A Bit of My (College) Stuff

As you know, if you read this blog, and surprisingly, people seem to do so, I have been going through STUFF (the thought of this made me watch the George Carlin bit on this very subject; highly recommended). Some of the sentimental STUFF I have put in photograph form online, just in case somebody, 100 years from now, if we survive as the human race, might find interesting, from a kind of personal and historical point of view.  Just call me Ozymandias.  I believe in eternal immortality, but I also like the idea of an earthly version in memory. Maybe it will work better for me than it did for Ozymandias. I'm not holding my breath, but I have this bug about trying.  Of course, whether or not there is life after death (hint: I think there is), I won't probably care. I digress. 

Some of the STUFF I have placed in a similar form on this blog, like my Dad's short short stories so that he won't be utterly forgotten. A whole lot I have given away to a Veteran's Group, the STUFF that actually can be used, clothes, jewelry, books, small furniture. I should note that the latter seems not to make a dent in my lingering STUFF. The condo still looks chock full of tchotchkes, each of which, upon review, is emotionally indispensable. I know, this reflects all sorts of psychological realities. Hey, we all got them! Take a look around your abode. Bet you are holding onto all sorts of ridiculous things. 

One of those items I present to you today, both in photographic form and textual form. It's Freshman Year at Fordham University, the Bronx, New York, 1973, (that reality causes a groan!). I am in an English class and poetry is the current focus.  We have an assignment to write on John Keats, "Ode on A Grecian Urn", particularly it seems on both the style and the content; no surprise. I was usually pretty good about doing my homework on time, and ahead of time. But if my memory serves, this was one of those flash assignments, like a pop quiz. I tended to do my homework in my room (by then we had been three years in an apartment that had two bedrooms, instead of one for a family of three), but that evening, I took to the galley kitchen and the small round particle board table. What I remember about the exercise was that it was one of those rare times in which something came easy to me, flowed into my head, and just came through the pen (and then my handwriting wasn't as awful), and I found myself actually enjoying the task. I got a good grade, and there was something comforting, even joyful that something I enjoyed doing, was appreciated.

Yes, I feel compelled to put it here, and if you want, just skip over it. 

Djinna Gochis

English 15, Section 9

April 24, 1973

    An understanding of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" requires knowledge that only a classical education could give, or, at least, a little research.  With his allusions, Keats assumes that the reader has some prior conception of Greek life, art, myth and philosophy. An awareness of the extended allusions seems essential to the meaning and greater appreciation of of the ode.

By selecting as his subject, a Grecian urn, representative of a golden age of humanity, Keats effectively establishes his believe in the lasting perfection of human creation.  The urn is symbolic of physical and spiritual beauty, suspended in time. The expressiveness of Greek art is the expressiveness of human kind.  That such a thing was created by man seems proof of man's essentially lofty nature.  Indeed, while he describes the intricacies of the painted figures (descriptive), he allows himself the freedom to tell the story of mankind, the persistence of the spirit and of human ideas (narrative).

The images themselves are remarkably real.  All senses come into play while reading the poem. Once can see the forests and the maidens, chased by the gods in the growth.  One can hear the pipes and smell the sweet flowers.  It is even possible to feel the pulsation of life itself.  The poet chooses his words well--the diction allows the pictures to come alive.  Every detail is meticulously arranged--the picture is clear.  

But what does the poet say? Each stanza has its own significance.  The first tells of the joys of earth-bound living.  There are two mythical stories--one of Daphne, who, scorning Apollo, was turned into a tree at Tempe and the other of the revelries of Pan (half-man, half-horse) and the nymphs at Oready.  All life life to the fullest.  They enjoy physical pleasures (a kind of deification of human pleasure these myths).

There is more than physical joy.  There is the pleasure unbounded by time and space-the mind, the imagination. The youth will never grow old.  The tree will never lose its foliage.  Love will never fade for the young there pictured.

The third stanza is an extension of the second..  It is a development of the concept of the eternity of things beautiful--of art and of the mind. 

The life of Greece will ever be remembered.  Once the priests brought sacrifice to the gods.  Once there existed an ancient town and its sleeping ancient inhabitants.  All these will be preserved forever on the urn.  Their memory lives.  Herein lies the importance of art.

The fifth stanza draws Keat's thoughts through to a conclusion--neither unexpected nor startling.  He merely reiterates that BEAUTY lives when each generation is dead and gone. It provided that (envied) sought after link with eternity, with immortality.  Beauty is forever.

The meter seems to be generally iambic which represents perhaps the smoothness, the gentle flowing of time through eternity.  The rhyme is partial and peculiar (ababcdedce).  The stanzaic form is difficult to determine and required some research.  It is apparently a rather unconventional form, praise as a feat.  It is a combination of the quatrain (the first four lines) and the sestet (the last six lines, generally used in the Italian Sonnet).

