October 3, 2026: “The Cold Outside,” Absence, “The Impossibility of Honey”

Greetings, faithful disciples.

In my last post, I gave you a catalogue of trials and tribulations, from a broken sewer line to a strong bout of clinical depression.  I’ve always believed that the Book of Job in the Bible was allegorical.  I mean, who would believe so much shit could be heaped on the head of such a decent, honest human being?  And with God’s approval?  Today, I would file Job’s story under nonfiction versus religious studies or philosophy.  In short, because of my experiences these last few months, I understand Job’s struggles a LOT more.  

I’m not looking for sympathy.  Everyone deals with sadness and calamities in their lives.  That’s part of being a human being.  The world is a broken place, with broken people calling the shots.  My little laundry list of struggles is pretty inconsequential compared to Super El Niños and genocides and famines.  In fact, most people would look at my life and think, “What the hell do you have to be upset about?”  And those people would be correct.

That doesn’t negate the power of prolonged depression.  Rationally, I know I’m a really lucky person—roof over my head, food in the fridge, warm clothes, and jobs that pay all the bills (for the most part).  Overwhelming sadness, however, is not rational.  It comes from a place of worry, fear, and anxiety.  

Marie Howe writes about looming dread . . . 

The Cold Outside

by: Marie Howe

Soon I will die, he said—that was during the heat wave that summer:

the orange lilies bending toward the house beside the driveway,

the heater in his car broken on blasting.

And the green shade flapped against the window screen,

as if what was out there inhaled and exhaled,

sliding away from the window, banging lightly against the sill,

sucked flat against the screen,

then peeling off and blowing out again.

Today the cold outside is bright and brittle,

heaps of hard snow between the sidewalk and the street,

and look, someone has shoveled a narrow path in front of the bakery,

so that, walking, a person has to step aside

and let another person through,

or pass through as the other person steps aside.

Soon I will die, he said, and then

what everyone has been afraid of for so long will have finally happened,

and then everyone can rest.

This is not an easy poem.  It’s a hard poem, filled with hard reality.  I’ve seen enough of my loved ones fade away and die to know both the pain and relief of loss.  My brother died suddenly, only after suffering for years with the effects of a stroke.  My sister, Sally, struggled for over two years, and my sister, Rose, was in and out of the hospital several times in the last year of her life.  Both of my parents ended up in nursing homes near the end of their lives.

Emily Dickinson wrote that Death “kindly stops” to pick up passengers, because, in the face of immense, daily anguish, mortality IS kind.  Terrifying (if you don’t believe in an afterlife), but kind.  I think Death did kindly stop for my mom, dad, sisters, and brother.  And don’t forget that the other passenger in Dickinson’s fatal carriage ride, besides Dickinson herself, is Immortality.  That’s the reason I find Dickinson’s vision of the Grim Reaper almost hopeful.  It’s not an end.  It’s a journey.

Of course, that knowledge doesn’t make the absence of someone you love any easier.  Loss is loss, and it comes with a whole trainload of grief.  As a way to combat my recent depression, I’ve been streaming episodes of the sitcom M*A*S*H.  It’s a TV show I have clear memories of watching with my entire family, every week.  Sure, my father was sort of MAGA-ish before MAGA was even a thing.  And yes, I didn’t always understand the episodes dealing with the insanities of war when I was younger.  But Hawkeye and BJ and Klinger and Colonel Potter and Hot Lips and the rest of the 4077th showed up every week, without fail.  

I often get stuck on movies and TV shows, watching them over and over and over to the dismay of my wife and son.  I reread books from my youth, as well.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited Holden Caulfield or Wilbur and Charlotte or Willy Wonka.  It’s comforting to know how the story ends, even if that ending is incredibly sad.  (Charlotte’s death destroys me every time.)  No surprises.

That’s very comforting for a person dealing with overwhelming fear and anxiety and sadness.  It’s like a security blanket.  Sure Holden has a breakdown at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, but he’s getting help and will eventually be reunited with his beloved little sister Phoebe.  Yes, the Korean War ends and Hawkeye returns to Crabapple Cove, but he survived.  If I know the fates of all these characters I love, I don’t have to worry about the future (which, for me, is a constant source of Sturm und Drang).  

Last Sunday, my puppy was attacked again by a German shepherd.  The attack resulted in some serious wounds that required surgery.  There is a row of staples running down my puppy’s back; it looks like she’s been zippered into her body.  She’s going to be alright, thank God.  However, this past week has been really difficult for me, mood wise.  Let’s just say that even Hawkeye couldn’t save my emotional life.

