March 8: "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," International Women's Day, Laughter

Caution:  Emily Dickinson allusion ahead!

Billy Collins on a Longfellow in the grass . . . 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

by:  Billy Collins

Trouble

was not

his middle name.

If you haven't noticed, I dislike people who take themselves too seriously.  Perhaps that's why Billy Collins' poems appeal to me so much.  He doesn't mind having fun.  Popping inflated egos.  Seeing the ridiculous and the sublime.  

Today was International Women's Day.  I've been around strong women my whole life.  My mother and sisters.  My beautiful wife and daughter.  Mentors and best friends.  The man sitting here tonight typing this post is a product of the women he's had the privilege to know and love.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned from these wonderful women is humor.  Women have to have senses of humor to deal with all the stupid shit men have done and do in this world.  Think about it.  The Cold War.  Healthcare.  World Hunger.  Climate change.  All the result of male ego, ignorance, and hostility.  

If women had been in charge, the Cuban Missile Crisis could have been solved over a couple Bloody Marys.  Universal health care in the United States?  No problem for a government run by Mother Teresa.  Put Greta Thunberg in charge of combatting climate change.  Julia Child could have ended world hunger decades ago.  And my mom could have stopped all of the insurrectionists on January 6 by just standing on the steps of the Capital with one of her wooden spoons.  

The world would be a much happier place if women were in charge.  There would be a lot more laughter and compassion, and a lot less name-calling and stick throwing. I believe this to the marrow of my bones.  (Of course, there are some exceptions--Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert come to mind.  And, let's be honest, Lindsey Graham.)  

So, for all the joy and love and support that the women in his life have given him, Saint Marty salutes you.

August 25: ""When Death Comes," Joy Fest, "Martian Girl"

Mary Oliver has some death wishes . . . 

When Death Comes

by:  Mary Oliver

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say:  all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.

Oliver gives us rules to live by, especially in her last line.  When Death comes knocking, you don't want simply to be a visitor on this planet, waiting for the mothership to come and take you home.  Like Oliver, you should be in the world, of the world.  Every day, another encounter with wonder and amazement.  Even the simplest field daisy is a gift, singularly beautiful.

I spent most of this afternoon preparing for something happening at the library tomorrow.  It's called Joy Fest, and it is a day-long celebration of my friend, Helen, and all the joy she brought into this world during her time on it.  There's going to be poetry and literature and music and singing bowls meditation and yoga and art and healing and chocolate.  And laughter.  Lots of laughter.  If there was one thing Helen loved to do, it was to laugh.

If all of that sounds like too much, then you understand in a small way who Helen was.  She was, as Oliver puts it, the bride married to amazement.  The bridegroom, taking the world into her arms.  She reveled in everyone she met, made them feel as if talking to them was the greatest pleasure she'd ever known.  If you knew Helen, you somehow knew that goodness and love were the most powerful forces in the universe.

Don't misunderstand me.  Helen was human, with all the attendant failings and struggles.  She sometimes gave into anger, sorrow, maybe despair at times.  Yet, she knew that even darkness could be beautiful, and she shed her light into it.  (I remember, in particular, the night after Donald Trump won the 2016 U. S. presidential election.  Helen and I had a particularly dark conversation, venting all of our fears and frustrations and worries.  At the end, after almost an hour of shared sadness, Helen said, "We aren't going to give up or give in, Marty.  There's more amazing people in the world than there are assholes."  And we laughed and laughed until we were crying.)

That was my friend Helen.  A Martian girl who visited our planet and fell in love with it.

Saint Marty is blessed to have had so, so many close encounters of the Helen kind. 

Martian Girl

by:  Helen Haskell Remien

Oh, Mother, don't tell me it isn't safe,

that we are rotting inside, that we will die

if we don't enter that ship and take off.

Don't you see!  I have tasted it, Mother, the salt of sea,

the ripeness of berry, the very soil we are standing upon,

and I have heard it, Mother, a sound more divine

than the voices of the high beings on our planet,

a song, these earthlings call it, emitted from

their own body home, and my body has moved

to this sound, felt it inside me, and the wind . . .

they call it wind, this wild air, and they have trees, Mother,

trees with names, giant sequoia, tiny scrub pine.

I want to cling to the trees.  I am not ready to say goodbye 

to the trees and to the sea that carries me in its currents,

not ready to say goodbye to the mountains

topped with the wonder of snow.  I want to dive down

into the white billowy bank and swim my way 

to a shore of crystal flakes.

