March 24: Twenty-Nine Seconds Later, Coincidence, Weigh My Options

More about the fictional The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . . .

To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of the distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered.  Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other sucuh dizzying concepts. 

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.  It takes eight minutes to journey from the star Sol to the place where the Earth used to be, and four years more to arrive at Sol's nearest neighbor, Alpha Proxima.

For light to reach the other side of the Galaxy, for it to reach Damogran, for instance, takes rather longer:  five hundred thousand years.

The record for hitchhiking this distance is just under five years, but you don't get to see much on the way.  

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that if you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds.  However, it does go on to say that what with space being the mind-boggling size it is the chances of getting picked up by another ship within those thirty seconds are two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine to one against.

By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off with--she went off with a gate-crasher.

Though the planet Earth, the Islington flat and the telephone have all now been demolished, it is comforting to reflect that they are all in some small way commemorated by the fact that twenty-nine seconds later Ford and Arthur are rescued.

Ah, coincidence.  The chances of getting picked up by another spaceship within 30 seconds of being jettisoned into the vacuum of space being the telephone number of a flat in Islington where Arthur was humiliated by a girl.  Coincidence.  Yet, Arthur and Ford do get rescued within that 30 seconds.  Their lives, and the rest of the novel, are saved.

I don't believe in coincidence.  I think everything happens for a reason, even if we don't understand or know what that reason is.  For instance, my job at the Surgery Center will disappear into the vacuum of space in about two or three weeks.  Yes, this job loss is happening for purely economic reasons on the part of the huge health system that owns the Surgery Center.  It's just business.  That's what I've been told.  (I'm not going to go on a rant about the soulless nature of the United States' healthcare system today.  I'll save that for another day.)  What I want to say is that, perhaps, this closure is happening for a reason.

I have no idea what that reason is.  That's what I've been trying to figure out for over a month now.  Very few people understand the strong connection I have with the place.  That this surgery center was my sister's baby.  She's been gone for almost four years now, but, in those four years, the surgery center she built was still in operation.  So, in a way, she was still alive and breathing.  Maybe this closure is forcing me to fully come to terms with my sister's death.  Maybe.

Or perhaps there is a another career opportunity in the offing that I would have never considered if the surgery center was still open and operating.  I'm kinda stubborn when it comes to change.  Don't like it.  If something is working for me, I see no need to alter my life in any way.  My life was absolutely working for me.  I was comfortable.  I worked with two of my best friends at the surgery center.  But one of those best friends got a new job about a year ago.  She's gone.  The other best friend will be moving away soon (let's say within months).  Without these two people at the surgery center, there won't be a whole lot of joy for me.  Time for me to weigh my options.

Or perhaps it really is just random bad luck.  Like being jettisoned into outer space with no hope of survival.  The pessimistic side of myself has been thinking along these lines for a while.  The optimistic side of myself thinks this line of thought is bullshit.  Catch me on a good day, and I'll tell you that the future is exciting and new.  Catch me on a bad day, and I'll be drinking special hot chocolate and reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

This Sunday, at this moment, I'm leaning toward Cormac McCarthy.  It's cold.  The sky is gray.  And there's a full bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream in my cupboard.  That's the recipe for a good old-fashioned Irish wake.

In a few hours, Saint Marty may be singing "Danny Boy" at the top of his lungs.

August 7: Rabies, Truth and Literature, "Mein Kampf"

Billy and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby crossed the prison yard to the theater now.  Billy was carrying his little coat as though it were a lady's muff.  It was wrapped around and around his hands.  He was the central clown in an unconscious travesty of that famous oil painting "The Spirit of '76."

Edgar Derby was writing letters home in his head, telling his wife that he was alive and well, that she shouldn't worry, that the war was nearly over, that he would soon be home.

Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was going to make fuck him, whether they wanted to or not.  If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies.  So it goes.

As they neared the theater, they came upon an Englishman who was hacking a groove in the Earth with the heel of his boot.  He was marking the boundary between the American and English sections of the compound.  Billy and Lazzaro and Derby didn't have to ask what the line meant.  It was a familiar symbol from childhood.