I’m going to be okay.  I tell myself that every morning.  Remind myself of it frequently during the day.  Repeat it as I’m drifting off to sleep.  It’s my mantra at the moment.  I’ll keep chanting it in my head until my puppy is healed, my plumbing problems are fixed, and you-know-who is no longer occupying the Oval Office.  At the moment, those things seem impossible.

But Saint Marty knows, as the song goes, the sun will come out tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s a poem Saint Marty wrote about impossible things that are true . . . 

The Impossibility of Honey

by: Martin Achatz

Saturn is gas, would float in a bathtub

lead snows on Venus’s mountaintops

Jupiter’s red pupil is a 300-year-old storm

winter lasts 42 pitch-black years on Uranus

the Sun dances in Mercury’s skies—rising, stopping, reversing

one volcano on Mars could swallow Arizona

Neptune was discovered through math:  x + y = planet

ice mountains float across Pluto’s surface

and bees fly 750 miles on Earth to create 

          a single teaspoon of sweetness

January 27: "Breaking Up," First Kisses to Final Kisses, Dreaming Up

Billy Collins on heartbreak . . . 

Breaking Up

by:  Billy Collins

Like the nomadic dollar

I pass to the cashier

behind the register

you are off to other hands.

We break up with things and people every day of our lives, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we close them again at night.  Some breakups are easy:  dropping your son off at school, knowing that he will be climbing back into your car in the afternoon.  Other breakups are more difficult--watching your daughter drive away from your house with all of her belongings packed up in her car, knowing she will never sleep in her childhood bedroom again.  At the end of every book or poem we read, we break up with its characters or subjects.  When you're done reading this blog post, you'll break up with it, as well.

Of course, breaking up with something or someone doesn't mean you erase them from your mind or heart.  No.  Every individual you encounter or movie you watch or taco you eat remains a part of you.  Forever.  I can still taste the pineapple I ate on a coral bay when I was on my honeymoon.  And I can still conjure up the feelings of standing in line to see the first Star Wars movie way back in 1977.  Nothing is ever lost, from first kisses to final kisses.

A few days ago, I submitted a huge grant to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).  It's the third time I've written an NEA grant for the library.  The first time, I requested $20,000 for programming inspired by Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise, and I got it.  The second time, I asked again for $20,000 to fund events focused on Andrew Krivak's The Bear.  I didn't get it.  My latest:  $16,600 for programming based on Roz Chast's graphic memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

I truly enjoy dreaming up experiences for people, whether it's an encounter with a U. S. Poet Laureate or an essay on the meaning of joy.  I love the ability of art or music or theater or writing to somehow change a person in a meaningful way.  Of course, the nature of any art is temporal.  It lives for a brief time and then evaporates like frost, leaving behind only memory.

This is true of even seemingly permanent works of art--paintings or sculptures or literature.  For instance, I've read The Catcher in the Rye ten or more times in my life, starting when I was ten or 11 years of age, and, with each reading, I experienced different emotions and reactions.  Because I was a different person each time, and Holden Caulfield meant something different to each one of those different persons.

So, loving any kind of art is about forming a relationship with it, and all relationships are temporary.  Eventually, there will be a breaking up/letting go.  Perhaps you will reencounter and reexperience that work or art again, and you will form a new and different relationship with it.  Or that work of art may just remain a lovely memory, like the taste of fresh pineapple on your tongue as you watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

I've had my fair share of breakups.  Said goodbye to people and things I love.  Perhaps that's why I'm a poet.  I'm keenly aware of the passage of time and the need to preserve experiences in a tangible way through word and image.  That's what all art is about:  trying to capture lightning in a bottle.  Or on a canvas.  Or page.  Or with musical notes.  Or in a blog post.

Saint Marty has a piece of pizza to break up with now.

October 7: "Ghosts," Repeat It, Neverending Story

Mary Oliver is haunted . . . 

Ghosts

by:  Mary Oliver

1.

Have you noticed?

2.

Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

lay down on the earth and died

it's hard to tell now

what's bone, and what merely

was once.

The golden eagle, for instance,

has a bit of heaviness in him;

moreover the huge barns

seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off

toward deeper grass.

3.

