What I Watched About Love

I started watching movies on television. Whether Saturday afternoon monster movies, short films on the CBS Children’s Film Festival with Kukla Fran and Ollie, Sunday afternoon matinees, movies of the week on Tuesday nights, Sunday night movies, or Friday night late shows, I watched movies. The movies of my early life ranged from img_0274-1The Red Balloon to The Great Race, from The House of Frankenstein to The Trouble with Angels. I first saw Lawrence of Arabia on a 19-inch screen. I first watched the Wizard of Oz on a black and white television.

My high school, a boarding school, had movies boys could love (James Bond, Juggernaut, and Sky Riders) on Saturday nights. What I most remember are Sundays after church, when I watched the Flash Gordon serials in the tv room of the dorm. My college had a “popular” film series on Friday and Saturday nights—I was recruited to join the selection team because I had seen Enter the Dragon, and members could only nominate films they had seen to add to the series—and an art series on a weeknight. I can admit that I rarely went to the art films, but can remember classmates going on about Renoir’s Beauty and the Beast. I took a cinema class in the spring of my junior year, and remember listing Star Wars and Airport among my favorite movies. And then I saw Persona, Masculine/Feminin, Providence, Meshes of an Afternoon, Breathless, img_0275Un Chien Andalou, and Birth of a Nation. Kaori Kitao used a projector to screen the films, and we watched and re-watched scenes for hours on Wednesday afternoons. Our three hour class often ran six hours.

In my twenties, my girlfriend bought me a vcr, and between rentals, late-night movies on Philadelphia’s Channel 29, the Ritz Theater, and movies at the TLA, I filled in what I had missed. I saw Bringing Up Baby, The Searchers, Some Like It Hot, Red River, It Happened One Night, Flying Down to Rio, Koyaanisqatsi, Duck Soup, Ran, The Thin Man, Vagabond, Snow White, Freaks, and Claire’s Knee. I watched two or three movies a day. Some movies I watched as many as a dozen times, and there are some, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas come to mind, that I still have not seen and, still, want to see. I watched nearly all of the Marx Brothers, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Howard Hawks, and Jacques Tourneur. I liked Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Robert img_0276Mitchum, Rosalind Russell, Humphrey Bogart, Irene Dunne, Toshiro Mifune, Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire,  and Charlie Chaplin.

During this time I started writing a novel that I would abandon later. In that process, I went to graduate school, and then started reading books the same way I had watched movies. My walls are lined with bookcases full of the books I read while I found my way as a writer: Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Lorrie Moore. Hundreds more. Nonetheless, given two hours and a good movie, I still get lost in film.

Movies shaped me. My parents did not dispense life lessons, short of “don’t bug the grown ups.” My brothers and I lived fairly privileged and independent lives. My parents expected us to self-entertain, and we lived where we could do exactly that. Our play ranged over many square miles of field and forest. When we got bicycles, we rode as far as our will and muscle would take us. At home we ate dinner together then went to separate rooms to watch television (when we did watch television). Only event movies drew us into a single room. There were times when I was a teenager that my father and I would watch the same movie in different rooms, and at the end, my father would say, “That was good, wasn’t it.”

godzilla and mothraMy father loved movies. He shared his love of old horror movies with us, and we did watch Frankenstein and Godzilla together. Back then, Frankenstein was not played often on television, and one UHF channel featured a week of Toho giant monster films. These, along with the Wizard of Oz or Lawrence of Arabia, were event movies. I learned from watching movies that my father also had a soft spot, enjoying The Trouble with Angels and Agnes of God, but enjoying them alone and sharing his enjoyment after the fact. If I did not learn to watch movies alone from him, I certainly continued doing so, never feeling the need for company either when watching at home or in the theater.

Without much direct advice about how to live life, I learned from what teachers I could find. Mr. O’Connor, my eighth grade history teacher, taught me not to swear, and that police work was valuable; he was a former police officer. Mrs. Vandergrift, my fifth grade homeroom teacher, taught me about kindness and to value my academic achievements. But as far as the calculus of adult life, I learned from literature and from movies. Literature, like The Catcher in the Rye or Billy Budd, taught me about the pitfalls of adult life. Perhaps it is not so strange there there is very little in literature that reassuringly implies, “Everything is going to be all right.” There was even less in the literature I read for school about love. For love, I turned to film, or rather, film found me. I was a willing student.

