May 28: "Invitation," Change-phobic, Christmas Tree

Mary Oliver hears an . . . 

Invitation

by:  Mary Oliver

Oh do you have time

     to linger

          for just a little while

               out of your busy

and very important day

     for the goldfinches

          that have gathered

               in a field of thistles

for a musical battle

     to see who can sing

          the highest note

               or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,

     or the most tender?

          Their strong, blunt beaks

               drink the air

as they strive

     melodiously

          not for your sake

               and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning

     but for sheer delight and gratitude--

          believe us, they say,

               it is a serious thing

just to be alive

     on this fresh morning

          in this broken world.

               I beg of you,

do not walk by

     without pausing

          to attend to this

               rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.

     It could mean everything.

          It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:

               You must change your life.

You know, if we all listen close enough and hard enough, we can hear those goldfinches singing to us--an insistent chorus charging us to change our lives in some way.  And it's not just a polite suggestion.  The verb Rilke uses, and Oliver repeats, is "must."  We must change our lives.

The follow-up question, of course, is simple:  "How?"

Today, my wife and I took down the Christmas decorations in our house.  (Before you get all judgmental, let me say that, in the past, we have let our Christmas tree blaze in our living room until well past Independence Day.  So, we are actually ahead of schedule this year.)  The reason for ending yuletide season this Memorial Day weekend is quite simple:  it just felt like the right time.

I often let instinct motivate my decisions.  For most life-altering choices, I do a gut check.  If the idea of making some kind of change makes me uncomfortable, I interrogate that discomfort.  Any kind of switch in life can inspire a certain level of anxiety in my being, and I'm not a person who embraces change easily.  In fact, some might say that I am change-phobic.  

That doesn't mean that I reject the idea of change outright, given a choice.  No.  That means that I need more time than other people to adjust to shifting realities.  I'm not Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, leaping from one life situation to another with little to no preparation.  If I wake up tomorrow morning on the planet of Tralfamadore, I'm probably not going to have a good time.  

However, I can sense when a change is right and necessary.  The last huge change I made in my life was over three years ago.  At the time, I'd been working in the healthcare industry for over 20 years.  The first six or so months of the pandemic, I masked up, registered patients, and took temperatures at hospital entrances.  Then the adult programming position became available at the library, and I knew immediately that I wanted to pursue it.  I applied and was interviewed.  A couple weeks later, I was offered the job, and I accepted.

I like to think I helped a lot of people during my time in the healthcare field.  I was good at calming patients and families down in stressful situations, making them laugh and relax.  Some of my best friends still work in the medical profession, and I still make people laugh and relax for my job at the library.  Some things never change.

I always listen for the goldfinches in the thistle field.  They may be calling on me to start my next big adventure.

Or they may simply be saying to Saint Marty, "It's time to take down your Christmas tree."

February 28: Feeling Much Better, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Prayer

Santiago finishes his prayers . . .

"Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." Then he added, "Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is."

With his prayers said, and feeling much better, but suffering exactly as much, and perhaps a little more, he leaned against the wood of the bow and began, mechanically, to work the fingers of his left hand.

The sun was hot now although the breeze was rising gently.

Like Santiago, after praying, I often feel better, even if nothing in my life has noticeably changed.  I think it has something to do with unburdening.  I carry around all these worries and fears and irritations all the time, all day long.  That's a lot of alls.  When I pray, I hand these things over to a Higher Power.  Call it what you want--God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (yes, that's actually a deity), or the universe.  Once I perform this great handoff, the next step is the hardest:  trust.  I have to trust that my Flying Spaghetti Monster will take care of me.

Today, I said a little prayer on my way to work.  It sort of went something like this:  Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, please watch over everyone I love today.  Grant me wisdom and strength.  Help me not to fuck up.  In the name of oregano, parmesan, and the holy cheese.  Amen.

And then I trusted.  I sat in my office.  Did my work.  Accomplished a lot.  Came home.  Fed my kids.  Cleaned at church.  Picked my wife up from work.  Got in my pajamas.  Sat down on my couch to type this blog post.

