Another Annual-versity

It was one year ago this past weekend that the auctioneers came to the old house for the last time, took what they were going to take, and I loaded up the last of what I wanted, and turned over the keys to the new owners.

The old house. . . it feels like a dream now. I can still "see" it in my mind's eye, can still mentally navigate it as if it were a bit of virtual reality, but that thirty-five years of history? Gone. It almost feels like it happened to someone else.

I have word through my father that the new owners are planning to tear the barn down. They may already have done so. This means that the old place literally isn't the same place that I lived in anymore.

Although it was nothing but a hardship at the time, I guess now I should be grateful for the move; among other things, it kept some thoughts and emotions at bay that have lately been catching me up.

I can't believe that this coming May, Mom will have been gone for two years. Two YEARS. Two years and it's still an open wound. This morning at work a book landed on my desk that had no obvious connection to the memory, but it dredged everything up anyway, and I had to run to the men's room to cry.

I have so many reasons to be thankful at this point, and yet the memory still has the power to cut me down at will.

One year ago today, the new house was strewn with boxes. Today, it's a home that I am happy in, but it seems that I still have plenty of baggage to unload.

-- Freder

Holes. . . and a Discovery

I couldn't understand why the palm of my right hand hurt so much yesterday. It was over-all ouchie, but just at the base of my thumb it was particularly painful and red. I wondered about it all day. Then, around dinnertime, the coin finally dropped: on Saturday I dug two hundred and sixty holes in my lawn with a hand trowel. DUH! You think?

I'm a slow thinker. When rapid decisions are called for, I usually just freeze. If they got me on Hell's Kitchen, I'd probably just stand there with a spatula in my hand looking bewildered and repeating to myself, over and over again, "Oh my god! Oh my god!"


"Wake up!" Chef Ramsay would shout.  "What the **** are you doing?!"

"Yes, Chef! Sorry, Chef! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

Anyway. Two hundred and sixty holes exactly. I counted them.

A Hole is to Dig. I'm sure that my neighbors thought I was crazy, especially when I started in digging holes along the strip of grass beside the road. But I was planting daffodil bulbs. My father left a plastic bucket full of them on my doorstep. It's more than likely that some won't make it, but with any luck my yard will be dotted with daffodils next spring.

Most people plant daffodils in garden beds. But out at the old house we had a section of the back yard that was full of them every spring. My mother used to say that planting daffodils in that section of lawn was the best thing my father ever did.

I'm taking the idea one step further. I'm going to have daffodils all around my house. Don't know how I'll mow the lawn, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.

By the time I was done, having cut the grass just prior to the planting, I was so shagged out that I flopped on the porch and just evaporated. My shoulders were complaining bitterly at my treatment of them. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pounding against the back of the couch. But, yeah, it was a good kind of tired.

Today we've had two periods of torrential rain, so my daffodils are getting a good soaking.

Next, the hosta has to come out, to make way for hydrangeas. I don't think that's going to happen right away!

*

Yesterday I bought a combination printer and scanner. I wasn't planning on doing it. It was just there, with a sign overhead that said $49. I couldn't believe they were serious. Ah, but t probably doesn't work with a Mac, I tthought. Checked the box. Yes, it does! It's been so long since I was able to print or scan anything at home; even so, I stood there and thought about it for several minutes. I told you; I'm a slow thinker.

Later in the evening, printer / scanner ensconced and software installed, I cast around for something to test the scanning bit with. I finally settled on the black and white portrait of Mom that's been sitting in my kitchen here ever since I moved in. It was taken by her sister-in-law, my Aunt Sharron, maybe twenty-plus years ago, and is hands down the best portrait of her that I have.

In the process of taking it out of the frame, I found three more photos concealed underneath it. Photos that I had no memory of ever seeing before. All of them terrific. In one of them, she's seated on a wooden rocking horse with her brother, my Uncle John, standing beside her.

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the one that's heading up this post. Maybe it's that she's standing inside the "hoosegow" that's out in my back yard right now. Maybe it's because I've come to think of the structure as "my TARDIS," and this makes me feel as if she's just popping off for a bit, out for another lark in time and space, you know it's bigger in here than it is on the outside, possibility, possibility, possibility, see you later.

Maybe it's because she looks happier than I ever saw her, ever, in the last five years of her life.

I'm not putting it back behind the other pictures. This one deserves a frame of its own.

-- Freder.

By Any Other Name

I try to be brutally honest in most things here on the blog; but sometimes (like this morning) it seems as though I'm writing around the point, rather than getting to it. Not being deliberately misleading. Just not getting it.

There's something that I'm missing.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? As if the monster is standing right behind you, but no matter every which way you turn, you can't manage to see it?

Just like a movie, really. The audience can see the monster, but the character can't -- until it's too late.

*

At work on a Sunday. Seems pointless, really. Perhaps things will pick up as the day rolls on, perhaps the upperclassmen will start to return. Even so, it seems silly to be here at eight bloody o'clock in the morning when the campus is deader than Rock Hudson.

*

Ah, now. Speaking of Death. Although I sometimes personalize him (or her, depending on my mood), I dislike euphemisms for death, especially since my mother's.