Okay, I wasn't going to be political in the post, but I just have to point out something:  Lazzaro sounds like Donald Trump.  Revenge.  Rackets.  Rape.  Pretty much describes everything that we know about the Trump dynasty.  Throw in some Russians and a couple numbskull sons, and we would have to call him President Lazzaro.

It always amazes me when literature seems to predict the future.  Of course, it's all hindsight.  We don't see how George Orwell's 1984 describes 2017 America until we are in the middle of the collapse of society.  We don't realize that Stephen King was describing Donald Trump in The Dead Zone until after Trump's finger is on the red button, ready to launch missiles at North Korea.  If more people read, perhaps the United States wouldn't be in its current predicament.

Thank God both of my children are readers.  My daughter read Cormac McCarthy's The Road in seventh grade.  By the time she was a freshman, she was arguing with teachers about "unacceptable" books she wanted to read, and she usually won the arguments.  When I see something about Jeff Sessions on the news and say, "Big Brother is watching," my daughter knows where I'm coming from.

Literature is about truth, and truth does not seem to be a valuable commodity at the moment in the White House.  Perhaps public schools will be forced to start teaching alternative literature to students soon.  Alternative novels.  Alternative poems.  Copies of Mein Kampf handed out to every student stepping onto a school bus.  The Art of the Deal required reading for all high school graduates.

I am joking here, for the most part.  But, as with all humor, there's always a kernel of truth in it.  Let's hope that kernel never gets popped.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for every writer and poet he has ever read.

February 5: Big Event, Lady Gaga, Classic Saint Marty, "Praise for Waiting"

Sunday after a long weekend of rehearsals and performances for my kids.  I have been working on lesson plans most of the afternoon, after shoveling for close to an hour.  My back is sore and my eyes are burning.  But, I am pretty much prepared for my week of teaching.

Of course, I'm also preparing for the big event tonight.  Got my snacks and drinks.  Some Fritos and cheese and peanuts.  I'm all ready for the big show:  the Lady Gaga halftime concert.  Of course, I have to get through two interminable quarters of football first.  When I said this to my 16-year-old daughter, she said, "That's exactly what my gay friend said."  I'll take that as a compliment.  My daughter is not homophobic.  She has lots of gay friends, and she was just stating a fact.

I'm a lucky guy.  I have two kids who are open-minded and accepting of everybody.  I have a beautiful wife.  And Lady Gaga is singing tonight.

Today's episode of Classic Saint Marty first aired almost six years ago, when I was thinking about the important things in my life . . .

February 8, 2011:  Saint Josephine Bakhita

Right now, I'm teaching Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road to my writing and literature class.  It's one of my favorite books, but my students, as I anticipated, are struggling.  They're struggling with McCarthy's language and style.  His themes and ideas.  More than one of them have said out loud during discussions, "I hate this book."

What I really think my students are struggling with is maturity.  Most of them are only just out of high school a year or so.  I guess I can't really expect them to feel the terror of the dying father for his young son in The Road when they can barely keep a goldfish or fern alive.  They just don't have the life experience to appreciate the book.  Today, I tried again to make them "get it."  I had them write a journal entry about the one thing that's most important in their lives.  My goal was to make them think about the difference between need and want.

One of my students wrote about his eyesight.  Another wrote about her cocker spaniel.  One girl wrote about her faith in God.  They were all incredibly sincere and earnest.  The students who didn't read their journal entries out loud looked stricken, as if I were going to ask them to strip naked and dance to "Funky Town" for everybody.  I could tell that I hit pay dirt with some of them, that I pushed through the layers of Facebook and iPhone numbness to something real, raw, and alive.  Then I read them what I had written:

"This novel makes me stop and evaluate all the things I regard as important or necessary on a day-to-day basis:  Diet Mountain Dew, books, teaching, students, lobster pizza, car, jobs, money.  However, when I reflect on the nittiest and grittiest, those things in my life that really do give me a reason to get up every morning, I would have to list just three:  my son, my daughter, and my wife.  I can't winnow the list any more.  It's a choice I can't even contemplate.  There's a terrible scene in William Styron's book Sophie's Choice where his main character, Sophie, is forced to choose which of her two children will live and which will be executed.  It's a moment so brutal and agonizing that I can barely read it.  If I were asked to choose just one thing I cherish most, the one thing I would rescue from destruction, I couldn't.  I couldn't make a choice like Sophie makes.  It's unthinkable to me.  Wife?  Daughter?  Son?  I know I'd end up like Sophie, haunted the rest of my days by the cries of the choice I didn't make."