I did not experience any major catastrophes.  Everyone I love is safe.  My puppy sat in my lap for a while this evening, licking my face and then sleeping.  To the best of my knowledge, I did not fuck anything up today.  The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster came through for me.

Prayer is a good practice to get into.  If you don't want to call it prayer, then use a different term.  How about meditation?  Or centering?  Or preparing the pasta?  The term doesn't matter.  What matters are those few minutes of reflection on what you able to do and what is out of your hands.  In twelve-step programs, that's known as the Serenity Prayer:  "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."   

I trust the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, the way that Santiago trusts the sea.  Or Billy Pilgrim trusts Tralfamadorians.  The way writers trust words to take them where they need to go.  That's what prayer is for me.  It's like crossing your hands on your chest, closing your eyes, and falling backward into the spaghetti arms of God.

Saint Marty just hopes those arms aren't too al dente. 

March 23: Ten Times a Donkey, Mean Drunks, Pretty Darn Pleasant

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up- flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"- he would mutter to himself- "for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.

"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.- Down, dog, and kennel!"

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir."

"Avast!" gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called a dog, sir."

"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it," muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go back and strike him, or- what's that?- down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!- his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad! Anyway there's something's on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say- worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game- Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth- So here goes again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with me. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though- How? how? how?- but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight."

Another first--we finally hear Ahab's voice.  It's not a very pleasant encounter between Ahab and Stubb.  In fact, I would venture to say that Ahab is kind of an asshole.  Of course, he's not in his right mind.  Sleep-deprived.  Driven to the brink of madness in his desire to hunt down the whale that cost him his leg. 

When I read books, I sometimes play a little game.  I try to decide which character I wouldn't mind getting drunk with.  Holden Caulfield would be an obnoxious drunk.  Bob Cratchit, on the other hand, would know how to have a good time.  So would McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse wouldn't be the life of the party.  Most of the characters from The Great Gatsby would be able to hold their liquor.  However, Ahab and Ebenezer Scrooge would be mean drunks. 

It has been a really long week.  Lots of drama with kids.  My daughter was taking tests, performing in concerts, and preparing for her trip to Florida.  When I got home from work this evening, she was stressing about the end of the marking period.  For about a half hour, she thought she was going to receive less than an "A" in one of her online classes.

I am happy to report that my daughter is on her way to the sunshine state, and she has retained her 4.0 GPA.  My wife and I did not receive any phone calls from the principal of my son's school this week, and, tomorrow, we head to Wisconsin to see a traveling production of Les Miserables in Appleton.  Nobody from my family is in the hospital or near death, and I am not on the brink of bankruptcy.

I think that my wife and I have earned a few drinks tonight.  I am not Ahab, although some of my students this semester would probably beg to differ.  Alcohol tends to amplify personality.  If you tend to be an asshole naturally, like Ahab, you will be a flaming asshole after a carafe or two of wine. 

I'm a fairly easy-going guy.  I enjoy good jokes, good food, and good friends.  So, when I drink, I tend to be pretty darn pleasant.  If you don't believe me, I invite you to drive to Jasper Ridge Brewery in Ishpeming tonight.  I will be the guy in the dining room, guzzling Tanqueray and tonics and eating cheese curds. 

If you are an Ahab, please stay below decks in your cabin. 

Saint Marty is thankful for Friday and alcohol and Victor Hugo.

January 23: Weary, Brett, Full of Expectation

Weary was as new to war as Billy.  He was a replacement, too.  As a part of a gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger--from a 57-millimeter antitank gun.  The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.  The gun lapped up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch thirty feet long.  The flame left a black arrow on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden.  The shot was a miss.

What had been missed was a Tiger tank.  It swiveled its 88-milimeter snout around sniffingly, saw the arrow on the ground.  It fired.  It killed everybody on the gun crew but Weary.  So it goes.

Roland Weary is just as naive and frightened as Billy Pilgrim.  Roland just hides it better.  Puts on a John Wayne mask and pretends he's a cowboy in green.  Of course, Billy, being just as naive and frightened, buys Roland's act.  But they're both kids, and they're both staring down the barrel of a gun.

