September 8: "House," Home, "You Motherfucker"

In my adult life, I've lived in exactly six different houses/apartments.

I sometimes wonder about the difference between a house and a home.  Friends and relatives have let me stay at their houses when I've traveled.  I just spent a weekend in Calumet, staying at a nice hotel with a swimming pool. hot tub, sauna, and continental breakfast.  And I know that, if needed, any number of people would open their houses to me and my family.

But there is a difference between a house and a home.

Billy Collins writes about his house . . .

House

by: Billy Collins

I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—

and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.

I know just a little of the history of my house.  It was built over 100 years ago, and it has seen a couple additions.  The original part of the house consisted of the dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and attic.  When indoor plumbing and electricity became a thing, a kitchen and bathroom were added.  We bought the house from my sister-in-law's in-laws. This weekend, I found out that one of the original owners portrayed a corpse in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

But none of those details make a house a home.  A home is defined by the people in it, I think.  When I look back on my childhood home, I don't recall the kitchen or dining room or bedrooms.  I remember my siblings, parents, and grandmother.  They're the ones that made that two-story building into a home.

I've been in my current house now for around 25 years.  We've remodeled the attic into a bedroom.  Put in a new furnace recently.  Painted the dining and living rooms.  However, for me, home is my wife and son and daughter.  I'm typing this post in the room that my daughter slept in as a child.  My son is upstairs, playing online video games, swearing like a Marine drill sergeant.  My wife just went to bed in the room that used to be the nursery.  Every square inch of this place is filled with memories of my little family, good and bad, joyful and sorrowful.

And that is home for Saint Marty.

You Motherfucker

by: Martin Achatz

My son says it to his friends

like an endearment--You motherfucker--

full of the kind of admiration

Queen Isabella had for Columbus

when he returned from the new world

after seeding it with smallpox, or maybe 

the true wonder Pope Sixtus IV expressed

when Michelangelo brought him

into the completed Sistine Chapel

for the first time, Sixtus craning his face 

heavenward, crossing himself with palsied 

hand, muttering to the painter in Latin,

You motherfucker.

Photo courtesy of Abbigail Berry

November 30: "The Return," Theseus, Thread

Mary Oliver on how to find your way home, with a little help from Theseus . . .

The Return

by:  Mary Oliver

The deed took all my heart.

I did not think of you,

Not till the thing was done.

I put my sword away,

And then no more the cold

And perfect fury ran

Along my narrow bones,

And then no more the black

And dripping corridors

Held anywhere the shape

That I had come to slay.

Then, for the first time,

I saw in the cave's belly

The dark and clotted webs,

The green and sucking pools,

The rank and crumbling walls,

The maze of passages.

And I thought then

Of the far earth,

Of the spring sun

And the slow wind,

And a young girl.

And I looked then

At the white thread.

Hunting the minotaur

I was no common man

And had no need of love.

I trailed the shining thread

Behind me, for a vow,

And did not think of you.

It lay there, like a sign,

Coiled on the bull's great hoof

And back into the world.

Half blind with weariness

I touched the thread and wept.

O, it was frail as air.

And I turned then

With the white spool

Through the cold rocks,

Through the black rocks,

Through the long webs,

And the mist fell,

And the webs clung,

And the rocks tumbled,

And the earth shook.

And the thread held.

Yes, Oliver is using the myth of Theseus as a way to talk about being lost and found.  Most of you, faithful disciples, are probably familiar with the narrative--how Theseus outsmarts King Minos of Crete, kills the Minotaur, and leads the Athenians out of the labyrinth.  Of course, he doesn't do it by himself.  He seduces Minos' daughter, Ariadne, and Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of yarn to help guide him out of the Minotaur's home.  It's Ariadne's love that saves Theseus.

Love is a powerful force in the universe.  It has started and ended wars, inspired sonnets and plays and songs, and led many a lost soul from darkness to light.  In the end, that's what homecoming is all about--following your heart back to a place where love blooms like dandelions, wild and golden and abundant.  (Let's not get into the fact the Theseus lied to Ariadne, who either hanged herself or ended up marrying the god Dionysus.  Either way, Theseus is an asshole.)

Tonight, I am sitting in my office at home typing this post.  My wife is reading in the living room.  My son is upstairs playing online games with his friends, and my puppy is perched in a living room window, barking her brains out at every passing walker or car.  Basically, I'm surrounded by love on this last night of November.  I even received a text message from my daughter a little while ago; it contained a video of all these famous people thanking their fathers for their unconditional support and love.  It made me cry.