The movies I will write about are not my favorite movies, with one exception. They are movies that stayed with me, like shadowy guides, for years. I feel their influence even now, in some cases I fight against them, the way one might struggle with a parent long after he or she has died. We are never truly done with the past. And so, I will revisit these films, neither to praise them nor to bury them, but to think about them and what I learned from them about love.

Are these the best depictions of love in the movies? Hardly. Nor are they the truest depictions. They simply stood out to me. Beyond that I had only two simple rules for their selection. First, I had to see each one first on television. All but one of these I watched alone the first time I saw it, with the exception being My Fair Lady, an event movie to be sure. Second I had to see each before I was 17, before I became an adult, and before I said the words “I love you” to a woman. Whether I like it or not, every time I have said those words, from the time I was 17 until now, when I am 57, “I love you” is an echo of something I saw in these films. For better and for worse.

The Films

The April Fools

Two for the Road

Hotel

Petulia

What’s Up Doc

My Fair Lady

Dr. Strangelove

Thanksgiving Dinners

The holiday season is upon us, and it is a time we gather with people. Well, to be honest, I gather with people year round. For me, holidays are more a way point, a place to aim for during the journey, and a time to take stock and reflect. When I look backward, I can see the faces of friends who have gathered at my table, at all my tables, and not just at the end of the year festivities. There have been Bastille Day dinners, and Friday night dinners, lobster feasts, and barbecues, as well as Thanksgiving meals. I don’t know that I ever really expected all those people I have cooked for to remain at the table year after year, but in reflection there they go, drifting off into new arrangements, seated around distant tables.

When I think about the holiday dinners I have made and attended, while the courses have remained the same, the people at the table have changed nearly every single year. Of course there is the family—my brothers, my mother, and while he was still alive, my father. My own family, the family of choice, has shifted over the years. Both my brothers are at or just past twenty year marriages and their wives, and then their children have held stable seats at our gatherings, but I have brought four or five different friends or partners or, in one case, wife to holiday meals. I’m not sure what my family thinks of this. I’m sure they were reasonably pleased that the revolving door had stopped spinning when I married, but then that relationship ended as well.

And before this all seems too mawkish and wistful, the holiday table has never been a place of “what was,” or “what if,” but almost always “what is.” And maybe because nostalgia, or its future looking younger cousin, desire, have provided no overwhelming gravity to either pull me back or towards some land other than the one in which I reside, holidays have not had for me that tinge of regret or loss. Still, I am cognizant of the changing faces, and I wonder where they have gone, and also wonder who might be at the table this year, or the next, or the next.

The only twinge I feel is that I do not think that this is what other people feel. Do other people have the weight of memory and expectation to draw them somewhere? What must that be like? What must it be like to spend twenty or more years gathered with the same people? I feel sometimes as if I am missing out on something, that I lack some key that will unlock a door to this experience.

And yet. And yet there is a simple untaintable joy in seeing new faces, even in imaging where the old ones may now be seated. I picture tables in rooms that I have never seen, with gatherings peopled by a mix of friends and strangers, and in some inexplicable way, I am there too.

The Man in the Basement

Francis crept back into the basement. It was not his basement. It belonged to a woman he had courted in his youth, or in his middle age; he could not remember which. He had been creeping into the basement every night for as long as he could remember, but there must have been a time when he had not. He could not remember such a time.

The basement was simple and stark. He had entered through the steps that opened onto the driveway at the side of the house. In the far corner of the space a wooden staircase proceeded up into the house with a series of three short flights of steps, joined by right angles; his bed was under those stairs. It was a small bed, and the bedding was the brightly colored sheets of a child’s bed, but faded with time and use. He looked at the bed and tonight it seemed smaller than it ever had before. Had the bed been larger once, he thought? Had it occupied some other place in the basement? Perhaps, but he could not imagine that place.

As he got into the bed, he began to wonder what he was doing there. He did, after all, have his own home. His daughters had retired to their own beds. His pets: one large dog–a cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Great Dane–and three small cats; would wait for him to return in the morning. His bed was made, and he dutifully washed the sheets every week, even though he had not slept there for longer than he could remember. “Shouldn’t I be at home?” He wondered. 

He tried to roll over in the small bed. Nothing he did seemed to make sense anymore. He thought of his daughters, at home alone. He knew there was a family living in the rooms above where he slept each night, but they were not his family, no matter what fantasy he had once had about them. Perhaps it had been more than a fantasy. Perhaps he had once imagined a place in that home with a bevy of beautiful daughters and handsome suitors, and a place permanently set for him at the head of the table. He tried to recall when he had started slinking into the basement late at night, and his memory was a wash of grays and browns. This, he thought, is not where I should be.

He got out of the bed and gathered his things. He tried to do it without switching on the light. He could not find his glasses. Maybe they had fallen between the mattress and the wall. He tried to make no noise, cognizant of the people who lived in the house above him. I must not disturb them, he thought.

Then a light flicked on, and one young woman bounded down the stairs. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Francis offered.

“It’s okay,” answered the young woman, “we knew you were here.” 

“I hope I didn’t bother you,” said Francis.

“No. You’re fine,” answered the young woman, “just don’t try to get to mom.”

“No, of course not.” Francis held up his bag, “it’s time for me to go home.”

“Wait,” declared the young woman, who then ushered her sisters down the stairs. “He’s going,” she told them.

The basement now seemed full of beautiful young women. They were dressed in sweat pants and t-shirts, dressed for bed in the house above the basement. “Don’t leave yet,” one of them said, “we have something for you.”

They brought down large baking sheets covered with food. There were cookies and candied fruits. One of the younger women knew that Francis loved their candied strawberries, and offered them to him. “Take as much as you like,” she said.

One of the young women wept. He was going; he had been there so long.

As the women gathered, more lights were turned on in the basement, which no longer seemed as cramped and contained to Francis. Rooms upon rooms seemed to open up. There were men in brown tweed jackets and loafers, and the family he had imagined all these years teemed throughout the rooms. There were daughters and granddaughters, and young men for each as they were wished. Only one thing was missing, and he knew not to look for her.

Two floors above the gathering, the mother got out of her shower, toweled off, and clapped powder over her arms and legs. “Surely this must be over,” she thought. She listened to the quiet commotion, and grew mildly annoyed. But she was tired. She had, after all, raised her family and prepared them for what came next. She fell asleep. She dreamed of a house–some nights it was in the desert, some nights it was in the mountains, other nights it was on an island surrounded by the green northern sea. It was a house without a basement, into which men might come to fix the water heater or garbage disposal, and then leave. She dreamed on through the night and into morning, and when the sun rise and she woke, she stripped the little bed in the basement for the last time.

Exit 7A


I have traveled along the New Jersey Turnpike many times. When I was a kid, my parents would take us to New York to visit their parents. When I was in high school I would travel to swim meets with my school. In college, I went to Great Adventure with a collection of friends. After college, I had a girlfriend who lived in Freehold, and drove there and back  to visit her in my first car. I later took dates to Great Adventure. Most recently, I headed north with my (now ex-) wife and family to visit her family in Ocean Grove, NJ. Today, I took the familiar exit 7A to attend a workshop on the Jersey Shore. I can recall all or parts of all the trips I made along this highway, but I didn’t make it so often that it became rote. I remember leaving from Steve’s home out toward Exton, along with Chris, Darius, and Julie. I remember driving to, and then from Ginny’s home in Freehold. I remember the warm spring air across snow plowed into mounds in the Lawrenceville gym parking lot. I remember riding the Ferris wheel with Marie. I remember missing the turn onto Rte 18. I remember the radio signal fading out from WIP close to where the NJ State Police building was along the turnpike. I can remember feeling happy, sad, angry, jealous, confused, frustrated, thrilled, elated, confident–all along this same stretch of road.

As I drive along this road, I feel as if I am accompanied by several versions of myself, each one traveling the same path to different destinations, either alone or in the company of friends. I wonder what habits have shaped my travel, and me, and how the habits formed over time. I wonder what it would be like to wander over this path–and a dozen, a thousand other paths–for the first time. “You’ve analyzed this enough for both of us,” someone once told me. Of all my habits, analyzing–what I will call wondering or remembering or reveling or pondering or considering or questioning or figuring or honoring or respecting or holding or living–is perhaps my most ingrained habit. It isn’t second nature; it is first nature. What would it be like to just do–either guided by feelings or by someone else’s direction–without thinking?

I once used the metaphor of a path in the brain to demonstrate how memories are made and habits formed. I told students to imagine someone walking through woods over and over until a dirt path had been worn into the underbrush. walk along that path enough and it becomes more like a rut. As soon as the path takes hold, it begins to seem like there is only one way through the woods. I said that once a neural pathway had forms in the brain, it becomes a little like that deep hewn path, and that will power and determination alone are insufficient to the task of changing it. I was trying to disabuse my students of the notion that addictions or mental illnesses like depression could be combatted by force of will alone–that there is no shame in seeking help. I was also trying to show how deeply ingrained habits and patterns in our lives could become.