Roland and Billy aren't much older than the students I teach at the university, and those students all enter my classroom wide-eyed and nervous, pretending that they understand the ways of the world already.  I see it at the beginning of every semester.  My job is to somehow strip away the masks they're wearing and teach them a little about life. 

This afternoon, I received an e-mail that one of the students at the university--a 19-year-old sophomore, let's call him Brett--died last Friday night in his dorm room.  Unexpectedly.  I am not going to speculate about the cause of his death.  In the e-mail, there was a link to the website of the funeral home.  I clicked on the link, and there was Brett's picture.

He was in jeans and a long-sleeved tee shirt.  His face looked so young, like he was trying to be an adult, but didn't have the experience to back it up.  He was a Billy Pilgrim or Roland Weary.  Maybe a little scared.  Maybe a little excited.  And full of expectation about the future.

I sat and stared at that picture for a good five minutes, filling up with sadness.  I never had Brett in a class.  I may have walked by him during the year-and-a-half that he was a student at the university, and he probably blended in with all the other Billys and Rolands on campus.  And, now, he is gone.

In about an hour, I have to go teach a classroom filled with young people.  I am going to try to keep Brett's face in my mind's eye.  In the last few days, I've been swept up in the pessimism of the recent presidential inauguration.  Tonight, I am going to try to kindle a little hope for the future.  I'll do it for Brett.

This evening, Saint Marty is grateful for his students, for the hope they carry around in their backpacks. 

January 19: Filthy Flamingo, Sounds Crazy, Alien Abduction

When Billy got back from his furlough, there were orders for him to go overseas.  He was needed in the headquarters company of an infantry regiment fighting in Luxembourg.  The regimental chaplain's assistant had been killed in action.  So it goes.

When Billy joined the regiment, it was in the process of being destroyed by the Germans in the famous Battle of the Bulge.  Billy never even got to meet the chaplain he was supposed to assist, was never issued a steel helmet and combat boots.  This was in December of 1944, during the last mighty German attack of the war.

Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German lines.  Three other wanderers, not quite so dazed, allowed Billy to tag along.  Two of them were scouts, and one was an antitank gunner.  They were without food or maps.  Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound.  They ate snow.

They went Indian file.  First came the scouts, clever, graceful, quiet.  They had rifles.  Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.

Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death.  Billy was preposterous--six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches.  He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon, and no boots.  On his feet were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father's funeral.  Billy had lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down.  The involuntary dancing, up-and-down, up-and-down, made his hip joints sore.

Billy was wearing a thick field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long underwear that was soaked with sweat.  He was the only one of the four who had a beard.  It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old.  He was also going bald.  Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson.

He didn't look like a soldier at all.  He looked like a filthy flamingo.

I know that is a fairly long passage.  I've decided to try something different this year with the book I've chosen to use.  Instead of searching for random passages that inspire me, I am typing out the entire novel, from start to finish, one day at a time.  So, if you've never read Slaughterhouse Five before, by the end of this year (perhaps sooner), I will have transcribed the entire text into my blog, one section at a time.

I've had writer friends who have done this before with short stories and poems.  I don't think that I know any person who's retyped an entire published novel before.  There is something very satisfying in stringing together the words, just as Vonnegut did so many years ago.  It makes me feel a little more connected to the creation of such an important work of literature.  Those paragraphs spilling out of my tapping fingers.

I suppose that sounds crazy to any of my disciples who are not writers.  It sounds a little crazy to me, and I'm the one doing it.  Maybe I am a little bit like Billy Pilgrim, the filthy pink flamingo.  Not really fitting in.  Limping along, off-balance and lost.  Sometimes, I think that my family and friends simply tolerate my eccentricities.  When I decide to do something like retype Slaughterhouse Five, they probably roll their eyes, thinking, "He's nuts, but he's not a danger to himself or anybody else."

Of course, Billy's eccentricities become a little more pronounced when he starts talking about his little green friends from Tralfamadore.  I'm not ready to talk about my alien abduction experiences yet.  Still a little too fresh.  Plus, I'm negotiating to get Donald Trump a one-way ticket to Tralfamadore.

