"The Quotidian"
by Fred Owens
(In style this is halfway between Karl Knausgaard and Forest Gump)
Monday morning. I got up. I put on the coffee. I went out to the driveway and picked up the newspaper. I noticed the air was a bit foggy and cool. I went back in the house and cleared the cat litter box, then I turned on the TV for the morning news. I kept the volume down low because we have a new housemate and the sound of the TV might disturb him.
I emptied the dishwasher. I try not to clatter the plates when I do this first thing in the morning. By now the coffee was ready. I took the rubber band off the furled newspaper and stuck the rubber band in a plastic bag in the tool drawer.
I glanced at the front page of the newspaper. I decided to skip that part and go to the sports section to read about the US Open. The golf story was interesting. I checked last night's scores for the Dodgers and the Angels, then I skipped over to Dear Abby and the funnies.
By now the coffee was ready. I poured a cup. I like it black.
I looked at Facebook on my iPad. Mitch Friedman was posting photos of his roots journey. He -- and I assume his wife -- has been to Athens where they stayed in a hotel with a view of the Acropolis. He posted a selfie with the ruins in the background and my first reaction was -- how heavy the stones!
My years of gardening in New England have altered my perception. In New England I wrestled with large and small granite stones and rebuilt the old stone walls. Stone upon stone, and so often I thought of the ancient ruins --- the castles, temples and pyramids -- huge stone-works built by massive manual labor.
If I spent a day or a week moving stones then I appreciated how much work it was for ancient men, toiling up the hill with marble slabs to build the Acropolis so that we, the heirs, might pose for selfies in 2017.
There was Mitch Friedman, at the Acropolis, among the Greeks.
Mitch Friedman is scarce of hair on the top of his head, so he shaves it proudly bald and smiles lightly. I know Mitch from his old days in Earth First! The year was 1988. The month was January, when we resisted the loggers at Fishtown Woods. Mitch and his Earth First! cohorts -- I always resented their interference in what had been a moderate and local protest. But why didn't I say something at the time?
And why say anything now, 29 years later? Mitch and his group coordinated the protest and mass arrest at Fishtown in 1988. Later he lived in Bellingham and made a good living as a promoter of wilderness preservation.
Now I see him on Facebook, howling with wolves or catching a Seahawks game in Seattle.
Or in Athens, on the balcony of his hotel room with a view of the Acropolis.
The thing is, when I saw his photo standing proudly in front of the ancient stones, I was happy for him. I was glad that he made this life journey, even though I might not ever get there myself.
I am so commonly envious of other people. Why did Mitch Friedman become a successful and well-known environmental activist? He saved the wilderness in eastern Washington. He spearheaded the introduction of wolves to that area. He went to court and won. He organized hundreds of donors. He led petition drives. He left the notoriety of Earth First! And put those radical days behind him. “I’m being reasonable now. I accept moderation and gradual change.” He re-shaped his image in that way.
I envied his success. If people ask, but nobody asks, what have you done to save nature? When I hear that I start to voice a rasping scream, an inarticulate wordless moan, a string of obscenities. Even now as I write this, my breathing gets heavy.
I did as much as Mitch Friedman ever did. I know it, but I can’t prove it…. I guess I am over that now, almost over that anyway, because when I saw the photo of Mitch in front of the Acropolis I smiled and I was happy for him. He deserves that pleasure.
I remembered my Greek teacher in high school. His name was Father Ryan, a young man, barely thirty, not tall, of a slight torso, neither clumsy nor athletic. He was our Greek teacher for two years. He only had wisps of grey hair on his head, and except for those wisps, he was totally bald. It was cancer of some kind and chemotherapy for treatment, but they never told us what it was and we never asked. Sometimes Father Ryan would lay his head down on the lectern in the middle of his lecture – just lay his head down for a few moments and gather his strength and then carry on. This was 1963 and 1964. We didn’t ask questions about his health, but we learned the Greek and we read Homer out loud, words as ancient as the stones on the Acropolis.
I still have the Greek books. I guess I didn’t need to make the trip to Athens. I carry it in my soul.
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I’m sitting in the living room waiting for lunch. I told Laurie I would eat at one p.m. so I have 15 minutes to go. The big window is open and so is the front door, the breeze is easy. It is not as hot as they predicted --- meaning here in Santa Barbara. For some cruel reason I am monitoring the temperature in Phoenix. You can do that on the Internet. Just type in “Phoenix temperature” in the Google search box. It says 113 degrees at noon. And you worry about power failures when it gets that hot, and some old woman living in a small cottage and the power goes out and the AC shuts down and she suffers through the heat of the day – 113 degrees at noon means even hotter by 3 p.m.
I am sitting on the couch and the laptop is on the coffee table. Laurie is in the far back of the yard picking plums, little hard purple plums. I pruned the suckers off that tree two years ago, but I haven’t gone back there lately. I volunteer for garden projects when I can think of easy jobs that will make her happy. Like hedging the Indian hawthorn by the driveway – that hardly took 20 minutes.
For lunch I will fix myself an open-face liverwurst sandwich, hold the mayo – just bread and sausage. I have been enjoying liverwurst on bread since I was a small child. My mother sometimes took me to the butcher shop on Central Street in Evanston, back in Illinois. You had to drive down Prairie Avenues to get there from our house in Wilmette. Drive down Prairie Avenue right past Uncle Ted’s stucco bungalow. Only we never stopped to visit Uncle Ted. I just knew he lived there with Aunt Bee and their three children who were much, much older than me -- so much older than me that I classified them as adults and not fun.
We drove down Prairie Avenue to the butcher shop on Central Street. The butcher would give me a small slice of liverwurst as a treat. Usinger's Braunschweiger -- that was the brand name. I always like it. I still do.
I will fix the open-faced sandwich for lunch today and that will finish the 8-ounce package that I bought last week. With that sandwich I might eat a small fresh tomato on the side.
This is where Laurie and I differ. She would carefully slice the tomato and put it in the sandwich. I don’t do that. It gets too messy. You get a fresh juicy slice of tomato in your sandwich and you hoist it up to your mouth – and then the juice squirts on your shirt. It’s not worth the risk. Better to have the tomato on the side and cut wedges and spear them with a fork -- and be sure to lean over the plate when you hoist it to your mouth. This is a way to keep spots off your shirt, something I learned recently, the part about leaning over the plate, rather than leaning back in the chair.
Eat the sandwich and the tomato wedges, but then think about eating one or two small, juicy almost-overripe peaches. White-fleshed peaches from Hugh Kelly’s back yard garden.
Hugh has gone to England for a month to visit his family and I water his plants for the one month he is away. And I may was well pick all the peaches when I come to water – either me or the squirrels.