Yes, I'm struggling with darkness right now, but I know that my wife and kids love me.  That is the thread that I'm holding onto this evening--the thread that will lead me out of the labyrinth in which I currently find myself.  That thread will lead me home.

When my mother was dying in the nursing home, I sat by her bed, listening to her watery breaths.  All my other family members had left for a little while.  I took my mother's hand in mine, and I held on for dear life, as if she was a balloon or kite struggling to slip "the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God," as Ronald Reagan said after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.  I thanked her for being my mother.  Told her how much I loved her.  Let her know we were all going to be okay.  "It's okay," I whispered to her.  "You can go home now."  She died a few hours later.

Everyone on this planet needs a home--a place to return after long and fraught days of struggle.  A place where love simmers on the stove like a pot of tomato soup, filling the air with promise.  My mother taught me this, not so much in words but in everything she did for our family, every day of her life.

Saint Marty hopes he can do the same:  be the thread--the tomato soup--for his wife and kids.

April 12-13: Very Good Catholic, Place to Belong, Home

 Merton is a stranger in a strange land, and finds himself home . . . 

At Matanzas I got mixed up in the paseo where the whole town walks around and around the square in the evening coolness, the men in one direction and the girls in the other direction, and immediately I made friends with about fifty-one different people of all ages. The evening ended up with me making a big speech in broken Spanish, surrounded by men and boys in a motley crowd that included the town Reds and the town intellectuals and the graduates of the Marist Fathers’ school and some law students from the University of Havana. It was all about faith and morals and made a big impression and, in return, their acceptance of it made a big impression on me, too: for many of them were glad that someone, a foreigner, should come and talk about these things, and I heard someone who had just arrived in the crowd say: 

“¿Es católico, ese Americano?” 

“Man,” said the other, “he is a Catholic and a very good Catholic,” and the tone in which he said this made me so happy that, when I went to bed, I could not sleep. I lay in the bed and looked up through the mosquito netting at the bright stars that shone in upon me through the wide-open window that had no glass and no frame, but only a heavy wooden shutter against the rain.

Merton, visiting Cuba to recuperate from an operation and rest before entering the monastery, finds himself in a group of Cubans from all stations of life.  Intellectuals and communists.  Marist Fathers students and University of Havana students.  The one thing that unites them all--their faith in God.  Despite being a foreigner in the country, Merton is filled with the peace of belonging.

I think that's what everyone is looking for, every day:  a place to belong.  I lived in Detroit when I was a young child.  For most of the rest of my life, I have made my home smack dab in the middle of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, except for a short, three-year stint in Kalamazoo.  Four apartments.  One house.  I've taught at two universities.  Worked in a book store.  An outpatient surgery center.  A cardiology office.  Two hospitals.  As a plumber's apprentice.  A housekeeper, cleaning operating rooms and birthing rooms.  I've been an organist at five different churches, four different Christian denominations.  Now, I work for a library.  I've been with the same woman for over thirty years.  Have a beautiful, 20-year-old daughter, funny 12-year-old son, and the cutest puppy in the world.

As the song goes, it has been a long and winding road.

And I don't think I'm done yet.  I have lived the life of a pilgrim, constantly searching for what Merton describes in the above passage.  A place where I look up through mosquito netting at the bright stars and feel completely content.  At home.  

Of course, my parish priest--and one of my best friends who's a Methodist minister--would tell me that the home I'm searching for isn't physical at all.  Merton would probably agree with them.  It's a spiritual thing.  A God thing.  It's what Paul encountered on the road to Damascus.  What Moses met on Mount Horeb.  What Buddha found beneath the Bodhi tree.  What Muhammad discovered in a cave called Hira.

But I'm not Merton.  Or Paul or Moses or Buddha or Muhammad.  My road is still a little unclear to me.  I try to treat everyone in my life with love and kindness every day.  I fail every day.  I try to be a good Christian every day.  And fail.  Good husband.  Fail.  Good father.  Fail.  I think that the only thing I've really perfected in my life is my ability to be imperfect.  

Here is what I call home tonight:

• My son, who let me kiss him on the forehead before he went to sleep.
• The peanuts I'm eating.
• My daughter, who brought me a cup of ice water before she went to bed.
• A picture of my sister who died of lymphoma about six years ago.
• My puppy, who forced herself into my lap and insisted on being held close to my chest.
• Books of poetry stacked on the table beside me.
• My wife, in all the complicated messiness of our thirty years together.
• Rain tapping against the window behind me.

All of the things on this list are ephemeral.  Could disappear tomorrow.  Yet, at this moment, they are what make me feel like I'm exactly where I should be.  Like I belong.  