Too many people in the world today are forced to make decisions like that in places like Sudan, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.  Life-and-death decisions.  Today's saint, Josephine Bakhita, was stolen from her family in Sudan by slave traders around the year 1879.  After many years and many owners, Josephine was freed.  She wound up in the convent of the Canossian Daughters of Charity.  She joined the order and served as "cook, gate keeper, and keeper of linens."  She died on February 6, 1947.  When Pope John Paul II canonized her in 2000, he referred to her as a "universal sister...[who] can reveal to us the secret of true happiness."

Josephine Bakhita--former slave, nun, servant--found happiness in the religious life, in throwing her energies into helping others.  She became Christ in the lives of people who were sick, broken, cast-off.  She took a life of slavery and turned it into a life of compassion and love.  That was Josephine Bakhita's choice.

You see, it's all about the choices we make.  That's what I wanted my students to understand today.  When all the elements of my life are distilled--job, money, iPad, Kindle, car, clothes, stuffed-crust pizza, all of it boiled off--what are the oxygen and hydrogen of my daily existence?  What do I need to survive?

If it's a cell phone, I may be a student. 

If it's food, money, a car, I may be a janitor.  A nurse.  A lawyer.  The President of the United States.

If it's love and compassion, I may be a husband.  A father.  Or a saint.

It's my choice.


This evening, I have a poem I wrote a few years ago, as I was waiting for my daughter's ballet class to finish.  Appropriate for this ballet recital weekend.

Saint Marty is grateful for a little quiet this evening. 

Praise for Waiting

by:  Martin Achatz

I scribble these lines in my journal 

As I wait for my daughter’s ballet

Class to end, her to come out of the studio,

Flushed from grand jeté, allegro, pirouette.

I treasure these moments of waiting

At the end of the day, in my car,

Radio silent, evening creeping into air

Like frost on a kitchen window, delicate

Fingers of cold and dark.  This moment,

Suspended between dinner and sleep,

Seems timeless, the way pictures of Garbo

Seem timeless, black-and-white, eyes

Focused upward, as if some lover

Hovers above her, waiting to press

His lips to hers, taste her meter, rhythm,

Sonnet of skin, snowdrift body.

Words cannot, will not touch these long

Seconds, no verb or adjective coax

Onto page the pure pleasure of possibility,

Reaching out like an unwritten poem.

I close my eyes, understand why Garbo

Flickered out when she did, left the world

Waiting for one last word, one last glimpse.

A snapshot.  My daughter caught mid-leap,

Waiting, as we all do, to descend.

The only reason to watch the Super Bowl

 

April 2: Cheap Commodity, Monster Energy Drinks, Billy Collins, "I Love You"

We all say it.  When I leave for work in the morning, I kiss my wife goodbye, whisper, "I love you."  After I'm done saying bedtime prayers with my son, I say, "I love you, bud."  As my daughter leans over me, presents her head for me to kiss before she disappears into her room for the night, I say, "I love you."

I often wonder if saying "I love you" so much lessens its meaning.  My son, when he gets a new computer app, says, "I loooooove this game."  I'm teaching Cormac McCarthy's The Road in my good books class currently; I told my students, "I love this book."  My daughter loves drinking Monster energy drinks.  My wife loves taking naps.

I often wonder if love has become a cheap commodity.  Maybe we should reserve that word for really important people and things--like spouses, children, parents, siblings, and the occasional stuffed crust pizza.  For example, yesterday, I stopped by the cemetery to visit my sister's grave.  I talked to her for a little bit, and, when I left, I put my hand on her headstone and said, "I love you."

