March 1: Optometer, Ash Wednesday, Lenten Sacrifice

They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road.  It was a collecting point for prisoners of war.  Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and smoky.  There was a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace.  The fuel was furniture.  There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames--thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.

Nobody talked.  Nobody had any good war stories to tell.

Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep with his head on the shoulder of an unprotesting captain.  The captain was a chaplain.  He was a rabbi.  He had been shot through the hand.

Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl.  The owl was hanging upside down from a rod of stainless steel.  The owl was Billy's optometer in his office in Ilium.  An optometer is an instrument for measuring refractive errors in eyes--in order that corrective lenses may be prescribed.

Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was in a chair on the other side of the owl.  He had fallen asleep at work before.  It had been funny at first.  Now Billy was starting to get worried about it, about his mind in general.  He tried to remember how old he was, couldn't.  He tried to remember what year it was.  He couldn't remember that, either.

Billy is an eye doctor by trade.  Time traveler by coincidence.  One minute, he's a prisoner of war.  The next, he's a confused--possibly old--man, falling asleep on the job.  He can't remember his age or the year.  And he's worried that he is losing his mind.

It is Ash Wednesday.  First day of Lent.  My forehead is smudged with a cross of ash.  It sounds like Billy is struggling in the above paragraphs.  He's not just unstuck in time anymore.  He's not even sure what time it is.  He is afraid that he's losing himself.

I went to a worship service this evening at my wife's church.  I played with the band and prayed for the people in my life.  I'm always greatly moved during the Lenten season.  I used to give things up for these 40 days.  Chocolate.  Cheetos.  Naps.  (Actually, I never take naps--so that was an easy one.)  Several years ago, I decided to pray for people for Lent.  Every day, I would pick a different person, and I would spend a good half hour lifting that person up to God.

This year, like Billy, I'm sort of lost.  I don't quite know what to do for Lent.  Nothing has really taken hold of my heart, pulling in a specific direction.  Usually, by Ash Wednesday, I already know what my Lenten practice is going to be.  This year, I'm sitting here, thinking about sacrifice and literally falling asleep.  (In my defense, it IS almost 11 p.m.)  I'm unstuck.

So, I am going to pray about it for a few more days.  Perhaps, after those days, I will simply discover that I am supposed to pray all Lent.  Give up watching The Lawrence Welk Show on Saturdays.  Work in a soup kitchen.  Start a soup kitchen.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for the ashes on his forehead.  A gentle reminder of the need for sacrifice.

June 20: Pay the Bills, Carve Out Enjoyment, Sally Wen Mao, "Lessons on Lessening," New Cartoon

[Ives said]  "Yes, we'll go.  I'll pay for it, and then you tell me who'll pay the bills a year from now if something should happen to me."

Ives is using finances as an excuse.  He's retired, and his wife wants to travel.  She brings home pamphlets about cheap airfare to the British Isles and Italy.  She desperately wants to rekindle her love for Ives, but he is stuck, unable to move from a place of grief years after their son has been dead.

Ives and Annie are not living paycheck-to-paycheck.  They are not wealthy, but they have a comfortable life.  They don't have to worry about money.  I sort of envy them.  I can't remember a time in my life when money wasn't a concern for me.  Maybe when I was in college, living at home, and had overage checks from my college scholarships.  That's about the only time.

On Thursday, I just signed the papers for a loan to get the roof of my house replaced.  My next paycheck is dedicated to getting my car fixed.  Most of the time, my paychecks are spent on the day that I receive them.  And the bills still pile up.

I know I'm not unusual.  Most families are in this situation.  I do have great fear of what would happen if I suddenly couldn't work for whatever reason (just like Ives).  It would only take a few weeks for the walls of my life to come tumbling down, so to speak.  That's always in the back of my mind.  I try not to dwell on it too much.

I worry too much about the future.  I know that.  I worry not about things that are happening, but things that might happen.  It's not a really healthy way to exist.  It's sort of like standing on a street corner, afraid to cross the street because a car might come screaming through the intersection and kill me.  Living like that precludes any enjoyment at all.

