June 13: Isak Dinesen, Orlando Shootings, Grief

I stood, alone, and the world swayed.  I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.  Isak Dinesen in Kenya, her heart utterly broken by loss, stepped out of the house at sunrise, seeking a sign.  She saw a rooster lunge and rip a chameleon's tongue from its root in the throat and gobble it down.  And then Isak Dinesen had to pick up a stone and smash the chameleon.  But I had seen that sign, more times than I had ever sought it; today I saw an inspiring thing, a pretty thing, really, and small.

Isak Dinesen, broken by loss.  Anyone who has seen the film Out of Africa has an idea of what Dinesen is mourning.  The love of her life has just died, and she is consumed with violent grief.  She is hurting, and she wants the world to hurt, as well.  At least, that's the way I interpret this little tale.  Grief in action.

Yesterday, I did not comment on the shootings in Orlando, Florida.  I was not ignoring the tragedy.  I simply didn't know what to say.  Still don't.  Of course, all sides of the political spectrum are weighing in.  Donald Trump is blaming terrorists and reiterating the need to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.  Hillary Clinton is focusing on the need for stricter control of weapons like the assault rifle used in Orlando.  And President Obama just sounds tired of standing in front of the White House Press Corps, talking about yet another senseless gun tragedy. 

It is a sad day.  Fifty innocent people dead.  Fifty more wounded.  There is nothing to say that can come close to expressing that amount of grief.  It's not a Republican/Democrat thing.  Not a heterosexual/homosexual thing.  Not a West/East thing.  It's a human thing.  Loss doesn't really discriminate. 

Do I believe there should be stricter gun laws in the United States?  Yes, I do.  However, tonight is not the time to argue and point fingers.  Tonight is a time for prayer and healing and love.  Lots of love.

Saint Marty feels like smashing chameleon tonight.

June 12: Dance Recital Weekend, Tony Awards, Classic Saint Marty

I am at the other end of the Dance Recital weekend.  I have survived a week of rehearsals and two performances.  During the past five or six days, I have put about an extra two hundred miles on my car chauffeuring my kids back and forth.  I am tired and happy.  My kids did really well, and now my daughter is at Bible camp for the week.  Dropped her off about an hour ago.  I feel a little guilty in saying that I'm looking forward to a few days of relative calm.

I am a little exhausted at the moment.  I had little time to relax (unless you count dozing off in the auditorium during dance rehearsals).  Five days of work await me.  I have a feeling that it's going to be a very long week.  My only consolation is that tomorrow will be a relatively quiet day at my new job, and I will be working by myself.  Solitude.

Tonight, however, I will be watching the Tony Awards to see Lin-Manuel Miranda take home a boatload of prizes for Hamilton.  And I will be eating Scoop Fritos and cheese dip (it's sort of a tradition for me).  It will be a good night, full of people breaking into spontaneous songs on television.

The episode of Classic Saint Marty I have chosen to share today is only about a year old.  It was written during a time when there was still hope for my sister's recovery from brain lymphoma.  In fact, I don't think she'd received that diagnosis yet.  I was thinking a lot about miracles at the time and the need for them in my life.

June 16, 2015:  Weeping Building, Miracles, Sally Wen Mao, "Monstera Deliciosa"

In one slip of a second, anything seemed possible--had the moon risen and started to sing, had pyramids appeared over the Chrysler building weeping, Ives would have been no more surprised.

Ives has just had a near death experience.  As he walks the streets of Manhattan, he starts having visions of God's goodness.  Four colored winds spinning in the sky.  The sun, glowing red and huge.  Car horns sounding like celestial trumpets.  As the above passage says, anything seems possible.

I've been contemplating miracles recently.  Ives thinks of his near-death experiences as some kind of divine vision granted to him.  I'm not so sure that's accurate.  I think most people go through their days with blinders on.  Ives' blinders have simply been removed for a little while.  He's seeing the world from a God's-eye-view. 

I think I'm a lot like the blindered Ives.  Driving to work, talking to patients, eating lunch, walking to my car at the end of the day, I probably miss more miracles than contained in the gospels.  For instance, near the medical center where I work, there's a bike path in the woods.  I know there are albino deer in that forest.  One night, as I was leaving the university after teaching an evening class, I drove by a cemetery.  Near the cemetery fence was a family of deer.  When the headlights of my car spotlighted them, the deer leaped into the darkness, hurdling headstones and hedges like souls racing to heaven.

