireland is the only old sow that eats her farrow? That’s why you book a hotel room at the airport for the night before your flight—haha!
* * *
Many sleepless hours later, the circulation is beginning to move again in your wife’s hands. Bloodless as always with flying terror, they start to look normal in the Miami airport. Both of you are shuffling toward the luggage carousels with other dazed escapees. Pasty and sun-famished, you stare out at bright palms and crotons floating magically beyond the lobby windows.
Expected! Greeted! Bronzed youths from the ship in canary-yellow shirts guide you to buses, see to luggage. In minutes you see ships ahead, in the Port Everglades harbor. You’re leaving! In two hours you will be at sea. Well, on your way to the Gulf of Mexico, close enough. No phone, fax, students, enemies, allies, auto soliloquists or office mates suited to the training needs of proctologists. At Sea.
* * *
Unpacked, having prowled the ship and gotten lost, you clean up and change clothes. At 7:30 you succeed again in locating the Waikiki Dining Room.
This is an important moment: now you will learn whether the tip given to the maitre d’ that afternoon was sufficient to get you seated with people not being deported or in quarantine. For five days you are going to break bread with:
George and Belle, borough of Queens
Marie and Frank, upstate New York
Dan and Diane, Traverse City, Michigan.
“Nice to meet you, this cabin we’re in, I don’t believe it, who’s kidding what, we’re supposed to live in a closet?”
For the next two courses, the Belle of Queens enumerates the hopeless conditions in her cabin. The ship and the cruise we’ve all booked is strictly on the cheap, but Belle expected a room at the Ritz. George at her side is called on frequently for support, but not for color commentary of his own. He provides the support with a single phrase you know will constitute his world view for the cruise: “F’geddaboudit.”
With a professional’s sense of timing, our waiter Alvarez sends the wine steward. Soon you are toasting your table mates. You drink deeply all through Belle’s clinically detailed account of a gallbladder operation, followed by a second critique of naval architecture.
Never mind, f’geddaboudit. Seafood en chemise, sole meurniere, black forest tort, a brandy—hell, another brandy. By the end of dinner you are resigned to Belle and her escort-service husband, grateful you like the others.
Especially Frank, on your right. He and his wife are from the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. There is something reassuring about him, a person of graceful gestures and manner who must weigh over three hundred pounds. He looms above your right shoulder, blotting out a quadrant of the dining room. Eating and drinking with deft movements, he puts you in mind of a casino dealer or professional pool player. Slipping his comments beneath or aslant Belle’s monologue, Frank tells you he has played golf courses everywhere—Saint Andrews, Pebble Beach, Paradise Island, Maui—
Given the size of his forearm, you assume Frank plays them all at once, teeing off in the Bahamas, selecting a club for his next shot, boarding a jet for Scotland….
January 21, 2010
REVENGE OF THE TUITION BANKRUPTS
The next seven postings present a travel piece I wrote in 1990.
After what’s happened in Haiti, it seems callous to talk about frivolous things, especially cruising in the Caribbean. But other than condole with the Haitian man who works at the tennis courts where I play, and write a check to a relief agency, there’s not much I can do.
————————————————-
Cruise ships are very old hat now; they had long ceased being exotic even in 1990. But I think something of the less acidic flavor of that era comes through, down to my choice of cruise reading. Imagine a garden-variety Democrat—not a journalist or a politician– freely choosing to read anything whatever these days about Ronald Reagan. I did so twenty years ago, and that seems amazing to me, now.
There are also politically incorrect aspects to the piece. You’re not supposed to talk about people being beautiful anymore—that’s Lookism. And it’s no longer acceptable to talk in terms of national or regional character. That’s Profiling. I suppose it’s even sexist to still use feminine pronouns when referring to ships. Ah well. Here’s what I wrote, warts and all.
REVENGE OF THE TUITION BANKRUPTS #1
On this particular Monday morning, the mid-winter grind at last does you in. You’ve arrived at that nadir of personal resources no amount of reason or common sense can salvage. Like the midnight-blue morning and failed backyard outside, you look defeated in the kitchen window.
The dark a.m. commute works like road salt, corroding everything. Waiting for a traffic light, the one timed so long you can actually feel your life slipping away, you turn to watch the woman waiting next to you. Alone in her own grimy car, she’s deep in debate. Her mouth is working, then stops as she listen to her phantom companion. Now she makes another point, finger jabbing at the windshield. You see this all the time, but this morning it gets to you.