Oh, Mother, must we go?

We have learned to feast at their table,

and I want the whole meal, here, on this planet

that is thrumming with an energy we have never felt before,

vibrating in its rocky soil.  There are rocks, red rock cliffs

that light up like fire, and there is a drumbeat

in these fiery hills.  Oh, Mother, must we leave

a place we have learned to love, that lights us up?

I will carry back with me the memory,

the vibration and love these humans

have dished out so freely, so unwittingly.

Oh, Mother, I will pack it all in my bag,

the laughter, the light, a song I have learned

that is now my very own.

July 9: Do Nothing Stupid, Straight White Men, Laughter

Santiago does some wishing . . . 

I can do nothing with him and he can do nothing with me, he thought. Not as long as he keeps this up.

Once he stood up and urinated over the side of the skiff and looked at the stars and checked his course. The line showed like a phosphorescent streak in the water straight out from his shoulders. They were moving more slowly now and the glow of Havana was not so strong, so that he knew the current must be carrying them to the eastward. If I lose the glare of Havana we must be going more to the eastward, he thought. For if the fish's course held true I must see it for many more hours. I wonder how the baseball came out in the grand leagues today, he thought. It would be wonderful to do this with a radio. Then he thought, think of it always. Think of what you are doing. You must do nothing stupid.

Then he said aloud, "I wish I had the boy. To help me and to see this."

People frequently do stupid things.  Say stupid things.  Endorse stupid things.  If the last five or six years have taught us anything, it's that people will support stupid, even if it flies in the face of incontrovertible fact.  

I went with my family to a parade today.  Tonight, I'm attending a fireworks display.  In the parade, there was the usual array of political candidates marching and shaking hands and handing out brochures.  I have no problem with this.  They can wear their red-white-and-blue ties and tee-shirts and walk behind a car that's blasting Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U. S. A."  That's how they drum up support.

On the way home from the parade, my son started making up new lyrics to Greenwood's song:  "I'm proud to be an American, where straight white men are free!  And don't forget those who lied to steal women's liberty!"  I grew up with a profound respect for those who serve in any branch of the Armed Forces of the United States.  My dad served in the Army during the Korean War.  But, we laughed pretty hard this afternoon when my son started singing his version of that song.

Here's the thing:  my son gets it.  He believes in freedom, and he is very aware of the sacrifices people have made for him to live his life openly and without fear.  He is also aware that, currently, there are some pretty stupid decisions being made in the highest levels of government--decisions that will affect him and his loved ones for years, if not decades.  

We laughed this afternoon because the only other options are disillusionment and despair.  Given those choices, I will always choose laughter.  If we laugh at stupidity, we can chip away at its power over us.  Because laughter is contagious.  One person starts laughing, and then another person joins in.  And another.  And another.  Pretty soon, everyone is laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.  

Laughter is a powerful tool against the stupidity of the world.  Comedian George Carlin once said, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."  If we can laugh at those large groups of stupid people, perhaps sanity will eventually prevail.

So sing it will Saint Marty:  "I'm proud to be an American where straight white men are free!"

October 14: Another Living Soul, Love and Hate, Laughter

Billy's story ended very curiously in a suburb untouched by fire and explosions.  The guards and the Americans came at nightfall to an inn which was open for business.  There was candlelight.  There were fires in three fireplaces downstairs.  There were empty tables and chairs waiting for anyone who might come, and empty beds with covers turned down upstairs.  

There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and their two young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids.  This family knew that Dresden was gone.  Those with eyes had seen it burn and burn, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now.  Still--they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.

There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden.  The clocks ticked on, the fires crackled, the translucent candles dripped.  And then there was a knock on the door, and in came four guards and one hundred American prisoners of war.

The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city.

"Yes."

"Are there more people coming?"

And the guards said that, on the difficult route they had chosen, they had not seen another living soul.

It's a bleak moment.  An entire city filled with people bombed to extinction.  It's almost post-apocalyptic.  I'm sure that's how Vonnegut saw and experienced it.  It's a scene straight out of a science fiction novel.  Think of Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, kneeling in the sand in front of a destroyed Statue of Liberty, screaming, "God damn you all to hell!"

I believe in humanity.  Sure, the current political climate in the United States tries my faith.  Seeing Nazis marching in the streets of my country fills me with anger and disappointment and fear.  There isn't any other way to react to that if you are a compassionate, loving, sane person.  Unfortunately, where love exists, there will be hate.  Two sides of the coin.