Mother Teresa said, "If you want to change the world, go home and love your family."

Saint Marty tries to change the world every day.

February 6-7-8: I Do Belong, Feeling Like a Stranger, Blessed

Merton rediscovers the land of his birth:

And yet it was France that grew the finest flowers of delicacy and grace and intelligence and wit and understanding and proportion and taste.  Even the countryside, even the landscape of France, whether in the low hills and lush meadows and apple orchards of Normandy or in the sharp and arid and vivid outline of the mountains of Provence, or in the vast, rolling red vineyards of Languedoc, seems to have been made full of a special perfection, as a setting for the best of the cathedrals, the most interesting towns, the most fervent monasteries, and the greatest universities.  

But the wonderful thing about France is how all her perfections harmonize so fully together.  She has possessed all the skills, from cooking to logic and theology, from bridge-building to contemplation, from vine-growing to sculpture, from cattle-breeding to prayer:  and possessed them more perfectly, separately and together, than any other nation.

Why is it that the songs of the little French children are more graceful, their speech more intelligent and sober, their eyes calmer and more profound than those of the children of other nations?  Who can explain these things?

France, I am glad I was born in your land, and I am glad God brought me back to you, for a time, before it was too late.

I did not know all these things about France the rainy September evening when we landed at Calais, coming from England through which we had passed on our way.

Nor did I share or understand the enthusiastic satisfaction with which Father got off the boat and walked into the noise of the French station, filled with the cries of porters and with the steam of the French trains.

I was tired , and fell asleep long before we got to Paris.  I woke up long enough to be impressed by the welter of lights in the wet streets, and the dark sweep of the Seine, as we crossed one of the countless bridges, while far away the fires on the Eiffel tower spelled "C-I-T-R-O-E-N."

The words Montparnasse, Rue des Saints Peres, Gare d'Orleans filled my mind with their unmeaning, and spelled me no certitude concerning the tall grey houses, and the wide shady awnings of the cafes, and the trees, and the people , and the churches, and the flying taxis, and the green and white buses full of noise.

I did not have time, at the age of ten, to make anything out of this city, but already I knew I was going to like France:  and then, once more, we were on a train.

That day, on that express, going into the south, into the Midi, I discovered France.  I discovered that land which is really, as far as I can tell, the one to which I do belong, if I belong to any at all, by no documentary title but by geographical birth.

Merton has not really belonged anywhere he's lived so far in his short life.  Always on the move, he's felt more like a visitor than a resident of every place he's called "home."  That includes his maternal grandparents' house in New York.  Landing in France, however, he feels as if he has found himself, understands why he is who he is.

It's difficult always feeling like a stranger in your life.  Like you don't ever belong.  I have felt like that a lot.  I've always been the weird sibling in my family--artistic and sensitive, a poet and actor and musician.  Line me up with my remaining siblings, and you could play a game of "One of these things is not like the other."

Feeling like a stranger is a lonely thing.  It's as if, even though you're speaking the same language as everyone else, nobody really understands what you're saying.  Because of circumstances in my life, in the past and recently, I have felt completely alone in rooms filled with people.  Separated.  Unable to ever talk about what is on my mind or heart.  The only thing that has saved me at those moments is knowing that I have tons of friends and family who love me deeply, despite my brokenness.

So, this post is for all of those individuals.  A thank you from a stranger in a strange land.  I don't understand how I got to the place where I am right now.  I've always tried to live right, work hard, love unconditionally.  Yet, I'm surrounded by struggle.  If you are reading this post because you care about me, please know that I care about you, too.  In the world at large, love is in short supply.  In my life, however, love abounds.  I thank you all for that.  I'm not sure I deserve it.

Sometimes Saint Marty feels like an alien, and sometimes Saint Marty feels like the most blessed person alive.

July 16: Two Homes, Plan of Treatment, Adrienne Su, "Home"

He [Ives] would watch his son nod and think and think and think, contemplating the things he'd heard and looking around the church as if he were waiting for the statues to move, for the Christ to come down off the Cross.  He'd remember how the boy had always loved all of that from the very beginning, that he had, in some sense, two homes:  their apartment and the church.

Ives lived the first years of his life in a foundling home.  If Mr. Ives' Christmas had been written by Charles Dickens, Ives would have been Oliver Twist, begging for gruel in an orphanage, dreaming of having a mother and father.  A home.  Robert, Ive's son, is luckier than his father was.  Robert knows the safety and comfort of loving parents, a stable family, and a nurturing spiritual faith.  Robert is always home, wherever he happens to be.