Hugh pays me $50 for the vacation watering service. I do gardening work for about a dozen customers near our house. It sounds peachy doing garden work for friends and making a little cash to boot, but I don’t like doing the work very much. I’ve done too much gardening and farm work and yard work over the years. I’m not too old for the work. That isn’t it, but I’m getting bored with it. Losing interest. I love my customers – they are the best people ever, but I would quit tomorrow if I could find another source of income. I imagine myself taking all the hand garden tools out of the trunk of my car – shovels, rakes, pruners, loppers, hand saws, trowels, tarps – all that stuff. I imagine taking it all away and putting it into some storage locker somewhere. And I don’t pull weeds anymore. Maybe never again or maybe not for a long time, like a year or so. I imagine myself taking long walks across fields and forest, hand in hand with Laurie, looking at birds, only there is no work, just the walking.
And then maybe I will tell people what I am thinking.
Cataracts. They want to fix the one in my right eye. Didn’t say anything about the left eye. I do have two eyes. Pre-op consultation should clear that up. Dr Katsev wields the knife. A strange man is going to poke a knife in my eye and they call it routine surgery. Katsev takes a casual air. I said you must be good at it. He said I do about 20 a week. The clinic website says he has worked there for more than 25 years and he is chairman of ophthalmology. Technically, intellectually, this is all above board. Everybody does it.
Why don’t I do it, but next year, not this year? I can’t drive at night, so what!
Laurie says why not do it now, this month. Get it over with.
I filled out the pre-op form. Did I ever get hepatitis? (among a hundred other questions) Yes, hepatitis A in 1973, from drinking bad water in Nuevo Leon in northern Mexico. I remember the well, in the back yard of a peasant home, the well and the home a hundred yards off the highway that went from Laredo to Monterey. We pulled off the road and asked the residents if we might spend the night. They said fine and we drew buckets of water from the well.
Something about that well wasn’t right. Too shallow, to close to the house. The air was fetid. Tortilla Tom said it was okay, but he said everything was okay. Eva said we are as good as the people who live here and if they drink this water so can we. Tucson wondered where he could bum a smoke. Fat Tom went off in search of beer.
We drew the water, started a fire, put on a pot of beans and just sat around or stood around. It was getting dark. Mexico wasn’t as pretty as we expected.
Later Fat Tom came riding back to our camp in the back of a pickup truck – two federales coming to check us out. Pulling the truck up too close to the fire, getting out slowly.
We didn’t move. They said Hi, where are you going? -- They spoke a little English. We’re going to Oaxaca. We’re cooking beans for dinner. You want some? The cops looked around and nobody moved. They started to smile. They walked back to the truck, threw off the burlap sack covering a rack of cold Modelo beer, enough for everybody.
Fat Tom had a big smile now. I love Mexico, he said. Hey, Maria, how do you say that in Spanish? Mexico me encanta! she cried out, and she began to sing. The night passed sleeping under the stars.
But the water from the well was not good. Too natural, to use a term. I got the hepatitis A from that well water. Ended up in a hospital in Mexico City one month later. I liked that hospital. They fed me well and let me rest. A clean bed, a TV, a pretty nurse.
But I had resources. The same privileged resources I have had all my life, right up to today, getting cataract surgery at Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara. My regular doctor is a good-looking young man -- Dr. Bryce Holderness got his degree from the University of Southern California medical school.
I filled out the rest of the pre-op form. No other surgeries, or broken bones, no strokes, angina, endocrine disorders, blood pressure -- actually blood pressure is not so good and I take a pill for that every morning. The pill must be good, because it only costs $9 a month. My health insurance does not cover prescriptions. So for $9 a month it keeps the blood pressure within range.
Cholesterol? Nature blessed me. Basically I have a license to eat mayonnaise.
Anxiety? Yes, I take half a pill PRN. I can get nervous. I can get nervous at times when I used to get angry. Only I am too old to get angry, so I get nervous instead and take the pill.
This goes back to the garden work and the field work. It can be very boring and hot and sweaty and it takes no mental skill for field work. But when I was younger and I was working out in a field, you start to get angry and you’re out in the middle of the field -- there is nobody to get angry at. They aren’t there – the people you’re mad at, except for Pedro working 20-feet from you nearby, only you’re not mad at him.
You get mad at the field itself? Mad at the soil and stones? Kick the stones, the stones don’t care……. No, the stones do care, but they say to be calm.
Now I am older, the field is too far away. I work in the garden. It doesn’t make me angry or nervous, just bored.
After breakfast I went out to the driveway to wash my car. My car is parked these past few days in Julia’s spot under the pepper tree. There is a hierarchy of parking places here. Laurie gets the cement paved driveway. The two renters get the off-street space, but graveled, not paved – Julia is under the pepper tree and Ryan is under the jacaranda.
I park on the street uphill from the mailbox. Mariah parks on the street downhill from the pepper tree. Gavin, who is here temporarily, parks wherever he can.
It all works out. But I am in Julia’s spot today because she is gone to house sit for her brother who lives across town. So I pulled into Julia’s spot because it is flat and off the street and I can damp-wash my vehicle.
I drive a black 2004 Nissan Sentra -- bought it five years ago for $5,800 – never a problem, but it has one of those lousy Japanese paint jobs, all mottled and disparaged. I hired an artist to paint acrylic flowers over the discolored parts, so my car is like a moving mural. I can send you a photo. People tell me all the time how much they like it. Well, I run a gardening business, painting flowers on my car is a way to advertise. Not my name or phone number – just the flowers.
Being that the flowers are only painted on with acrylic and beginning to flake off, I can’t run my vehicle through the car wash under those big scrubbers, so it just kept getting dirtier, until I realized I could damp wash it in the driveway. Three gallons of water, three clean rags, 30 minutes. Just wipe it down and wipe it off and wring out the dirtiest rag. Then get a second bucket full of water and use the second rag for finer work, and then the third for the final touchup.
Easy, peasy, Japanesy – that’s what the librarian said in the Shawshank Redepemption. I hate it when a phrase like that gets stuck in my head. I did not choose to remember that phrase. I would like to get rid of it, but it is probably lodged in there forever.
Like the names of my grade school teachers. I can recite them Kindergarten through 8th grade. But in that case I am glad to remember those names and I even wrote them down for the archives.
But the memory is scarred with trauma – horrible burning events that get buried deeper and deeper but can never be --- there is no verb – can never be erased, eliminated, deleted expunged – there is no verb because it is not possible.
You can force the memory down deeper in your subconscious. Bury it. That’s why they ancient Egyptians built the great pyramids --- huge piles of hewn stone symmetrically arranged. The purpose of these pyramids is to bury something -- we cannot say what. Some terrible, scarring memory is buried under the pyramids and will never come to light.
Nothing is ever forgotten. It is all stuck in your brain somewhere, in the lower drawer, under the cobwebs, in the basement.