"Passed Away" isn't the worst; the "away" part at least acknowledges the truth. But "Passed" or "Passing" to me smacks of Magical Thinking -- as though your loved one isn't gone. . . just, you know, moved sideways into another dimension.

To say that they are "with God now." That's the worst. Surely, if you are Of The Faith. you have to believe that all of us are with God, all of the time, all of our lives. What then is the purpose of this phrase? Does anyone really believe that our dearly departed are gleefully cavorting on the playground in the clouds with the Bearded Old Man watching over them like a benevolent parent? Does anyone really believe that our dead are busily having tea parties with Jesus in the stratosphere?

"Called Home." What does that mean? My mother's home was here with me. She wasn't called. She was taken.

"Crossed Over."  The Styx aside, death isn't a river that one ferries across, to emerge on the other side, Just the Same, only in a Different Place.

I have a hard time saying "dead" and "died," too, and have to force myself to type it, as when I had to write about my Uncle Orly earlier this week.

The word that I feel, the word that I know, is "Gone." It's the only honest word, the only word that expresses the emptiness. We like to imagine that our loved ones are "in a better place," but the reality is that they aren't where we want them to be: here, with us. How can death be a better place when what it means is the absence of life?

At their worst, euphemisms for death can even be used to justify the taking of life. I've been feeling well alone, in this past decade, with my belief that George Bush did a terrible thing when he invaded Iraq, and that President Obama has been wrong not to bring a swift end to it. Two wrongs don't make a right. All life is sacred. It's galling to know that the same people who want to outlaw abortion are perfectly OK with killing as many Muslims as possible. When Jimmy Carter declared with a smile that "Today, we are at peace," I was one of the ones who snickered -- because I believed that it was finally and for all time evident to the plainest idiot that War is never the answer. Now look at us. Carter's peace was a bigger accomplishment than I believed.

I've said good-bye so many times that it's become monotonous, a litany of goodbyes, like a string of Hail Marys assigned in penance: "Say a thousand goodbyes and call me in the morning."

Say a million goodbyes.

Say ten million goodbyes.

Keep on saying goodbye. . . until it's your turn.

In my case, there isn't going to be anyone left here to miss me. That's probably for the best. I'd hate to be responsible for anyone feeling the kind of sadness and loss that I feel on a daily basis.

-- Freder.

Uncle Orly

My Uncle Orland died yesterday. He was my father's older brother.

We weren't close. My father moved us to Maine in the mid-'60s, and the families, which had previously been very social (we summered together at Lake Vermillion, always did the holidays together, and had dinner often at each other's homes) went their separate ways. I saw my Uncle Orly only twice after I reached adulthood. The first time he took the fedora off of my head and rearranged the creases. The second time he called my car "an American piece of crap" (well, he was right) and told me, "This is what 84 looks like."

That bluntness was characteristic of Uncle Orly, but also of my father and of their father, Grandpa Adolph. Uncle Orly often said things that he shouldn't have said, especially to my father. Once, he took my father aside and told him off for being so critical of me. He said, "Don't you see what you just did? He was working really hard, and when you cut him down he completely deflated."

Once, he took me aside and complained about my father's hair. "He has beautiful snow-white hair, and he makes himself look ridiculous by washing it out with that Grecian formula stuff."

Remembering comments like that makes me wish that I had known Uncle Orly better. He was right about a lot of things, but being right doesn't always make it right to say it. There were sometimes Inappropriate Incursions.

Uncle Orly had white hair for as long as I knew him. He had piercing blue eyes and a strong voice. I used him as the physical model (though not a character model) for Mr. Sentack in my short story "Punch & Judy" (available elsewhere on this blog). He liked the outdoors and he liked racing cars, and he liked being the Alpha Dog.

I didn't have those words to describe him when I was a little boy, but I could sense it about him, and it's confirmed when I watch the footage of him in our family home movies. When he entered any room he was in command, but somehow in command from a distance.

There were stories from my father about their scouting days, about pranks played. One of the pranks involved the streetcars of St. Paul, although the details are lost to me. I'll have to ask my father. On another occasion, a Scouting trip (this was back when the Boy Scouts were really Boy Scouts, and much time was spent in the wild), the boys were investigating an abandoned house and Uncle Orly rigged up pranks to play on the others, to make them think the place was haunted. According to my father, Uncle Orly was deeply engrossed in this when he sensed a presence in the room, felt a hand on his shoulder, turned around to find himself alone. But that may have been a prank as well.

Uncle Orly was legendary for the Treasure Hunts he would sometimes set up for us kids, if he was cajoled in the right way. My sister and I had a taste of this when his family visited us in Maine, I think during our second summer. He started in the front yard and went deep into the woods out behind the house, leaving us clues of various kinds at every step of the way. Some were written, some were blazes on the trees. Some were too hard for us to figure out ("What's a hoosegow?" we asked our mother. It was the jailhouse that now rests in my back yard). We spent the entire afternoon on my Uncle Orly's Treasure Hunt, and finally found a cache of lollypops and candy in the mailbox far down the hill at the end of the drive.

