November 8: "Cemetery Ride," Weird Week, Orange Sections

At the end of this long, dark, weird week, I can honestly say that I haven't listened to or read any news reports about the Felon in Chief.  I simply can't.  Eight years ago, I dreaded checking my news feed in the morning.  Hated his voice and face and stupidity.  I sometimes harbored pretty scary wishes in my heart against him, including death.  I'm not proud of those thoughts, but I own them.  These last few days, I've found the same thoughts returning.

Billy Collins takes a bike ride . . .

Cemetery Ride

by: Billy Collins

My new copper-colored bicycle
is looking pretty fine under a blue sky 

as I pedal along a sandy path 

in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,

wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons, 

the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports, 

Arthur and Ethel, who outlived him by 11 years. 

I slow down even more to notice,

but not so much as to fall sideways on the ground. 

And here’s a guy named Happy Grant 

next to his wife Jean in their endless bed. 

Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds

a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley. 

And good afternoon, Emily Polasek, 

and to you too, George and Jane Cooper, 

facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.

I wish I could take you all for a ride 

in my wire basket on this glorious April day, 

not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith, 

even trickier than Clarence Augustus Coddington.

Then how about just you, Enid Parker? 

Would you gather up your voluminous skirts 

and ride sidesaddle on the crossbar 

and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?

I’ll even let you ring the silver bell. 

But if you’re not ready, I can always ask 

Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep 

beneath the swaying gray beards of Spanish moss

and ride with me along these halls of the dead

so I can listen to her strange laughter 

as some crows flap overhead in the blue 

and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.

I've loved walking through cemeteries since I was a kid.  (That should have been a clue that I was going to grow up to be a poet.)  I'm fascinated by the history that can be witnessed through the headstones.  Wars.  Flu epidemics.  Tragic accidents.  Military service.  Long love affairs.  It's all there if you pay attention and read between the birth and death dates.

I'm wondering if there are going to be whole new sections in cemeteries after the Felon in Chief is sworn in for his second term in the Oval Office.  Think about it.  During his first term, because of his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,219,487 people died in the United States.  (If you're a pandemic denier, please move onto another blog.  Might I suggest something maintained by the KKK?)  That's a whole lot of new graves in his first term.

Here comes term number two.

Certainly, more women are going to die because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the possible nation-wide abortion ban.  Then there're people of color, LGTBQIA+ people, and poor people--all targets.  Affordable healthcare might be going bye-bye, including the price cap on bottles of insulin.  (Being an insulin-dependent diabetic since I was 13 years old, I know about having to ration insulin because I couldn't afford to buy any.)  I could go on.

Needless to say, cemetery rides might take quite a bit longer once January 20, 2025, rolls around because of the new orange sections.

Saint Marty hopes he's wrong.  Prays that he's wrong.  

April 9: Maunday Thursday, Timelessness, Poem from "Kyrie"

It is Holy Thursday, or Maunday Thursday.  In the Christian calendar, that means getting together to commemorate the Last Supper, before Christ is betrayed by Judas Iscariot and turned over to the Sanhedrin for judgement.

Because of the lack of church services right now, Holy Week has seemed lacking in the "holy" department.  Instead, the days just blend together.  I spent all day yesterday, thinking it was Thursday.  Usually, I feel the weight of these seven holy days pretty strongly.  The Christ narrative of the Passion sort of wrecks me every year.  Brings my spirit down and then resurrects it.  I'm craving that like Cheetos or a midnight milkshake right now. 

Without the markers of Palm Sunday and Maunday Thursday, I feel like I'm stuck in some kind of limbo, in between a New Year's Day and next Christmas.  Floating like a full moon trapped in black branches.

This is another result of the Covid-19 pandemic--timelessness.  Where everything and nothing is the same.  Tomorrow, I will participate in a Zoom Good Friday Service.  I'm playing piano and my wife is singing.  Something normal, in a way.  A marker on the map to Easter Sunday.

I will hold on to that tomorrow when my wife and I "go" to church.  It will feel as if I've taken one step forward toward some kind of future.  I know I am living in history right now.  Perhaps, in hundred years, a poet will write a collection of poems about this time.  Maybe the collection will be called Sanctus and start with an epigraph from John Prine:  "Jesus was a good guy, he didn't need this shit."

Saint Marty communioned with Hamburger Helper tonight.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

My father's cousin Rawley in the Service,
we got word, and I think a neighbor's infant,
that was common, my mother'd lost one too.

Then he went to town to join the war.
The Sheriff hauled him home in an open rig
spat on the street, been jailed a week or two.

She ran from the henhouse shrieking, shaking eggs
from the purse of her white apron to the ground.

Before I was born, he built a wide oak drainboard
in the kitchen, didn't just glue the boards,
screwed them down.  Glue held, one split in two.

My mother was an angel out of heaven.
My father was a viper.  I wished him dead,
then he was dead.  But she was too.

March 23, 24, 25: Moral Lessons, Essential, Negative Capability

Merton getting a little religion in his young life . . .

On the other hand, I do not think they can have been very well instructed Catholics, for one day, as we were emerging from the Lycee, on the way out to one of those walks, we passed two religious in black soutanes, with black bushy beards, standing in the square before the school, and one of my friends hissed in my ear "Jesuits!"  For some reason or other he was scared of Jesuits.  And, as a matter of fact, now that I know more about religious Orders, I realize that they were not Jesuits but Passionist missionaries, with the white insignia of the Passionists on their breasts.