My sister's doctors outlined a plan of treatment yesterday for her.  It involves a lengthy course of chemotherapy.  The problem is that the treatment is only available at the University of Michigan and another hospital in the lower peninsula.  She will have to live in a long-term care facility downstate for over a year.  There are quite a few other "ifs" involved.  If the chemo doesn't kill her.  If she responds well to the treatment.  If she doesn't develop other life-threatening infections (she's had a lot of them over the past year).  If the tumors in her head shrink and/or disappear.

If all of these ifs happen, my sister may be able to return to a nursing home in the Upper Peninsula, closer to home.  She is never going to be the person she was.  More than once, doctors have said that the atrophy in her brain is permanent.  She will never work again.  Or drive a car.  Or boss me around.  Or bake her Christmas pizelle cookies.  Or play Zombie Dice on my iPad.  She may never even speak again.

Last night, as I listened to my other sister outline the treatment plan, someone asked her, "Does Sally understand what's happening?"  My sister said, "All she wants is to come home."

That's incredibly difficult for me to hear, because I know she will never come home the way she wants to.  Her life, however long that life will be, is going to be spent in nursing homes.  That is a fact.  A difficult fact.

I'm really conflicted tonight.  I want my sister to live, but I don't want my sister to spend the rest of her time on this planet yearning for something she will never have again:  a home where she can walk and talk and laugh and watch TV and blow out birthday candles.

Saint Marty's home might need a roof and a kitchen ceiling and new front steps and an extra bedroom.  But Saint Marty has a home.

Home

by:  Adrienne Su

It is a long way back,
more than a drive
from dawn to the black
hours.  It is five

thousand days to a sky-blue
summer of swelling
and pain, in which two
sisters stopped telling

their secrets.  It means
restoring a dead man
to his office to dream
and tally, and a woman

to a classroom full
of girls, whom she orders
into the hall
and orders

to stop crying.
It's not just that,
either; a dying
uncle must come back

to his bed in the city,
Chinese be forgotten,
and four pretty
faces erased.  Often

I wake under the high
ceiling and can't
remember why
I'm here, and want

to die.  Then years
of memory revive
noisily, in clear
focus, but my life

isn't mine.  One
of the girls in the hall
has stopped and undone
her hair, which falls

generously down
her back all the way
to the floor.  Her round
shoulders are bare.  A

moment later, so is
her back.  Her legs
are bare.  She is
laughing, and the next

instant there's no girl
to speak of,
just the door and the hall
she's walked out of.

WWMTD--What would Mother Teresa do?

April 3: Poopy Head, Billy Collins, "Child Development Poem"

I am going to see a movie with my son this evening.  It's called Home, and it's a feature-length animated cartoon.  My son has been talking about this film since the commercials for it started appearing on the television.  He's going for the funny purple alien.  I am going for the buttered popcorn.

I will enjoy myself.  My son can make me laugh all the time.  He's playing a computer game with his sister right now.  He's shirtless, and his hair is slicked to his head with sweat.  They're actually getting along.  Of course, in a matter of seconds, things could change.  My daughter could decide she's done playing, and he could kick her in the shin and call her a poopy-head (one of his favorite insults).

For now, though, peace reigns.  I will take that.  Laughter.  Giggles.  Squeals.

No poopy-heads in Saint Marty's house.

Child Development Poem

by:  Billy Collins

As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

That's Mr. Poopy Head

April 14: Gratitude Thirty-Nine, Forty, and Forty-One

I just realized that I owe you guys three gratitude posts.  Somehow I fell off the wagon this weekend.  Spaced out.  I don't know how it happened.

Anyway, I have to come up with three things for which I am grateful.

Thirty-Nine:  I am grateful to be home tonight after a very long day of work.  I'm in my recliner, feeling very Marty Crane (from Frasier).  I'm relaxed for the first time today.

Forty:  I am grateful for my beautiful, funny daughter.  She just did a comedy routine for me.  It was hysterical.  Now, she's waiting very (im)patiently to use my laptop.

Forty-One:  I am grateful for Hostess Ding Dongs.  Last night, I stole my son's last one.  It was delicious.  Don't worry.  I got him some more tonight.

There, I'm all caught up.  Now, I have some grading to do.

No rest for the wicked.  Or Saint Marty.

One Marty to another

January 3: The Barn, My House, Fairy Tale Friday

The barn was very large.  It was very old.  It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure.  It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows.  It often had a sort of peaceful smell--as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.  It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope.  And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish.  But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead.  And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.