I have nothing but supposition to base this on,.but after the loss of his middle son Brian (who has been very much on my mind of late; I'm planning another post about him), Uncle Orly appeared to go into a tailspin. Bad things began to happen. I won't type about them here.

Based on what little I know about their relationship, I would describe Uncle Orly's marriage to Aunt Lucille as one based on mutual disrespect. And yet they married for life, and seemed to have some good times with the bad. If Uncle Orly treated my Aunt badly, he paid for it in later years when his health began to go and he had to rely upon her "mercy." Once he fell on their front step and broke his hip. Aunt Lucille walked right past him, she had a church function to go to and couldn't be bothered, she left him lying there in the front yard. That's probably the most extreme example of how she dealt with him on a daily basis in his last years.

This week, the nursing home called to let her know he was going. She had another church function and that was more important. By the time she got home from that, they had called again telling her not to bother.

From my father's reports of Uncle Orly's final days in the nursing home in conditions that I am certain he found intolerable, I do not feel sad for his loss. But I feel terribly sad for his family and for my father, who loved him warts and all. And I feel terribly sad for me: because it seems like they are beginning to drop like flies, and I know that within a decade's time I'll probably be all on my own. I cried all last night and this morning, and at the same time felt disgusted with myself for all the tears over someone that I never made the effort to know as an adult.

My mother disliked Orly, and she had good reasons, but they were the reasons of grown-ups, and as I've already pointed out more than once I really only knew Uncle Orly from the perspective of a child. Still, her feelings colored mine as I grew up, which accounts for why I regarded him warily on the occasions when we did meet.

She disliked the way he treated my father. My dad worshipped his elder brother, and in return Orly was often condescending at best. She disliked the way that he treated his wife. She disliked the whole Alpha Dog thing.

For my part, I prefer to remember him as the man who created the legendary Treasure Hunts.

-- Freder.

A Blooming Tragedy

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post with the saddest news. Terry Pratchett, British author of the Discworld novels, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and says he will consider assisted suicide when the time comes. Presumably, when he can no longer write or work for legalizing assisted suicide in England.

Here's a link to the NPR story.

I can't say that I've read all, or even most, of his novels. The man is prolific. The one bitter little gripe that I have about him is that nobody who is that prolific has the right to be so good.

Lots of writers have attempted the comedy-fantasy, but none, to my knowledge, have brought such humanity to their work. Pratchett isn't just a genre writer -- the stories are character-driven and the humor is a full-blooded mix of satire and verbal slapstick that masks an underlying seriousness and concerns some of  the big questions of life. It's not for nothing that Death is a recurring character in Pratchett's novels; in Reaper Man (one of his best) The Powers that Be actually sack Death because he's developing a personality. Can't have that happen!

The bumbling witches and warlocks that populate his early novels aren't shallow characters. They bumble not in the form of pratfalls but because they are human.

A friend of mine is a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse. I don't know why I was surprised to learn that she is also a big fan of Pratchett's, but it's easy to see the connection once you think about it. They share the same lightness of touch and a distinct British-ness that colors their work. Like Wodehouse, you can pick up any one of Pratchett's books, start anywhere, there's no one beginning point, all avenues into their worlds are good. But there the similarities end: where Wodehouse draws eccentricity out of the natural world, Pratchett draws humanity out of the most eccentric of fantasy worlds. More so than Wodehouse, Pratchett has something to say. If you haven't read him, you should.

I don't feel sorry or sad for Pratchett. My sense is that he is as emotionally well-equipped to face the challenges ahead of him as well as anyone. And although the prospect of Alzheimer's must be worse for a writer, who makes his living and defines himself out of his own head and personality, all the evidence indicates that Alzheimer's is harder on the family than it is on the sufferer.

I'm sad -- and angry -- for us. It's not fair. More damn tears to hold back. Pratchett might have had more than twenty years of activity and as many more books ahead of him. It's a crime. We're being robbed. Why couldn't this have happened to Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steele, instead of Pratchett? Why does this sort of thing have to happen to people who bring good into the world?

Thank you, Mr. Pratchett. You will be missed.

-- Freder.

Almost All Gone

Old photographs can be haunting even when you don't know anyone in the picture. Change is the murderer of all things. When you do know the people in the photograph, you can be left feeling powerless and sad. I look at the picture above and think, my god, was the world ever really like that?

There are only three people in that picture who are still alive: My sister the wolf, my father, and me. It's funny that we three are sitting together while everyone else outside of the car is waiting to be swept away by Time and Motion.

My grandmother Agnes, far left, was the first to go. This picture was taken before she suffered a stroke while weeding her garden on a sweltering hot day. It didn't kill her: it robbed her of herself and her memory. She became first a wordless, frustrated child, and then, slowly a vegetable confined to bed. She died of choking while my Aunt was feeding her.

And the auto moves on.

Next was her husband, my grandfather Adolf, the first alcoholic in the family, standing on the runner board to my right. He was coming out of an antiques show when he was struck by a car driven by a young idiot with a girl in his lap. He was hit so hard that his body was thrown clear across the street. Grandpa had a hard life, had a lot to cope with, including the loss of most of his tongue to cancer. He was a very matter-of-fact guy. I didn't know about most of his troubles.

