I've always thought of myself as ill-equipped to deal with crises. I don't like change, especially change over which I have no control. I survive, but I'm sort of like a stegosaurus stuck in tar. I thrash around, trying to escape, and then sort of give in and sink to the bottom. Become a fossil.
This past weekend, a friend told me that I deal well with change. "You adapt," she said. Her statement surprised me. I'm the guy that sits home on Saturday nights and watches The Lawrence Welk Show on PBS. I reread books. Rewatch movies. In the past two weeks, I have watched the same documentary about writer David McCullough five times. I find this kind of repetition comforting because I know what's coming.
"Adapt" is not a verb I'd apply to myself. When drastic and unwelcome change occurs, I scramble around, trying to find a new routine. It may take a few days or weeks, but, eventually, I will find a new rut for myself. I haven't gone the way of the passenger pigeon yet. But, if I were an endangered species, I probably wouldn't survive because I'd keep returning to my wetlands until they were turned into a parking structure. And then I'd surrender to extinction. I'm a dodo bird, not a platypus.
My friend sees something in me that I certainly don't see.
My sister has not been transported home from downstate yet. She will be coming tomorrow by ambulance. The hospital bed will be delivered to my parents' house in the morning. Right now, I feel this uneasy sense of anticipation among my family members who are here. They aren't quite sure what to expect. A meteor is approaching. A new Ice Age. The topography of their world is about to change drastically.
My job this week will be to prepare. I plan to contact the local funeral parlor tomorrow to set up an appointment. I've already talked to a musician friend about music for my sister's funeral Mass. These are things that need to be done. And I don't think any other person in my family is thinking clearly enough to do them.
My question for Ives tonight is this:
Am I a platypus or a dodo?
And the answer:
One of the pamphlets was called The Sweet Summons. Its cover depicted clouds that were bursting with light, a chorus of gospel singers standing before them--"The Good Light of Eternity" awaiting all, the "sweet summons" that came at the end of life.
I find that answer strangely comforting tonight. Sweet. Quiet. Peaceful.
Maybe Saint Marty will survive the coming apocalypse.
NOTE: The Poet of the Week is Mike Madonick, who read at the university last year. I chose him because his poems make me smile.
Platypus
by: Michael David Madonick
Elegance breeds extinction, or
quite the opposite. Take the Persian
gazelle, if you will. All leg and
leap and pirouette, the poor bastard
is as old as the pyramids, its
brains crowded out by its horns. But
the broadfoot, the duckbill, the
soft woolly thing gone wrong in Tasmania,
uses everything it's got. The size
twelve shoe it calls a nose is as sensitive
as the crazed Vladimir Horowitz's
imperfect pinkie playing Scarlatti in candlelight
at Carnegie Hall, some tight-stitched
prayer rug under the bench to prevent the
passion from slipping. The rug-maker
himself, having mastered the masterful math-
ematical deigns, impregnated, for
better or worse, a gesture or real piety, the
mistake he offered to Allah that now
is being pressed like a question by the sharp
thin leg of the piano bench--Horowitz
unconscious in his reverie and trill. But not
to forget the platypus, who uses
his spatula head, a non-kosher adaptation,
stirring the silt for insects, worms, the
detestable shellfish. And when it swims, dives, it is
its own invention, adroit, simple, making
all its inchoate parts the envy of the ridiculous
otter. This is not, after all, the panda, whose
cuteness has brought him to the brink. It is a Scrabble
word of a name--platypus, implying just what
it is, a kind of canker in evolution, an oddness that
never quite inherits the whole. Make no mistake,
anything can be anything, but this, just on the short
side of grotesque, attracts as much attention
as it needs and then retreats. Finally, whose prayer
is perfect anyway? Yet the platypus is full
of incongruity and pain; it lies in wait, some Ninja
in the backwater, the only mammal
with the horny spur behind its leg, venomous--
so they say.
Adventures of STICKMAN
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