1805

near the Bitterroot Mountains:

a man named Lewis kneels down

on the prairie watching

a sparrow's nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop

and lined with buffalo hair.  The chicks,

not more than a day hatched, lean

quietly into the thick wool as if

content, after all,

to have left the perfect world and fallen,

helpless and blind

into the flowered fields and the perils

of this one.

4.

In the book of the earth it is written:

nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:

they have gone away into the earth to hide.

Nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing.

5.

Said the old-timers:

the tongue

is the sweetest meat.

Passengers shooting from train windows

could hardly miss, they were

that many.

Afterward the carcasses

stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned

with slopes of white fat,

black ropes of blood--hellhunks

in the prairie heat.

6.

Have you noticed? how the rain

falls soft as the fall

of moccasins.  Have you noticed?

how the immense circles still,

stubbornly, after a hundred years,

mark the grass where the rich droppings

from the roaring bulls

fell in the earth as the herd stood

day after day, moon after moon

in their tribal circle, outwaiting

the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

have you noticed? gone now.

7.

Once only, and then in a dream,

I watched while, secretly

and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

a cow gave birth

to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him

in a warm corner

of the clear night

in the fragrant grass

in the wild domains

of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

in my dream I knelt down and asked them

to make room for me.

A wise person once said that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  I think Mary Oliver had that piece of wisdom in mind when she wrote this poem, which is full of the bones of millions of powerful bawling beasts, singing with flies and ribboned with white fat and black ropes of blood.  Each line, each word is full of great hulking memories.

Every person who makes it to adulthood harbors memories that possess them at times.  Choices they made.  Loved ones they've lost.  Places rattling with the chains of the past.  We all accumulate ghosts as we march through our days.

Today, for me, the ghosts have been very, very near.  Temperatures have fallen nearly 50 degrees over the past three days, and I woke to bone-chilling winds.  There was sun and blue sky and iron clouds and bullets of rain and, just down the street, a rainbow arcing over the roofs and trees.

Basically, it was a typical October morning in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  

I did a poetry reading with several poet friends at my hometown library this afternoon.  My wife took our car to work, so I walked to the reading.  That is where ghosts started appearing.

You see, as a youngster, I used to spend hours and hours at this library, working my way through biographies of famous writers, reading e. e. cummings and Heart's Needle, and devouring all the mythology and paranormal and horror I could get my hands on.  I knew those bookshelves the way I knew which houses in my neighborhood gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween.

So each time I step foot inside that building, I bump into ghosts of myself and my literary friends.  Shades of Holden Caulfield and Santiago, Bigfoot and Martians.  My mother never questioned my reading selections, even when I returned home with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist tucked under my arm.  I read anything and everything, frequently staying up all night to do so.

This evening, as I sit writing this post, I'm still surrounded by today's ghosts. living and dead, literary and real.  Ahab and Zaphod Beeblebrox.  Earlier incarnations of myself and parents and brothers and sisters.  They all swirl around me like tendrils of fog.

One of my favorite books as a kid was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.  I found comfort in a narrative that had a life of its own, that continued even after you stopped reading.  Maybe that's what we all are--ghosts in a story that never reaches "The End" or "and they lived happily ever after."

Maybe Saint Marty is the ghost of that little boy, sitting on the living room couch with his stack of library books, waiting for the next chapter to unfold in his own neverending story.

July 13-14: The Young and Strong, Holden Caulfield, Dreams

Merton returns to England as a teenage American gangster . . .

The truth is that we did have quite a big bar bill, the Bryn Mawr girls and myself, but we were never drunk, because we drank slowly and spent the whole time stuffing ourselves with sardines on toast and all the other dainties which are the stock in trade of English liners.

In any case, I set foot once more on the soil of England dressed up in a gangster suit which Pop had bought me at Wallach's, complete with padded shoulders.  And I had a new, pale grey hat over my eye and walked into England pleased with the consciousness that I had easily acquired a very lurid reputation for myself with scarcely any trouble at all.

The separation of the two generations on board the ship had pleased me.  It had flattered me right down to the soles of my feet.  It was just what I wanted.  It completed my self-confidence, guaranteed my self-assertion.  Anyone older than myself symbolized authority.  And the vulgarity of the detectives and the stupidity of the other middle-aged people who had believed all their stories about us fed me with a pleasantly justifiable sense of contempt for their whole generation.  Therefore I concluded that I was now free of all authority, and that nobody could give me any advice that I had to listen to.  Because advice was only the cloak of hypocrisy or weakness or vulgarity or fear.  Authority was constituted by the old and weak, and had its roots in their envy for the joys and pleasures of the young and strong.

