September 29: Sunday Night, Feeling Prepared, Powerlessness

Sunday night.  Probably my least favorite time of the week.  It's all about getting my 11-year-old son to take a shower and put on his pajamas.  Making my lunch.  Setting out my work clothes for tomorrow.  Double checking that my lessons are planned and my books are gathered.  Leaving nothing to chance before I go to bed.

However, I know that I'm going to forget something.  I always do.  That's the way I roll, always feeling as if I'm forgetting something.  It could be a bill that is coming due.  Or an assignment I forgot to grade for my students.  Or some writing deadline that went whooshing by me like a freight train.  There's always some shadow looming over my shoulder that I can't quite make out.

I like feeling prepared.  That's why I addressed my Christmas cards for this year back in February.  And I bought a Christmas present for my nephew back in January in Florida.  At the moment, I'm planning to order the pictures that I'll stuff into those Christmas cards.  I just made a reservation for a little trip I'm taking to Calumet on Thursday, and I've completed two writing tasks that were on my to-do list for today.  Like I said, I like feeling prepared.

Of course, there are things for which you can never prepare yourself.  Illnesses.  Car problems.  Marriage problems.  Money problems.  Kid problems.  These things strike like lightning from a blue sky.  There's no way to anticipate them.  That's when you go into survival mode and live minute-by-minute, as opposed to day-by-day.

I've been doing the minute-by-minute thing for quite some time now.  It's exhausting.  And I don't see an end in sight.  Yesterday, I talked about everyone leading lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau said.  It's a pretty apt description.  You can prepare and prepare all you want, but there will always come that moment when lightning strikes and everything changes.  Then, chaos for a while.  Desperation.

I'm looking for a way to end this post on a positive note.  Something hopeful to say.  The only thing that you can do sometimes is acknowledge your powerlessness and give your problem up to your higher power.  Because it's always at the lowest times when God steps in and helps out.  That's pretty much the way it works.  When you hit rock bottom, there's nowhere else to go.

Saint Marty embraced his powerlessness quite some time ago.

May 8: It's Raining, a Kiss, an Almost Job

"No, I'll just watch ya.  I think I'll just watch," I said.  I gave her some more of her dough.  "Here.  Get some more tickets."

She took the dough off me.  "I'm not mad at you any more," she said.

"I know.  Hurry up--the thing's gonna start again."

Then all of a sudden she gave me a kiss.  Then she held her hand out, and said, "It's raining.  It's starting to rain."

"I know."

It's a tender little scene between between Holden and Phoebe at the end of the book.  Holden has reached rock bottom.  His little sister is his only anchor to life at the moment.  A few paragraphs past this conversation, Salinger provides the happiest moment in The Catcher in the Rye.  At this point, however, Holden has finally given up.  He's letting go of his plans to run away, to live as a mute lumberjack (or whatever the hell it was) in Wyoming (or wherever the hell it was.).  He's reaching a point of surrender.

Over the last day or so, my wife and I have been trying to arrange daycare for my son this summer.  Yesterday, my wife was offered a part-time job.  Three days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.  The difficulty is childcare.  All of the daycare providers we have used in the past are already full and have waiting lists.  We've explored several avenues, but we are now at a dead end.  My wife is going to call her would-be employer this morning to turn down the job.

She's upset.  It would have been a great boost for her self esteem and confidence.  Just getting the job offer has done wonders for her in the last 24 hours.  However, she seems at peace with the way things have turned out.  She called me a little while ago and said, "You know, it wasn't meant to be."

It was an almost job.  The extra money would have been great, especially over the summer.  But this isn't rock bottom.  That will come about mid-July, when the tax return runs out.  I'm upset for my wife.  I'm upset she has to sit on the bench in the rain, watching Phoebe ride the carrousel.  I will give her a kiss when I get home, tell her everything is going to be alright.

Saint Marty is letting go.  He has no other choice.

Haven't gotten this bad yet

January 24: Jesus, the Disciples, and Hope

Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed.  I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it.  I can't always pray when I feel like it.  In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist.  I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible.  Take the Disciples, for instance.  They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth.  They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.  All they did was keep letting Him down.  I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples...

I love the fact that Holden, this scrawny teenager, is "sort of an atheist."  Yet, he seems to know a lot about Jesus and the Disciples.  As Holden keeps talking, he discusses how Jesus hand-picked the Disciples, and then he gets into a philosophical debate about whether Jesus would sent Judas to Hell.  For an atheist, Holden seems to do an awful lot of thinking about Jesus Christ.

But Holden says he can't pray, even though he wants to.  Holden is depressed.  He says so about every other page of the book.  Depression doesn't allow a person the comfort of prayer.  It doesn't allow a person the comfort of hope.  Holden can't think about Jesus or the Disciples because he's spiraling downward.  He's on his way to rock bottom.

Perhaps if Holden wasn't an atheist, if he had some kind of belief in salvation or redemption, he wouldn't be in quite so black a place.  In Biblical terms, I suppose he's like Saul, blind and bereft, on his way to becoming Paul the Apostle.  Yes, Holden wants to believe in something, wants to have some kind of faith in humankind.  What he believes in at the moment are his dead brother, Allie; his kid sister, Phoebe; and the girl from his summer in Maine, Jane.  Holden can't imagine the future because he's stuck in the past.  He wants to play checkers with Jane.  He wants watch Allie play baseball again.  He wants to take Phoebe to the movies.  He's tired of phony Disciples.  He wants Hope.

In some ways, I'm a lot like Holden.  I see phony bastards everywhere I look.  The difference between Holden and me is that I, for the most part, think the phony bastards aren't going to win.  I believe that goodness and innocence will trump the darkness of the world.  I see evidence of it every day of my life.  In my son's laugh.  In my daughter's red hair.  In the flash of sun on snow.  In a good book.  In a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.  In the warmth of my wife when I go to bed at night.

Saint Marty is surrounded by Hope.

It's always there