May 23: Read the Baseball, "Hidden Pictures," Stigma of Mental Illness

Santiago talks luck and baseball . . . 

"Eighty-five is a lucky number," the old man said. "How would you like to see me bring one in that dressed out over a thousand pounds?"

"I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?"

"Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball."

The boy did not know whether yesterday's paper was a fiction too. But the old man brought it out from under the bed.

"Perico gave it to me at the bodega," he explained.

I don't really believe in luck.  Bad things happen.  Not because of bad karma or planet alignment.  They just happen.  Santiago is a good guy.  He works hard every day.  Loves the boy.  Prays.  Yet, he hasn't caught a fish in almost three months.  

Tonight, I screened a film called Hidden Pictures:  The Underexposed World of Global Mental Health.  There weren't many people there.  Besides my wife and son, there were just two other attendees.  The film is about the stigma of mental illness throughout the world.  The filmmaker travels to India, South Africa, China, and France.  She also talks about her father's schizophrenia and suicide.  It's an eye-opening documentary.

After the movie was over, one of the audience members wanted to have a conversation about its content.  My son was sitting in the back of the room, listening.  I talked about my personal experiences with mental illness in a close family member.  The rollercoaster of medication adjustments.  The power of guilt and shame and secrecy.  And the need to drag mental illness out of the back of the family closet.

Then my son walked to the front of the room and sat next to me.  He started talking about his own experiences with ADHD and depression.  He spoke his truth without embarrassment.  Eloquently.  I sat next to him, marveling at his composure and ability to speak in front of complete strangers. 

I'm always proud of my kids.  That's my job as their father.  Tonight, however, listening to my son talk about his mental health struggles, I experienced a moment of grace.  After having a full week of what many people would call bad luck in school. my son tried to help this woman understand mental illness.  I don't know too many thirteen-year-olds who would do that.  

Saint Marty wishes his son's entire school could have seen him tonight.

May 1: Whaterever was Coming, Professor Hannibal Lecter, Grace

One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher from Indianapolis.  His name was Edgar Derby.  He hadn't been in Billy's boxcar.  He'd been in Roland Weary's car, had cradled Weary's head while he died.  So it goes.  Derby was forty-four years old.  He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of war.

Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age.  The subject he had taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization.  He also coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body.

Derby's son would survive the war.  Derby wouldn't.  That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days.  So it goes.

The worst American body wasn't Billy's.  The worst body belonged to a car thief from Cicero, Illinois.  His name was Paul Lazzaro.  He was tiny, and not only were his bones and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting.  Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with dime-sized scars.  He had had many plagues of boils.

Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary's boxcar, and had given his word of honor to Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay for Weary's death.  He was looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy.

The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled wall.  There were no faucets they could control.  They could only wait for whatever was coming.  Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted.  Reproduction was not the main business of the evening.

Again, this scene could come from newsreel footage of the Holocaust.  All these naked prisoners of war lined up in a shower room, awaiting their fates.  They may be lucky and survive, or they may be unlucky and gassed.  Of course, Billy survives.  We already know this.  Billy survives the prison camp, the firebombing of Dresden, an airplane crash later in life.  He is not killed by his German captors.  Or Edgar Derby.  Or Paul Lazzaro.  Billy's luck holds out.

As I reread Slaughterhouse, I'm struck by how lucky Billy really is.  He is witness to a string of different tragedies, yet he is never mortally harmed.  That's pretty damn good luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.  Others would call it fate.  Christians might call it grace.

I am sitting in my office at the university right now.  It is Monday, and I have one final night class to teach for this semester.  I am not feeling lucky or fated or graced.  I'm exhausted from a weekend of grading.  Even worse, I left a red pen in my shirt pocket this morning.  The pen cap came off, and now I look like a serial killer or a butcher.  Both of my shirts are soaked with pools of red ink.  My hands are stained, too.  It doesn't look like I was grading essays.  It looks like I was slaughtering them.

My wife is supposed to bring me a change of shirt in a little while so that I don't frighten my students tonight.  Imagine it:  me walking into the room, Professor Hannibal Lecter.  I sit at my desk, smile, and say, "Hello, Clarice."  It would be pretty epic, but my students haven't done their class evaluations yet.  I want a job in the fall.

I'm not sure that I believe in luck.  Luck sort of hints at a random universe, where bad and good things happen for no apparent reason.  As a Christian, I fall in the grace camp.  God at work in my life.  That's comforting.  Sort of like Billy knowing that he's not going to die in that shower room, I know that God's looking out for me.  If something bad happens, I will be alright.  If something good happens, I will be alright.

Now, the red pen exploding in my pocket--that was just stupidity on my part.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for clean shirts and pants.