Tonight, Saint Marty is grateful for weirdness and tolerance. 

January 14: A Calling Much Higher, Writing, Chipping Away

"Why didn't you answer me when I called?" Barbara wanted to know, standing there in the door of the rumpus room.  She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which Billy described his friends from Tralfamadore.

"I didn't hear you," said Billy.

The orchestration of the moment was this:  Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but she thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six--senile because of damage to his brain in the airplane crash.  She also thought that she was head of the family, since she had had to manage her mother's funeral, since she had to get a housekeeper for Billy, and all that.  Also, Barbara and her husband were having to look after Billy's business interests, which were considerable, since Billy didn't seem to give a damn for business any more.  All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.  And Billy, meanwhile, was trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade Barbara and everybody else that he was far from senile, that, on the contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere business.

He was doing nothing less now, he thought, than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls.  So many of those souls were lost and wretched.  Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore.

A higher calling.  That's what Billy Pilgrim believes that he has.  His job is to open people's eyes.  Life on other planets.  He's a prophet of sorts.  In his professional life, he corrected vision problems.  Now, after a series of personal tragedies, he has made it his crusade to make the world understand the secrets of time and, concurrently, happiness.

I hear people talk about their "calling" all the time, from pastors to priests to teachers to nurses.  It's an undeniable urge, usually to better the world in some way.  I work in a medical office.  Just sort of fell into that job, and I enjoy helping the patients.  But it's not my calling.  I teach college English.  I love opening students' minds to new ideas.  That sort of sounds like a calling.  I'm a church musician.  Enjoy it a great deal.  It's a way to crack open people's hearts and souls.  I suppose that's sort of a calling, as well.  And, of course, I'm a poet and writer.  That, I think, is my true calling.

Blog posts, my poetry and essays and stories, public readings--all of these things really fill me up, energize my mind and spirit.  I think that's what a calling does.  It doesn't empty the "called" out.  It fills him/her up.  I don't know if my writing has changed anything.  I send words out into the world, like putting a note in a bottle and throwing the bottle into the sea.  I don't know ever know where that bottle lands or if my note makes a difference.

But this, I believe, is my true calling.  Writing.  Chipping away at the injustices of the collective universe one syllable at a time.

Today, Saint Marty is grateful for words.

January 10: Flying Saucer, Doctor's Appointment, In a Zoo

When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while.  He had a terrible scar across the top of his skull.  He didn't resume practice.  He had a housekeeper.  His daughter came over almost every day.

And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an all-night radio program devoted to talk.  He told about having come unstuck in time.  He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967.  The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said.  He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said.  He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack.

To paraphrase Han Solo, here's where the fun begins in Slaughterhouse Five.  Billy time jumping.  Billy abducted by aliens and kept in a zoo with the beautiful Montana Wildhack.  Suddenly, Vonnegut's Dresden book morphs into a 1950s porno science fiction flick.  Billy becomes a prophet and a patient.  You're not quiet sure if he's telling the truth or belongs in a mental institution.

I had a doctor's appointment today.  Saw a liver and digestive disease specialist.  As I was sitting in the exam room, waiting for the doctor to appear, I stared out of the windows.  There's a snowstorm blowing through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan right now, so the scene below looked almost like a Christmas card.  Cars mounded with snow.  The air a frenzy of white.

Waiting for a doctor to show up is a humbling experience.  I wasn't quite sure what he was going to say, what course of treatment he was going to recommend.  I was sort of at the mercy of a man that I had never even met.  I sort of felt like Billy Pilgrim in the zoo on Tralfamadore.  A specimen to observe and probe.

Thank goodness, the doctor was nice.  A little too serious, but that's okay.  When you're talking about family histories of bleeding ulcers and stomach cancer, you probably want a guy who's earnest and concerned.  (Please don't worry.  I do not have a bleeding ulcer or stomach cancer.  Those were just a couple of the questions the doctor asked.)

I left the hospital with an appointment for an upper endoscopy.  I walked out into a world of cold and white.  There's always a strange stillness that descends in a snowstorm.  I felt like I was stepping into an Edward Hopper painting, the world all muffled and lonely.  Like I was entering the deserted Automat.  So it goes.