So my father was the first one of my parents to become an orphan, while I was still quite young. The auto had a chance to speed forward some few years before the next one dropped away, the man holding the camera, my grandfather Claude. He died at home, in my grandmother Melvina's arms, I believe of an aneurysm.

Grandma (sitting on the running board) went steadily downhill after that. She was already frail. I don't think that she ever forgave Grandpa Claude for dying first. My mother and her brother got her into an assisted living facility, a better place than many I've seen. I was there to help move her from her house into her new apartment. She tried to get along, but I could see she was bitter. I came back home to Maine and never saw her again. On her deathbed she told my mother, "Is this really all there is? What's the point?" and early last year Mom said she was starting to feel the same way about life.

The car didn't last long. Dad loved old cars, but he kept switching them out. The one I remember was a big black enclosed car the size of a small house.

The picture was taken at our house on Edgcombe Road. Even though I was very little, I have many memories of my life there that I can "see" as clearly as when they happened. My father didn't believe me, but I was able to describe the house to him in detail. Sometimes my memory is so vivid that I feel like I'm looking into an alternate universe. Can see into it, but can't go there. The black automobile carried the three of us away from all that. It is far, far in the distance.

Sometimes I don't think I understand the world or the way it works any better than I did when I was that little kid behind the wheel.

-- Freder.

Memorial Day

A terrible bout of tears at 5 AM on Memorial Day when I should have been asleep.

The realization that I am "on the spectrum," so to speak, brings with it a lot answers to the questions of what a lot of "normal" people would -- and have -- judged as being an unhealthy relationship with my mother and an unhealthy reluctance to leave home.

But there was nothing Freudian about it. I had Asperger's. No one in the family had a name for it, but we all knew that something was wrong.

Mom was my Protector. Home was my Safe Haven in a world that I could not begin to understand.

How difficult, then, to suddenly have the roles reversed when, six years ago now, she had to have her right leg amputated due to diabetes, and I was suddenly thrust into the position of being the Support Person -- physically, emotionally, financially. . .

Coping, coping, coping, my life and hers became a landscape of dealing with things that were a horror to us both.

And still how much more difficult to lose her so suddenly, without significant (to me, anyway, although a neurotypical might have picked up on the signs more easily than I did) warning -- and then to be assaulted by my sister, entering My World and stealing from the estate, turning things upside down; by the legalities of death; by the auctioneers coming into my home and tearing it apart into a horror, a ruin, literally, for me, ripping my Reality into shreds, turning a rich world of organized clutter into a Depression-era state of Chaos --

A year ago today, we laid her remains to rest around the  old house. This was made necessary because Memorial Day was the only day that I could  get off from work. I was drunk, of course, as I am drunk now typing this at 5:30 AM, for the same reasons.

I gave everybody a chance to say what they wanted to say, and then I said my piece, and then in deference to my hypocrite sister, who wanted Jesus present in some form, I recited the following verse, the only verse that I know by heart, because it's from a favorite movie of mine, and as an Aspie I am good at remembering these things, even drunk --

My name is known: God and King

I am most in majesty in whom no beginning may be, and no end.

Highest in potency I am, and have been ever!

I have made the stars and the planets in their courses to go

I have made a moon for the night

And a sun to light the day also..

I have made Earth, where trees and grasses spring.

Beasts and fowl both great and small

All thrive, and have my liking

I have made All of Nothing for Man's sustenation.

And of this Pleasant Garden that I have Mostly Goodly Planted

I will make HIM gardener for his OWN re-creation.

There was a pause. Then my father said something along the lines of Amen -- and, I do not exaggerate, everyone RAN for their cars. ZOOM! There was dust in the air in the wake of their tires tearing up the driveway.

I was left alone.

I thought, Why did they all run away and leave me?

Then I went inside and poured another drink.

-- Freder.

Too many brains at the Breakfast Table

I'll be back with a real post before the holiday weekend is out, but for now I just wanted to type this interesting passage verbatim from the back end of Nick Dubin's book about Aspergers and anxiety. It comes as part of a conversation about aligning the head and the heart. Take it away, Nick:

In recent years, there has even been evidence to suggest parts of the body, other than the brain, register emotions the same way that the brain does. Dr. Paul Pearsall (1999), a respected psycho-neuroimmunologist, suggested the heart also thinks and feels like the brain. This seems like a radical notion, but he showed many of the same neural cells that are found in the brain are also found in the heart. In her 1997 book, A Change of Heart, Claire Sylvia described what happened to her after her heart transplant. According to Sylvia, after she received her new heart, she experienced a major change in her personality. Further, new memories and sensations surfaced out of nowhere. She ultimately sought out the family of the young man who had donated his heart. To her utter surprise, she found out she had seemingly acquired some of his personality traits. Even more surprising, her story is not unique. Apparently, reports of this phenomenon of a personality transfer are not uncommon among heart transplant recipients (Pearsall 1999).

Oh, great! Bad enough that all men have two brains, usually with conflicting desires -- now there's a third with a voice of its own! No wonder I always feel conflicted!

Later.

-- Freder.