The day that follows fits perfectly.
On your drive home, at a different traffic light you happen to glance at a service station. A person half your age is doing most of the stylistic things about his generation you most dislike. Someone else is pumping his gas while he preens for traffic, overcoat and suit coat off, standing next to his Lexus in the wintry air so all can see his sharpie’s red suspenders. Look at him yammering into his cell phone, poised with one arm over the open door. Very take-charge, very New Order.
Home, you find your wife in the kitchen, still in her coat. “We need a proctologist in our office,” she says as she opens a piece of mail. “He’d feel right at home.”
The mailing is from the gold-plated college our younger daughter attends. “This is the bill for next term,” your wife tells you. “Let’s do something to mark the occasion. At this moment, all our money is gone and so are the children. Here we are.”
Penniless and alone, you both face the frostbelt evening. After dinner, you scan the travel section of Sunday’s paper. The following morning, you are on the phone, looking for an exit point.
January 19, 2010
GOD’S WRATH: FIRST N’AWLINS, NOW HAITI
Where was I?
I know. In Michigan. Then I went to Florida with my wife Barbara and our dog Chelsea, where I got sick. I’m still feeling poorly, but need to rouse myself. If for no other reason, I need to get out of bed to thank Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson for clarifying the whole horrible business going on in Haiti.
Robertson first. I think he comes first, because he’s president of Regent University. It’s a comfort knowing someone like him is at the helm of a university, so Pat first. Recently, he revealed that once during a Caribbean cruise, he had occasion to go ashore in Haiti. It was a port of call, and while buying souvenirs he gathered some deep background on the country. That background can now serve to train the garish light of truth on Haiti’s disaster.
It turns out, Pat explains, that way back, oh, heck, way way back there somewhere, Haitians made a pact with the devil. They did it in order to get rid of their French oppressors. This was bad. They shouldn’t have done it, so now look what’s happened. To the Haitian people, right here and now. In the present. And if you don’t think God is punishing Haitians for their ancestors having done business with the devil, just look over the mountain range, into the Dominican Republic. It’s great over there, because they didn’t mess with the devil.
Rush Limbaugh’s take on the catastrophe is similar, but Rush thinks the devil is a communist. Or a liberal, which is the same thing. And since Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest and Haiti’s first elected president, was left-leaning in his politics (he didn’t think Jesus would approve of hunger for the many and riches for the few), that explains for Rush how it is all these people are dead now. He didn’t exactly say it, but I’m sure that’s what he thinks. Because of that commie, Aristide. Rush even thinks that other commie, Barack Obama will soon try to get Aristide back in power. So he and any other commies still alive in Haiti can supervise more communist-inspired natural disasters in the country.
These insights hearken back to the ones provided by Jason Storms. Or was it his father? If you remember, Jason and his dad, both men of the cloth, interpreted Hurricane Katrina in a way similar to the analyses of root causes provided by Pat and Rush a propos the earthquake in Haiti. They saw what happened in New Orleans as a sobering expression of God’s Wrath being visited on their city in order to cleanse it. How this works is that God visited His Wrath on the city just in time to save it from another installment of something called Decadence Days. Jason (or his father) explained that it was way past time for all the sin and sinners in New Orleans to be rooted out and dealt with in the harshest terms. All the girlie men parading around in skimpy briefs on Bourbon Street during Decadence Days–something had to give besides Spandex.
But wait. I have it on pretty good authority that some of the bloated bodies still swilling around in the detritus when Jason made his pronouncements belonged to God-fearing, church-going Christians. Maybe some even belonged to Republicans. Not many, but some.
Can this be? God-fearing Christians drowning right alongside really awful, Spandex-wearing catamites who deserved what they got? Was Jason telling us God can actually screw things up that badly? No way. We’re talking Supreme Being, we’re talking Primum Mobile.
Sorry, Jason, sorry Rush and Pat. You’ll all have to go back to the old cosmological drawing board on this one. Assuming, of course, you aren’t busy getting settled in the circle assigned to you by old Mister Beelzebub.
December 15, 2009
LONELY AT THE TOP OF THE BOTTOM
The agony of victory has at last subsided, and I can now write about it.
Almost three months ago, on Monday, September 28, 2009 something perfect came to an end. But nothing perfect can be expected to last forever. It’s built into the nature of things that something flawless will eventually be marred and brought down.
