August 16: Silver Boots, Unstuck in Time, My Dad

The temperature climbed startlingly that day.  The noontime was balmy.  The Germans brought soup and bread in two-wheeled carts which were pulled by Russians.  The Englishman sent over real coffee and sugar and marmalade and cigarettes and cigars, and the doors of the theater were left open, so the warmth could get in.

The Americans began to feel much better.  They were able to hold their food.  and then it was time to go to Dresden.  The Americans marched fairly stylishly out of the British compound.  Billy Pilgrim again led the parade.  He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a piece of azure curtain which he wore like a toga.  Billy still had a beard.  So did poor old Edgar Derby, who was beside him.  Derby was imagining letters to home, his lips working tremulously:

Dear Margaret--We are leaving for Dresden today.  Don't worry.  It will never be bombed.  It is an open city.  There was an election at noon, and guess what?  And so on.

They came to the prison railroad yard again.  They had arrived on only two cars.  They would depart far more comfortably on four.  They saw the dead hobo again.  He was frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track.  He was in a fetal position, trying even in death to nestle like a spoon with others.  There were no others now.  He was nestling with thin air and cinders.  Somebody had taken his boots.  His bare feet were blue and ivory.  It was all right, somehow, his being dead.  So it goes.

Billy is on his way to Dresden with the other Americans.  He knows what's going to happen.  Edgar Derby facing the firing squad.  The firebombing of the city.  All the death that he will witness. So it goes, as Vonnegut says over and over.

Sometimes I wish I could become a little unstuck in time.  It would make my life simpler.  At the moment, my 90-year-old father is in the hospital.  One of my sisters took him to the ER this morning.  I'm not going to get into details, but he's going to there for a while.  Tomorrow, he will be transferred to another facility.  Most likely downstate in Alpena. 

He's angry about his situation.  My dad has always been a difficult man.  He can be belligerent.  Sometimes physical.  A couple times today, he tried to walk out of the hospital on his own, only to be escorted back.  He's resting now, after a really bad couple of days. 

If I were Billy Pilgrim, I would know how all this is going to turn out.  I would be able to jump back to family vacations in Gay, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Superior, when I was a kid.  Or the time my dad came to see me play the Stage Manager in Thorton Wilder's Our Town in high school.  Or a few months into the future, so that I would know how all this is going to turn out. 

Unfortunately, I am not unstuck in time.  I have to take it one day at a time, just like everybody else, and hope and pray for the best.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for compassionate nurses and doctors.

April 12: Flew Backwards, Orwellian Doublespeak, Speaks the Truth

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet.  He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent.  Somebody had stoppered it again.  "Drink me," it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs.  It didn't make a pop.  The champagne was dead.  So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove.  He had an hour to kill before the saucer came.  He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television.  He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again.  It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them.  Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.  Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.  They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up and backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.  The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of planes.  The containers were stored neatly in racks.  The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes.  They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes.  But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.  Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

Coming unstuck in time.  Things moving backward and forward in time.  That's Billy's life.  Instead of a straight line, he's born and gets married, dies and graduates from high school.  He knows the truth before it happens.  That's what Slaughterhouse is really about--Vonnegut approaching the truth of his war experiences through fiction.

I am tired of living in a time of Orwellian doublespeak and alternative facts.  For some reason, people in the world don't want to speak the truth.  It's easier to talk about a "life limiting condition" than a terminal illness.  Instead of waging war, we launch "strategic airstrikes."  Mass firings in a company are simply corporate reorganizations, and an asshole is referred to as the President of the United States.

So, tonight, I want to use some doublespeak.  I work for an organization that is currently restructuring, forcing many employees to seek alternative futures.  Managers are telling the remaining employees to be positive, focus on being leaner and more productive.  This realignment of staffing will not impact the ability of the organization to provide optimal services to its customers.

Is that Kellyanne Conway enough for you?  I would like to speak the truth, but I am not in the position to do so.  I am in the position to be leaner and more productive.  I am also in the position to quietly recognize bullshit.  As Fox Mulder says, "The truth is out there."

Saint Marty is thankful for  anyone who speaks the truth.

February 20: So It Goes, Craziness, Poetry Presentations

So it goes.

I forgot my copy of Slaughterhouse at home, so I cannot continue with the story this evening.  Instead, I quote one of the refrains of the novel--"So it goes."  Vonnegut usually uses the phrase after something ridiculous or catastrophic happens in Billy Pilgrim's life.  Billy's father dies in a hunting accident.  So it goes.  Billy's wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning.  So it goes.  Billy becomes unstuck in time.  So it goes.  To me, the phrase is slightly fatalistic, as if the world is simply a series of unfortunate events (to borrow a phrase from Lemony Snicket).