Perhaps we should find substitutes for the word "love" when "love" really isn't the correct term.  Here are some suggestions:

• I am grateful for...
• I put up with...
• I don't hate...
• I can stand...
• I accept...
• I enjoy...
• I wouldn't mind...
• I can't avoid...
• I like...
• I get along with...
• I don't get sick by...

Those are just a few alternatives I've come up with.  Try them out.

Here's another Billy Collins poem, because you all know Saint Marty loves Billy Collins.

"I Love You"

by:  Billy Collins

Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

It's all new to this only child.
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day

would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I'm looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.

Of course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern.
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.

But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of a volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,

or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges into the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
but enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now,

and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student knows, it really counts.

August 17: Preparations, Classic Saint Marty, New Cartoon

After I'm done typing this post, I'm going to work on my syllabi for the upcoming semester at the university.  I've already completed a lot of the preliminary stuff.  Looking up important dates, classroom numbers, exam times and days.  Now, I have to plug all those things into my existing syllabi, switch a few numbers around, and Presto!  Instant semester.

It's a tedious process.  Busy work, mostly.  However, it will keep me sane for the next three months.  I can't go into the fall feeling unprepared.  It causes way too much stress in my day-to-day existence.  Tonight, I'm registering my kids for dance.  Once I have those schedules figured out, I'll be able to set my university office hours.  That's the last piece of the puzzle.

I know none of these things is very interesting to any of my disciples.  That's my life right now, though.  I'm at an in-between place in my year.  No longer summer.  Not yet autumn.  I'm not ready to let go of August, and I'm not ready to grab hold of September.  Limbo.  That's where I am.

Today's Classic Saint Marty finds me in that same limbo.  Between chlorophyll green and frost yellow.

This episode aired almost four years ago, before Saint Marty was Saint Marty.

August 21, 2010:  Saint Pius X

Two days before I start to teach for the fall semester at the university.  The weather has been swerving from grey and raining to cool and sunny to humid and hot all weekend.  It is the end of summer, even though there's still two weeks of August left.  These last days of summer always fill me with melancholy.  I know, I know.  No big surprise.  I usually spend this time planning and preparing the next three months of work for myself.  Read this book this week.  Papers to grade the next week.  Quizzes to create that day.  Reading journals to review the following weekend.  I am no longer free to do what I want.  I have obligations, 50 students depending on me.  Lesson plans.  Schedules.  Deadlines.  Less day.  More night.  Basically, everything that is the opposite of May, June, July, and August.  And don't even get me started on Christmas music and programs at church.  Yes, it starts this early.  You thought Wal-Mart was bad.

It doesn't help that I just started rereading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for class, which is one of the coldest, bleakest novels ever written.  The first time I read it, I was sitting by a pool in the middle of July during a heat wave, and I still found myself getting chilled.  If you haven't read the novel, you should.  It's one of my favorites.  It's about a father and son trying to reach the Pacific Ocean in post-apocalypse America.  They're starving and desperate.  They encounter bands of cannibals who capture and keep people like livestock, harvesting them for food.  The father and son have a handgun with one bullet for protection.  Oh, and the father is dying of some ailment that causes fits of bloody coughing.  This all takes place in a landscape of charred trees and baked earth, where sunlight is a memory and everything and everyone is covered in grey ash.  Constant snow and rain.

So, throw that uplifting piece of literature on top of my already end-of-summer melancholia, and you have the recipe for a pretty shitty day.  I know I should feel blessed in my life.  I mean, I'm an English major with advanced degrees, and I have jobs that don't require me to run a deep fryer.  Let's make it even simpler:  I have jobs that allow me to pay my bills.  In this economy, that's pretty damn good.  I'm feeling sorry for myself when some people I know don't have the money to make their next house payment.  That's pretty fucked up.