On that day came the end of the Golden Age of Failure here in our town: After nineteen losses in a row, tying an NFL record, the Detroit Lions lost their way on the road to pro football immortality. Instead of losing and thus securing unshared first place, they beat—no doubt inadvertently–the Washington Redskins.
But out of a wish to salvage something, I see a certain negative perfection in this. Failure is the only kind of perfection the Lions deal in, so, had the Lions lost one more game, thereby achieving an unshared record of sequential defeats in the NFL, they would have been out of step with the essence of mediocrity. Real mediocrity calls for sacrifice—in this case, an unshared record. Hence, mediocrity was achieved when the Lions won.
As one columnist put it, the sighs of relief drowned out the cheers of victory.
All the principals were interviewed. Even the team’s owner, Mr. William Clay Ford, the architect behind the unbroken string of nineteen defeats, condescended to speak to reporters. Isolated for years by the burden of his team’s relentless pursuit of perfection, he had finally lost his grip.
Up to that point, he had managed to assemble a team uniquely gifted at losing, commanded by a hand-picked general manager whose talent for hiring dud coaches and quarterbacks left the pundits week after week with less to say. Mouths open as the clock again ran out each Sunday, the writers must collectively have thought: How many ways can you flog a dead Lion?
It was hard not to feel sympathy for them. After all, there are just so many synonyms for hopeless. But now the journalists’ long night of the soul was over. Against all he held to be good and true, Mr. Ford had reluctantly fired his GM, not just his general manager but his friend, the two of them, for so long, lonely at the top of the bottom.
But at last Mr. Ford’s staunch spirit gave out—or, he sensed himself summoned by a higher calling. That calling obliged him to sacrifice his personal quest for more defeats in favor of the greater good, namely the demands of the common man and their sports writer flunkies, all of them badgering the beleaguered team owner for a victory.
So, the Lions won. Too bad. These days, Detroit is down on its luck, but in those heady weeks, months and years of recent history, at least we had something to call our own. Even so, let the Golden Age of Failure shine in memory. Requiescat in pace.
December 10, 2009
COMING CLEAN, PART TWO
The previous post detailed the facts as best we know them about about our rescue dog, Chelsea.
My wife Barbara did manage to find the web address of the family that got rid of her. The wife responded with a well written, self-serving e-mail. In it, she describes Chelsea as having been acquired, when she was about two, from a family living in a trailer. Her tail was already damaged, and her left eye blind–says the writer. The second family’s reason for wanting a another dog was to serve as a companion for their Australian cattle dog.
The writer characterizes Chelsea’s life with her new family as ideal, a happy, outdoor-dog’s life in the company of their alpha male cattle dog. The two lived outside, chased cars and wildlife, and were, according to the writer, boon companions.
Then the alpha died. After this, the writer says Chelsea retreated under her favorite bush and spent her days there. Given her ways when she came to us (and however self-serving the rest of the e-mail may be), this makes sense. Chelsea is extremely sensitive, and almost alarmingly intelligent. It’s easy to think of her grieving over the death of her companion, a powerful male cattle dog. For a long time before we learned any of this, my wife and I thought Chelsea was grieving over having been taken from her foster family (those good people will get a posting of their own). In fact, of the dozens of dogs in our community encountered on walks over the years, only two have roused Chelsea’s interest. Both look something like Aussie cattle dogs.
Then, we’re told, someone in Chelsea’s new family had a baby. This, added to Chelsea’s grieving, caused her stock to drop with her owners. She was now boring, no fun, just there without purpose under her bush. So, the family got a golden retriever puppy. From what we know of her, it’s easy to believe how big this did not go over. Chelsea doesn’t like frisky, in-your-face dogs, especially puppies.
But in the end, what gives the lie to at least some of the writer’s history is the nasty, near-death state of neglect our dog was in when she was dumped at the Vanderburgh Humane Society in Evansville, Indiana. Everyone who has a dog and cares about it knows the following: along with the basics of food, water and shelter, dogs at a minimum need Heart Guard as a prophylactic against heart worm, and Frontline or something like it to prevent fleas.
Neither were apparently provided to Chelsea. And obviously, she was never groomed. The writer told us the dog had been spayed before coming to live at her new house, so there had never been any need to take her to a vet. Nor was she ever allowed in the house. We judge from her initial refusal to eat regular dog food that the family fed her with table scraps.
And so forth. When bitter thoughts about this treatment rise and add to the day’s store of angst, I comfort myself with knowing that, had Chelsea lived in Evansville with people worthy of her, she would never have made the journey that brought her to us. She’s been with us now five years. Like the white hairs on my chin, those on Chelsea’s speak to “the aging process.”