The blatant metaphor, and the most famous is "Beaty is truth, truth beauty."  It is difficult to interpret, but perhaps easy to misinterpret.  It recalls the Platonic philosophy, the World of Forms, to which men strive. When a man seizes upon an IDEA, he has found Truth.  When he has found TRUTH, he has also found the Good or Beauty.  In reverse, when a man has found what is BEAUTIFUL, he has come to TRUTH.  Such is the message of Keats. 

This page I've carried around with me, how long--a bit over 51 years represents, essentially, freezes in time the  kid at the kitchen table, age just 19, trying to consider the depths of a poem for a school exercise and who then never would have imagined herself  sitting here, in California. At that point, the idea of leaving New York, or even the Bronx, had not yet really occurred to her. At that time and place, there had not yet been a diagnosis of her mother with a terminal cancer (that came just about two months later). That particular night, I seem to remember a peace as she wrote. Do I remember or do I imagine that my mother was feet from me preparing the dinner for our family triad. I know my father was not yet home. I was no doubt happy because Spring had arrived. I have always loved the arrival of the Spring, and the sense of coming out of an unsafe and dark cave. I know I felt good that night. Able.

And so, I have protected this little piece of paper more than any of the many other college things I maintained (until my recent purges). As I sit here writing, I am not sure I am going to let it go, even now, just now. No, I don't think I will. I will have to leave that to the person who gets rid of my remaining STUFF when that time (which I hope is not soon) comes!

A Long Way to Go

In the last year or two, I have been delving deeply into my Catholic Faith far more than the previous nearly 40 years. I have sought to stop being a perfunctory person in the pew or in assisting ministries. (People I know would say, I think, that I am far from perfunctory. I am often at Mass, and often in Confession, and participating in many parish activities. This is only proof that appearances are deceiving. I am and have been active indeed, but activity is not of itself transformative).

 I have once again explored two approaches to this life:  the Sartre/Camus existentialist "life has no meaning, life is absurd, life is hard and then you die, the end" variety and then "the God created us to be happy, and we were, yet, with our free will, we set off an explosion of sin and suffering and death, but God so loved us and has given us a second chance in the form of following Him who took on our sin, died and transformed death into life" variety. The former makes no sense to me at all, is, pardon the expression "meaningless". In "The Plague", Camus' hero fights a plague despite his fervid assumption that life has no meaning. He seeks meaning in fighting the plague.  Why fight for what does not exist? Why should we long for that which does not exist? How can a human being, thrown into the world randomly, discover meaning where there is none? Fighting for something presupposes there is something discreet out there warranting risk and charity.  Either meaning exists or it does not---and if you seek it, then it must exist, somewhere.  The desire for meaning seems to prove the existence of a universe with ultimate meaning. Ok, I'm not going down that rabbit hole, just leading to my choice of the latter, which posits the meaning that we humans seem to seek in every action we take and every argument we make. I have concluded, hopefully for the inevitably short balance of my life, that Catholicism, provides the fullest source of Meaning, that is God Made Man, who reaches out His physical yet Transcendent Hand to every single one of us, if we would just clear away the pride and its overgrown chaff. He asks us to see that the suffering we caused is transformed if we follow Him through it to Resurrection. 

The wounds of our lives, the result of the tsunami of sin caused (credit for the phrase here is to Fr. Ed Broom of St. Peter Chanel, who calls sin a "moral tsunami"), that we use to justify our rejection of God is the very thing that that can be healed through the Catholic Church, who is Jesus Christ. The people (Peter, the "Rock", the Apostles, the Disciples, Mary, His mother) upon which Jesus, the Church, upon which He joined Himself, upon which He laid His Foundation, are His branches (I am the Vine; You are the Branches). The branches break, some stop bearing leaves or fruit, while others manage to continue, but the Vine, the Church He is and He founded, survives and manages always to feed, to bring health. In the Sacraments we are nurtured and healed. In the teachings, we are led by the hand back to the meaning that we obscure. 

A retreat (through the John Paul II Healing Center held in Sacred Heart Retreat House in Alhambra), I went on a short while ago, was focused on the wounds, inevitably inflicted by other frail humans in our development, and inflicted on ourselves by our own consequent sins, did something being in therapy, studying therapy, and reading endlessly never did.  We all have wounds. All of us. That was the inevitable consequence of the first choice against God. It was four days of about 30 of us looking at wounds in both a psychologically and spiritually integrated way using a video presentation, prayer, Mass, Spiritual Direction, and Confession . I have looked at each dimension over the course of my life, but somehow, I never really joined them into a unity. I had nearly despaired that there was a chasm between me and God that something in me would not bridge. For all my church going, participation, receipt of the Sacraments (since I came back to the faith officially), I have been living parallel to God. I have, implicitly, and mostly unconsciously, even when I thought I was fully aware, been using what I perceive to be my wounds as a fortress to keep God at bay. I say all the time, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief", while telling Him not to get too close. He, of course, could broach the moat and pierce the walls or heavy door, but He won't violate my choices. He reaches to me; and like the model of the greatest saint, Mary, His Mother, he yearns for my unqualified "Yes!" instead of a hedging one.