At first, on the Sundays when I remained at the Lycee, I stayed in Permanence with the others who did not go to Mass at the Cathedral.  That is, I sat in the study hall reading the novels of Jules Verne or Rudyard Kipling (I was very much affected by a French translation of The Light That Failed.)  But later on, Father arranged for me to receive instructions, with a handful of others, from a little fat Protestant minister who came to the Lycee to evangelize us.

On Sunday mornings we gathered around the stove in the bleak octagonal edifice, which had been erected in one of the courts as a Protestant "temple" for the students.  The minister was a serious little man, and he explained the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Pharisee and the Publican and so on.  I don't remember that there was any particularly deep spirituality about it, but there was nothing to prevent him from showing us the obvious moral lessons.

I am grateful that I got at least that much of religion, at an age when I badly needed it:  it was years since I had even been inside a church for any other purpose than to look at the stained glass windows or the Gothic vaulting.  However, it was practically useless.  What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction?  Without Sacraments, without any means of grace except a desultory prayer now and then at intervals, and an occasional vague sermon?

Religion has not played a very big part in Thomas Merton's youth.  Aside from a couple of Quaker meetings and a grandmother who taught him how to recite the Our Father, he is fairly clueless when it comes to spirituality.  It seems that Merton's belief in God begins and ends with Jules Verne at this point in his life.

I've had a lot of time to think about my own spirituality recently.  I've found myself sitting at employee check-in stations at the hospital on three days--last Saturday and Sunday and tonight.  I am currently at an employee entrance, scanning badges and taking names.  Today, the hospital pretty much locked itself down.  The only people (besides employees) who can enter and exit the buildings are patients.  That's it.  Things have gotten VERY serious in a short period of time.

I am struggling to see the point of all of this from a spiritual perspective.  Where is God, and why would He allow this to happen?  These days, I'm sure I'm not alone in this line of thought.  In fact, I'd lay money that most people with any kind of religious faith are pretty much in the same boat.  I imagine Noah, sitting on the deck of the ark, watching the rains wipe out everything that he knew, probably thinking, "What in the hell is this all about?"

I am still working at the medical office, although that could change at any moment.  You see, I'm not really considered "essential" as an employee.  If you don't understand what that means, let me translate:  my job will probably be one of the first ones to go when the health system that owns us starts making cuts due to the epidemic.  Because I don't do direct patient care in any way, I simply don't make the cut.

It seems, in the past year, that God has been slowly stripping away all of my security blankets.  You know what I mean.  Everything that made me feel safe and secure has pretty much evaporated since last April.  Addiction had a part in it.  So did mental illness.  And the economy.  Now it's a tiny little virus.  Losing my job (and health insurance) from the hospital will almost be the last vestige of stability that still exists in my life.

Of course, I'm dealing with unknowns right now.  I don't KNOW that I'm going to be laid off.  I don't KNOW how long that layoff will last IF it does happen.  I am living in a state of negative capability, as poet John Keats would have said.  It's all about uncertainty. For Keats and Shakespeare, that was a good thing.  Me?  It puts me right on the edge of my roof, ready to jump off.

But, for the moment, I am employed.  I have paychecks coming in from the college and the health system.  I am important.  Necessary.  Until I become unimportant.  Nonessential.

So, tonight, I see employees coming in and leaving.  The ones coming in look a little grim.  The ones going out look exhausted.  I scan badges.  Wish everyone a goodnight.  Feel the cold swoop in every time the door opens and closes.

Perhaps God is trying to prove to me that I'm not that significant.  Like the Grimm fairy tales that I'm teaching my students at the moment online, the people who put their faith in material possessions and circumstances (the wicked stepmothers and evil sorcerers of the world) are generally sealed in barrels of boiling oil and snakes and heaved into the river.  It's a rough lesson to learn.  No happily ever after.

So, this is Marty, non-essential saint, signing off from the pandemic front line for now.

March 21: Front Lines, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Poem from "Kyrie"

Yes, I am sitting in a hospital right now, stopping and questioning people walking through an entrance.  Yes, I am masked.  Yes, I have disinfected my hands about 20 times since I sat down at this desk.  And the confirmed cases of coronavirus continues to grow.

I am writing these posts as a record for my children when they get older.  My daughter, born the year before the 9-11 attack, doesn't remember a time before the "War on Terror."  My son, who is eleven-years-old, will probably have little recollection of a time before the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I'm sure, after the dust settles, the world is going to be a very different place for everyone.  People won't hug as much.  They'll avoid walking near strangers.  They will probably have large stores of nonperishable foods in their houses.  (Child:  "Why do grandma and grandpa have so many cans of spaghetti sauce?"  Adult:  "Because they grew up during the Coronavirus Pandemic.")  Everything will change, good or bad.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, in her Author's Note to her poetry collection Kyrie, writes of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918, ". . . the national memory bears little trace."  The blog posts I'm writing during this time are my attempt to preserve these memories for my kids and their kids' kids.

Saint Marty is reporting from the front lines, as a healthcare worker and educator.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

This is the double bed where she'd been born,
bed of her mother's marriage and decline,
bed her sisters also ripened in,
bed that drew her husband to her side,
bed of her one child lost and five delivered,
bed indifferent to the many bodies,
bed around which all of them were gathered,
watery shapes in the shadows of the room,
and the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
the frightened beasts so clumsy and pathetic,
heaving their wet breath against her neck,
she threw off the pile of quilts--white face like a moon--
and then entered straighway into heaven.