Yes, it’s the process leading all things organic back to alluvial ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But so what if this is true for all living things? Chelsea has become so important to us that every time my wife and I try to imagine life in her absence, we fail. When she dies, no strength of reason or common sense or simple acceptance of How Things Are is going to make much difference. It will be awful, and we will have to grieve our way through, as we believe she did.
Knowing this makes each day—six or seven of Chelsea’s for every one of ours—a ticking, time-conscious blessing.
December 5, 2009
FESSING UP
Saturday, December 5, 2009
My master says it’s time to come clean. He thinks the whole Bill-and-the-Mister idea should be laid to rest.
The photo at the top of this blog is the one used for the cover of his second novel, Just Bill. Barry Knister is the author—the ‘mister’–and the dog he’s been speaking for up to now is the one in the picture.
Bill is a real dog, and he lives with a friend, Bob Nelson. That’s the man who actually rescued him. But Bill’s real name is Shadow, because he “shadowed” Bob on a road in western Michigan, as is described in Just Bill.
Except not exactly. After the novel was published last year, Bob revealed that he had in fact rescued or captured Shadow, not on a road but later, while the dog was drinking from the lake where the Nelsons live during the summer. Bob roped Shadow and took him home. In the following days, he asked around, went to the local humane society and various shelters. He even made up posters and stuck them on trees and phone poles. No one contacted him, so Shadow became family.
In other words, Knister, the person writing this (on my behalf) got it wrong in literal terms, however right it may be for the story he wrote.
But the point to be made is not literary. It’s a matter of sensibility. The dog in the novel is an Everyman dog, a regular-guy kind of dog. He’s a dog like the ones next door here in Michigan. This is not the case with me.
So Knister thinks it’s time to cash out the Bill idea. Not Just Bill, the novel, but Bill as the other voice in this blog. He’s decided its time to start presenting a different transliterated reality. That’s the word he uses. It’s not the right word, because I don’t have an alphabet. But what he’s been doing for his fictional dog is what he now wants to do for me, which is what the fancy word stands for.
The sensibility thing has to do with me, Chelsea Knister. As best Knister knows—as best I know—I’m a border collie mix. At least “mix” seems a good bet. I look like a border collie, but I’m heavier. I have a white blazen on my chest, and white paws similar to Bill-Shadow’s, except I’m double-coated as all border collies are.
I am blind in one eye, the left, and something’s wrong with my tail. It’s about half the length it should be. Collies have long, wavy tails, the kind you see on golden retrievers. It works something like the outrigger on a dugout canoe. Waft the tail to the right when you dodge left, and it helps you to balance.
Why is my tail the way it is? Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell anyone. Maybe it’s been that way since I was born, a defect of some kind. Maybe it was injured or cut off. Knister will never know.
So I have these attributes that he read about when he was looking for a dog to adopt. He was scrolling through the petfinders.com website, and stopped when he saw my picture.
PICTURE OF CHELSEA GOES HERE, IF AND WHEN SHE PERMITS HERSELF TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED
Plus, there was a short narrative about me, written by a woman named Sheila Fawcett, a volunteer. I was described as having been dumped by my owner at the Vanderburgh Humane Society in Evansville, Indiana. When this happened, I was covered with mats (hair all clumped in knots), and I was dying of heart worm.
From these few facts alone, you already know something about the people I now live with. Anyone who doesn’t keep scrolling through the list of dogs after reading such details is probably not someone you want to trust with serious decisions. Hardened-silo nuclear missile management, for instance. In the most charitable terms, Knister and his wife have to be hopeless sentimentalists. Suckers for hard cases and lost causes. People who love movies about losers who eventually make it, etc.
Anyway, Knister didn’t keep scrolling through the next screens of border collies, all of whom would I’m sure have looked like better bets. He stopped, and went to work to learn more about me, the hard-luck collie. Once in, all in, as they say. I flatter myself in thinking he did a smart thing.
November 27, 2009
BLACK FRIDAY, A LA CORMAC MCCARTHY
The horses, bowed to sparse patches of grass raised their heads as one. From the salt plains below came again the muffled roar, an ululation of thousands hidden by foothills where, many miles off, the plain gave way and climbed to the horizon.
Rising and falling on the wind, the sound still came, long enough now to become part of the ambient world for the horses, so that again as one they bowed to the grasses. After their stoic fashion, the three travelers bowed as well to continue counting.