Yes, I have to account for every dime.  Yes, I bring home left-overs from drug rep lunches at work.  Lo mein and lasagna.  Yes, I only go to movies once or twice a year now.  (It used to be once or twice a month.)  Yes, I have house payments and car payments and loan payments coming out of my ass.  Yes, yes, yes.

But I still have to carve out enjoyment.  I'm planning on going to go for a walk today.  I may take a book with me, find some place to sit and read.  Tonight, I will have pizza, maybe watch an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show.  For Father's Day tomorrow, I may read all day long.  It's cheap and relaxing.

Lawrence Welk and walks.  Saint Marty is livin' large.

Lessons on Lessening

by:  Sally Wen Mao

In the rigmarole of lucky living, you tire
of the daily lessons:  Sewing, Yoga, Captivity.
Push the lesson inside the microwave.
Watch it plump and pop and grow larval

with losses.  Watch it shrink like shrikes
when they dodge out of this palatial
doom.  On the sky's torn hemline, this horizon,
make a wish on Buddha's foot.  How to halve,

but not to have--how to spare someone
of suffering, how to throw away the spare
key saved for a lover that you don't
have, save yourself from the burning turret

with the wind of your own smitten hip.
Do you remember how girlhood was--a bore
born inside you, powerless?  How you made
yourself winner by capturing grasshoppers

and skewering them?  You washed a family
of newts in the dry husked summer, wetted
them with cotton swabs before the vivisection.
That's playing God:  to spare or not to spare.

In the end you chose mercy, and dropped
each live body into the slime-dark moat.
Today is a study in being a loser.  The boyfriend
you carved out of lard and left in the refrigerator

overnight between the milk and chicken breasts.
Butcher a bed, sleep in its wet suet for a night.
Joke with a strumpet, save the watermelon
rinds for the maids to fry in their hot saucepans.

Open your blouse and find the ladybugs
sleeping in your navel.  Open your novel
to the chapter where the floe cracks and kills
the cygnet.  Study hard, refute your slayer.

Confessions of Saint Marty

May 17: Feasting and Carousing, Graduation Party, Eleanor Lerman, "Starfish," New Cartoon

"What a night!" he repeated, hoarsely.  "What feasting and carousing!  A real gorge!  I must have eaten the remains of thirty lunches.  Never have I seen such leavings, and everything well-ripened and seasoned with the passage of time and the heat of the day.  Oh, it was rich, my friends, rich!"

Templeton is a total hedonist.  He stuffs himself on rotten meat and popcorn kernels and half-eaten hotdogs.  He doesn't worry about indigestion or his stomach exploding.  He's a rat.  Rats scavenge.  Rats eat.  Rats don't care about anything but themselves, at least in the Charlotte's Web universe.

I have indulged myself a little bit today.  I went to McDonald's for breakfast.  I read The Fault in Our Stars.  I went to my niece's high school graduation party, at which I ate a lot of stuff I shouldn't have eaten.  Soft pretzels with nacho cheese.  Cheesy potatoes.  Mac and cheese.  (My whole gastrointestinal system will probably be backed up for a week as a result!)  And now I'm sitting on my couch, watching an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show (another guilty pleasure).  After a week of mourning, not to mention starting a new job, I decided to give myself a little vacation.

Of course, I'm experiencing a little guilt now.  I should have been more productive.  Maybe picked sticks off my lawn or raked my backyard.  Worked on a new poem.  But I didn't.  Sometimes, you really do have to just...stop.  Breathe.  Relax.

Tonight's poem comes from a poet named Eleanor Lerman, and it's about appreciating life, in all its facets.

Saint Marty needs to do that a little more often.

Starfish

by:  Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does.  It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.  It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee.  Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish.  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud.  Reeds
speak to you of the natural world:  they whisper,
they sing.  And herons pass by.  Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment?  Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing.  There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart.  Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become.  And then life lets you go home to think
about all this.  Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out.  This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky.  (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.)  Because you
were born at a good time.  Because you
were able to listen when people spoke to you.  Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert.  (Pie for the dog, as well.)  And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Confessions of Saint Marty