The End

I don't know what time it was when I left the hospital. It had to be around two-thirty, going on three AM. I was in a dazed state, the tears had not yet begun. The building seemed completely empty. I was carrying my mother's prosthetic leg and a shopping bag full of her things, including a Babar book that I'd bought on Friday to cheer her up and which she never got a chance to see.

I can't believe that it's been a year. Sometimes it seems like that much time cannot possibly have passed, and other times it seems like too much has happened to possibly be contained by just one year.

The parking lot was deserted. I drove home through a dead world and somehow made it in to work the next morning, and every morning after that. It was graduation time, I wasn't allowed to take any time off. The falling apart happened gradually.

Mom and Mickey Mouse were born the same year. She grew up on Disney animation, and her whole house was filled with Disneyana, among other things.

It still doesn't seem real. Go figure. Nothing seems quite real to me anymore. All something I dreamed. I go through the motions, pretend to be a Real Boy. That's what life has become.

Goodnight, Mom. Goodbye.

Baby Steps. . .

Eddie Fox and Buster Keaton at the graveside of Roscoe Arbuckle.
From chapter eight of "Tinsel*Town."

Today I took the bull by the horns and began assembling content for the new website. Instead of just re-posting the same old files, all of my comics are going to be "remastered" to a significantly larger size, and reframed to reflect a whole page of story instead of the original 3/4 page serial installments. The computers are faster than when I started doing this, the screens are bigger, and I think the new sizing is pretty darn nice. When I post an update, it will be an entire chapter of each series, instead of just a page at a time. It will still take a while to get everything online, so I'm not in danger of having to create anything new for a while. That's a good thing. I need to take this slow.

In order to do all this, I had to un-stuff the original files from my old computer, and while I was at it I burned them onto CD -- the first time I've ever had a really proper back-up of this material.

I dreaded starting on the work, but it was time. Once I got into it and started seeing the new results, it became enjoyable. But it sure is hard to work with graphics when you have a persistent pussyquat determined to sit on your lap!

*

One year ago tonight, I was at my mother's bedside in the hospital, holding her hand,  while she seemed to get farther and farther away. I refused to accept what was happening, was still hoping for the best. That's what I do.

Around seven o'clock my sister came in. She stood at the foot of the bed and started talking. With one thing and another, her usual "wonderful" bedside manner and the fact that she didn't have any trouble at all accepting what was happening and was determined to "help" me reach the same stage, I ended up having a not so small meltdown, and was politely asked by the hospital staff to leave.

At home, I fed the cats and poured liquor into myself, repeating as necessary until I fell into bed.

Shortly after one AM, I woke and could not get back to sleep for thinking about Mom. I decided to get up and go back in there to be with her. I took a quick shower first, which I needed badly.

As I was getting out of the shower, the telephone rang.

One of my mother's favorite songs was "Somewhere," from West Side Story. She kept the lyrics by her side in the last years of her life.

I was going to play it at her Memorial Gathering, but I goofed somehow, or there was a technical glitch, or something, and that one never got played.

So I'm making it up to her tonight. She never heard the version that I'm going to post here (performed by Tom Waits, of all people), but I feel certain that she would have liked it, maybe even loved it.

Here you go, Mom. This one's for you.

-- Freder.

Time Marches On

It's so ironic that the virtual end of the move and the transition falls, almost to the day, on the anniversary of my own personal Hiroshima.

Exactly one year ago today, I came home from work to find that my mother was not sitting in her usual place, in her cat chair in the kitchen.

(You can't see it very well, but my cat Patches, self-proclaimed Queen of the Universe, is sitting in it in the photo above, taken in the old house at the height of its clutter.)

This would not have been such a distressing thing, had it not been for the scene I'd experienced that morning, described a few posts back.

There were empty cat food tins overturned on the stove. The kitties had not come to greet me as usual. The television was playing to an empty room.

I ran into my mother's bedroom hollering, "Are you all right?" and heard, faintly. . .

"no. . . I think I'd better go to the hospital."

I found her sitting on one of her stools at the end of her bed, slumped against the bedpost, breathing hard.

I called 911 from the phone that sat in the pile of dolls and stuff at the foot of her bed. They stayed on the line with me, and I stood with the receiver in one hand held to my ear, holding my mother's hand in my left, until the ambulance arrived.

It took half an hour, and when they came, unfolding their massive stretcher in the yard, I hollered at them, "There's no way you're going to get that in the house."

They ended up walking her out to the stretcher, and I ended up kicking myself and kicking myself and kicking myself.

Damn. I mean, I could have done that. I could have walked her out to my car, and driven her to the Emergency Room, and I could have saved half an hour, and maybe that would have made the difference.

Damn it. Damn it all. Oh, god, it could have made all the difference.

That night, she and I both believed that she was still going to survive this.

That night, a small part of me, something that the rest of me could not bear listening to, knew something that I could not bear to admit.

I'm going to post some music over the next few days, Highly Illegally.

So, let them sue me.

Here's the music for tonight, Let me know if it doesn't work.

To my knowledge, my mother only heard this song once, and it moved her to tears.

My first thought was to play it at her Memorial Gathering, but I made the decision early on that there would be No Sad Songs at that Event.