People say I have a good memory. I recall details of events that happened long ago. I dwell on the past. I love the past – that’s where all the good stories are. I love the history of all people. I brood over my own life. Often I wake up at 5 a.m. when it’s still dark. I emerge from a deep sleep and my mind begins to stir. I will my mind to stop working. I tell myself, “Don’t start thinking. There is nothing to think about. Go back to sleep.”
But I start remembering older years, very often 1993, when I had the corporate driving job for Boston Coach and Fidelity Investments. I drove a spanking new black Buick Park Avenue. I took business executives to and from the Boston Airport. I spent hours crawling through rush hour traffic, but I was getting paid by the hour, so I didn’t care.
But what bugs me in the memory, the part I wish I could forget, is the cheap, black polyester pants I wore every day. Why didn’t I spend another ten dollars for good pants and get all –cotton which is far more comfortable? Instead I was itchy in polyester and it was my own fault. All day driving in itchy pants.
My life would be different if I had bought more comfortable pants. That small memory haunts me, and a million other memories that I will bury under a pyramid in the back yard as soon as I collect enough stones.
June 26, 2017
Joe La Suza lives in Carpintaria which is twelve miles down the 101 from Santa Barbara. They have a great beach in Carpintaria, smooth sand, no rocks, no seaweed and no tar. Everybody goes there in the summer. I don’t mind crowds at the beach. Everybody is happy and relaxed, they don’t bother me. Teenagers used to blast their boom boxes at the beach, but no more, they have ear buds and smart phones, lying on their towels, as quiet as clams. They don’t bother me.
A good beach day, we bring big towels, two Tommy Bahama folding beach chairs, and one large Tommy Bahama umbrella with a screw-into-the-sand pole. Almost everybody around here buys Tommy Bahama chairs and umbrellas. We are part of that crowd.
Except if you go up to Coal Oil Point where the college kids go – they just bring towels, they don’t being chairs or umbrellas, for whatever reason – to be different? It’s just something I have noticed.
We bring books, one for her and one for me. Sometimes I bring a rolled up magazine, like the Economist or the New Yorker. Laurie might bring a section of the newspaper, but that seems too hard to deal with at the beach with the wind and sand. Mainly I just bring a book, and, as you already know, this year it’s My Struggle by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Sunblock lotion, SPF 30. Chapstick, SPF 30. Don’t forget to protect your lips. A thermos of ice water. If we think we’re going to stay a long time, we bring sandwiches. Here at the beach you don’t want anything too messy. I favor peanut butter and jelly sliced into halves, one sandwich for her and one for me. Or to be more ambitious, for a longer beach flop, bring the small ice box with a shoulder strap to carry, put in Persian cucumbers and hummus, and sliced apples in a small plastic bag plus the sandwiches.
This is where experience and team work pays off. Bananas and citrus are messy and might even be sticky. Apples slices are neat and can be very tasty.
Finally, a flannel shirt for me and some long-sleeved cover for her – when the sun gets to be too much, or when the wind begins to blow late in the afternoon.
Lately, we have left the boogie boards and wetsuits in the garage. Those days might be over for us. Now I skip the boogie board and skip the body surfing, and just paddle out a bit further and swim back and forth, up the beach, then down the beach. Good exercise beyond the crashing waves. Loving salt water, feeling it seep into my bones.
Except for Jaws – you know – sharks! I’m not going into the whole shark question here, but there are more of them out there these past few years. Too many if you ask me. Better that we eat them, not them to eat us. Resume shark fishing is my solution.
I love to merge into the salt water. Laurie, being a California native, is more fastidious. She goes in the water only late in the summer when it is good and properly warm. Her beach history is different than mine. My yearnings, coming from the Midwest, are not the same as hers, yet we have met and stayed together these past six years and spent many happy hours at the beach together.
Joe La Suza is a retired contractor. His voice used to be gruff, now it has a velvet tone, smoother, less bellowing, no more barking orders. He smiles underneath his broad white mustache and greets me with pleasure at the Mesa Harmony Garden where we both volunteer.
Joe drives the twelve miles from Carpintaria to the Mesa Harmony Garden. You wonder why he couldn’t find a volunteer garden job closer to home, but I guess he doesn’t mind.
Joe has dedicated himself to installing an efficient drip irrigation system in our 100-tree fruit orchard. He has the plastic pipes laid out in four sections, each with its own timer. Each fruit tree has two driplines to plunge the dripping water six inches below the ground.
You don’t drip out the water on the surface, less evaporation steal it. You bury the dripline outlet six inches down and you put all that water to work. Then you put in two driplines, one on each side of the tree for balance, because the tree sends out roots to where the water comes in.
And you have to maintain the system by walking the lines at least once a week. Hoses break, connections slip, water gushes out and gets wasted.
Once a volunteer left the hose running and we didn’t find out until two days later, and $50 worth of water got wasted.
Joes maintains it all. He has been faithfully coming to the garden every Saturday for months. On his hands and knees, pushing his blue foam kneeling pad from one tree to the next, under peach and plum, under apple, pear, fig and citrus, each tree gets two driplines, and if they get plugged up with dirt, Joe unplugs it.
But he’s doing all the work lately, and no one is helping him. He wants help or he wants to quit. I think he should stop working and take a rest. That’s what I’m doing. I noticed two things – that he was tired of doing all the work himself, and that I am darn sure I don’t want to do that work either, so we should take a rest.
Let nature take its course. Our fruit trees have deep roots and many inches of mulch for ground cover. They are strong. They will keep growing. But Joe and I need a rest. I told him – lemonade in the shade for you and for me, maybe a small bag of Kettle potato chips to pass back and forth, talk about grandchildren, watch the trees grow. Just watch. You find out things when you watch. Time to rest. Time to watch. Joe, don’t get mad, just put down your trowel and pull up a chair under the pine tree.
Randy Stark is not so easy to talk about. He is difficult. I have needed to defend his behavior, saying oh he’s not so bad.
He became very angry when he discovered that the Fund for Santa Barbara had donated money to the Mesa Harmony Garden. This was filthy money in his opinion. The Fund for Santa Barbara had also donated money to Planned Parenthood -- baby killers! The garden should not accept money from that fund.
Other board members found that view extreme, as did I. Randy is a very conservative Catholic, and this is how it gets sticky:
The Mesa Harmony Garden is a community garden sited on one-acre of land that belongs to the Catholic Church. We are a formally organized non-profit with no affiliation to the Church, yet our one hundred fruit trees are planted on Church property. In other words, the orchard belongs to the archbishop in Los Angeles and we’re just passing through.
Remember Joe, out there on his knees, using the blue foam rubber knee pad, going from apple tree to peach tree to hook up the drip emitters. Joe could give a flying fuck about the Catholic Church and its sacrosanct dogma, its ancient ritual and its perverted priesthood. Yet Joe toils on Church land and you must pay the piper.
