Continuing Ed

I'm thinking of auditing a class. An AA meeting. Can you do that? There's one that meets every Monday evening in the church which houses the preschool where I teach. They come by the multitudes, packed into the caffeinated ambience of the Fellowship Hall as I pass through the kitchen with garbage and recycling on my way out of the building.

My idea of fellowship is enough wine to go around.

It's not that I'm looking for community per se. Certainly not human community. Or even commiseration. I'm fully capable of commiserating all on my own, thankyouverymuch. And I don't need a bunch of strangers to tell me what an asshole I am. I figured that out long ago. It drove me to drink.

In the final words of W.C. Fields, a lifelong atheist, purportedly spoken on his deathbed when a friend asked why he was reading the Bible, "Just lookin' for loopholes."

loop-hole (loop-hohl), noun, 1. a small or narrow opening, as in a wall, for looking through, for admitting light and air; 2. a means of escape or evasion (from Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2006, italics mine).

I'm getting desperate about the world. About the continuing pathological indifference of humanity to the chaos that surrounds us. Chaos we've created. The clock is ticking or maybe it's a bomb but it's not in my neighborhood (yet) so give me my uzi and my 24-oz. steak and my 900-channel high resolution flat panel TV and my teeth-whitening agents and build the landfills and the stockyards and the nuclear dumpsites and the missile silos in somebody else's backyard and leave me the fuck alone and BTW, turn up the lights on your way out.

We've allowed ourselves to become so dumb-downed that anyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the NRA and the National Right to Life is suspect. When did "educated" and "intelligent" become synonymous with "elitist"? Hillary, shame on you. BTW, it's time to take your ball(s) and go home.

A few weeks ago a headline in the paper read "Studies have shown an alarming number of children are suffering from 'Nature Deficit Disorder'." Quote-unquote, I kid you not. Ala Woody Allen, who makes it a point to, quote-unquote, "give trees a wide berth," these poor unfortunates are struggling through their obesity-prone childhoods not knowing their way around the local green space, let alone an actual "natural woods experience," what an alarming proposition, are you suggesting a field trip? Better bring an uzi. A cellphone. A GPS unit. A dozen Quarter Pounders with Cheese. Better yet, just stay home and watch "The Nature Channel" on your high resolution flat panel TV and order in.

Driving my daughter to school the other day, I told her she was beautiful and that I loved her. I did this to divert her attention from the dead cat lying in the middle of 42nd Avenue. It worked. Her eyes rolled heavenward. On my way home the cat was still there. Some asshole's young calico was roadkill, and everyone was driving right on by. Then it occurred to me...so was I.

Why didn't I turn around and do the right thing? Because, as stated, I'm an asshole. As much as the next guy. Only in my own unique way, remember, all of god's children are individuals, precious in the eyes of the lord. I wept and raged half the morning over that cat, over all the cats, the dogs, the birds, the monkeys, the wolves and deer and moose and dolphins and elephants and mice and doves and monkeys and chipmunks and geese and whales and lions and tigers and bears.

Sometimes it seems my life is one long continuum of weeping and raging. And what good have tears and rage ever done, the Moving Finger keeps writing. I'm just looking for respite from all the words. I'm just looking for an opening for admitting light and air. A means of escape or evasion. I'm just searching for other desperados, with their heads sticking through the loopholes, hollering, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

That Monday-night bunch seems compatible enough with my needs, but for one snafu. I don't drink coffee after 3 in the afternoon. It keeps me awake. Then I'm lying in bed half the night, eyes wide shut, thinking about how desperate things have become, trying not to weep and rage. Which also keeps me awake. No, I'd be better off looking for a less, um, stimulating venue.

Last Call

Walking through the bumpout the other day, I had an overwhelming urge to call my mother. My feet actually turned in the direction of the phone. An understandable impulse, but for one detail: my mother is dead. She died in 1999, just shy of the Millenium. She laid down for a nap and woke up...well, that's the point. She didn't. She was 76.

For weeks following her death, I felt a presence in my house. As if the air had changed, shifted slightly. Like the nip of fall, the breath of spring. Basically she was haunting the place. And this coming from an old atheist such as myself. Until you experience this...er...phenomenon, you're clueless. Skeptical. But I can testify. It happened to me.

Then one day, it was over. One minute this "presence" was there, waiting in the hallway, turning the lights off and on, watching from the third floor window, and the next, it wasn't. As if the Great Barkeep in the Sky had called it a night, and the few remaining clientele had hightailed it before Lights Up! revealed all their well-kept secrets. And what is the ultimate secret if not the one my mother held?

And holds still.

I'm open to Energy being the explanation for the ghost. In the sense that Energy cannot be created or destroyed. A good description of my mother. The energy field that surrounded my mother in her earthly life was a vortex that pulled you in. Like a whirpool. Or a tornado. Ask anyone who knew her. No one was immune. After I left home, it took years to extricate myself from her life force and begin to identify my own. We're still getting to know each other. Myself and I, that is. I never really knew my mother.

Who does? We know our mothers as Mothers. Not as people. This is as it should be. Life is difficult enough without acquiring personal details about our mothers, for instance, that they are fundamentally ambivalent about being mothers. All you mothers out there, you know what I'm talking about. It's another one of those well-kept secrets, how radically your view of motherhood changes once you become one. You cannot possibly comprehend the distance between the New World and the Old Country until you get on the boat and make the crossing. By then it's too late. You've landed. There's no going back, and there's no map. That's why they call it the New World.