It will already be known to some of you. It's one of my favorites.

Take it away, Van!

Don't Dance on this Grave

So -- Osama Bin Laden is dead, and I am disgusted with the way some of my fellow Americans are acting.

Death is never a good thing, never something to celebrate, not even when it happens to someone as bad as Bin Laden.

By dancing in the streets and chanting "USA! USA!" you are only fanning the fire of hatred. By being jubilant you are only demonstrating your own ignorance. By celebrating, you are only showing that you don't abide by the tenets of the religion you profess to believe in.

The Bible is pretty specific about this: Love your enemies, and pray for your persecutors. Thou shalt not kill. It doesn't say, Thou shalt not kill, except for the Bad Guys.

If nothing else, think of what we could have learned from the man about his operation had he lived.

I'm against the death penalty and I feel the same way when people stand outside a state penitentiary and celebrate when someone is put to death. I don't care what he did. We are taught that vengeance is not ours, but we sure as hell don't practice it, and some hard-core Bible Thumpers are some of the worst offenders.

It seems to me that all this stuff should be obvious. We are rightly upset and outraged when our enemies celebrate the deaths of our fallen soldiers or drag their bodies through the streets. It's just common sense that if our cause is just, we ought not to behave in the same way.

Grow up, get a conscience, get a clue, and stop singing Ding Dong The Witch is Dead. The war isn't over. There's still more than enough Death to go around.

-- Freder.

Flowers for the Dead

I know that other people are thinking this, because I think it myself sometimes: It's been a year. Why aren't you over this? You should be over this by now.

In just a couple of hours, it will be -- would have been -- my mother's birthday. She was no worse off than she had been for some time. I thought she had a few years still left in her. Instead, she was gone in two weeks.

For the past two mornings, and tonight, this evening, I've had much more than the usual amount of tears.

I can't believe that it's been a year. My perception of time has been even more whacked-out than usual.

A year ago, the largest problem seemed to be my mother's financial troubles and the way that they were tapping me out, too. Every couple of months she'd come crying to me to ask for another thousand dollars. I didn't mind the drain on my finances so much, because I'd sold a piece of art for a lot of money and I could afford it. What I did mind were the waterworks.

She was so dependent on me for everything -- most especially for company -- and it was emotionally and physically exhausting. She used to complain that I stayed in my end of the house too much. But with the job and being responsible for absolutely everything around the house, I desperately needed my Alone Time to recuperate.

Now I know why. My senses were completely overwhelmed. No wonder I kept myself well pickled pretty much 24/7. Life was demanding the very things out of me that were the hardest for a Probable Aspie to give.

Last Spring was a good deal warmer and sunnier than this one. The weekends that began the month of April were sunny and hot. On Saturdays, we made our errands run into town. It took the whole damn day. Mom would walk out to the car, and then at every stop we made, I would pull her wheelchair out of the trunk, set it up, and she'd wheel herself through the various stores. It was a lot of work for her, and she performed like a champ.

Until we got home. Somehow, somewhy, the walk from the car back to the house hit her like a ton of bricks. The sun was high and bright and hot. She would collapse into a chair just short of the door, and I would have to stand over her with an umbrella to shield her from the heat. I'd plead with her to do what she could to get into the house where it was cool and she could rest -- because the umbrella wasn't helping much. A couple of times I ran into the house to get her a glass of ice water.

That walk from the car to the house was a real point of concern. On Friday the fourteenth of April, I was looking ahead to Saturday and worrying about that walk.

We never got that far.

On Friday the fourteenth of April, just a year ago, she walked out of the house for the last time.

That's another post. For now, there's nothing left but to cry and cry.

I spent the bulk of today planting more and more nasturtiums. . . in pots and planters, along the edge of the side back garden. I'm done now. I hope that they come up. Some stupid atavistic monkey stuporstitious part of myself still imagines that I can bring her back if I plant enough nasturtiums.

When the Apocalypse Comes. . .

I spent the weekend largely immersed in my own little world, coming up for air just long enough to run some errands, take a walk around the block, and follow the sad events in Japan.

I think of how hard the last few months have been for me, and I know that it's nothing, less than nothing, compared to what's facing those poor people in the years ahead. This morning comes the news that thousands of bodies are washing up on the beaches of Japan's coastal towns, literally a tide of death. Also the news of another explosion in one of their nuclear power plants -- this Big Event is still unfolding, with Who Knows What waiting in the wings.

I lost my mother and my home -- but I landed in a new home in better circumstances, and am steadily getting it together.

In Japan, whole populations were wiped off the face of the earth. Whole towns erased from the map.

And I am fascinated to look at the faces of the survivors. I see very few tears. There is grief, but it seems to be underwritten by strength. Some even manage to smile. It took me months to reach that stage, and mine was a common, garden-variety grief.

No doubt some are still in shock, still in survival mode; no doubt that the tears will come, once they have the time to look around. The devastation is so widespread, and in some areas so complete, that it must be numbing to the sensibilities.