I used to look forward to fall and winter, the shortening of the days, the long reach of the night.  I waited for the maple leaves to turn yellow and orange, the evenings to ice the throat when you breathe.  I've always been a lover of the dark.  That may shock some of you.  I never opened windows or curtains in my house.  I was the neighborhood Boo Radley, with kids walking by my property and whispering stories about the crazy English professor who only comes out under the cover of darkness.

Nowadays, I look forward to those long summer days, when the sun is in the sky at 5 a.m. and sticks around until nearly 11 at night.  I like the bright heat, opening windows and airing out the dead moats of autumn and winter.  I crave those dog days when just shifting in a chair from one ass cheek to another can make you break a sweat.  The thing is, in the hot months, I don't have to do anything that makes me sweat.  School's out, and, aside from punching the clock at my second job, I have the freedom to simply...do...nothing.  That freedom comes to a close tomorrow.

I don't do well with things ending, especially things that I've enjoyed, like vacations or friendships or movies or books.  It's a selfish impulse, wanting a happiness to continue forever.  In his last will and testament, today's saint, Pius X, who was one of the first popes of the 20th century, made the following statement:  "I was born poor, I have lived in poverty, and I wish to die poor."  Maybe, because of my mood, I read those words as meaning poverty of body, mind, and spirit.  Right now, I'm clinging to the happiness of the last month or so.  It has been a time of stability and relative peace in my usually chaotic day-to-day.  I've really enjoyed that.  But usually, when things are going that well, the earth shifts, and I find myself in poverty again.

Poverty is not a bad thing.  It brings you back to the basics, makes you realize what wealth really is.  Wealth has nothing to do with the tangible--money or possessions.  It has everything to do with the intangible (peace, love, security, hope), because the tangible always ends up slipping away, like sea water through your fingers.

Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road, "All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.  Their birth in grief and ashes.  So, he whispered to the sleeping boy.  I have you."  It's a father cleaving to his son.  A man cleaving to something pure, something sacred, something intangible.  It's the way, I imagine, God cleaves to us.

Through pain.  Through darkness.  In light like summer.  That's unchangeable.  That's wealth.

Confessions of Saint Marty

August 29: Taking It Easy

Going to be very brief with this post.  Tired,  Hungry.  Ready to take it easy.

Week over.  Done with teaching.  Still sore from operation last weekend.

Daughter waiting to use my laptop.  Going to brush my teeth.

Saint Marty's done.  Good night.  (Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out!)

August 15: Powerful Speaker, Nobel Prize in Literature, Arguing

“Let me hear another sound from you," said Scrooge, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation.  You’re quite a powerful speaker, Sir,” he added, turning to his nephew.  “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”

Scrooge is not a pleasant guy, at least not at the beginning of the book.  He threatens poor Bob several times in the opening pages.  He argues with his nephew, Fred, and pretty much tells him to go to hell.  Yet, Scrooge also seems to obtain great pleasure in this verbal sparring.  When Scrooge gets the better of the two gentlemen seeking a charitable donation a little while later, he practically gloats (Scrooge resumed his labors with an improved opinion of himself, and in more facetious temper than was usual with him).  Scrooge likes to argue.

This morning, I started reading a conversation thread on the World Literature Forum on the Internet.  The thread deals with the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Most people who follow the Nobel Prize are nerdy literature students and professors and translators and wannabe writers.  I proudly claim my spot in that company.  This particular discussion thread was started just last week, and there are already six pages of comments and barbs and witty (sometimes) repartee.  Nobody agrees about anything or anyone.  Some love Cormac McCarthy.  Some love Chinua Achebe. Some love Amos Oz.  Everyone hates Philip Roth.

About the only thing everyone agrees upon (aside from Philip Roth hatred) is the fact that they all love the game of argument.  Who is right or who is wrong is irrelevant come October when the winner of the Nobel is announced.  What is important is who sounds smart and well-read and literary.  Some of these people can read six languages.  Others have a clear-cut agenda, simply pushing one writer to the forefront of the discussion.  One year, there was a rabid John Ashbery fan whose response to anyone seemed to be, “Yes, but what about John Ashbery?”