Wounds can be used as a shield against the rescue operation He successfully mounted on the Cross. "Nope," we/I say, my family of origin, my father, my mother, my brother, my school, the horribly human priest, or nun, "I am too hurt, too injured to reach out to a God even if it means that I separate myself from Him instead of living in joy restored to Heaven".  In Paradise, we had it all, and rejected it. Now, we have a second chance and we spit "I will not Serve" either deliberately or reflexively out of deep hurts and fear and anger. 

I have never said, "I will not serve" and I do seek to do His Will, knowing that ultimately it is not merely out of obedience to the Truth, but, to be truthful, beneficial self-interest. Am I foolish enough to prefer hell, worse than any suffering here, rather than bliss in the Beatific Vision? But those emotional carbuncles distract and confuse. 

The area in which my particular perceived wounds reflect themselves in everyday life, and after the retreat, there was a lightbulb, much brighter than all others which have flashed through my searching was in fear and anger.  For purposes of this entry, it matters not how they were developed, but that they have governed even the smallest interaction where those wounds were touched upon and how often they have been touched and limited me in my relationships and lacks thereof. And how, if I do not address both the psychological and spiritual at once, with the indispensable help of God's penetrating Grace, the last chance, to love the God who loves us, who loves each of us completely and fully, nor accept the love He so obviously offers by the historical fact of His death on the Cross and its Resurrection miracle, will be lost. 

Mostly, I have kept my anger to myself, driven it within; my fear I think has been more visible to those who know me, but a few have seen an outbreak of anger in public places. It has been rare, but it has happened, and seemed triggered by nothing. Oh, but it never has been nothing. It has been something the other cannot see. And when they have laughed,  or dismissed, to the extent they have seen, the determination to drive my heart behind the wall has increased away from everybody, and just in case, from God too, silly as that is. I haven't even realized it. That's what I mean. The retreat helped me see in a way I never have. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who hasn't first tried traditional therapy, and/or spiritual direction. I needed the preliminary insight. And I had insight up the wazoo. But it wasn't translating into a real change.

These days, since the retreat, I have noticed the moments that lead up to the feelings of fear and/or anger and their various components in a way I do not think I have before. I see that they defeat me and keep me from jumping the chasm and to God.  How exactly that happens, well, let's see from an example of yesterday.

I had some business to attend to that required me to mail a significant number of envelopes so that I could have tracking. I have a favorite small post office that is in an equally favorite tourist area. They are more efficient than the main post office nearby, and usually they are not terribly crowded because it is an odd spot for a post office. When I got there, there was just one person ahead and no one behind me. The lovely cashier was patient and kind as she began the painstaking weighing and printing of labels for each envelope, which was complicated by the fact that her new label printer was malfunctioning. Meanwhile, a line behind me had developed and I began to feel the general impatience of the gathering customers, which I certainly understood as I too have had to wait on such lines. My Spidey senses, the ones I developed as a young child, felt the seething annoyance not merely at having to wait, but that this person, me, was in the way. I felt the unfair pressure, but I also felt some guilt, or was it a sense of charity, I don't know. Perhaps it was both, as I have become especially aware of late of the reality of the wounds of others, but guilt in that I have never been sure when I have done something warranting remonstration or something that does not--a legacy of my early life. I asked the cashier if she could help some of the people that had quick needs, and one even was not that quick. At first she said no, because it would interrupt the momentum we had begun and the receipt process, then she said she was able to do it. So I let two individuals break into my task, which also created its own stress as I wanted to be careful and accurate. The context of the fallible labeler and the unhappy stares was an aggravating factor. I did not sense gratefulness from the first youngish woman, and sure enough though she said something to me as she finished, it was not "Thank You". The next was a man who needed to pick up some already paid for postcards. He said nothing as he passed me and left.  A third woman just walked up to the window, and I asked her politely I thought, I hope, whether what she was about to do would be a small task. She wanted to know why that was any of my concern. I explained it to her. She was displeased. Her husband thought that since I had a few envelopes left that this meant it would be fast and so I began to explain the situation, and by now, feeling anger at them, and at myself for having even attempted to be courteous, the woman accused me of raising my voice. Had I? I don't know. But I certainly was by now angry enough to as they huffed off. I had done nothing wrong. Right? So why did I feel like a bad little girl? So, apparently even when I am trying to do the right thing, I am doing the wrong thing? Oh, that is an old psychological ghost. You can imagine what it was like when as a prosecutor the other side inevitably threw out accusations about my doing my job and my motivations for doing it. Oh, in those earth bound situations, I have defended and will defend usually because it was my job to do so. I had an obligation to overcome my fear. I put it aside. I did not overcome it.   But I am never sure that I had a right to do it.  And so there was anger at the not knowing and the sense of potential repercussions. And as to a personal life--- not taking any chances with anyone, and that includes God. Oh, the power of transference and projection even beyond the bounds of the earth? Silly girl. But it limits, at least for me, both love and trust. They tell you in this retreat not to compare your wounds to that of anyone else. But let me tell you, I can't avoid it. My "wounds" are far less than many I have heard in my life's travels, and so there is also a bit of embarrassment that I haven't conquered fear, anxiety and anger that have tied me in knots, and kept me wary of man, and God. All of which implicates a pride that I can do it myself--even as I know God is there to offer His help. To reach out to Him, the God of the Universe, somehow is terrifying. It is a great risk even in the presence of faith, albeit it one that needs constant reinforcement. To trust and love God even in the presence of the very worst I fear. In the presence of the constant ambiguity of life. 