February 6: Grace Moments, Catie Rosemurgy, "Billy's Vision of Grace"

Everybody experiences grace.  Grace is a moment when the world suddenly seems good, or open to some kind of goodness.  I know, when I experience grace, it feels as if I'm opening up.  I'm a room with a door that's been locked for a couple of decades, and suddenly that door swings open and sunlight enters, along with wind, fresh air.

I really treasure those grace moments, because they give me hope.  Make me believe in God.  Christians experience grace.  Muslims experience grace.  Buddhists experience grace.  Atheists experience grace.  They all just call it something different.  Goodness.  Enlightenment.  Luck.  Whatever.

Saint Marty has a little poem about grace for you.

Billy's Vision of Grace

by:  Catie Rosemurgy

She lands next to me.  She hides in my heart
and pecks.  She's a sudden bird, my own
small, ruffled piece of nowhere.  She can't stay.
Her heartbeat forbids it.  She leaves me behind,
as blue as a robin's egg in the grass
She's the color of sand by day, the color
of the bottom of a well at night.
She's the color of everything at night.
She's a charming shape, and so the moon tries
to use her as a stencil.  She's what it wants
more and more of.  She emerges and emerges.
She's born and born.  Not very many things,
maybe only a bird at night, can keep
flying and still seem completely empty.

I like accordion music . . .

July 9: Hard Work, Keeping at It, Confidence

Andy also found that his spirit was calmed by hard work.  He gravitated to the college newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun.  One of only two dailies published by an American university--and also Ithaca's only morning paper--its eight pages even carried national and international news, complete with an Associated Press feed that came in every night via the telephone line.  It seemed sophisticated.  Andy's long-running connection with the paper raised his status until by his last year he walked across campus with unprecedented confidence...

The "Andy" in the above paragraph is E. B. White.  When White entered Cornell, he was given that nickname by his fellow students, and he embraced his new identity with relish.  Gone was the shy, sickly young boy.  Instead, "Andy" White was smart, talented, and full of confidence.


Sometimes I have that swagger and confidence, too.  I believe that I'm a good writer.  Talented, even.  Other times, I suffer from incredibly low self-esteem.  My poems seem derivative, sentimental.  I dwell on my failures instead of my successes.  Writing is a difficult avocation.  It sort of depends on acceptance.  Yet, more often than not, a writer receives rejection instead.

But you keep at it.  Keep sending out manuscripts to publishers.  Keep entering writing contests.  Keep sitting down with a pen and paper.  Keep writing.  Confidence comes with experience.  I know good writing.  I know when I write something good.  However, getting published is 25% talent and good writing.  The other 75% is simply luck.  Stephen King's wife rescued a manuscript from the garbage and forced him to finish it.  The manuscript turned out to be Carrie.  Luck.

At the moment, my confidence is at a low ebb.  Despite that fact, tomorrow night, I will submit more poems for publication.  Keeping at it.  That's the whole game.

Saint Marty is rolling the dice.

C'mon, daddy needs a publisher

May 2: Early Start

I have to get my daughter up early tomorrow.  I'm not looking forward to it.  My daughter is thirteen-years-old and wakes up like a hungry grizzly after hibernation.  If I'm lucky, she won't even speak to me until she takes her shower.  If I'm not lucky, she will whine and scream when I rouse her.

She is feeling better today, with several doses of antibiotics in her system.  But she went to bed quickly tonight, which indicates that she's not 100% yet.  She would still be awake right now, diddling with her iPod, if she were completely healthy.

Wish Saint Marty luck tomorrow morning.  He's hoping not to lose any appendages.

Go ahead.  Wake her up.

December 22: Mary Hatch, Why in the World...

"Mary Hatch, why in the world did you ever marry a guy like me?"

Donna Reed--hubba, hubba

George Bailey says this to his wife after a particularly difficult day at the office.  He's been faced again and again with what he considers his "failures."  He's just turned down an offer from Mr. Potter of a very lucrative job.  He returns home, and gazes at Mary, the one choice he's made in his life that he considers "lucky."  It's sort of a heart-breaking moment.

I think I've made some terrible choices in my life.  Choices that have changed my life in very permanent ways.  I never finished my Ph.D.  I moved back to the U. P. instead of searching for a teaching job in more populated areas.  I'm a part-time adjunct and a part-time medical records clerk.  I barely make enough money to scrape by.  I'm friends with other people who are in much better places in their lives--better careers, better homes, better health insurances, better job security.  I know where George is coming from when he asks Mary this question.

I have a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids.  My family is the only thing that keeps me going.  My wife.  My daughter.  My son.  They're why I bust my ass six days a week with work.  I want them to have everything they deserve.  Sometimes I think they would be better off with a guy who had the ambition to complete his education and get a tenured job at a good university.  Instead, they get a guy who's one huge pleasure in life is writing blog posts and keeping track of his blog stats.  I sometimes do think, "Why in the world did my wife ever marry a guy like me?"