On the Global scale, I have to wonder what's going on here? Haiti, China, Thailand, New Orleans. . . the planet knocked off it's axis, shortening the days. Landslides, tidal waves, hurricanes, eruptions. I'm not even close to being one of those loony "End of Days" theorists, the 2012 crowd and the "Left Behind" bible thumpers who actually want to bring on the apocalypse so that they can get to Heaven in their lifetime, but to me the planet does seem to be tearing itself apart, and doing it at an alarming rate.

If, as Jorge Luis Borges once imagined, the planets were sentient beings, communicating with each other as they circled about in the sea of stars, then I could well understand why the Earth would wish to be rid of the human parasite that has been infesting it for, in the grand scheme of time, the last few days. I'd scratch, too. I could even understand why it might begin to succumb to the illness.

And if I believed in God, it would be easy to imagine the old guy thinking that it was time to do another Sodom & Gomorrah number, on a much grander scale.

But none of that gets me any closer to understanding what's really going on here. That something is going on, I have no doubt.

While making my errands run on Saturday, I passed one of those non-traditional churches that has a display sign out front, and thinks that it needs to regale the public at large with "Wise Sayings." Usually these sayings are more along the lines of the trivial, the trite, and the idiotic. This one, that day, read: "Don't think about the strength of the storm. Think about the strength of your God."

On one level this reminded me of the purpose of religion, and the value of faith, and why even J.R.R. Tolkien depicted loss of faith as a mortal sin. But if you believe in God then, by definition, you have to believe that God created the storm as well, and that he had a reason. The most common reason offered is that God does these things to test us.

What a pernicious, evil-minded son of a bitch! What a foul, sad, pathetic creature that God must be!

That God killed a lot of people last week just to learn that the Japanese are made of Strong Stuff.

When I knew that I would have to move on, I looked at the job of work ahead of me and allowed myself to  despair, not knowing if I could ever get through it all by myself. Now I look at the pictures coming out of Japan, all the rubble, all the wreckage, and am in awe of the ability these folk are demonstrating to keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

It's not just an example to follow. It's the meaning of life.

Working Out Warhol

Songs for Drella, a musical piece by Lou Reed and John Cale, is an internalized, introspective look at the life of Andy Warhol. It is billed as being entirely fictitious, and insofar as it tries to represent the thoughts and feelings of Warhol himself, that must be true.

But where it reflects the vagaries, the trials and the conflictedness of Reed and Cale's longtime personal and professional association with Warhol, Songs for Drella takes  on the weight of reality. Quoth Reed:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough

He said I was lazy, I said I was young

He said "How many songs did you write?"

I'd written zero, I lied and said ten

"You won't be young forever.

"You should have written fifteen.

"It's work. The most important thing is work."

Whether or not this exchange actually took place, it still rings true, and carries with it a lashing bite for anyone involved in the creative trade. Reed and Cale paint an ethical side of Warhol that's rarely discussed by people who didn't know him.

You expect interesting things from Reed and Cale; you expect complexity in the writing of both music and lyrics, but in Songs for Drella the pair deliver something that I don't believe they are much known for: emotional complexity. The piece chronicles a difficult relationship, one where mutual respect exists but accord cannot be reached, one where misunderstanding often rears its head, and love and honor come with the price of regret.

I really miss you,

I really miss your mind

I haven't heard ideas like that in such a long, long time

I loved to watch you work and watch you paint

But when I saw you last, I turned away

Here's the soundtrack for tonight's post.

Reed is thoughtful and hard-driving musically, while Cale is thoughtful and melodic. The two work together like a precision timepiece. Middle age has caused them to look backward with candor -- about Warhol, and about themselves.

They really hated you, now all that's changed

But I have some resentments that can never be unmade

You hit me where it hurt, I didn't laugh

Your diaries are not a worthy epitaph

You need not be an admirer of Mr. Warhol to find something in this work that you will recognize in yourself, perhaps painfully. While Songs for Drella makes as eloquent a case as any for the value of Warhol's contribution, it goes much farther than that.

To Middle America, Warhol was the equivalent of a Space Alien, remote and unknowable. By writing about the fragility of life and friendship, Reed and Cale bring Warhol down to Earth, and humanize him for the first time.

-- Freder.

Life is a Cabaret, old chum. . .

Dame Judi Dench has an autobiography just out; I can't say whether she actually wrote it or not. I've enjoyed her work a lot over the years, but I was surprised to learn that she played Sally Bowles in the original 1968 London production of Cabaret.

It's one of those things that doesn't seem right, somehow. Of course I hopped over to Google to see if I could find any photos of her in the role, and was surprised again to find that someone actually had film of it, and had posted it on YouTube!

This is a surprising age we live in.

Not surprising (to me, anyway), was to learn that I was correct to think this was a strange casting choice. My apologies to Dame Dench, but she was all wrong for the part. She didn't look the part, and she didn't manage to capture the spirit of Sally Bowles. Her delivery of "Don't Tell Momma" was nowhere near as good as that of Jill Haworth, who originated the part on Broadway.

Haworth was crisp, light, insouciant. The young Judi Dench seems plodding and frowzy by comparison.

The clip includes the introduction of Sally Bowles by The Emcee, a character played so remarkably on Broadway by Joel Grey that he has become forever identified with the role. The young man playing the Emcee in the London production looks the part, all right, and has the voice, but again, his interpretation is woefully wrong-headed.