Last week, when I asked them to identify signs of spring, one of the Preschoolers hollered Garbage! I looked around and had to agree. We were out on the playground, the snow melting to reveal a winter's worth of trash. Maybe the urge to call my mother was another sign of spring. Rebirth, renewal, reawakening. Something about the cardinal in the feeder, the dog in the sun on the deck, the cloudless sky. A sky my mother would have called "periwinkle." One of those generational words you don't often hear anymore. Like copasetic. Hightail it. For the love of Mike! Barkeep.

Whenever my father, the resident barkeep, had a bump of whiskey, he called it snapping on the jar. My mother was pretty much a teetotaler, another of those words. Something I've never been. Not since discovering lime-vodka-and-Seven-Up when I was seventeen. Like the song says, it was a very good year. My mother wouldn't agree. I remember her waiting up for me after one particular escapade, sitting in the rocker in the living room in the dark, a shadow among shadows. Until she flipped the switch on the pole lamp and I was revealed, all my well-kept secrets laid bare.

When my mother lay dead in an emergency room in a hospital two hours away, my aunt called with the news. Then she did a surprising thing. She put the receiver to my mother's ear. I cannot describe the wave of...something...which came careening across the phone line. I stood in the bumpout of my 100-year-old house two hours away while the wave hit, and out of my mouth came the only words in there, I'm sorry Mama sorry sorry sorry sorry

My mother was still flipping switches in those weeks after her death, as I wandered my midnight rooms, a shadow among shadows, snapping on the jar. Something she would have disapproved of. But for the love of Mike, what did she expect? You cannot possibly comprehend the distance between (she's) Here and (she's) Not Here until you get on the boat and make the crossing. There's no going back, and there's no map. The best you can hope for as you ride out the tsunami is one last phone call. Or a bump. Or, sometimes, a bump in the night.

Homeland Security

Some of you will be surprised to learn we have a gun. In the house. Just in case.

If a robber makes it past the hound-in-husky-clothing who guards our citadel, we have Plan B. But we're not taking any chances in the safety department. Plan B is locked in a strongbox in the second floor TV room closet. The bullets which integrate with Plan B are stashed in my husband's office at the back of the bottom file cabinet. Or maybe it's the top. Anyway, the key to the strongbox is...well, I can't remember exactly where the key is. But I'm sure my husband knows.

So we're set. The right to arm bears. Or something to that effect.

The gun belonged to my father, a souvenir from WWII. It's a black handgun, probably collectible. It sits in a little black case on a foam mattress. Like that egg-carton stuff you put between the mattress pad and the mattress, to enhance your sleep experience.

When my father died, we inherited the strongbox. In it we found the gun, along with a box of bullets, a stack of papers and photographs from the Old Country including my grandmother's 1899 passport, my father's WWII induction notice and consequent honorable discharge, and a dozen notebooks containing detailed lists of household expenditures written in his precise hand, beginning in 1946 and continuing up through the week prior to his first stroke in 1992.

My middle name means "anal" in the Old Country. I'm named after my father.

To enhance our safety experience, we decided to keep the gun. Though we needn't have bothered. At least not while the aforementioned dog continues to draw breath. That is, most people seeing her on the street assume she's a dog. In fact, she's an elaborately designed central alarm system, disguised to resemble a dog.

A casual passerby on the sidewalk who, for a nanosecond, lets her shoe brush against a stray blade of grass at the edge of our front lawn, can trigger a full-scale response from the alarm system, which can be heard through lead. Like Superman. The mail carrier -- not to mention the housekeeper and the occasional repairperson -- has taken to wearing earplugs.

Once my daughter and I rolled three humongous snowballs in the front yard and, unable to stack them, lined them up and stuck arms on each one and called it a day. The alarm system, which had been imitating a sleep state beside the fireplace, rose and stretched and ambled over to the window, whereupon it went into emergency overdrive until I was forced to dismantle the three anatomically-challenged creatures out in the yard to save my overstressed auditory nerve, not to mention my psyche.

A robber wouldn't stand a snowball's chance at our hacienda.

Truth be told, we really don't have much worth robbing. Our primary television is over twenty years old and has an elusive waver in the center of the image such that everything appears to be doing the hula. Including buildings and golf courses. No wonder Tiger's in a slump. He should quit playing on our TV.

The only jewelry of any value is located on my fingers, from which you would have to pry it when they are cold and dead. Or something to that effect. Computer-wise our daughter is the mark in this household, but then you'd have to find your way to it through the No-Man's-Land of her room, an undertaking any robber worth his salt would surely forego. In fact, if a robber actually managed to succeed in this quest, I'd be tempted to give him one of her gymnastics medals as a reward. But only a third-place. And only after he was behind bars.

Which is one of my favorite places to be, behind bars. It started in childhood, when my father built a knotty-pine bar down in the rec room to better accommodate his monthly poker nights. When not in its intended use, the orange formica bartop served as a building site for my elaborately constructed Barbie houses utilizing encyclopedias and empty La Palina boxes. After my father's death, I came upon one of these old boxes while going through his things. It no longer contained cigars, but small cartons of staples. I never found the stapler.

Which is sort of like finding the bullets, and not the gun. The egg before the chicken. Or something to that effect.

Wish I'd Said That

"'I think given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor,'* Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.

Senator Clinton, I think given all I have heard and seen, he would have been my ex-husband."

Leonie Gardner
Star Tribune
"Letters to the Editor"

(*Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor)