I sit in my office surrounded by surfaces. In front of me a foot stool covered with a Turkish rug and books and papers to-be-read and both this year's and next year's appointment book -- each calendar to be filled in as the time passes and later taking its place on a shelf designated for calendars ... the rings of my tree ... every year a new one. There's a new manuscript there from my friend, J, about his last 25 years trying to teach others how to write. I've read maybe a quarter of it. Tomorrow is coming, soon. On my left, is a tilted and movable surface that holds notes about meetings and on my right a round table with a lamp that shines light on memories.
I don't know where my Dad found the lamp's ceramic vase but I do remember it being either the Winter of 1954 or 1955 when he fashioned a base for it of Maple, turned on a lathe at a local community center in Toledo, Ohio. It was the very same Center at which Grandpa Miltie's Swimming School got its name, the evening that he catapulted me into the middle of the deep end of the pool making it unquestionable in both words and deed that 'not swimming wasn't an option.' I suppose it's possible that when my spawn and grand-spawn heard of Grandpa Miltie's
ways and means, they may have understood an implied threat. Mea maxima culpa. In any case, the lamp shade must be older than the lamp or even the vase from which the lamp was fashioned. SisterJ thinks it may have been hers. Stories of the Fourth Quarter are -- each one of them -- variation myths that modify with different themes, as they arise from different memories. The shade is adorned with alternating brass and copper lion-heads on its six barely translucent sides ... two are missing. This round lamp-table holds a modern phone that reads "ringer off" but continues to quietly ring when interlopers call. And then there are my pens that commemorate a little boy's watching his own Grandpa write with ink-pens on his desk in
his religious office where he met with his congregants in the Coney Island neighborhood in the halcyon days when four Grandkids lived upstairs.
That pretty much covers my practical reach from the chair on which I sit for well over 40 hours each week ... meeting ... reading ... writing ... puzzling and fascinating about the present and past.
The past few days, (I want to say) too many ghosts have been visiting ... the Dead have risen, only to fall, again. I heard Monday of a modern day massacre. One of the dead I must've met for I knew his grandfather, well. I cannot yet retrieve a memory of meeting this man ... barely into his Fourth Quarter ... hacked to death in the name of difference, otherness and retaliation. It would've been when he was a little boy. Ach! Certainly a very old story even if he was only 60 years old. I once wrote that our animal instincts seem to split our sensing of the Other into one of three categories ... Prey, Predator or Kin. When Kin are with us? we seem to naturally protect them from Predators. And when those Kin have been taken from us, those we imagine to be
responsible may all-too-easily become our Prey in a never-ending cycle of retaliatory moves set in motion, perchance, when our ancestors met strangers in the clearings of jungles and blamed them for all that was wrong in their own little Primal Horde situated in some clearing just over the next rise.
Who starts a cycle that I am able to mouth the word
responsible as if I could determine that, as the kids on the playground can say, so easily:
'he started it.'
All those words like
responsible that don't quite mean what they say. When presidents or commanders accept ultimate
responsibility for some
oops, they don't mean they are
able to respond to the consequences of whatever occurred and to remedy or undo the same. No. It's more like:
'Something bad happened
and I can't find anyone to throw under the bus;
nor can I do jack-shit about it.'
I don't like words like
fault much, either. And I don't like
blame. Pointing-fingers are all so linear .... 'he did it and pointedly not me.' And, oh, I'm not the Dalai Lama who can meditate about it ... I lack his faith ... I wish I had it.
Yesterday, I got news, as well, that Bill died after drifting away for too many years into a cloudy place. Last time, M and I ate out with he and his wife, Bill began doing a jig and singing quietly and happily in the Thai restaurant in a young part of our city. Bill was a gentle Soul. We worked together. Funny. Bill was the Director but we did, indeed, work together. No pettiness in his directing. He saw the role of a clinician-administrator as protecting his colleagues from intrusions from above and below ... from inside and outside. I brought the same view from my days running a school. Bill was also my general in days when he ran Emergency Medical Services at rock concerts. He would put together a team of perhaps 130 people ... ER docs, Trauma Nurses, EMT's and VietNam trained Paramedics, and Psychologists, as well as the many Stretcher Bearers whose job it was to bring in those fallen on a typical day at a 125,000 person concert ... I think the last one we did was
Live Aid some more-than twenty years, ago. Bill was a great general and, as far as I know, we never lost a single celebrant -- no matter how intoxicated on no matter how many drugs. Oh, some needed to be trucked off to nearby hospitals and others got worked on in ORCA's -- Mobile Surgeries ... but no one on our team and no concert goer ever got left behind. I do miss the image of the General always even-tempered and almost always walking about with a cellophane box of Stella d'Oro cookies.
Wanna a cookie, Howard?
Thanks, Bill.
I think what saved me, yesterday, was a visit from a friend. We've decided that it's time -- here, in the midst of the Last Quarter -- for us to understand the writer of Ecclesiastes and his view of the value of relationship over everything else. Our workdays had shut down and we spent our hours together pondering our pasts and wondering about the choice of the author to call himself
Kohelles. It comes from the biblical word for gathering.
L'kahel is to convene but it could be to gather, as well.
l'ha'Khil is to make to convene.
Kahal is a congregation.
Some writers have suggested that he saw himself as
gathering together much wisdom. D and I wondered if
Kohelles was chosen to denote his status as
one of the convened ... a Congregant ... an Everyman.
Maybe it doesn't matter. We have decided
to convene when we can to discuss these writings:
"All the Rivers go to the Sea
and the Sea is not filled?
(they go) to the place
where the Rivers go ...
(and) there, they return to go (once more)."
With more than a nod to Bill
and his bride J
and their kids H & B
and his grandkids
whom I never got to know.