That was Saint Marty's afternoon.  In a zoo on Tralfmadore. Waiting for the alien probe.

January 9: So It Goes, Eyes of Gratitude, Word for the Day

He was treated in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, and was given shock treatments and released. He married his fiancée, finished his education, and was set up in business in Ilium by his father-in-law. Ilium is a particularly good city for optometrists because the General Forge and Foundry Company is there. Every employee is required to own a pair of safety glasses, and to wear them in areas where manufacturing is going on. GF&F has sixty-eight thousand employees in Ilium.  That calls for a lot of lenses and a lot of frames.

Frames are where the money is.

Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his daughter Barbara married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in business. Billy's son Robert had a lot of trouble in high school, but then he joined the famous Green Berets. He straightened out, became a fine young man, and he fought in Vietnam.

Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes. 

While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.

This little synopsis of Billy Pilgrim's life can be a little frightening.  It emphasizes the randomness of tragedy, of which Billy seems to have more than his fair share. A nervous breakdown, Vietnam, airplane crash, carbon monoxide.That's quite the laundry list of catastrophe. Nobody would blame Billy if he just shut the windows in his house, closed the curtains, and stayed in bed all day.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Examining the paragraph differently: Billy is a successful optometrist, rich and popular; he survives an airplane crash that killed every other passenger; Billy's son does not die in Vietnam--he's a "fine young man"; Billy does not die accidentally of carbon monoxide poisoning with his wife. So, in reality, Billy Pilgrim is a pretty lucky bastard.

Again, it's all a matter of perspective. Billy can choose to live in despair or gratitude. If I was Billy, I'm not sure which option I would select.  But I am NOT Billy Pilgrim. I haven't had a nervous breakdown (yet). My son is too young to serve in a war zone. I don't plan on taking any plane trips in the near future, and I don't think I have to worry about carbon monoxide in my house. I have chosen to make 2017 a year of gratitude. So it goes.

I think the world would be a much better place if viewed with eyes of gratitude. Instead of feeling deprived and wronged, people would feel satisfied and blessed. Not that there aren't injustices in the world to confront--racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, to name a few. There are. But, if all the homophobes or Islamophobes simply lived their lives in love and gratitude, they wouldn't hate gay people or Muslims. Ditto racists and sexists.

I am not a child of the 1960s. I shower. Wear shoes and socks. I can't remember the last time I flashed the peace sign to anybody. However, embracing love and gratitude is not just a hippie thing. It goes back a lot further. To Jesus Christ. To before Jesus Christ. In the Book of Daniel, there is this little passage: 
     . . . 
     Every shower and dew, bless the Lord.
     All you winds, bless the Lord.
     Fire and heat, bless the Lord.
     Cold and chill, bless the Lord.
     Dew and rain, bless the Lord.
     Frost and chill, bless the Lord.
     Ice and snow, bless the Lord.
     Light and darkness, bless the Lord.
     Lightnings and clouds, bless the Lord.
     Let the earth bless the Lord.
     . . . 
So, you see, the call for gratitude isn't new.  It's ancient. And, really, it's exhausting to live in a constant state of deprivation and anger, feeling wronged and cheated every minute of the day. The people who live like that just elected Donald Trump to be President of the United States.

So, gratitude is the word for the day, the week, the month, the year, the century, the millennium.

Tonight, Saint Marty is grateful for his wife, who keeps him sane and centered when he's going off the rails.

January 7: Mild Nervous Collapse, Normal Life, Sausage McMuffin

Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there.  He was a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth--tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola.  He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in the Second World War.  His father died in a hunting accident during the war.  So it goes.

Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.  After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium School of Optometry.  During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder and owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.

This is the beginning of Billy Pilgrim's story in Slaughterhouse.  Inauspicious.  He's nothing special.  Just one of those normal young guys who became a normal young soldier during World War II, went to Europe and saw normal human atrocities, and then came back home and tried to settle into a normal American life.  The only problem is that the normal human brain doesn't really settle after experiencing normal trauma.  Hence Billy's normal mild nervous collapse.