Of course, the challenge is to not let hate and fear win.  If you call yourself a Christian, you believe that's why Christ came into the world--for love.  Jesus didn't like people who judged and punished.  He didn't throw stones.  He forgave and invited people to have dinner with him.  Of course, He was killed because He loved.

Now, there will be some people who read this post who will point out the terrible things that have been done by some "Christians."  My response to that criticism will always be the same--Jesus didn't preach hatred.  He preached love.  If you hate or harm or kill people in the name of Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian.  You're a hypocrite.

Some of the greatest tragedies of the human race have been committed in the name of God.  That doesn't mean that God is to blame.  That's all human.  Terrible things have been done by human beings in the name of science, too.  In the United States alone, over 20,000 frontal lobotomies were performed by 1951, the majority of them done to women.  The man who pioneered the lobotomy won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Human beings are flawed creatures.  We hate.  We kill.  We support dictators and Donald Trump.

Yet, mistakes can be corrected.  Love and joy are more powerful than fear and hate.  Anybody who has seen Monsters, Inc. knows this.

Saint Marty prefers laughter to screams.

August 31: Goldfinch, Alleluia Moment, Charlie Chaplin

The goldfinch here on the fringed thistletop was burying her head with each light thrust deeper into the seedcase.  Her fragile legs braced to her task on the vertical, thorny stem; the last of the thistledown sprayed and poured.  Is there anything I could eat so lightly, or could I die so fair?  With a ruffle of feathered wings the goldfinch fluttered away, out of range of the broken window's frame and toward the deep blue shade of the cliffs where late fireflies already were rising alight under the trees.  I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off.  Alleluia.

Dillard is having what I call an Alleluia moment.  It's when, for whatever reason, grace sort of descends upon you.  The whole world suddenly seems transformed into beauty.  Dillard, watching a goldfinch eating thistle, feels the very pull of gravity dissipate from her body.  She's weightless.  Winged.  As if, with a single breath, she could float into the heavens.

I realize that last night's posts weren't very grace-filled.  No Alleluia moments.  Understand that, every time these half-truths and rumors about job eliminations spread through the university departments, I get a little unnerved.  It's sort of like I'm living on the fringe of a forest that's raging with fire.  The wind shifts in my direction, and my house burns down.  At least, that's what it feels like.

I am trying to embrace grace today.  Tonight, I teach my film class.  We are watching a Charlie Chaplin movie.  Seeing Chaplin in a boxing ring, dancing around his opponent and the referee, is enough to lift my spirits.  Laughter does that, like turning on a light in a dark room.  Plus, I really enjoy talking about films and film theory.  It makes all those hours I spent as a kid reading books about the history of horror, science fiction, and animated movies worthwhile, as if I was simply preparing myself for this evening.

I don't feel quite as transformed as Dillard does in the passage I quoted.  But, after a couple of days, I have a better perspective on my future at the university.  I'm not going to start packing up my office just yet.  I don't feel quite so angry or hopeless.  After twenty years, five university presidents, seven English Department Heads, I'm still here, talking about writing and film and literature.  That says something.

They're going to have to light a stick of dynamite under Saint Marty's ass to get rid of him.

Laughter is a sign of grace, I think

May 13: Give It a Try, Collage Concert, Let There Be Peace

"The thing is, Pop, I've decided to give it a try, it just feels like something I'm destined for; it's something I've thought about since I was a kid, and it just won't go away.  I guess what I'm asking you, Pop, is for your blessing.  I know you can give me that, can't you?"

Robert, Ives' son, has decided to enter a monastery, and he wants his father's blessing.  Ives never saw it coming.  He knew his son was devout in his faith, but Ives didn't realize how deep the waters flowed in Robert.  Of course Ives gives his blessing, but, like most parents, he frets and worries about his child's happiness.


I just got back from my daughter's Collage Concert.  It is the big, end-of-the-year performance for all the bands and choruses (grades four through high school).  It's one of my favorite events of the school year.  This evening, the closing number was an arrangement of "Let There Be Peace on Earth."  I thought I was going to hate it.  They have been playing that song at the end of the worship services at my wife's church every Sunday for months.  It doesn't make me feel very peaceful any more.  It makes me want to jab somebody with a sharp pencil.