Finally, when I arrived at Oakham several days after the beginning of the term I was convinced that I was the only one in the whole place who knew anything about life, from the Headmaster on down.

I remember that time in my life, when I thought I had everything figured out.  It was wonderfully comforting, knowing that I had all the answers.  And when some authority figure tried to provide guidance or advice, I nodded dutifully, went away, and did exactly the opposite.  My mother told me to study computer science in college.  There was a future in that, she said.  I went to the university and became . . . a poet instead.

Adults always choose the safe path.  Security.  Money.  Employment.  That's not what young adults want.  When I was an undergrad, I was one step away from establishing my own Dead Poets Society.  I was artistic, love-starved, and, a lot of the time, clinically depressed.  In short, I was Holden Caulfield.

Now, as one of those old authority figures that Holden disparages through most of The Catcher in the Rye, I find myself craving safety, security, money, and good employment.  I often wonder if I chose the right path.  Perhaps I should have stuck with computer programming.  I might now have a good-sized 401(k), a nicer house and car, and a vacation home.  If only I had listened to my mother.

Yet, I know that, even with all those luxuries, I probably wouldn't have been very happy.  I mean, John Grisham was a successful lawyer, but he spent his spare time writing novels.  William Carlos Williams was a doctor, scribbling poems on his prescription pads.  Wallace Stevens sold insurance his whole life.  All of these writers had adult jobs to support their writing habits.

That's the real challenge about being a responsible adult--somehow managing to hold on to some part of what excited you as a young person.  The part that spurned all the advice of adults who wanted you to be responsible and boring.  The part that wanted to be Ingmar Bergman or Amelia Earhart or J. D. Salinger or Thomas Merton. 

If you're able to do that, no matter what career you eventually end up pursuing, you'll find happiness, despite all the adult pressures of the real world.

Me?  I work in a medical office and teach at a university.  But I'm also a Nobel Prize-winning poet.  Oscar-winning movie director.  Underground cartoonist.  Mad blogger.  My reality and my dreams.  The day I give up on my dreams is the day I stop believing in miracles. 

This message has been brought to you by Saint Marty, official sponsor of dreams and miracles.

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.

May 15: Loyal and True, My Book Bag, "The Fault in Our Stars"

Wilbur was merely suffering the doubts and fears that often go with finding a new friend.  In good time he was to discover that he was mistaken about Charlotte.  Underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, she had a kind heart, and she was to prove loyal and true to the very end.

Wilbur is not alone in his feelings.  I find that I often suffer doubts and fears when encountering someone or something "new."  Today, I started a new job.  I met about 5,451 new people.  I remember about three of their names.  In my book bag right now is a new book, one that I've been avoiding for quite some time.  It's too popular.  Trendy. 

The book is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.  I've been avoiding it because too many people have told me I have to read it.  Out of principle, I try to avoid books that have a following that resembles the Manson family in devotion.  Fears and doubts.  However, I've started reading Green's novel.

And I'm loving every word of it.  Hazel Grace Lancaster, the narrator, reminds me of Holden Caulfield in her utter disdain for normal pretense.  She's smart, dark, intelligent.  And funny as hell.  Her opening salvo hooked me immediately:

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

I love this girl.  She's the antidote for all the stupid, vapid heroines of most young adult novels.  You know, the ones who don't know they're beautiful and eventually fall in love with tortured boys who suffer from some sort of undead personality disorder.  Hazel's story is honest.  She knows that death is inevitable and forever is a fairy tale.

That's what I'm really appreciating about The Fault in Our Stars.  Of course, I haven't finished it yet.  But I don't think John Green is going to disappoint me.  Hazel surely won't disappoint me.

Saint Marty highly recommends this book.  Okay?  Okay.

Read the book.  You'll understand.

December 31: Should Auld Acquaintance...

I have no idea what "auld" acquaintance is.  I've always thought it meant old friends or lovers or times.  Basically, "Auld Lang Syne" is a lament about the past.  Maybe a warning even.  It's saying, "Don't think about the past" or "Think about the past with fondness."  It's about letting go and moving forward.

I am letting go this evening.  I'm saying goodbye to J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye after over 300 posts.  Holden has become a part of me, like Ebenezer Scrooge became a part of me in 2012.  I'm totally ready to part ways with Holden.  He's not an easy guy to live with for a year.  Of course, I will miss him.  Eventually.