Everyday miracles.  I need to open my eyes and look around more often.  Maybe I'll see the moon singing or the university clock tower weeping.  Who knows?  The whole world is full of wonder.  Sure, I'm sort of stuck in a swamp of worry right now.  But I know that my very existence--my lungs' habit of breathing, my heart's habit of beating, my pores' habit of sweating--all of the things that keep me alive are impossible miracles of creation.

Sally Wen Mao's poem for tonight is about one of those miracles of nature that most people don't even stop to notice.

Saint Marty is taking some time tonight to give thanks for miracles.

Monstera Deliciosa

by:  Sally Wen Mao

I'm a monster because I poison the children.
They dance around me and my fronds flutter
with holes.  They invite:  Eat my fanged fruit.

Each scale will peel off easy, but if you eat it
unripe, it will steal your voice.  Your gums
will blister little stars.  You'll vomit, swell, tremble.

When ripe, it is sublime.  Better than banana,
soft mango, sweeter than wild yellow rambutan
coated in syrup.  It only takes one year.  Bite.

Bon appetit!

June 10: Free to a Good Home, Campbell McGrath, "Emily and Walt"

I have been receiving some really kind comments on my posts regarding my sometimes difficult relationship with my teenage daughter.  Those comments have bolstered my lagging faith in my abilities as a father.  Even my therapist told me this past Tuesday that my daughter's job right now is to be difficult and frustrating.  "That's what teenagers do," she said.  "It's how they cope with their changing lives."

So, I am not a complete failure as a parent.  This I know.  My daughter is not the spawn of Satan.  This I know.  She is a typical, 15-year-old girl, full of anxiety and self-doubt and body issues.  And I am a typical father of a 15-year-old girl; I sometimes think about putting a sign outside my front door that says "Free to a good home."

Campbell McGrath has a poem about parents.  It doesn't make me feel any better about what's in store for me in the near future with my daughter, but it's a good poem.

Saint Marty better start setting aside some money for his daughter's college fund.  Or therapy fund.  She's going to need both.

Emily and Walt

by:  Campbell McGrath

I suppose we did not want for love.
They were considerate parents, if a bit aloof,

or more than a bit. He was a colossus
of enthusiasms, none of them us,

while she kissed our heads and mended socks
with a wistful, faraway look.

She might have been a little, well, daft.
And he—Allons, my little ones, he’d laugh,

then leave without us.
And those “friends” of his!

Anyway, he’s gone off to “discover
himself” in San Francisco, or wherever,

while she’s retired to the condo in Boca.
We worry, but she says she likes it in Florida;

she seems, almost, happy. I suppose they were
less caregivers than enablers,

they taught by example, reading for hours
in the draughty house and now the house is ours,

with its drawers full of junk and odd
lines of verse and stairs that ascend to God

knows where, belfries and gymnasia,
the chapel, the workshop, aviaries, atria—

we can never hope to fill it all.
Our voices are too small

for its silences, too weak to spawn an echo.
Sometimes, even now, when the night-wind blows

into the chimney flue
I start from my bed, calling out—“Hello,

Mom and Dad, is that you?”

Daddy and Mommy at the prom

June 10: A Monster, A Freak, A Dance

Either the world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak.

Dillard goes on, after this short paragraph, to discuss both of these options.  She talks about them for almost a full page of the book.  She presents evidence that the world may be monstrous and that she herself may be a little on the freakish side.  Dillard never really chooses sides.  She leaves it up to the reader.

I am too tired to argue either of these alternatives.  I will say that I have seen some pretty terrible things in the world--suffering that made no sense, death that seemed arbitrary and unjust.  On the flip side, I have always been a little bit of a carnival sideshow attraction in my family, different from all of my brothers and sisters.  I have never met a poet who wasn't a little bit of a bearded lady.

My weekend is going to be equally monstrous and freakish.  Most of my day tomorrow will be spent in a dark auditorium, watching my kids practice and perform for their annual dance recital.  It is a long eight or nine hours.  Some people find this weekend a little torturous.  It's like an entire season of football or basketball in two days.  That's the monstrous part.  I really enjoy recital weekend, seeing all my kids' hard work over the past nine months pay off.  I am the freakish.

Don't get me wrong.  By about 4 p.m. on Sunday, I am going to be exhausted.  My daughter and son will probably be at each other's throats.  My wife will probably fall asleep on the way home from the theater.  It's not all sequins and feathers and lights.

However, I will enjoy myself.  Despite my daughter's inevitable meltdowns.  In the eye of my son's coming tantrums.  There's something very affirming for me in watching all these kids doing something they love to do.  Plus, dance is a beautiful art form.  It's live poetry--music and movement.

Saint Marty and Baryshnikov have a lot in common.