I've performed the part myself, and seen it performed by actors other than Mr. Grey, and it amazes me how many actors simply don't get it.

The Emcee is not meant to be fey and limp-wristed and comical.

The Emcee is meant to be EVIL. Evil, evil, evil! He doesn't just introduce the acts. To some extent he controls the events and dominates all the characters in the play. The somewhat good-naturedness of his perversion (as exemplified in the song "Two Ladies") is meant to be deceptive. The Emcee represents all the corruption of the Nazi regime, all its murderous enmity, all its bigotry. When Sally is condemned at the end of the play to return to the Cabaret, it must be given to understand that Berlin is about to erupt and her life under the spectre of The Emcee is about to become dark and dire.

That message cannot be delivered if the actor playing the Emcee would rather charm the audience than frighten them. In my opinion, even Alan Cumming's portrayal in the Broadway revival was misguided. By sexualizing the Emcee, his menace becomes too specific and down-market. He needs to be above the earthy concerns that he markets as his wares.

All of this got me to thinking about Jill Haworth as well, and I Googled her just to see what she had been up to over the years. It turns out that she died just recently, on January 3, at the age of 65, of "natural causes."

This is from her obituary:

"They underestimated her," Cabaret's director, Hal Prince, told the New York Times. "Sally Bowles was not supposed to be a professional singer. She wasn’t supposed to be so slick that you forgot she was an English girl somewhat off the rails in the Weimar era. When Jill came in and auditioned, she nailed it right away, walked that line. That’s what we wanted, and that’s what she delivered."

All Those Years Ago

John Lennon was assassinated on my twenty-second birthday. The first words that I heard that morning came from my mother, hollering up the stairs, "John Lennon's been killed."

Happy Birthday.

I had already lost two grandparents by then. My fraternal Grandma Agnes had suffered a stroke years earlier, and died a vegetable in a nursing home with a feeding tube forcing mush down her throat. My fraternal grandfather Adolf had been killed several years later coming out of a Stamp Collector's show. He was hit by a young moron driving down the road with a girl on his lap.

Both of these deaths came to me with a sense of detachment. First there was the physical detachment, in that my family had moved to Maine when I was six years old and since that time I saw my grandparents only when they came to visit, once or twice a year. I was not a part of their deaths, I lived half a continent away from them, and my parents did not even see fit for me to join them at the funerals.

Beyond that, I was just so young. I hadn't begun to ask the big questions; hell fire, I did not even know the words to express the concepts in those big questions. I'm still not sure that I know them. Religion? Up to a point, my family went to church every Sunday. Then, suddenly, we stopped. I know that religion was never anything more than an abstract to me, and my sense is that my parents were starting to feel the same way about it.

When I was very, very young, and we were living in Minnesota, my mother taught Sunday School at (I think) the Lutheran Church. I remember only one particular lesson. She told of how they nailed Jesus to the cross, and I asked, out loud, "Didn't it hurt?"

I was so little that the concept of somebody doing something like that to anyone was unbelievable to me.

Now, all I have to do is turn on the television and hear about what's happening in Mexico and other places, things so horrible that crucifixion seems mildly invasive by comparison.

This is going off on a tangent. Here's where I wanted to go in the first place:

John Lennon was another thing. I believe that Lennon's murder was the first time I started to know at some level that this is real, this is all there is, and it's not permanent, it can be taken away from us at any time, if you leave your house at the wrong time (or even if you don't) you can be snuffed out just like that.

When George Harrison released his memorial song, "All Those Years Ago," I confess that I didn't understand it.  The thoughts and emotions that it expresses are a good deal more complicated than what you encounter in the average pop song, and the deceptively upbeat, bouncy tone of the melody is in one sense misleading. The song is by no means a dirge -- and I suppose that was my problem with it.

I didn't begin to understand the song until I reached the age that George was when he wrote it. The joy of the music and the pain of the words started to come together for me. Harrison's relationship with Lennon was not always the rosiest; that's the way friendships and partnerships are.

Harrison was a much more religious man than I am. As I've written in other posts, I believe it when I can see it, and sometimes not even then. But there's something awfully compelling in the very harsh, angry thought behind the lyrics:

They've forgotten all about God

He's the only reason we exist,

Yet you were the one that they thought was so weird

All those years ago

Now I'm more than a decade older than Lennon was when he was assassinated, and George has been gone an awfully long time, too. Both of them lived significantly shorter lives than anyone in my family.

Shortly after Harrison's death, I believe that I wrote a series of emails to friends, in effect asking: What's going on here? Where has it all gone? Why does it have to be like this?

My very pragmatic friend BC replied to them saying, "George Harrison isn't dead because [I honestly forget this part]. George Harrison is dead because he smoked six packs of cigarettes a day."

And he was right. Actions have consequences. The same thing is true with my mother, who shouted up the stairs to me on my birthday that John Lennon had been killed by a madman.

Her death should not have come as such a shock to me. I was paying attention, but I was running away from what I saw. I was pickling my fear and dread in a sea of alcohol. I couldn't face it. I didn't want to know.