But, on the positive side, this time I saw what I was doing, that my first reaction was to withdraw, to ruminate, to avoid, to rage internally and to add another brick to the fortress (they talk about fortresses in the retreat) of my particular design. And this time, small thing that this was in the scheme of the harms and hurts of the universe, I looked to God. I didn't demand satisfaction from Him. I didn't demand that He answer my small and big questions.  I just asked Him to be with me.  And so, maybe one day, with a lot of prayer, with a lot of resort to the Sacraments, I will stop being parallel to Him. I will stop being afraid of suffering, large and small.  I will run into His open arms. I will see His hands and feet and side pierced and healed and will know I am safe. Resistance will be delightfully futile. 

 

Historical Perspective by Constantine Gochis

 Prescient for such a very short observational story. Dad was warning me about the state of the world for a very long time. I heard him. I even believed him. I didn't think it would come in my lifetime, though he said it would. This was written in June 2005.

   

        Woody Allen has added his insights to the general clamor.  Among other things he advises against putting too much stress on incidents such as the 9-11 attack.  He says that this and all other instances of man killing man must be viewed in historical perspective.  It has always been thus and thus it will alway be.

Of course, many other men have made similar statements. Old Joe Stalin for one. He is credited with the epigram, "the death of a single person is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic."  What consequence is the murder of a few thousand people in the history of human interactions?

I cannot quarrel with Woody.  I like his work.  I agree with him that what we are witnessing is nothing more than a repetition of history. Men do not change nor do the patterns they create. The machinations of governments are the same as they were when Israel sided with Assyria almost three thousand years ago and was wiped out by Babylon for making the "wrong" choice.  To coin a phrase--"Seems like Deja-vu all over again."

The history of empire can be traced to success in commerce and the development of weapons that make those aspects of opposing nations obsolete--the Egyptian and Persian chariots, the Greek Phalanx, the Roman Gladius (short sword), gun powder and now the hydrogen bomb.

Now this together with the suicide bomber forecasts an interesting dilemma.  The MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) no longer restrains combatants.  One cannot localize and identify a dangerous enemy.  He can be anywhere among us, armed not only with ultimate weapons but with the mental pathology to use them though he himself dies.

And the world needs only the striking of the match to create a holocaust.  But surely, not all humans will die. And peace will return after the war as it has in the past.  The philosophers, historians and mountebanks will reflect on the millions wiped out, and dismiss the numbers as another phase in the history of mankind.  And as it was in the beginning the soothsayers will look to the future and propound prophesy as it has been before:

"And behold a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death. And hell followed him. And power was given to him over the four parts of the earth, to kill with sword, with famine and with death and with the beasts of the earth." (Book of Revelation, chapter 6)

If Dad were alive, he'd be beyond apoplectic (if that is even a thing). He was pretty well already there in 20025, nearly 20 years ago. Today, not only can we not localize and identify a dangerous enemy, we are inviting them in and no one is allowed to object. Iran nearly has the bomb and we attribute logic to a nation that is rageful of the West. That Bible from which he quoted was held in little esteem two decades ago, and now it is considered less than comic book, though it describes us perfectly, and our faithlessness. And when the new worst comes, we will be surprised. Oh, well, I guess. 

They Were Real and Wonderful Days by Constantine Gochis

 We meet up with Dad's writing alter ego, Diogenes.

I am not always surprised to encounter by street bum friend in front of my house, but today I find him, ignoring my arrival, not eagerly solicitous for his periodic stipend, but sitting on an abandoned carton perusing intently a copy of People Magazine. It is held aloft so that I can easily read the headline:  "Journalist Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself".

For those of you who do not know Diogenes, he is a classic bum who has been on my tab for years. His history extends from the heights of affluence to the nadir of penury.  Additionally, his sagacity has always been a source of knowledge fro me, sometimes surcease from the petty trials of life; hence, I always supply him with what he reveres most--spare change.

I interrupt his reverie, somewhat annoyed that he does not greet me. I hail him jovially, disguising my annoyance.

"What ho," I say, "What news from the Rialto?" I am confident in the knowledge that he is sufficiently erudite to know the source of the line from a Shakespeare play. He was--Diogenes I mean--a man of intelligence and education as well as a CEO in industry before his wife abandoned him for the love of a poetess, making a bum out of him, financially, as well as in his incarnate state.

Diogenes does not respond immediately.  He reaches into one of many plastic bags and produces a book and a copy of a newspaper review. I would say the review was annotated, but that is incorrect.  It was lined in black ink throughout.  The book is the late Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in San Francisco".  I am curious as to what distraction would divert Diogenes from his usual purpose of small change or an occasional dollar bill.