However, tonight, I found myself profoundly moved by the closing number.  All those young people, singing, playing instruments, raising a sound for peace and love.  I was overwhelmed.  The fact that this is my daughter's last year in middle school may have also been a contributing factor, as well.  Like Ives, I find myself fretting and worrying about my daughter's future.

Anyway, Saint Marty had a really good night, full of music and laughter and a few tears.

There is hope for this world...

March 9: Little Time, God's Love Number Twenty, "Ives" Dip

I have little time this evening for reflection.  In a few minutes, I have to head out to a dance thing in which my daughter is performing at a local high school.  I have about seven minutes before my phone will ring, and I will have to leave.

It has been a very long day of work.  Lots of crabby coworkers.  Lots of crabby patients.  I am struggling to find God's love number twenty in the cesspool of the past ten hours.  The only thing that made today tolerable were the two young women with whom I work in the business office.  They make me laugh, all the time, and today I needed the laughter.

So, that's God's love number twenty:  my two coworkers.  They brighten some very long, stressful weeks.

It is also Ives dip Monday.  In a week, I will know whether or not I have been selected as the next
U. P. Poet Laureate.  I will certainly be happy to know the outcome.  At the moment, I live in two worlds:  1) the possibility that I have been voted U. P. Poet Laureate, and 2) the possibility that I have not been voted U. P. Poet Laureate.  Obviously, I prefer the former to the latter, but there will certainly be a sense of relief next Monday, either way.

So, my question tonight is:

Will I be the next U. P. Poet Laureate?

And the answer from Ives is:

Later a woman who described herself as a "pragmatic Catholic" stood up and spoke of visiting the amphitheater of Ephesus, Turkey, where Saint Paul once preached, and of being lulled into a kind of "glorious waking dream" because she was certain that his spirit was still a powerful presence there.

I'll take that.  I will have a glorious waking dream.  That's pretty good.


Saint Marty--the next U. P. Poet Laureate.  For now.

Another of my waking dreams

January 26: Awards Show Junkie, Classic Saint Marty, New Cartoon

All the schools in the area are closed tomorrow because of the polar temperatures.  We're talking 35-below-zero wind chills.  My kids don't have school.  The poetry workshop I teach for the community schools is cancelled.  My son's religious education class is called off.  The only school that hasn't succumbed to the weather is the university for which I teach.  But I'm ever hopeful.

Tonight, however, my main focus is watching yet another awards show.  I am an awards show junkie.  The Tony Awards.  Emmy Awards.  NAACP Image Awards.  Soap Opera Digest Awards.  Academy Awards.  It doesn't matter.  I've even been known to sit and watch the Kid's Choice Awards.  This evening, I am partaking in the Grammy Awards.

Now, I'm not particularly "up" on all the current music.  In fact, I will probably be asking my daughter who a lot of the nominees are.  But, it's an awards show, and that's good enough for me.  Plus, Beyonce is going to be on it.  It's a win-win.

I do have a Classic Saint Marty for you guys tonight.  This particular episode originally aired exactly two years ago on this date.

And Saint Marty still thinks it's feckin' hilarious.

January 26, 2012:  Something to Laugh At, Cheap Flights, a Friend

The members of my book club left just a little while ago.  The house is clean.  The dishes are washed.  I'm ready to call it a night. 

This afternoon, a friend sent me an e-mail with a video attached.  My friend wanted to make me laugh.  I'm blessed by friends who share their laughter with me.

Tonight, after a long day of work and an evening spent with more good friends, I want to share my laughter.  Below is the video, called "Cheap Flights," that my friend sent me this afternoon.  Just a small warning:  the video contains some PG-13 language.  Be careful where you watch it and with whom you watch it.

Saint Marty thinks it's feckin' hysterical.

Confessions of Saint Marty

January 26: Something to Laugh At, Cheap Flights, A Friend

The members of my book club left just a little while ago.  The house is clean.  The dishes are washed.  I'm ready to call it a night. 

This afternoon, a friend sent me an e-mail with a video attached.  My friend wanted to make me laugh.  I'm blessed by friends who share their laughter with me.

Tonight, after a long day of work and an evening spent with more good friends, I want to share my laughter.  Below is the video, called "Cheap Flights," that my friend sent me this afternoon.  Just a small warning:  the video contains some PG-13 language.  Be careful where you watch it and with whom you watch it.

Saint Marty thinks it's feckin' hysterical.