That is E. B. White's description of Homer Zuckerman's barn.  Wilbur's home.   Although I'm not a big fan of farm animals (I avoid the livestock and chicken exhibits at the State Fair), I must say that White makes the barn sound almost pleasant.  Homey.  As if "nothing bad could happen ever again in the world."

Of course, that's the key passage in that paragraph.  We all know that bad things happen in the barn.  Bad things will happen to Wilbur in the barn.  From the day Wilbur arrives at the Zuckerman barn, his days are numbered.  Come winter time, Wilbur has a date to be Christmas dinner.  That's the reality of farm life.

I live in an old barn.  Not literally, but it's an old house.  The original portion of the house was erected over 100 years ago.  An addition was built when indoor plumbing became more than just a novelty.  The wiring is old.  The bathroom is smaller than a broom closet.  But it's home.  It's a place where I can turn on the lights on a cold winter night, lock the doors, and keep the wolves of the world at bay for a little while.

I'm not saying my house is perfect.  I would trade it in a heartbeat for something with a couple of bathrooms, a few more bedrooms, and a kitchen that doesn't seem like an afterthought.  But, for what it is, it's my home.  It's where my daughter and son have grown up.  It holds a lot of very happy memories for me.  It also holds quite a few painful memories for me, as well.  But that's what a home is.   It's a safe haven, in good times and bad.  And I'm lucky to have it.

This morning, my daughter had minor surgery on her ear.  It took the doctor all of 15 minutes to cut and stitch.  She was jumpy and nervous as a hummingbird all last night.  When she went to bed, she said, "I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep tonight."  Then she disappeared into her bedroom.  Within ten minutes, she was burrowed under her quilt, snoring away.  That's what a home does.  It makes you feel safe, secure, protected from the slings and arrows of the world.

Everybody should have a place like that.  A home.

Once upon a time, a farmer named Garth lived in a small farmhouse in the kingdom of Arable.  Garth had grown up in the farmhouse, as had his father before him.  Garth was the third generation of his family to work the fields and woods surrounding the farmhouse.

One day, Garth bought a pig from his niece, Fern, for six dollars.  It was a small spring pig, but it was quickly putting on weight.  Fern had raised the pig herself, feeding it milk and scraps of pancake and French toast.  The pig's name was Willy.

All summer long, Willy slept in the manure pile, ate his slop, and grew as big as a buffalo.  When the cold weather came, Garth slipped a rope around Willy's neck and walked him to the smokehouse.  In the smokehouse, Garth killed Willy and hung him up to bleed and cure.

That Christmas Eve, Garth, Fern, and their families sat down to a huge baked ham dinner, with bacon and mashed potatoes.  As Fern took her first bite, she smiled at Garth and said, "That Willy was some pig!"

Moral of the story:  pig is good eatin'.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Pass the fork

October 9: Home, Home, Home Body

"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh.  "To bring you home, home, home!"

I have had one of those days where I wish, when the alarm clock went off this morning, I would have turned it off, rolled over, and gone back to sleep.  All I've wanted to do all day is go home, home, home as Fan says to a young Ebenezer in the above passage.  I'm kicking myself for not stopping at the local gas station this morning and picking up a 52 ounce cup of Coke Zero.  That would have given me a little more fuel for the day.

However, I did not do that, and now I am paying the price.  I'm tired.  I didn't even have time this morning to type my normal post.  It's just been non-stop, tedious work.  I want this day to be o-v-e-r.  I'm not even feeling particularly creative this afternoon.  The extent of my wisdom from Charles Dickens today is this:  Fan was right.  Go home.  Stay home.  Be a home body.

Those are words Saint Marty can live by, especially today.

Couch potato sounds good to me!

May 7: Chocolate Milk Head, Crunchy, Home

We are home, and I am tired.  We got home over an hour ago, and everything is unpacked and put away.  The trip today was uneventful, except for a small chocolate milk incident.

As Desi Arnez might say, "Let me 'splain."

We stopped at a McDonald's right after we crossed the Mackinac Bridge.  As we were sitting in the play area, my wife was suddenly showered from above by chocolate milk.  All over her head and down her back.  It seems a little girl brought her drink to the top of the structure, and then she tripped while walking through the catwalk above my wife.  By the way, the little girl was the daughter of one of the managers at the restaurant.  So, the manager gave us a whole bunch of free stuff.  Cookies.  An apple pie.

But, my wife's hair is a little crunchy and sticky tonight.  No double entendre intended.  I myself am feeling a little crunchy and sticky, but that's the result of being in a car for nearly nine hours today.

Saint Marty will be back to normal blogs tomorrow.  He's going to bed now.

Just add whipped cream and a cherry!