"You know," he says without preamble, "I am in San Francisco at the time Hunter writes about, but I never see or feel the glory the reviewer sings about, the Reformation he extols.  It is of course a hymn to a glorious era.  I grieve now that I had no visionary awareness, though there were intimations.  I am not a bum at this time, and whenever one of the faithful hands me a flower, I get the feeling I am somehow at the root of their naked poverty.  My guilt deepens; corporate evil at work. I feel opprobrium in the air.  It is true. The wealthy must do some reflection on the meaning of life, see the visions so talked about, when tripping--albeit in the argot of the gifted enfants du Paradis, loosely children of Paradise--'cool man, make love, not war."

Diogenes reads from the review of the glorious meeting between the author and the reviewer in those halcyon days.

"In March of 1968, armed with two LSD capsules, I got there about 9 p.m. Hunter drank beer crushing the empty cans and throwing them along with cigarette butts into the empty fireplace.  The fierceness with which he hurled the cans and flicked the butts punctuated his non-stop rage about politics and religion and society. . . Hunter's position was, 'get the bastards before they get you!'"

Diogenes continues.

"We went to the men's room and sat in the middle of the floor, facing each other. Delicately, I removed the capsule from my pocket and tried to open it so that the tiny granules would be equally divided.  But things were swimming around. The granules slipped out and fell on my sweater.  Hunter and I looked at each other and shrugged.  And then we started sucking on my sweater.  Hunter stopped for a moment and said, 'What if some stock broker swine comes in now?'"

I said, "Indeed Diogenes, that is poetry," though I felt he was putting me on. I took the page from the Diogenes and read further. The reviewer had a kind of apologetic conclusion.

"And yes, to some degree it does show that anything was possible then. I don't want to minimize our drug fueled epiphanies.  They were real, and they were sometimes wonderful.  It was ignoring that actions have consequences. It was our denigration of the straight.  But it was about betrayal, mine, Hunter's for the sake of protecting our precious trip."

I looked sadly at Diogenes.  Had he been beguiled by the evil one? He had always seemed, despite his travailes, a straight arrow.  I felt that despite my chagrin at his apparently new found liberalism, he should have some reward.  Accordingly I increased my donation.  But I had to know the why of his defection.

"Diogenes," I said to mitigate my sadness, "when you finish the book, may I borrow it?"

"I don't intend to read it," he responded quickly.

"Why then did you buy it, or at least find it?"

"Of course," he concluded, "so that I might burn it."

Terse. Laconic. To the point, as always.  

Next by Constantine Gochis

It is two days in a row that I have done some reviewing of my father's rather voluminous short short stories, and observations and have actually posted them. I found myself separating a few out that I will never post, because something is missing, a page or because of how badly dad typed, lines I cannot quite edit to clarity.  I have also separated out those in which he waxes, often interposing tales of mythology, on sex with a certain amount of frankness. Oh, nothing extreme, but despite the frenzied society's embrace of the most disgusting habits, they will remove or flag something that is harmless or true, and censor it. It is wildly inconsistent. But we are, alas, the victims of the hubris which generates the inconsistency.

And,  in other postings, sometimes my father's cynicism is just too much, albeit I completely understand it. So, I've put aside several stories that will not see the light of day on this site. I have considered destroying them, but really, some are quite good. Maybe someone clearing out my stuff after I have shuffled off this mortal coil will think them worthy of some public denouement.  I doubt it, though, because neither dad nor I have any particular cache, especially the cache of fame. Still, he could be another Vivian Maier, the late photographer, whose hoard made her famous after her death. I think he might like that. The following really short piece was typical of dad's travels in his neighborhood. In his way, using words, he did what Maier did with her photos--he captured the detail of the ordinary parts of real life. 

NEXT

We spend our days in anticipation of some event, sometimes routine, sometimes joyous or sad.  e are destined for a lifetime to await the next call from some umpire in the game of life, within our roster of destined events--next. . .

I am reflecting on this matter as I inch my way towards an overburdened bank cashier.  

It is always crowded and burdensome at the bank.  I miscalculated in that I forgot that social security checks would be distributed early.  There is, this month, an intervening weekend before the third day of the month, the official day of distribution.  Washington is ever solicitous on behalf of the senior citizen on that signal day of our golden years. 

I am so engrossed in this state of inconvenience that I do not hear the mellifluous bell tone that signals the availability of the next teller.  My reverie is broken by a rude and impatient "next in line!" on the loudspeaker by a stressed out voice.  The announcement is not for me. The ample lady ahead of me is NEXT. She, however, urges me forward.  I am familiar with the reason. She is waiting for a cashier who speaks Russian.

"Spasiba," I say and she smiles, revealing a series of alternately spaced gold teeth.

As the cashier ministers to my financial needs I look at the ever growing, snakelike file of walkers and canes. I hear the incomprehensible drone of new languages, as it must have been in the ancient city of Bab-El. I think, "Wherein O Maker of All Things, have we offended Thee again?"

It is no different at the Albertson Market where I must perform my next task of necessity.  I follow a lady bent almost into an inverted L, pushing her empty cart into the store.  There is more than the usual clamor and bedlam, more of the elderly maneuvering their metal prosthetic aids through the obstructed corridors of can laden shelves. But this is ordinary madness.  I am not prepared for what happens next.

An elderly man taps me on the shoulder.  He leas forward with a partially filled hand basket and says: "May I leave this a moment in your cart?"

He is also pushing a modified perambulator, one that carries a prostrate figure, covered snugly against inclemency, and immobile.  I would have thought her dead except for two bluish eyes that did not blink, yet betokened life.

"Was she looking," I thought, "at vistas beyond the scope of our vision, an incomprehensible dimension that might be next when we leave this world?

I did not ask any questions, but he answered the one I was thinking. "She's my mother. She's ninety-two."

I would have guessed she was older.  She had the appearance of a ancient cadaver excavated from a long abandoned tomb.

I motioned him to precede me in the checkout line.

As he pushed his charge forward I looked at the other customers.  No one was paying attention, even looking our way. Was this lack of curiosity, interest or concern, or was it whistling past the inevitability of our own mortality?

"You are a very kind gentleman," the man said in leaving.  I thought the accent was British.  Perhaps it was the way he emphasized "gentleman" that gave it a sense of class distinction.

"By the way," I said, "how old are you?"

"Sixty-seven," he replied.

I thought older.

"Next," called the sales clerk.

You may well ask. 

Mater Dolorosa by Constantine Gochis

The painstaking effort to put as many stories on my blog written by my father, continues, ever so slowly. I think by now, it is close to 100, and I cannot tell you how many more are, in my eyes, so good, so evocative of times and places in his life, that I still want to add. No matter. I will do what I can, when I can in the middle of distractions of (my) life.

There was a deep streak of cynicism in my father. And belief, especially in a religion, the one he was vouchsafed upon his birth, Greek Orthodoxy, and the one he was received into at age 85, Catholicism, the faith he conceded to me at the behest of my mother, was always resisted and always tinged with an unbeliever's sarcasm--at least to my mind. Did he become a Catholic because he believed? I will never know. Perhaps my late pastor and friend Monsignor George Parnassus had insight into that, and perhaps, since he received dad into the Church, he saw belief. I do know my father's practicality, and he always said that he wanted to make things "easier for" me. It was certainly easier to bury my father out of a parish and have him interred in the Holy Ground of a Catholic cemetery. Now that I am old(er) myself, and he has been gone over 16 years, I have realized how much he sought and achieved to make things easier for me. Because I see that now, in a way I did not (though if I really thought of it, was right in front of me) when I was young, I more than a little guilty that I often felt he did not hear what I felt I needed as a child, giving me entirely what he thought I needed. Now I see the overlap in the two, though I still think he often missed the point of my all too often objections to his parental style, which persisted right up until the day he died. In any case, this preface is prelude to a story that like him, circles religiosity, and critiques it, all at once, in a way that I often found a tad, shall I say it, dear dad, smug, spectating God and finding Him wanting. I suppose that is part of what doubt is.  And the realities of the world do engender doubt. 

    MATER DOLOROSA

If someone asks me where I am going, I do not know; and yet it cannot be by pure accident that I find myself in the old neighborhood.  Today it is the feast of the Madonna, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  It is very festive, but not like in the days of my memory. Long ago the streets are lined with the stands of the peddlers.  One buys the watery but ice-cold lemon sherbert, the inevitable pizza.  There are the stalls that stock the disembodied facsimiles of arms, hands and other body parts, which the faithful keep in memory to the Saints' ordeals of penitence.  One sees again the massive candles that accompany the sculptured effigies of the Madonna and a pantheon of those saints.  Yes, it is very festive, but not like in the days of my youth.

How strange. You walk for hours along familiar streets searching for lost memories, and the years impose themselves, initially inexorably resistant, then suddenly a smile, a face like one you used to know, an old familiar air, a simple cooking aroma. 

Yes, this is the house.  It is the same, though perhaps a little shabbier.  Though it is hot outside, the halls are cool and dank  I would like to walk to the top floor, but the years weigh heavily on me.  Besides, I know what I will find, two doors heavily paned with frosted glass that face each other, silent guardians against the probing eyes of memory.  I hesitate. I turn to go, but the ghosts of other days, once aroused, do not return easily to their rest. Instinctively, my hand goes to the knob. "How futile," I think.  These are different days, and other unfamiliar lives abide here.  I merely stand and think how when I was very young. . .

Aunt Carmela was my favorite aunt.  She rarely smiled, but I was sure she was glad to see me whenever I called.  It was always the same.  She would go to her improvised cupboard behind print cloth suspended by a string, for three or four cookies.  Later, I would be allowed access to the player piano in that perpetually shaded room, where I would pump the pedals, my legs barely long enough to reach them.  Atop the piano three votive candles in little red cups illuminated three photographs casting eerie shadows in the semi-darkness.