For the first two years of my son's life, he never slept through the night.  I was up with him two or three times a night.  It was exhausting.  I would go to work tired, come home tired, go to bed tired.  I used to lie in bed, praying my son would sleep through the night.

Now my son is five years old.  He's stubbornly independent.  He doesn't like me to help him with anything.  In five or six years, he'll probably think I'm an idiot for not understanding the rules of football or not knowing the difference between the AFC or NFC or NFL or NHL.

My point is that I sort of miss the nights when my son would call out to me from his crib, needing comfort and love in the darkness.  And I will miss Holden eventually, as well.

Auld acquaintance.  Fond auld acquaintance.  Goodbye, Holden.

Saint Marty wishes you well.

Time to raise a cup of kindness...

December 30: What I Have Learned

I have learned a great deal about Holden Caulfield this year.  Holden is funny and smart.  He's a good writer, and so is his brother.  Holden has good taste in books, but he has lousy taste in friends.  Holden's severely depressed and has been for quite some time.  And Holden loves his little sister, Phoebe.  He smokes too much, eats too little, and thinks anybody over the age of ten or eleven is a phonie.

The most significant thing I will take away from my Catcher year is that it's not a great book to read if you're struggling in any way.  There's very little that's uplifting in Salinger's novel.  The only time Holden is truly happy comes at the end of the narrative, right before we find out that he's in a hospital, recuperating from a mental breakdown.  Holden's sitting in the rain, watching his little sister ride the merry-go-round in Central Park.  And he's really happy.

It's a simple moment.  Nothing really significant has happened.  Holden hasn't figured out the meaning of life.  He's figured out very little, actually.  Yet, he has finally reached a state of bliss.

Happiness isn't something to hunt down and capture.  Happiness doesn't depend on the school you attend, the job you have, or the people you call friends.  Happiness is a choice.  Whether you're sitting on a beach in Hawaii or on a bench in Central Park during a rainstorm, you can be happy.

Saint Marty chooses to be happy this last day of 2013.

It takes a lot of practice

January 1: The Beginning, David Copperfield Kind of Crap, The Secret Goldfish

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.  They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.  They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell.  Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.  I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.  I mean that’s all I told D. B. about, and he’s my brother and all.  He’s in Hollywood.  That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end.  He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe.  He just got a Jaguar.  One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour.  It cost him damn near four thousand bucks.  He’s got a lot of dough, now.  He didn’t use to.  He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home.  He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him.  The best one in it was “The Secret Goldfish.”  It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish, because he’d bought it with his own money.  It killed me.  Now he’s out in Hollywood, D. B. Being a prostitute.  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.  Don’t even mention them to me.

This is the opening paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.  The speaker is Holden Caulfield, a teenaged boy who has just suffered a nervous breakdown (although we don’t find this out until the end of the novel).  Holden is struggling.  He struggles through the entire book.  He’s talented and funny and friendless.  Holden is an outsider, a boy on the fringe.  Holden has many secret goldfish in his life, things he doesn’t want to share with anybody.  Like his parents, Holden is a fairly private person.  His secrets are deep and painful.

The other thing you might notice in this beginning paragraph is that, once again, I have chosen a Christmas book.  While not many people remember this fact, The Catcher in the Rye takes place at the yuletide season, just before Holden returns home for the holidays.  The story is not quite as warm and fuzzy as A Christmas Carol, but it is a story about redemption and healing.  That’s what I want to focus on today, this first day of January in the year 2013.  Healing.

Like Holden, we all carry around private pain, things we simply don’t speak about.  At times, that private pain can be crippling, even make you not want to get out of bed.  Most of the time, that private pain is just a scab or scar, a wound that is at once almost healed and almost ready to burst open again.  That is the nature of being a human.  We lie to ourselves.  We meet a friend in Wal-Mart, and the friend asks, “How are you doing?”  Invariably, our answer is, “I’m fine,” even if we’re just hanging on by the white moons of our fingernails.

In this blog, I always tell the truth, even if I tell it “slant,” as Emily Dickinson said.  I have a feeling that Holden Caulfield is going to force me to be even more truthful.  He’s going to call me out when I’m being a phony.  He’s going to bring about healing.

That’s the best hope anybody can have at the beginning of a new year.

That’s the best hope Saint Marty can have for 2013.

