January 4: Ducks, Lagoon, P.O..E.T.S. Day Mess, Firefox

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull.  I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South.  I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go.  I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over.  I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something.  Or if they just flew away.

Holden is still speaking with his teacher, old Spencer, in this passage.  However, he is allowing his mind to wander.  Old Spencer is lecturing him about his failures at Pencey Prep, and Holden is worrying about the ducks in Central Park.  He keeps coming back to those ducks as the story continues.  He talks to a taxi driver about the ducks.  He imagines the fish in the lagoon frozen solid in the ice, waiting for spring thaw.  Instead of worrying about his own life, Holden focuses on the plight of ducks and fish, wondering how they survive the snow and ice of winter.

I wish I could have been like Holden this morning.  I wish I could have worried about ducks on this P.O.E.T.S. Day.  Instead, I spent three or four hours trying to solve an issue I was having with Blogger.  Last night, I tried to upload an image from my computer.  I couldn't do it.  No matter what I did, I couldn't get the Upload function to work.  This morning, I tried again, with the same results, so I spent the entire morning trying to troubleshoot the issue.  Now, I may have a minor in computer science and two advanced degrees, but none of those helped me.

Eventually, I started deleting images from my Picasa web albums.  (Don't ask.  I have no idea what they are.  However, some genius on Google suggested that it would solve my issue.)  Well, all that did was eliminate images from a whole bunch of old blog posts.  So, on top of still being unable to upload images, I now had to go back through over a thousand posts to figure out how much damage I'd done.

Eventually, I stumbled upon another user forum on Google where hundreds of people were posting comments like, "What the hell is up with Blogger?  I can't upload any images."  I wasn't going crazy. However, I was the only moron who had unwittingly eliminated dozens of pictures from his blog.  The solution to the problem was pretty simple:  don't use Internet Explorer.  I switched to Firefox, and my uploading issues vanished, just like Holden's Central Park ducks.

Now I have a whole lot of repair work to do.

If you're looking through some old posts on Saint Marty and stumble upon a blog that has a caption without an image, that's just Saint Marty being a moron.

Even these ducks think I'm a moron

January 3: Vicks Nose Drops, Sick People, Book Club

The minute I went in, I was sort of sorry I'd come.  He was reading the Atlantic Monthly, and there were pills and medicine all over the place, and everything smelled like Vicks Nose Drops.  It was pretty depressing.  I'm not too crazy about sick people, anyway...

Holden is visiting his history teacher, old Spencer.  Old Spencer asked him to stop by to say goodbye before Holden leaves the school permanently.  (As I said yesterday, I believe, Holden is being kicked out of his boarding school at the beginning of the novel.)  And old Spencer has the grippe.  He's sick, and Holden can't stand being around sick people.

I'm sick at the moment, and I can't stand being around me.  It's a strange illness, sort of ebbing and flowing all day long.  Sometimes, I feel just fine.  My head and nasal passages are clear, and I have tons of energy.  Other times, my head and nose are filled with mucus, and all I want to do is go to sleep.  That's the way it's been all day long.

I spent most of the day getting ready for my monthly book club meeting.  Cleaning the bathroom.  Sweeping the floors.  Cleaning strawberries and a pineapple.  Melting chocolate for my chocolate fountain.  I also mailed off the last of my Christmas poems to distant relatives and friends.  I haven't had a lot of time to relax.

Tonight's book was Fannie Flagg's A Redbird Christmas.  It's a short, sweet little novel about a man dying of emphysema who moves to a little town in Alabama called Lost River.  There, he's befriended by the town's citizens and learns for the first time in his life the true meaning of love and happiness.  It reads like a fable, especially at the end, and I loved this book.  Flagg has a way of tempering the sentimentality of her stories with wry wit and a twist of the Southern gothic.  All of her characters are just a little off, and that's what appeals to me.

A Redbird blessing

So this night, when Saint Marty feels like he's suffering with the grippe, like old Spencer, he gives thanks for his book club, and Fannie Flagg, and a Christmas fable.

January 2: A Good-By, Small Moments, Day One

This morning is the first official morning of vacation for me.  Normally, I would be at the office right now, registering patients, putting together charts, thinking about the upcoming weekend.  When I'm at work, I think about being at school.  When I'm at school, I think about being at home.  When I'm at home, I think about being at work.  And when I'm on vacation, I think about the work I would normally be doing at the office.  It's a strange, vicious circle.

I got my kids off to school this morning.  I was actually looking forward to getting up with my daughter when I went to bed last night.  My alarm went off, and I got out of bed, made breakfast for her, and turned on the TV.  Then I actually woke the sleeping beast.  She was tired and cranky and whiny.  She kept saying things like, "I don't want to go to school" and "I'm not hungry" and "I don't feel good."  I responded with things I think every parent has said:  "Well, we all have to do things we don't want to do" and "It's only a three-day week" and "Once you eat something, you'll feel better."  By the end of our time together, she was screaming at me about her shoes and her lunch and the color of the sky and the injustice of the health care system in the United States, and I was dreaming about being at the office.

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is being kicked out of his boarding school at the beginning of the novel.  He's standing on top of a hill on campus, trying to figure out how to say goodbye to the place.  He hates leaving somewhere without feeling a sense of closure.  Then, he strikes upon this:

I was lucky.  All of a sudden I thought of something that helped me know I was getting the hell out.  I suddenly remembered this time, in around October, that I and Robert Tichener and Paul Campbell were chucking a football around, in front of the academic building.  They were nice guys, especially Tichener.  It was just before dinner and it was getting pretty dark out, but we kept chucking the ball around anyway.  It kept getting darker and darker, and we could hardly see the ball any more, but we didn't want to stop doing what we were doing.  Finally, we had to.  This teacher that taught biology, Mr. Zambest, stuck his head out of this window in the academic building and told us to go back to the dorm and get ready for dinner.  If I get a chance to remember that kind of stuff, I can get a good-by when I need one--at least, most of the time I can...

It's a tiny moment.  Simple and unimportant.  But it provides the comfort Holden's seeking at this point in the story.  He's able to say his goodbye with that memory in his pocket.

This morning, in the midst of my daughter's drama, my four-year-old son came up to me and tugged on my hand.  "Daddy?" he said.  I looked down at him.  He was in his winter coat and boots.  He backpack was on the floor beside him.  My daughter was shouting in the kitchen.

"What do you want, buddy?" I said.

"Can you come out to the bus with me?" he said, and he smiled.

I nodded, took him by the hand, and walked outside with him.  His bus was waiting.  He gave me a hug and kiss and climbed the steps onto the bus.  I watched him get buckled into his seat.  Then, he started waving at me and my wife.  He kept waving until the bus pulled away from the front of our house.

That is the moment I'm going to hold onto this morning.  I'm going to try to forget my daughter's back-to-school hysterics.  I'm going to think of my son's face, smiling, and his hand waving.  The trust and love of that one, simple moment of goodbye.

Saint Marty's day is off to a good start.

He made it all worth it

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