Sometimes, I would sense her presence behind me, as I played.  She would be staring, tearfully, at the memorial photographs of her three dead children, two girls, by scarlet fever and her first son, by drowning.  The piano was his.  The daring devil may care, Tony, suffered a cramp when he tried to dive under a Hudson River ferry and failed.  Only Nino was left, her last child.  Young as I was, I knew she listened perpetually for any sound, any signal that he was coming home. He was as daring as his brother, unpredictable in his comings and goings, but when he did appear, though she did not smile, her face illuminated with joy.

It is strange that this sad house was the family gathering place on the day of the Madonna.  

The Church was only a few blocks from my aunt's house.  Each year, she hosted the family for the celebration, always dressed in forbidding black, never smiling and rarely participating in the ceremonies.

Yet, there was always laughter, and food and wine, and cookies in mounds--unprotected from the natural avarice of children. Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall would dance the Tarantella with Nino, and all of us would clap our hands to the tempo of the usic.  Teresa would be flushed and happy, and everyone would remark on how well they danced together.  The children would repair to the fire escape, secured by sturdy planks, to observe the activity five stories below, watching the hydrogen filled balloons that escaped unwary hands.

Downstairs, the penitents continued their procession toward the Church, some crawling on hands and knees in supplication or in hope of a miracle.  Others walked barefoot, rosaries in hand, intoning prayers, interspersed with mutterings of self-castigation. But these things were far from us.  Here, there was food and drink and family and love, and looking down we could feel what God said at Creation, "It is good!"

The door on the right opens suddenly.  I am startled.  The face is unfamiliar, but looks very much like one I would expect, a ubiquitous face, lined, one that has known much of pain.  It is like my aunt's face, perhaps the last of generations, bound, like Prometheus, by the chains of custom and taboo.

I turn to go, but cannot.  There are voices from the past that intrude themselves. They seem to be coming from the landing that leads to the roof. The voices are familiar, insistent, hushed, afraid, uttering forbidden words of love. Cousins. Unmarried. "Jesu misericordia!" 

How hard it is to trace one's memory to that day of epiphany, when childhood innocence becomes disillusion.

There was music and laughter, and gallons of wine at the last party. There were trays of pastry, but one did not feel like having one more cookie.  Somehow the laughter did not hide the pain in eyes that did not smile.  Teresa, my beautiful cousin from across the hall did not dance with Nino. They sat as if a thousand miles apart.  I think of a phrase, "And for the first time they knew that they were naked in each other's presence."  So it must have been in that primeval beginning.  As I watched other eyes watched too.  Hate exploded.  A gallon of red wine came crashing down.  There was a flash of steel and ino fell, and rich red blood mingled with thick red wine.

A memory remains.  A face of abject, wordless sorrow.  It is her face, the face eternal of the Mater Dolorosa.  "There stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother. "

We must allow these restless ghosts to wander.  They are now beyond our compassion.  Downstairs, there are crowds and joy and laughter, and questions.  The festa of the Madonna del Carmine is at its height.  

 

Lessons in A (Personal) Aftermath--August 1, 2011

Although it feels as if I am not making a dent, I have been long going through my "stuff", especially things I never use, but feel deeply attached to, and an abundance of memorabilia, to purge and simplify. I already put most of my hard copy photos in the cloud, and I included scans of cards and notes sent to me over the years, and I tossed the actual paper. I used to call this saved content of my life, before we had the electronic revolution of the last 30 plus years, "the memory drawer".  Literally, it was all in drawers in my apartment. Although I believe that life on this earth is passing and not where or how it was supposed to be, and that I am (and you are) destined for eternity with God, there is this part of me, regrettable perhaps, but it is what it is, that doesn't want to have left no imprint during my time here. And so I write this blog. I have a podcast called "Ordinary Old Catholic Me" about the intersection of this life and my Catholic faith. I tell myself it isn't all about me. I just read a book about Vivian Maier, a woman whose life and eccentric connections with the world would never have been known but for the accidental discovery of her thousands of photographs that made her posthumously famous. Did she want to be famous? Given her psychological history, perhaps she would have said "No!" On the other hand, when she died all this creative material was out there, and providentially (I think) it was discovered and she has a form of immortality here in the memory of others. She had to have known that. I know that such people always fascinate me, maybe because I identify with them. And as much as I want to be known after I die, I want them to be known as well--I want to see their threads in the tapestry, and I hope that others might want to see mine, when I am long gone. In that book I just read there is a quote from Susan Sontag, "To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. By slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

I would extend that thought to journals, and now blogs and other forms of documenting a time in lives. I read the creative remnants of the famous and the not so famous. So do many of us. When I go to an ancient place, like Pompeii, or Israel, or old, but not quite as ancient places like Oxford, and I see a sign in a quad that TS Eliot walked these grounds, I feel the connection of time, place and people. I think of it as a taste of heaven. So, there is my preface for today's entry. Yesterday, in my rummaging I ran across something I wrote just about a month after I retired. The truth is that my ability TO retire and my being (along with several others, it was not, I have difficulty still remembering, personal) compelled to retire happily coincided. It has been just about 13 years since the five minute end to my vocation of 25 years.