 

We all have secret goldfish we don't talk about

December 31: Back to Our Regular Programming

Well, it looks as though The Catcher in the Rye will be the book of the year for 2013.  One vote, and Holden Caulfield wins the contest.

We will be returning to our regular programming in a day or so.  I'm not quite ready to give up the holidays yet.  Tomorrow morning, I will begin the year of J. D. Salinger.  I will miss Charles Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge, but I guess it's time for a change.  Yes, I just used the "c" work without breaking out in hives.  I have prepared myself for this change.  I have my copy of The Catcher in the Rye in my book bag, and I've already done a little research on Salinger.

Stay tuned for Saint Marty's New Year's Day special:  How I Met Your Salinger, or Two and a Half Holdens.

Holiday programming still coming your way....

December 26: One Vote and Counting...

So, The Catcher in the Rye has received one vote.  That's one more vote than I thought I'd receive on any book.  It looks like Holden Caulfield is in the lead at the moment.  Other authors have five more days  to beat Mr. Salinger.

It was tough getting back to work today.  I'd like to say I enjoyed myself.  That it was easy.  However, after being on vacation for four days, it wasn't quite like riding a bicycle.  It was more like strapping on roller blades for the first time in my life and rolling down a street in San Francisco into the Bay.  Tomorrow's going to be hideous.  I have to take the Christmas decorations down because I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, and nobody else in the office will do it.  It's going to be really depressing.

So, let Saint Marty sum things up:  J. D. Salinger--one, Christmas Decorations--zero.

They're coming down tomorrow

December 26: Life after "A Christmas Carol," Holden Caulfield, Another Useless Poll

It seems strange not to be starting this post with a quote from A Christmas Carol.  After a year of combing through that novel every day, I sort of feel like I’m bringing my cocker spaniel to the pound and leaving him there, hoping he’ll be adopted by somebody else.  There’s much to be learned from Ebenezer Scrooge, and not just about Christmas spirit and generosity.  I discovered passages that spoke to me when I was worried about finances, concerned for my daughter’s happiness, and anxious over my wife losing her job.  This fall, when I was celebrating getting a raise at the university after ten or so years, I had the Ghost of Christmas Present and Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, to make a toast with me.  And, if I got too wrapped up in my own selfish problems, I was confronted with passages about stark poverty, Tiny Tim with his little crutch.  This book kept me honest on many levels.

Which brings me to my worry for this Worry Wednesday.  Now that I am leaving Charles Dickens and company behind, I’m a little panicked that I may run out of things to write about.  See, another thing A Christmas Carol did for me was provide something to write about every day.  If I came to the blog well and found it dry one day, I could always flip open the book, put my finger on a page, and find a subject.  There was something very comforting about having Scrooge in my corner.

I’m actually considering choosing another book to focus on in the coming year, the way I did with A Christmas Carol.  I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now, but I can’t come up with a book that really appeals to me.  It would have to be a book with which I’m already familiar.  A book my disciples would know a little bit about, too.  I thought about another Dickens novel, but I’m not sure I could spend a year with Oliver Twist or David Copperfield.  Plus, I’m not as familiar with their stories.  I could go down the Mississippi with Huck Finn, but I get seasick really easily.  I thought about a collection of poems from one of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds or Donald Hall or Phil Levine.  None of those ideas really intrigued me enough.

The one book that I know well enough that sort of interests me is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.  I’ve been reading that novel since I was a teenager.  Holden Caulfield is one of my favorite characters in literature.  I must admit, my feelings toward him have changed through the years.  When I read the book the first time, I remember responding to his unrequited love for Jane Gallagher.  As a teen, I carried around a lot of unrequited loves.  When I was in college, I loved Salinger’s style of writing, his use of profanity and voice.  A year or so ago, I read the book again.  I found myself a little irritated by Holden.  I wanted him to get his shit together and buckle down.  I think that’s the parent in me now.

I’m still not sold on The Catcher in the Rye.  I would like to ask you, reader, for some other suggestions.  However, I never get much response when I put questions out there.  I tried a poll on favorite Christmas movies a week ago.  Nothing.  I’ve run contests with prizes and gotten no entries.  It’s a little depressing.  But, ever the optimist on this Worry Wednesday, I will ask:

Do you think I should choose a new book to focus on for 2013?  If so, what book do you suggest?

Saint Marty knows he’s not going to get any answers to this query.  He’ll probably end up with Holden Caulfield.  However, he’s open to any and all possibilities, short of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

Do you want to spend a year with this guy?