I can get into these discussions, although I never engage in them.  I like to sit on the sidelines and watch the lions tear each other apart.  Funny thing is, none of the people in this Nobel discussion thread will get it right.  They will just cannibalize each other for the next two months and then move on until next July or August, when the whole process starts over again.

I kind of get the feeling that Scrooge is a lot like these literary duelists.  They all think they’re right.  They all think they’re smart.  They all think they’re funny. In the end, they’re all wrong, just like Scrooge.  And they’ll all be haunted by the Ghosts of Nobel Past, Present, and Future.

By the way, in case you’re interested, Saint Marty is going to win the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ashbery--always a bridesmaid

February 8: Saint Josephine Bakhita

Right now, I'm teaching Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road to my writing and literature class.  It's one of my favorite books, but my students, as I anticipated, are struggling.  They're struggling with McCarthy's language and style.  His themes and ideas.  More than one of them have said out loud during discussions, "I hate this book."

What I really think my students are struggling with is maturity.  Most of them are only just out of high school a year or so.  I guess I can't really expect them to feel the terror of the dying father for his young son in The Road when they can barely keep a goldfish or fern alive.  They just don't have the life experience to appreciate the book.  Today, I tried again to make them "get it."  I had them write a journal entry about the one thing that's most important in their lives.  My goal was to make them think about the difference between need and want.

One of my students wrote about his eyesight.  Another wrote about her cocker spaniel.  One girl wrote about her faith in God.  They were all incredibly sincere and earnest.  The students who didn't read their journal entries out loud looked stricken, as if I were going to ask them to strip naked and dance to "Funky Town" for everybody.  I could tell that I hit pay dirt with some of them, that I pushed through the layers of Facebook and iPhone numbness to something real, raw, and alive.  Then I read them what I had written:

"This novel makes me stop and evaluate all the things I regard as important or necessary on a day-to-day basis:  Diet Mountain Dew, books, teaching, students, lobster pizza, car, jobs, money.  However, when I reflect on the nittiest and grittiest, those things in my life that really do give me a reason to get up every morning, I would have to list just three:  my son, my daughter, and my wife.  I can't winnow the list any more.  It's a choice I can't even contemplate.  There's a terrible scene in William Styron's book Sophie's Choice where his main character, Sophie, is forced to choose which of her two children will live and which will be executed.  It's a moment so brutal and agonizing that I can barely read it.  If I were asked to choose just one thing I cherish most, the one thing I would rescue from destruction, I couldn't.  I couldn't make a choice like Sophie makes.  It's unthinkable to me.  Wife?  Daughter?  Son?  I know I'd end up like Sophie, haunted the rest of my days by the cries of the choice I didn't make."

Too many people in the world today are forced to make decisions like that in places like Sudan, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.  Life-and-death decisions.  Today's saint, Josephine Bakhita, was stolen from her family in Sudan by slave traders around the year 1879.  After many years and many owners, Josephine was freed.  She wound up in the convent of the Canossian Daughters of Charity.  She joined the order and served as "cook, gate keeper, and keeper of linens."  She died on February 6, 1947.  When Pope John Paul II canonized her in 2000, he referred to her as a "universal sister...[who] can reveal to us the secret of true happiness."

Josephine Bakhita--former slave, nun, servant--found happiness in the religious life, in throwing her energies into helping others.  She became Christ in the lives of people who were sick, broken, cast-off.  She took a life of slavery and turned it into a life of compassion and love.  That was Josephine Bakhita's choice.

You see, it's all about the choices we make.  That's what I wanted my students to understand today.  When all the elements of my life are distilled--job, money, iPad, Kindle, car, clothes, stuffed-crust pizza, all of it boiled off--what are the oxygen and hydrogen of my daily existence?  What do I need to survive?

If it's a cell phone, I may be a student. 

If it's food, money, a car, I may be a janitor.  A nurse.  A lawyer.  The President of the United States.

If it's love and compassion, I may be a husband.  A father.  Or a saint.

It's my choice.