What follows is what I wrote just after that life event. 

Lessons in an Aftermath

About seven or eight years ago, I was on jury duty at the criminal court building which in the City of Los Angeles is only about a block from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels.  I found myself gravitating toward Mass during the long lunch hours, with time to spare for browsing the gift shop.  On one foray, I bought a pretty calligraphic print, in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript, with the well known words of Saint Teresa of Avila, "Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you, all things are passing; patient endurance attains all things: one whom God possesses wans nothing for God alone suffices."

I displayed the print by my desk in my office where I worked as an ethics prosecutor.  Immersed in reading complaints of consumers, listening to their often angry rants about wayward lawyers and my personal failure as a government employee, and worse, they perceived, as the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse, I often failed to notice it or to remember its words.  I certainly failed to implement the gentle exhortation of patient endurance, time and again.  I had been taking Christ under my roof in the Eucharist on Sundays and making prayerful promises about my week to come.  Yet, my world was my office and its peregrinations.  I did not act as if God alone sufficed.  I did not feel it much either.

I had a good long run in that portion of my career--twenty-five years--about a third of a statistical lifetime.  I comprehended hypothetically the dangers of being an at will long term manager in the midst of constant cyclical organizational renewal.  And although I saw the signs of professional danger among several of us similarly situated, since they and I had survived before, I could again.  This time, however, it was not to be.  The organization was going, we were told, "in a different direction."  We weren't going with them.

They say that losing a job is one of the most traumatic events in an individual's life.  In the first week or so, I went through the seven stages of grief in succession and overlap.  Acceptance was not coming easily.

No one is indispensable to a workplace.  But I would be lying if I were to say that I was not hurt horribly to have experienced how readily dispensable I was, without regard to the passion and commitment I had brought to the work of lawyer regulation.  I was both disturbed and frightened to find myself unceremoniously severed from that extended part of my life.  While my colleagues and I surely did good work, as our evaluations over many years would show, we will never receive extrinsic validation henceforward. In fact, the not so implicit future and transient message of our release cannot be other than that somehow we failed.  If they did not value me in that forum, I had no value.

I retrieved little from my office, my diplomas, a poster and my print of St. Teresa's words which now is displayed on my bedroom desk.  I find myself noticing it a great deal.  I find myself meditating on those words in a way heretofore uncharacteristic of me.  I am rediscovering words of similar import by others who experienced the crucible of the secular and spiritual worlds and were irrevocably transformed leaving us their guidance for our time.  Thomas a Kempis writes, "On the day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done, not how eloquently we have spoken, but how holily we have lived.  Tell me where are now all those asters and Doctors whom you knew so well in their lifetime in the full flower of their learning? Other men now sit in their seats and they are hardly called to mind.  In their lifetime they seemed of great account, but now no one speaks of them.  Oh how swiftly the glory of the world passes away. . .He is truly great who is great in the love of God. .  ."

Oh the tug of praise and recognition by my peers, by my bosses, by an institution! It is still there.  It will likely always be there.  But finding past praise meaningless and being severed from the possibility of future praise, at least from this source, has set me in a direction of my own, fitfully indeed, but certainly.

I woke up the other day.  As has been the case for nearly a month I remembered that the years of my niche legal career, painstakingly cultivated, was gone.  But something conjoined the memory.  I was momentarily ready to accept, without fear, the closing of that door and the opening of another where God alone suffices.  Now I must pray for the Grace of patient endurance as I embark on this last phase of my life.

****

Boy, are we inconsistent creatures! Well, boy, I am the queen of the inconsistent! All these years later I am still recognizing that the things of this world are transient, and yet trying to impose the memory of me into that transience. Perhaps that is the proof that we are meant to be eternal. And that heaven is the goal indeed overcoming the transient. Superseding the transient. 

As I commit this old bit of my writing to this forum, the world quite literally seems to be falling apart. Our nation is in a divide not unlike that before the Civil War, a battle of philosophies, where only one can ultimately be true. Our President is afflicted with the ravages of dementia, though it remains denied by the great and powerful who tell us what we are supposed to see. He has decided not to run for a second term for President, for reasons everyone knows but is pretended to be otherwise, but allegedly he is still the Commander in Chief for the next four months. Who exactly is running our country is a matter of reasonable speculation, but is also left unspoken, but certainly they were not elected as our Constitution requires. The former President was just nearly assassinated, left unprotected by the Secret Service we all used to admire. Today, the head of that service, after a defiant appearance before a Congressional Committee, has resigned. Last week, an "accidental" glitch shut down computers all over the world. And here I am worrying about my being remembered on this earth. But it is instinctual, clearly. In a way we are all the fictional Ozymandias, the king that is only remembered because the  desert dust accidentally cleared from his ornate tablet. 

I just like the idea that maybe 100 years from now, someone will be sitting on this very terrace in the middle of Los Angeles, if any of our world survives, reading this entry in my blog written on this day about another day in 2011.  

As to that print with the words of St. Teresa? That was moved to a wall in my living room. I am still working on the reality, the eternal reality, that God alone suffices.