No, I'm not feeling sorry for myself.  It's more a question of good fortune.  I've had good fortune with my family.  While we've had our struggles with mental illness and addictions, we really do love each other.  I feel that every day I get home.  To put George's question another way, he's asking himself, "How did I ever get so lucky?" 

Saint Marty is the luckiest man this side of Bedford Falls, even if Jimmy Stewart gets to make out with Donna Reed.

February 20: Saint Tyrannio

DISCLAIMER: All of my posts are going to be for the previous day's saint. I write these blogs at the end of the day, so there's going to be about a 24-hour lag time.

This post is not easy to write. I don't like admitting my weaknesses and failings. But, when I decided to do this blog, I told myself I would have to be completely truthful and utterly transparent, no matter how embarassing or painful.

One of my greatest downfalls is jealousy. I find myself constantly (and childishly) questioning the good luck of people. For example, my wife and I are in the process of trying to sell our home. We live in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house that's over a century old. The place has served us well, but with the addition of a little boy to our family about sixteen months ago, we are facing the eventuality that our nine-year-old daughter is not going to want to share her bedroom with a sibling who has a penis. So, last December, we contacted a real estate agent. Our house has been on the market for over two-and-a-half months. We've had quite a few people walk through our abode, but we have as yet to receive an offer.

This week, a coworker listed her house for sale on Friday. She and her husband are in much the same situation as my wife and me. Having just acquired another daughter in November, they have outgrown their current house. They want an upgrade. In the days leading up to Friday, they've packed, decluttered, cleaned, retiled, and patched. As they readied their home, I kept saying encouraging things like "you won't get any offers for a while" and "remember, it's a buyers' market, not a sellers' market." Secretly, I was looking forward to having someone to commiserate with over the shitty real estate situation in the area.

Yesterday morning, my coworker had the first showing of her home, which is listed, I might add, for over twice the price of my home. Near noon, my coworker's cell phone rang. Here it comes, I thought, the big let-down. (I remember the first time our house was shown and the pall of disappointment that sat on me like a ratty mink coat for days when no offer was forthcoming.) She answered the phone, said "uh-huh" a couple of times, "you're kidding" a couple of times, and ended with "Okay, thanks." She hung up, looked at me, and said, "We got an offer on the house."

"That's great," I said, smiling. You've got to be fucking kidding me, I was thinking. The old green monster crawled out of the cave of my chest and started whispering in my ear: She hasn't worked hard enough. She should have to struggle for at least a few months. What did she do to deserve this? Sonofabitch. Now, let me say that I really love my coworker. She's a good, supportive friend who has always been kind and generous toward me. So I'm not proud of this flaw in my personality. In the past, I've been jealous over some pretty ridiculous things and people, including J. K. Rowling, Wally Lamb, any poem or poet in the New Yorker, PT Cruisers, laptop computers, students who write really well, anyone who wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, pregnant couples, teenagers walking down the street hand-in-hand, and houses that have more than one bathroom, which brings me back to Friday and my coworker--

"That means you've only got about a month to find a new house," I said, trying my hardest to smile and rain on her parade at the same time.

She shrugged and smiled. "Oh, well."

Let it be known that I have no idea at this time how much the offer on her house was or whether she and her husband accepted the offer. Let it also be known that my coworker has just come back to work after having a baby and then suffering a seriously broken bone a month later (she has the pins and plates in her foot to prove it). She deserves some good fortune. That being said, I'm still having trouble stifling my jealous nature.

And today's feast saint, Tyrannio, ain't offering me much in the way of guidance or help. He's one of those early bishops who was surrounded by martyrs. He witnessed a group of Christians face down a pack of wild animals (think lions and tigers and bears, oh my) before being slaughtered with swords. Later, Tyrannio himself was arrested, tortured, and drowned for being a Christian. I was sort of hoping for the patron saint of real estate today, and I'm stuck with a man who makes my problems seem about as significant as a shortage of suntan lotion at a nude beach.

So, I guess I'm on my own to deal with my wild jealousy. I know I'll be able to force it back into its cage and lock the door eventually. I won't be able to kill it; I'll just throw it some raw hamburger and make sure it's got enough water to keep it quiet for the time being. And I will be happy for my coworker, geniunely happy, if her house sells. I will. I just need perspective. I'm not being stretched on the rack or thrown into a river with a boulder chained around my neck. I'm living in a house that 95% of people in the developing world would consider luxurious. I'm lucky. So what if I have to wait in line to use the toilet? I'm a lucky man.

I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

I'm lucky...I'm lucky...I'm lucky...I'm lucky...If you want to own my two-bedroom, one-bathroom, detached-garage piece of luck, make me an offer.