My day has sort of been a "so it goes" day.  I found out I had to replace the battery on the car I bought last July.  So it goes.  I lost my I.D. badge in the medical office where I work.  So it goes.  As I was driving back to work, I got interviewed on my iPhone by a reporter about being Poet Laureate, nearly causing me to hit a parked car.  So it goes.  I found my badge under an envelope on my desk.  So it goes.  I have three hours of poetry presentations to listen to in my night class this evening.  So it goes.

I feel like I have been tightrope walking all day, craziness just one misstep away.  But, I have retained my good mood amid bouts of panic and anger and panic again.  That's just how my week days are.  By about nine o'clock tonight, I will be ready to become unstuck in time myself.

I have no idea what I said during my interview this afternoon.  I can only hope that the interviewer is kind and makes me sound somewhat intelligent, instead of a babbling idiot.  (If you can't tell, I have self esteem issues to go along with my lost I.D. and reckless driving.)

Saint Marty is thankful that the day is almost over.

February 7: Unstuck in Time, Snowstorm, Hallucinating

Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest,  He was leaning against a tree with his eyes closed.  His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring.  He was like a poet in the Parthenon.

This was when Billy first came unstuck in time.  His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light.  There wasn't anybody else there, or any thing.  There was just violet light--and a hum.

And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds.  And then he swung into life again and stopped.  He was a little boy taking a shower with his hairy father at Ilium Y.M.C.A.  He smelled chlorine from the swimming pool next door, heard the springboard boom.

Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim.  His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim.

It was like an execution.  Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool.  His eyes were closed.  When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere.  He lost consciousness, but the music went on.  He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him.  Billy resented that.

Billy is walking through a forest behind enemy lines when he first comes unstuck in time.  I just spent a couple hours digging out from a snowstorm.  By about the hour-and-a-half mark, I think I became unstuck in time.  At the very least I was hallucinating.

I was suddenly back at the first apartment my wife and I shared after we got married.  I had an empty ice cream gallon bucket, and I was scooping snow off my front porch, because I didn't have a shovel.  And the snow just kept on coming.

I closed my eyes and opened them again.  It was four o'clock in the morning, and I was pushing snow when the city plows blew by, burying my car once again.  I stood there, swearing and shaking my head.  And the snow just kept on coming.

I closed my eyes and opened them again.  It was the night my daughter was born, and I was sweeping off my car.  The snow slammed into my face.  I was going home to check on our cocker spaniel.  My wife was in labor, but my daughter was in no hurry to appear.  And the snow just kept on coming.

I closed my eyes and opened them again.  Christmas lights blinked up and down the block.  The snowdrifts glowed green and red and blue.  It was December 24.  My sister was babysitting our newborn son.  It was six years from the time she would get sick.  Seven years from the time she would die.  And the snow just kept on coming.

I closed my eyes and opened them again.  It's the present.  I can hear the plow guy outside my parents' house, pushing the snow into the field.  It sounds like a roaring lion.  And the snow just keeps on coming.

My life seems like a series of snowstorms, interrupted by short reprieves of spring, summer, and fall.

Saint Marty is thankful for snow shovels tonight.

January 6: Unstuck in Time, Timelines, Funny Uncle

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Bill has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.  He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941.  He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.  He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, he has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun.  He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

So begins the story of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five.  Billy moves back and forth through time, a metaphorical and literal pilgrim, landing at different Plymouth Rocks in his life.  He's Vonnegut's surrogate, I think.  A man haunted and haunting.  A ghost and a ghost hunter.  A reflection of his creator, and a creator of reflections.

Having just joined Facebook recently, I have been privy to my friends' timelines.  I've ghosted back and forth through a few people's lives.  It's both comforting and discomforting.  I've come face-to-face with the dead, laughing and eating and dancing, completely unaware of their impending endings.  And yesterday, one of my best friends played a voicemail that she's saved on her phone.  My sister's voice, asking/telling my friend to perform a task.  Like Billy Pilgrim, I felt a little unstuck in time listening to the message.

This time of year does this to me.  Sort of shuttles me through doors of time.  It is Friday night.  Tomorrow morning, I will go to McDonald's for breakfast.  It's a habit that started with my sister who died.  Saturday morning, she would buy us all breakfast, and we would sit around a table, doing crossword puzzles and watching my kids play together.  It was one of my sister's favorite moments of the week.

I think, as we get older, as losses stack up like pancakes, we all become Billy Pilgrims, visiting and revisiting births and deaths and marriages and graduations and births again.  Over and over.  It's impossible not to.  We define ourselves by our experiences.  At Christmas, after the turkey is eaten and presents opened, we sit around and become wistful, dreaming of Christmases past, just like the ones we used to know.

I have become part of the older generation.  I'm the funny uncle that shows up with booze and makes spiked hot chocolate for all the adults.  I have slipped from author to subject.  I have become part of people's timelines.  Stepped through the door into narrative.  Years from now, I wonder how my daughter and son will remember me, what stories they will tell about me.  I hope they will laugh.  I hope any once upon a time that I'm a part of begins with a smile.

Saint Marty is grateful for Sausage McMuffins and crossword puzzles.