And the piper’s name is Randy. Randy is the deacon for Holy Cross parish, not quite a priest, he was a wife and a daughter in college. He has a remodeling contracting business and makes a decent living when he isn’t in church assisting at daily Mass, at funerals, weddings, and baptisms.
The old priest, Father Louis, speaks with a slight accent. He is from Belgium and he longs to return to his homeland next year when he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75. He is content to let Randy do the heavy lifting.
Randy is fifty-something, a native of Santa Barbara with a beer gut, a buzz cut on his over-large round head and a voice to match his buzz cut, loud and rasping.
His devotion to serving God is sincere. His face twitches when he tries to focus. He represents everything that is wrong with the Catholic Church – what some people say is wrong. Or maybe he is just a pain in the ass.
We can’t get rid of Randy, I have explained that to the other board members, but Randy can get rid of us. He drops broad hints of influence – talks about a recent phone conversation with the bishop, talks about old Father Louis not being up to much and leaving the major non-sacerdotal chores to Randy.
What can we do? Pack up our fruit trees and leave? We are stuck with Randy and this makes him happy. I am an observant Catholic myself. That is, I work in the community garden and I observe other Catholics going in the church for Mass, but I never go myself, except some days, during the week, I come in the church and light a candle at the side altar. Close enough. But I went to Catholic school all the way through – Saint Joseph grade school with Franciscan nuns, Loyola Academy for high school with the Jesuits, and St. Michael’s College in Toronto, run by a French order known as the Basilians – they are priests who enjoy a good glass of wine and know the difference.
So, even though I am lapsed, I can trump Randy on Catholic trivia, or hold my own, and he needs a friend.This is where my adopt-a-stray-dog personality comes in. Because Randy is not a very likeable man and he knows it. He talks loudly, adamantly. He can’t help it. But he serves at Sacred Heart parish, he does the yeoman chores and sees to it that someone keeps the parking lot swept, sees to it that Father Louis does not allow too many homeless people to sleep in their vans in the parking lot, sees to it that the Mexican families don’t make too much noise at the parish center when the wedding or quinceanera comes around.
He does all that because he wants somebody out there to like him. Me, I have plenty of friends and I know how lucky I am to have all these friends, close friends, medium-range friends, long-distance friends, every day friends, now and then friends, every kind you can imagine, in abundance. So why don’t I be a pal to Randy?
The other board members at Mesa Harmony Garden accept him with difficulty. Two Jews serve on the board, Larry Saltzman and Josh Kane. They are quietly aghast at Randy’s tirades, and cringe at his friendly smile that often conceals a tirade about to commence. Our board president has a particular angst. Hugh Kelly is of British descent, his pleasant accent pleases our ears. He is a devout and formal atheist. What an exquisite punishment for him, because it has been Hugh’s life dream to plant and maintain a fruit orchard using the most advance organic methods. To do it right!
And we do it right at Mesa Harmony Garden, but we do it on church property, within sight of the rectory where Father Louis nods his nap, within sight of the parish center where the Mexican familiar have their feuds and parties, within sight of the Sacred Heart church itself, where at least one candle burns night and day.
Where else will they tolerate two Jews, one atheist, and one lapsed Catholic to operate a fruit orchard whose fruit is donated to the Food Bank? We all get along with each other and with Randy. We have to get along. It’s our middle name. Mesa Harmony Garden. Harmony.
We gathered for a board meeting of the garden, sitting around a square picnic table underneath a huge pine tree. The orchard is surrounded by a cyclone fence on all four sides. We have planted table grapes and dragon fruit along the cyclone fence. We have planted rosa mutabilis roses outside the fence for beauty. We have done a tremendous amount of work over the past seven years.
I told the board members, because Randy wasn’t there that time, “Supposing we kick him out -- which we can’t do because he’s the deacon – but just supposing we do kick him out. He’ll just go and join another group and be a pain in the neck to them. Is that fair? I say Randy is our problem, and it wouldn’t be fair to the next guy to send him down the road. He’s never going to leave anyway. We’re never going to leave. That’s it. Plus he does a lot of work.”
Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord Amen.
Try forgetting that prayer. We only said it every night at dinner for as long as I can remember when we were kids. The same exact prayer with the same exact words. Everybody said it back then. Everybody meaning Catholics. Us. Protestants had to make up prayers on the spot, but why? We had one memorized and ready to go. And Jews, who knew what the Jews did? Mom said the Jews were as good as us but they were clannish.
I was ten-years-old when I heard her say that and I almost choked. Clannish? Mom, we’re clannish. We visit with our relatives and people from the parish. Period. Us. As in everybody who says grace before dinner just like we do. We don’t visit with other kinds of people. We’re not in the international friendship market.
My Dad liked Jews. He did business with them and they were his friends. Mom and Dad often had dinner with Art Shapiro and his wife. Shapiro was a fishing tackle wholesaler in Chicago. The business was called Faber Brothers after the previous owners. There were a lot of Jews in the fishing tackle business. They didn’t fish, but they bought and sold and my Dad liked them.
The Suns lived on the corner of Forest Avenue and 17th Street, on the block where I grew up. It was a dark and lovely red brick house. As a child I found it very pleasing, and so quiet. They only had one kid, Billy. They had so much room. I walked by their house every day on the way to school. I knocked on their door a few times to see if Billy could come out on play, but he was younger than me and seemed to be very sheltered. They were the Jews. The rest of the block was all Protestant except for the Giambalvos. I knew that because if they didn’t go to school or church with us, they couldn’t be Catholic. I don’t remember the nuns saying anything bad about the Jews or the Protestants. They were good people. Too bad they were going to hell when they died. The nuns didn’t dwell on that unfortunate fact. They kind of glided past it. My life was not full of glaring contradictions, so I could live with that one.
I walked away from the Church when I was 18. When I left for college I stopped going to Mass. Didn’t say anything to anybody or get mad, I just stopped going. That’s how it has always been. It would be too much effort to take up some other religion. Why would I want to be a Methodist or Buddhist or whatever? Or formally renounce my tradition like it was some kind of debate and I needed to choose the right side? I would rather stick with the teaching I grew up with. Stick it in my pocket, or hide it in the garage under a used tire. I didn’t raise my kids Catholic.
Why do I bother thinking about these things? Memories are a curse. Bad memories remind me of my stupidity. Good memories make me wish I was younger which is also stupid. Better to forget and be here now…… but O God that is vapid hippie logic! Be present? Well, you cannot really be anyplace else, except the present is such a narrow, tiny space, and the past is huge, the past is bigger than a cathedral with echoing marble halls, the years marching by gloriously.
I slept poorly last night, I began to think about the time we camped on Illabot Creek in the late summer of 1978. Susan was pregnant with Eva. Eugene was one-year-old. My stepson Tommy was seven, and we weren’t really camping, it was more like we were homeless and had no place to go.
We didn’t even have a tent, and the other people wanted us to leave. But I was defiant. Steve and Katy Philbrick said the camp was full and there was no more room for other people, but I said, “I don’t have to ask you if we can stay here. This land belongs to Gordy Campbell and a long time ago he said we were welcome to live here, and we will live here unless he says no.”
Gordy was an Upper Skagit Indian and a dead drunk. But it was true. In 1971 when my house burned down and we needed a place to go he told us about his small property on Illabot Creek and we were welcome there.
I had that right, at least as far as Steve and Katy Philbrick were concerned and they became quiet – and barely friendly.
Where else could we go? We slept by the creek. I borrowed tools and split cedar planks and made a lean-to. We had a cast iron kettle – made oatmeal for breakfast and beans for dinner. Eugene slept in a suit case. Susan and Tommy and I slept on the ground.
Illabot Creek runs right off the high mountain snow banks in the Cascades. The water came gushing down the foothills and spread out to flow smoothly over gravel beds. It was purely delicious water. Even one cup full was worth a million dollars, worth a mother’s smile and a father’s heartbeat. This pure water was our salvation. The wind blew through the shivering alder trees over our head. We stayed there all through August and then found a cabin to rent in Marblemount for $40 a month.
But why remember that? Today is Thursday, almost the end of June and many years later. Illabot Creek is still rushing by in cascades of pure water, but I will never see it again.
Now I live in Santa Barbara and the creeks are dry most of the year. Mission Creek flows from the foothills past the Mission, through the downtown area and into the ocean, but this time of year all you see are rocks and sunshine filtering through sycamore trees. We are going to the Mission this afternoon. We go every Thursday in the evening, to the Mission rose garden to do some pruning and dead heading. The garden has over 800 roses of many varieties. Laurie and I are assigned as volunteers to one plot of four roses – The four varieties are A Touch of Class, Duet, Sweet Surrender and Falling in Love.
Part Three 6,516, July 1, 2017
One of those damn flies is buzzing around my head. They fly near your ears and make a horrible sound. I hate them.
It was foggy this morning. We went for an early walk on the Douglas Preserve. This is an ocean front park on the Mesa in Santa Barbara. The actor Kirk Douglas and his family donated the money to buy the preserve and keep it natural so they get their name on it. Good people. We parked at Hendry’s Beach. We took the winding path through the forest and up to the Mesa – a bit of heavy breathing on that climb. At the top we walked across grassland on dusty paths.
Everybody is out walking their dog in the morning. “The morning dog walkers are different than the evening dog walkers. I think I like them better,” I told Laurie.
She said, “Maybe you just feel more friendly in the morning.”
Maybe.
I have stopped wearing my broad-brim straw hat on these walks. For some reason it makes dogs get mad at me. How is that fair? I said to her, “I have the right to wear the hat I choose. I can send a note to every dog owner in Santa Barbara and tell them to tell their dogs to act friendly to me and my hat. I can win this argument. It wouldn’t be my fault if a dog started barking in my face because of my hat… But I give up. I’m going to wear my baseball hat and the dogs will like me better.”
Then I felt grateful and squeezed her hand, thinking my biggest problem is I’m wearing the wrong hat. I should be so lucky.
We came to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean, where the giant Monterey Cypress fell over.
“It got old and it died,” I said. “Maybe it was the drought that killed it.”
We climbed up on the dead branches of the old tree and sat down on a bare limb to look out over the broad expanse of ocean. It was not windy – we usually go in the afternoon and that’s when the wind blows, but mornings are calm.
“…. It’s too foggy. You can’t see San Miguel,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Look over there at those humps.” She pointed to the horizon to the right of Santa Rosa Island.
“You can’t see any humps. You just know it is there, so you just think you can see it.”
“No, I can see the low humps. It’s San Miguel.”
Maybe.
My own theory is that they tow the islands much further out in the ocean on foggy days, so you can’t see them because they aren’t there. And they tow them back in later, back to where you usually see them.
Laurie has never seen a floating island, but I have seen them. In northern Wisconsin, on the Chippewa Flowage where we used to go on vacation when we were kids. You get floating logs and debris and they last so long in the lake water that seeds sprout and trees begin to grow.
The trees begin to grow on the floating debris, ten and fifteen feet tall, then the wind catches them and you have this rare sight of drifting half-acre islands covered with small trees, drifting across the lake.
I have told Laurie about this. I am with her six years now. I am running out of new stories to tell her. We’re getting into repeats. I don’t know what to do about that. She’s heard all my jokes. But old age is on our side. Pretty soon we’ll be forgetting the stories as fast as we tell them. Endless reruns.
We sat on the branches of the huge old dead Monterey Cypress and looked at the waves and then began walking again along the path which borders the cliff, underneath towering eucalyptus tree and pine trees. We came to the edge of the Douglas Preserve and then walked through the neighborhood for several blocks, past the little garden where we could easily steal strawberries, past the over grown yard that hasn’t been pruned or tended in thirty years, past the expensive landscape-designed front garden with carefully chosen granite stones, past the old yellow boat parked in the driveway on a trailer.
You don’t see yellow boats too often. Boats tends to be blue or green.
“But the Taxi Dancer is yellow,” Laurie said. The Taxi Dancer is the queen of the sailing fleet in Santa Barbara Harbor. The fastest and biggest sail boat. It’s yellow. So there you have it.
We came to the Mesa Lane stairs going back down to the beach, a thousand steps, twenty flights, down and down, holding the railing, watching one foot after another, down to the sand and the lowering tide.
The waves come easy on Mesa Lane Beach, washing up on the sand. Surging around the rocks, the molten rocks thrown from the cliff top by a giant baby having a tantrum, scattered here and there. We saw two surfers and one seal bobbing its seal head just past the surf line.
The tide was low so the beach was wide. On a high tide there is no beach here to speak of -- just a narrow sandy strip between the cliff and the ocean. It kind of makes me nervous to sit right under the cliff.
“You never know when the giant baby is going to throw another rock,” I said. “It could be anytime in the next hundred years, or in a second from now.”
“Do you think we would hear a warning sound – a creaking and cracking?”
Maybe. Better to keep walking and look out over the ocean. You see birds, seagulls going here and there, wheeling and diving. You see black cormorants racing – they fly fast. And the World War II bombers come rumbling in. I mean the pelicans. Stately, serene, lords of the ocean.
“I think they’re just showing off the way they skim so low over the waves,” I said. “Have you ever seen one catch a wing and crash into a wave?”
“I never have seen that, but I’m still looking.”
Pelicans are the biggest, cormorants are the fastest, and seagulls are the smartest. But not the nicest. Seagulls are not kind to each other. You throw out a piece of bread on the sand and they come dashing and fighting and stealing from each other.
Why don’t the seagulls share the food? Why don’t they take turns? Or give to the oldest and weakest. No, it’s just the seagull bullies who chase everybody else away and hog all the food.
“I’m going to teach the seagulls to share. It’s the kind of a thing people do in California,” I said.
“Maybe," she said.
“We could ask the Governor to charter a commission, Teaching Seagulls to Share.”
It’s a good half-mile from the Mesa Lane steps back to Hendry’s beach where the creek flows in and makes a small lagoon. They have a popular seafood restaurant right there, a place to dip your ceviche and watch the waves crash. We have never eaten there – too expensive.
They turned the water off on the outdoor public showers -- a water conservation measure because of the drought.
“I don’t like that. They shouldn’t turn the water off. It’s bad for morale. Moms take their little kids to the beach and the toddlers play for hours. There is nobody happier than a small kid at a beach in California. But when you take them home you need to wash off the sand. You need the shower. That’s what I think.”
“But it saves water,” Laurie said.
“Better to stop watering the lawn instead. But leave the showers running. In California we need to feel good. Suffering is bad. Getting sand in your car is bad.”
We sat for a while on the benches in front of the restaurant, to watch the surfers and the birds.
“I want to come down here late at night sometime. I think they turn the waves off at night when no one is looking, and then turn them on again in the morning. Why waste a wave if no one is looking and no one is surfing,” I said to Laurie.
“Maybe,” she replied.
July 11, 2017 -- the Quotidian continued, part IV, 7,918 words
Tuesday afternoon. I was resting in the living room in the recliner underneath the picture window. The fan was on high. Laurie was resting on the couch flipping through her iPad.
I was sleepy but I managed to get through a dozen pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume novel titled My Struggle. I am in the first part of Volume Three, subtitled Boyhood. Karl plays in the forest as a child and he lives in fear of his Father who is very strict and mean. His family lives on a beautiful island off the coast of Norway and young Karl rambles and roams for many happy hours with his friend Geir, just as long as his Father doesn’t find out that he stole a box of matches and almost set the woods on fire.
I was reading that in the recliner. It’s not engrossing, not in a compelling way, more like enjoyable and involving. Naturally, going into the third volume, I have become invested in the characters, but I can put it down and do something else.
This morning I worked at the Italian garden. The owner is a professor of medieval history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She makes an annual summer journey to Italy for research purposes – studies on the Italian Renaissance, hours spent in libraries poring over musty documents. She said she was writing about college life in Bologna in the 14th century. I said I bet it was all about parties and beer back then. Is it so different from now? She said some things never change.
I call it the Italian garden because it is laid out formally with a clipped boxwood hedge that borders a small fountain. The hedge also rounds off a stately collection of tree roses, and one enjoys this garden while walking on a path of pea gravel.
It is my pleasure to maintain this garden. Pleasure – that’s a guarded term. I have spent days and days complaining about the boredom of my work, hating the trowel and the rake. If I never see a stinkin’ garden again! I have been doing this kind of work for years and I do not love plants that much. After a while it all gets to be just dirt -- dirt with roots and dead leaves and nasty little bugs.
I do not fear the insects and crawly things. They exist in large numbers everywhere on the earth. I once read a book about ants and took some interest in their complicated lives. It was a famous biologist who wrote the book about ants -- E.O. Wilson. And he was a happy man. So I figure if I studied the ant world I would be happy too.
And that reminded me of when I lived in Texas and worked as a reporter for the Wilson County News. It was a weekly paper of 10,000 circulation and I was one of three reporters on the staff. I covered the farm and ranch news and wrote all kind of stories about cattle auctions and the price of hay. But one time, for the general amusement of readers and staff, I hit upon a weekly contest called Name That Bug.
Each week I would find a photo of a bug, one that was common in Texas, but not too common. Then the readers were challenged to identify the bug, and the first person to call into the newspaper with the correct name would win a free Wilson County News coffee mug and get their picture taken for next week’s edition of the paper.
There was a quite an interest in this little contest. That surprised me, but actually bugs – when they don’t bite or destroy your roses – are kind of fun.
That was eleven years ago when I managed the bug contest. Now I am in Santa Barbara, no longer working as a journalist, but scraping by on what I can earn as a gardener. I’ve been complaining a lot. I don’t make enough money in this occupation. Gardening is a lowly occupation.
This reminds me of the time I lived in Africa and met the Garden Boy. He was a lowly and humble man. All garden boys are humble. I am a garden boy and perhaps I should accept my status with a natural pride. That is what I do and what people pay me to do and there is no shame in it.
The Garden Boy in Africa was named Ernest. He wore blue overalls and black rubber boots. He tended the corn patch at a home on Airport Road in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe -- at the home where I stayed for a week or so -- stayed with Precious Mataka, the African woman I should not have married.
Whether we got married or not was no concern for Ernest the Garden Boy. He seemed hopeless. He was paid very little and he worked very slowly if at all. He was not a jovial man, nor somber, more neutral. He did not stand up straight and swing his hoe. He merely held it lightly and he seemed slightly puzzled as he squinted in to the sun.
I have his photo in my photo collection. That was in 1997. Ernest is very likely still tending the corn patch on Airport Road today.
Gardening is a lowly occupation. Ernest confirmed that. Garden boy. That’s what they call him in Africa. In all Africa it is a crime to call a man a boy. Not since the colonial British were thrown out. You cannot call a man a boy, or say Hey, Boy, come here, chop chop. No you cannot say that or you will get arrested or attacked,
Except the fellow who lives in the shed in the back of your plot. You call him a Garden Boy. He has not yet been elevated.
I remember these things, bugs and garden boys.
I worked at the Italian garden this morning, to trim the boxwood hedge. That needs to be done twice a year, clipped nice and square. I do not object to the task, but it pains me to spend several hours bent over the hedge. I like a hedge that is waist high, but a low hedge that is knee high means you bend over to trim it and I am getting too old for that.
So I asked Gavin to help me. He lives in his van, which is parked on the street in front of our house. We can’t seem to get rid of him, but I have found him garden work to do, and he is willing to work, so he is not a bum -- although close to being a bum and I keep an eye on him for that – I don’t care for too much idle hippie drifting.
But he was eager to come with me and see the Italian garden, and he took a great interest in being chosen to shape and trim the boxwood hedge. Gavin is 28 and the world is still young. So I brought him with me. The professor came out from her study and she was glad to see me and glad to meet Gavin. We had a team! We would whip that hedge in several hours. Gavin would run the electric hedger over the rows and I would rake up the trimmings.
We did it in less than three hours. The professor wrote Gavin a check for $50. She will pay me later. I enjoyed it. At least I didn’t hate it. Gavin can be the new Garden Boy. I will dig out the photo of Ernest, the African man, and share it with Gavin. This is our fraternity.
Saturday, July 15, 2017 -- 9,212 words
“Take off your shirt and put on this gown with the back side open.”
“Okay, but I’m going to be cold.”
“I’ll be bringing you a heated blanket in just a minute.”
Sharon brought in the heated blanket after she got me settled in the bed.
“Which arm do you prefer for the IV?”
I had to think about that.
“Which arm did they use the last time they drew blood?”
“I don’t remember which arm, but they said I had good veins, so you pick the arm that works best for you.” I thought I was being gracious to the nurse, to make it easy for her to find the best vein. I had no preference. It’s an art to install the IV needle with the smallest poke and some people have devilish tough and a hard-to-find veins, but I am one of the easy ones. She got me stuck and connected to the drip in no time.
Meanwhile she was wondering out loud what happened to the nice Hawaiian music on the radio overhead. She called out past the curtain to the hall and said, “I liked that Hawaiian music. Who turned it off?”
Then she told me about the time she was a single mom with four kids living out in the country and one of her kids got a fish hook in his nose, so she used a wire cutters to cut off the barb and then pushed the hook on through. That had to hurt. “But that’s what you do when you’re out in the country on your own,” she said.
I really didn’t want to hear that little story. She had light-blonde hair cut across evenly around the back of her neck and straight cut bangs in the front. Her complexion made her look experienced. I noticed her feet, in clean white sneakers and guessed her feet didn’t hurt, not yet. It was 8 a.m. figuring Sharon got there at 6 a.m. and her feet didn’t start to hurt until after lunch, if at all.
That’s why she was still working, and ten years older than any other nurse on the staff. Good bones and good posture will save the day if you’re on your feet all day at the day surgery center.
She got the heated blanket and put it over me. Then for good measure brought in another blanket on top of that. I was going into zen mode, into the pre-anaesthetic meditation state of mind. They were going to hook me up with the happy juice for the procedure, but I figured I would start going there already.
The way you do that is close your eyes and leave your body. I can do that easily because I have such an active imagination and powerful memory. Retreating into my own head is like entering into one of world’s great libraries – places I have been, people I have met, recordings of long discussions and arguments that I have never actually had, but imagine having. Like what Harry Truman and I were talking about one day when we were out for a walk together.
That was in Kansas City, Missouri, in the late summer of 1954. President Truman was two years retired from the White House at that point, and he continued his habit of an early morning walk in the neighborhood. One day I waited on the sidewalk in front of his house and asked to join him.
He came out striding briskly, well suited, clean-shaven, undaunted, “Mr. President can I join you?”
“Certainly,” he said without breaking stride. I had to jump to keep up with him. We discussed Dean Acheson, and the United Nations and the Soviet menace. Truman was an outspoken man in every respect, but he took his retirement seriously. It was no longer up to him to call the shots. Let Ike do it, he said in so many words.
I was remembering this conversation with Harry Truman as they wheeled me into the operating room. I was about to bring up the career of John Foster Dulles, but I was interrupted by the smiling face of Dr. Hussein, the anesthesiologist. “I am Dr. Hussein, your anesthesiologist.” He was less than forty years old, slight build, of a South Asian complexion, strong teeth, heavy beard, friendly smile. “I want to be sure you are comfortable. I will put some medication in the IV and it will feel like one or two margaritas. You will be awake, but you won’t care.”
Fine with me. That’s the power of trust. They draped me around the right eye to prepare removing the cataract. They call it routine surgery. I see nothing routine about it. Just because everybody in the room has done this same procedure a thousand times doesn’t make it routine to me.
This is the most important medical event in the year 2017. This is my life. The entire surgical center, the entire worldwide medical establishment, all depend on the successful completion of this “minor” operation on me, That’s how I see it.
The happy juice takes effect. Dr. Ketchup, the ophthalmologist, arrives. I don’t know how he spells his name. I don’t care how he spells it. He doesn’t care either. Dr. Ketchup doesn’t do the bedside manner. He is not the voice of re-assurance. He is the voice of how are the Dodgers doing today and the pros and cons of investing in real estate in the small town of Lompoc where he owns some investment property…. All the while doing stuff to my eyeball. I don’t care what he talks about because I can feel his hands working and his hands feel good. He’s having a good day, and that is to my benefit. Let the man work, I say. In five minutes he was done.
They pushed me into the recovery room. Waited a while. Gave me post-operative instructions and then called Laurie to come pick me up.
Meanwhile I took off the hospital gown and put my shirt back on. I was done.
Notes. His real name is Douglas Katzev, M.D., chairman of ophthalmology at Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara…… The Santa Barbara Surgery Center is located on De LaVina Street right next to Trader Joe’s. They ask you to sign a release to resuscitate, to transfuse blood, to transport you to the big hospital, to allow assistants to help the doctor, and to allow observation.
The basic procedure was covered by Medicare and my supplemental insurance from Blue Cross/Anthem. I chose a slight upgrade on lenses at a cost of $800. They gave me prescriptions for three kinds of eye drops that would cost $600. I balked at that expense.
It was Aurora, the surgery coordinator, who told me about the cost of eye drops. I said “I can’t pay that. My insurance doesn’t cover prescriptions. We’ll have to postpone the procedure.”
“Not to worry,” Aurora said. “I have a solution.”
She opened her desk drawer and took out a handful of samples. “Here’s what you need.”
So, Fred wins and big Pharma loses.
Dear Fred,
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed "The Quotidian." (May I post it?)
From what little I know of Knausgård I expected to be bored.
Instead, I was simultaneously relaxed and eager to know what would happen next.
Since there was no "great" plot line to be followed, I was not at all "put upon" by any (perceived) psychological need to "keep things straight."
"As he struggled to write a novel about his relationship with his father, Knausgård set upon a new project in early 2008: to write less stylistically and deliberately and instead, to "write plainly about his life".[1]
I've come away from "The Quotitidian "wondering if there isn't a "big place" - or perhaps a chthonic substrate -- in the human psyche where we crave the quotidian.
I'm reminded of Tolstoy's (quotidian) observation: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
We have become obsessed with the titillations of "abnormality" -- not necessarily in a grotesque Ted Bundy way, but we have abandoned "the quotidian" and, in doing so, we have willingly collaborated in our own departure from "The Natural Order," seeking instead, the unnatural, or at least "the prurient" in the broadest "itchy" sense of that word.
Perhaps we turned our back "the mundane" without realizing what we had done, thoughtlessly closing "the door on normality" then embracing abnormality, which, by definition, is that domain in which there are no norms.
Again, Tolstoy's observation. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Throughout my adult life, I have been aware that I reside "somewhere on The Spectrum." And so, my social phobia (disguised by an introvert's deliberate extroversion) often prevents me from engaging "the quotidian" as it applies to personal relationship.
However, when I sojourned in Mexico last winter, I was included in the life of la familia Sibaja, in whose "compound" I was lodged - an animated "extended" family revolving around two strong women, Julieta, madre... and Julieta, hija.
Julieta, la hija, is an irrespressible spirit who loves conversation and laughter - a 35ish overweight, beaufiful woman who, at any moment, will break out in song, dance and stand-up comedy.
Near the end of my Oaxaca stay, we asked our peluquera del barrio, Angela, from "down the mountain" to come to La Villada to give us all pedicures - my first ever.
And there I was, caught up in the klatch, a lovely Zapotec woman, Teresa, (who was very cosmopolitan to my surprise) doting for hours on our feet.
And when our feet were done, Julieta la hija wanted to "polish" my toe nails, hoping to paint flowers on the big ones.
And so it was...
Day before yesterday - at my dermatology consultation - my doctor, Tarranum Jaleel, did not say anything about the polish but it was nevertheless a curious "presence" deriving from a notably quotidian "tarde con las mujeres."
Here are some particular observations...
The material in the second half of "The Quotidian," although plenty enjoyable, was material I'd already read, and I was unconsciously hoping for more "fresh" revelations.
I was, for example, alternately engaged by -- and put off by -- the deacon at "Mesa Harmony Garden."
This was true when I read that vignette before, and I suppose my uncomfortable "love/hate" reaction to this second reading is bound up with my conflicted feelings for Catholicism.
I can only paraphrase, but Paul Schulte once said that "to be a practising Catholic" you have to undergo a kind of cortortionistic deformation, at the end of which you can finally bend-and-twist the dogma to "fit" in an intelligible framework.
Ah! But at what cost! (More on Catholicism below...)
As you may know, your literary genius is closely linked to your ability to say the simplest things in a way that is strikingly direct but hilariously unexpected.
"Cholesterol? Nature blessed me. Basically I have a license to eat mayonnaise."
Or...
"But what bugs me in the memory, the part I wish I could forget, is the cheap, black polyester pants I wore every day. Why didn’t I spend another ten dollars for good pants and get all –cotton which is far more comfortable? Instead I was itchy in polyester and it was my own fault. All day driving in itchy pants. My life would be different if I had bought more comfortable pants. That small memory haunts me, and a million other memories that I will bury under a pyramid in the back yard as soon as I collect enough stones."
And this marvelous epitomization: "This is where my adopt-a-stray-dog personality comes through."
A curious aside...
Until just now when I "looked it up," I thought an earlier generation of Californians had misspelled Carpinteria as Carpintaria - Carpentry. Not so. https://en.wikipedia.org/
Getting back to Catholicism...
You write: "I didn't raise my kids Catholic."
I tried to raise them Catholic. But they wouldn't "go to church" after 12 or 13.
However, Maria and Daniel are I think (in part due to the influence of their Italian mother) "culturally Catholic" in the fundamental sense that Catholicism puts primacy on community-and-
A fin de cuentas, I think the purpose of formal religion is to be a repository for values which -- "when religions works" -- seep out into the culture, into the community.
And in that domain, we have - as the western world's alternative - the hermetically-sealed "rugged individualism" of the protestant work ethic -- "What do you mean I didn't make it? That I don't deserve ALL of it?" -- contrasted with the communitarianism and "The Common Good" of Pope Francis, by far the most important person on the world stage.
If you're not apprized, here is Francis' earth-shaking announcement.
Pope Francis In Hiroshima: Use And Possession Of The Atomic Bomb Are "Immoral"
Francis is even including this teaching in the catechism!
Don't hold your breath waiting for any progressive politician (in "a position of authority") to make a similar assertion.
They know which side their bread is buttered on - and it is the side of Barbaria.
Over the course of my adulthood, I have been increasingly struck by how easily we humans overlook the obvious.
An example...
"It Is Time To Make Contingency Plans For Blue States' Secession"
What we overlook in our relationship with Catholicism is that we are the direct product of Catholic culture and Catholic acculturation.
Chesterton said that the western world was living off the accumulated "principal" of Christendom, and had stopped making new deposits.
As much as I value my secular friends who are liberal and progressive, they often lack mythic depth (and a bone-deep understanding of the importance of offering guests food and drink) and so, despite their goodness and many admirable contributions, something in them comes across a bit tinny, un-resonant.
Note well.
All value systems are belief systems. (Given the nature of unprovable premises, it is even a belief that Reason is reasonable.)
There is absolutely no getting around the fact of "belief's centrality"... as Trumpista lunacy makes ever clearer every time Mofo opens his mouth. And the crowds cheer!
Consider.
If we choose to believe that Jews are -- primarily -- dirty, cheating, greedy, conniving people, with no affiliation to their "host cultures-and-societies," what's to prevent a resurrection of belief in a Final Solution that targets these destructive, parasitic, self-aggrandizing people?
Although Christendom failed to prevent The Holocaust -- and even evoked it in meaningful ways -- I have considerably less hope that "consumer units" -- worshipping at the Capitalist altar of "s/he who dies with the most toys, wins" -- is going to do any better.
And, by my lights, "consumer units" (for whom the moral obligation of Capitalist consumption is a secular religion... and all the more enthralling for going unrecognized) is likely to do much worse.
A final comment (and then a quick question)...
I think you have been unusually lucky/blessed that you have so many relationships, in so many different contexts.
Building on my observation that Catholicism is essentially communitarian, I am convinced that "substantive meaning" resides chiefly (if not solely) in relationship, and that the Capitalist dogma of "accumulating-toys-to-secure-
The Phenotypic Expression Of Religion Matters More Than Its Dogmatic Genotype
The Phenotypic Expression Of Religion Matters More Than Its Dogmatic Genotype
http://paxonbothhouses.
We are dangerously close to the "value threshhold" (if not already "on the far side" of it) where an irreversible "vicious cycle" leads to progressive decline; then complete dissolution; and finally -- after a dark age that could last for centuries -- some kind of Renaissance.
So, although you have many regrets, your life is rich in meaning because you are rich in relationship.
The "other thing" -- the ruggedly individualistic thing -- is a Mad Hunt dedicated to the pursuit of happiness by heaving a steady stream of "purchaseable pleaures" into the bottomless pit where joyful relationship once lived.
George Carlin Discusses Republicans, Drug Use And His Superb Catholic School Education
Lastly, I have a practical question arising from your comment: "Anxiety? Yes, I take half a pill. PRN."
I have never taken medication for anxiety but I think it would help me "get back to sleep" when I awake before dawn and my "wheels start spinning" in ways that prevent me getting back to sleep. What anxiolytic do you use? And is it habit-forming?
Pax et amore
Alan
PS I must mention my admiration for Unitarian-Universalism which -- while "intellectual" and "progressive to a fault" -- seems to have successfully grappled with the issue of keeping Christianity alive-and-well in a world that is too smart (or believes it is too smart) to believe in the ubiquity of Divine Providence and the conviction (which often goes in tow) that "traditional pieties" and "submission to absolute authority" will insure joyful outcomes in this world - and the next.
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