I'm not quite sure what normal is.  I used to think that I had a normal life--married, wife, two kids (a daughter and a son), two cars, mortgaged home, two jobs.  That sounds pretty normal, doesn't it?  Yet, normal is relative.  There are millions of men and women like Billy Pilgrim who went off to war, but is war ever normal?  My wife has bipolar disorder, like millions of other people, but is bipolar ever normal?  My life has been touched by addictions, like millions of other people's lives, but is addiction ever normal?

I think that, when things like war and mental illness and addiction become normal, there's something really wrong with the world.  I'm not getting on a soapbox, and I have no answers to this conundrum.  War has been around since Cain picked up that rock and bashed in Abel's skull.  I'm sure mental illness and addiction have been slithering along since the Book of Genesis, too.  Maybe Adam had a thing for certain mushrooms in the Garden of Eden.

Whether you believe Genesis is literal or metaphorical, one of the points of that book is that humankind's history is flawed.  Full of violence and weakness and illness and jealousy.  That was normal back at the beginning of the universe, and it's normal now.  Just ask Billy Pilgrim.

I am going to have my normal Saturday.  Maybe I'll play a game of Operation with my son.  I'll go to church.  Have pizza for dinner.  Clean my bathroom tonight.  Vacuum and sweep and mop.  In between all this, I'll say a few prayers for people in my life who are facing challenges.  Normal challenges:  illness, unemployment, depression, addiction. 

Saint Marty is grateful today for his normal Saturday breakfast:  a Sausage McMuffin.

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.

January 2: Shot in Dresden, iPhone 7 Plus, Kurt Vonnegut

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his.  Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.  And so on.  I've changed all the names.

This is the first paragraph of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  At the beginning of the book, Vonnegut talks about how difficult it has been for him to write about his war experiences.  More specifically, his difficulties with writing about the firebombing of the city of Dresden while he was a prisoner of war there.  When reality becomes like fiction, Vonnegut turns science fiction into reality.

I have spent the day becoming part of the 21st century.  Translation:  I now am the proud owner of an iPhone 7 Plus.  My daughter helped me set up a Snapchat account.  I have sent a "snap" to a friend.  (Or is that supposed to be "I snapped a friend"?)  I'm not sure.  I have always been a little bit of a Luddite.  Distrustful of technology.  That's why, until about a week-and-a-half ago, I was not on Facebook.

There is something about a constantly mediated reality that I distrust.  Even though I write this blog, I don't share everything.  I still have difficulty with some aspects of my life.  Things that are too painful or embarrassing to approach right now.  Sort of like Vonnegut struggling with his wartime past.  I may write about these experiences eventually, like Vonnegut.

I once met Kurt Vonnegut.  Really.  He came to the university where I teach.  It was a few years before he died, and age had diminished him a little bit physically.  He walked unsteadily, and his voice had the rumble of a lifelong smoker.  However, his intellect was intact.  He spoke of the importance of teachers, and the nobility of the classroom.  It was really inspiring. 

As I sat in the audience, I imagined Vonnegut in a zoo on the planet Tralfamdore with the main character of Slaughterhouse, Billy Pilgrim.  Vonnegut as a prisoner in Dresden as the bombs began to fall.  Vonnegut as a Vietnam War protestor, marching and raising hell.  I imagined all of the Vonnegut realities.

So, my reality has expanded today.  I'm still a little distrustful of things like Facebook and Twitter, but it's a healthy distrust.  I will still write things in my daily planner.  I will still carry around a journal and fountain pen, in which I will record thoughts and inspirations.  I have to keep in mind that iPhones and blogs and journals and Facebook are all tools.  Ways to approach reality.

I think that Vonnegut, if he were alive today, would own the latest iPhone.  He would be tweeting (or poo-tee-weeting).  He would be writing on a tablet, and taking pictures and posting them on his timeline.  In short, he would be the King of all Media. 

Saint Marty hopes that, some day, he will be a really cool old guy like Kurt Vonnegut, talking/tweeting/blogging/Snapchatting about peace and love and sex and extraterrestrial life.