August 21: Saint Pius X

Two days before I start to teach for the fall semester at the university.  The weather has been swerving from grey and raining to cool and sunny to humid and hot all weekend.  It is the end of summer, even though there's still two weeks of August left.  These last days of summer always fill me with melancholy.  I know, I know.  No big surprise.  I usually spend this time planning and preparing the next three months of work for myself.  Read this book this week.  Papers to grade the next week.  Quizzes to create that day.  Reading journals to review the following weekend.  I am no longer free to do what I want.  I have obligations, 50 students depending on me.  Lesson plans.  Schedules.  Deadlines.  Less day.  More night.  Basically, everything that is the opposite of May, June, July, and August.  And don't even get me started on Christmas music and programs at church.  Yes, it starts this early.  You thought Wal-Mart was bad.

It doesn't help that I just started rereading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for class, which is one of the coldest, bleakest novels ever written.  The first time I read it, I was sitting by a pool in the middle of July during a heat wave, and I still found myself getting chilled.  If you haven't read the novel, you should.  It's one of my favorites.  It's about a father and son trying to reach the Pacific Ocean in post-apocalypse America.  They're starving and desperate.  They encounter bands of cannibals who capture and keep people like livestock, harvesting them for food.  The father and son have a handgun with one bullet for protection.  Oh, and the father is dying of some ailment that causes fits of bloody coughing.  This all takes place in a landscape of charred trees and baked earth, where sunlight is a memory and everything and everyone is covered in grey ash.  Constant snow and rain.

So, throw that uplifting piece of literature on top of my already end-of-summer melancholia, and you have the recipe for a pretty shitty day.  I know I should feel blessed in my life.  I mean, I'm an English major with advanced degrees, and I have jobs that don't require me to run a deep fryer.  Let's make it even simpler:  I have jobs that allow me to pay my bills.  In this economy, that's pretty damn good.  I'm feeling sorry for myself when some people I know don't have the money to make their next house payment.  That's pretty fucked up.

I used to look forward to fall and winter, the shortening of the days, the long reach of the night.  I waited for the maple leaves to turn yellow and orange, the evenings to ice the throat when you breathe.  I've always been a lover of the dark.  That may shock some of you.  I never opened windows or curtains in my house.  I was the neighborhood Boo Radley, with kids walking by my property and whispering stories about the crazy English professor who only comes out under the cover of darkness.

Nowadays, I look forward to those long summer days, when the sun is in the sky at 5 a.m. and sticks around until nearly 11 at night.  I like the bright heat, opening windows and airing out the dead moats of autumn and winter.  I crave those dog days when just shifting in a chair from one ass cheek to another can make you break a sweat.  The thing is, in the hot months, I don't have to do anything that makes me sweat.  School's out, and, aside from punching the clock at my second job, I have the freedom to simply...do...nothing.  That freedom comes to a close tomorrow.

I don't do well with things ending, especially things that I've enjoyed, like vacations or friendships or movies or books.  It's a selfish impulse, wanting a happiness to continue forever.  In his last will and testament, today's saint, Pius X, who was one of the first popes of the 20th century, made the following statement:  "I was born poor, I have lived in poverty, and I wish to die poor."  Maybe, because of my mood, I read those words as meaning poverty of body, mind, and spirit.  Right now, I'm clinging to the happiness of the last month or so.  It has been a time of stability and relative peace in my usually chaotic day-to-day.  I've really enjoyed that.  But usually, when things are going that well, the earth shifts, and I find myself in poverty again.

Poverty is not a bad thing.  It brings you back to the basics, makes you realize what wealth really is.  Wealth has nothing to do with the tangible--money or possessions.  It has everything to do with the intangible (peace, love, security, hope), because the tangible always ends up slipping away, like sea water through your fingers.

Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road, "All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.  Their birth in grief and ashes.  So, he whispered to the sleeping boy.  I have you."  It's a father cleaving to his son.  A man cleaving to something pure, something sacred, something intangible.  It's the way, I imagine, God cleaves to us.

Through pain.  Through darkness.  In light like summer.  That's unchangeable.  That's wealth.