This was not an obsequious bow before some potentate, that infamous gesture of concession and disgrace so recently enacted to the horror of those living off the map to the right of the foothills. No. Each man was isolated in his own financial maze. But also, like their horses they formed a unity as they counted, the thin tens and twenties fluttering on each man’s counting rock, small change ringing on the slabs like wind chimes.
By now, the distant sound of shopping had lost its power for the three. Resigned, each man had relinquished the adrenaline rush that precedes combat. Still counting they concentrated, each confident in his weapons, his kit—the debit cards and letters of credit, checks, and the Krugerrands secured around each man’s waist, gold coins that would serve as a final, last resort should yet another blow to the economy come just as some key transaction was taking place, some much coveted video game for this boy, the push-up bra and bustier needed for cheerleading practice by that teenage girl, the new tap shoes and red fedora and the floor lamp for a loyal spouse left at home and, like the counters, bent no doubt to her own task, at laundry hamper, staff meeting or hydrangea bed.
The ululation grew again and the men stopped counting. All their hard-won sang froid suddenly gave way, slipped from sturdy shoulders down the slope past their mounts to flow in rivulets into the pumice dust and small stones of the desert. There would be no victory this Black Friday, no triumph. After the battle with women slashing through piles of men’s sweaters, hacking and pounding in a ravening search for this same chartreuse-and-fuchsia tartan leotard but in a plus-size, the men saw as one their collective defeat–the money, the checks and letters of credit, even the precious Krugerrands all snatched away by clerks who handed them, grinning and awful in victory, plastic sacks heavy or light with wearable, edible, playable or readable fecal matter that, for all their efforts, would turn out to be wrong.
And so, stoic and wordless they gathered up the reins, swung creaking into worn saddles and not hesitating began the slow downward first leg of their ordeal to the salt plain, the horses knowing it all already, the terrible morning and afternoon to follow of the annual trek into Retail.
November 19, 2009
FREUD, FISH PONDS, MEMENTO MORI–PART TWO
The pond. Bill seems to like being next to it when the three of us sit out there before dinner. It has metaphorical possibilities that I wish I could explain to him.
In its small way, our pond serves to keep me mindful of Freud’s analogy to explain psychoanalysis. Freud compared analysis to draining something in the Netherlands called the Zuider Zee swamp. The more you drain the psyche’s swamp by chatting with your shrink, the more you expose what lies below consciousness. This means more of your cognitive real estate is made available for–whatever. Experiential agriculture, you might call it. Our little backyard pond serves to remind me of just how much of my own mental real estate is either buried deeper than the Marianas Trench, or lying fallow topside.
When we bought this house, the owner explained what I would need to do to keep the pond functioning. Of course she concealed the more disgusting features of the job, focusing instead on the simple draining part.
This would be accomplished with the quaint, old sump pump she would leave for me in the garage. Just stick it in, turn it on, and let old mister pump do the rest, she said. Good, I thought. That’s simple enough for my skills level. But as someone both wiser and less habituated to apartment living might have known, nothing good or simple would figure.
But that first spring, I did manage to get the sump pump working. Effluvia gushed from the attached hose. It was very satisfying to see. I had noticed the pump’s wiring was partially exposed, but since the thing worked, good enough.
Who can know why things turn out as they do? It’s like taking a walk, turning to see a skinny stray dog following you, deciding to walk home with him, and as a result changing your life.
As the pump chugged along, it exposed more and more of the Zuider Zee. I could tell all the water wouldn’t be gone, and when it stopped flowing, I took off my shoes and rolled up my pants. With a rake I stepped gingerly down into the chilly water, and began scraping up rotted leaves.
The whole thing stank and seemed to move. That I now saw was because of mosquito larvae. I dumped loads of this stinking sewage into a bucket, stepped out and threw the contents on waiting flower beds. As I moved back and forth into the water, the oddest tingling played about my feet, even in my hands as I worked the metal-handled rake.
Who can say how long it was this went on before it dawned on me–the mister, the professor emeritus, defender of the higher sublimations of literature, scourge of the dangling participle and tireless enemy of the passive voice–that where water and electrical current are present, humans should be absent?
Hearing all this later, my friend Bob, an electrical engineer, just stared at me. He has no beard, but at the moment bore a striking resemblance to Freud. After a long pause, he shrugged. You should be dead, he told me. Never do it again. You’ve used up every piece of luck you still had coming.