Maybe this kind of thought is simply a habit for me. Maybe others simply do not need to reflect and wonder. I don’t know what that would be like. I am reading William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, and he writes about being a young surfer and learning to surf a particular break, and how surfers–the epitome of “go with the flow”–patiently learn the dynamics of each place they surf. They intimately learn the combinations of wind, tide, and depth. And then make surfing seem effortless. Thinking is effortless for me–not easy, to be sure–but something that comes as naturally as breathing or eating. I barely need to daydream, because the visions, the thoughts, the fleeting glimpses and sometimes lengthy gazes into the breaks of the day come involuntarily.

 

 

Play time

I’ve been sucked in. It’s true. I have played an inordinate amount of Pokemon Go, although “play” seems like an exaggeration, since all that the playing involves is taking walks and swiping or tapping incessantly on my phone screen. Strategy? Pidgies: collect them, evolve them with a lucky egg when you’re ready to level up (but only in the 20+ levels). The game is gleefully simple (and relatively stupid): collect stuff, collect more stuff, and then collect even more stuff. The player is “rewarded” with greater strength and ability as he or she “levels up,” but let’s be honest: the stuff and the rewards are imaginary; the only thing real is the time one spends playing. So, why do we play?I explained the old rat-reward experiment to my daughter while we watched people paw at their screens. B.F. Skinner showed in an experiment with rats that variable interval reinforcement leads to a higher rate of response than constant rate of reinforcement, and that both were significantly more effective than punishment (which, it turns out, swiftly ends the impulse to work—or play). Well that’s a lot of mumbo jumbo. Here’s the skinny: rats work (or play, for the purposes of game play) harder when rewarded; they get turned off by punishment; and they work hardest and longest when the rewards come consistently but unpredictably. Surely, rat brains and human brains are different, but just try to run such an experiment on people. Wait, let’s track all those Pokemon Go players and see what that tells us about how they play.

Short story long, we are built to be frustrated. The brain likes rewards (and hates punishments), but only so often—too many and it gets bored. Of course our complicated brains find connections and correlations around causes and consequences. So, it’s not a surprise when my brain gets caught up in figuring out if I received that reward for bringing my girlfriend flowers, finishing my annual report, or catching a wild Gyarados, and that’s just if I got a reward for doing something in the first place. My rat brain tells me: just keep working and something will come.

The cool thing about being human (and not a rat pressing a bar in a cage) is that the rewards come in all shapes and sizes—M&Ms, Mazda Miatas, sailing ships in bottles, shoes. We can turn those cash/work rewards into whatever we like. And I will not overlook the reward of the view out my office window, or the company I keep at work, or at home. The world seems designed to reward us—all these surprises. The Clash sings, “I fought the law!” That’s right brothers!

I do believe–and when I started writing this last week (before I reminded myself of all the rewards that I have strewn before me, like a reverse trail of breadcrumbs into the future) I believed it a little more—that games like Pokemon Go offer a fairly consistent diet of rewards, and that in spite of their frustrations (and because of them too), they are bright little respites from the “thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.” If we lead, as Thoreau asserts, “lives of quiet desperation,” we lead them because too often we think that our human brains need punishments to convince and cajole them into agreement or good behavior or harder work. We beat ourselves and each other like mules bound to work until they stop. We preach about “tough love” and manly determination as values that have meaningful positive consequences. My rat brain says, “I’m done.” My human brain says, “No thank you. I’m off to play.”

 

Summer Time

Summer unsettles me. For the last three weeks I walked through my days drunk with free time, having gone from the manic pace of the end of the school year (exams and graduation) and the beginning of the summer Sunday School program, to a single (part time) job. The manic pace is the pace of the week from September through June. I put in six and seven day work weeks as a matter of course. I am fortunate that some of those days last only a few hours, but there is always something work-related on my schedule. That is the wonder of working what amounts to three part-time jobs, none of which is really part-time. When I add my daughter, who stays with me three days out of seven, into the mix, I really have no trouble getting from waking up to falling asleep with more than an hour here or there to sit idle.

As busy as I am, my schedule gives the day a durable structure. It does not feel so much like a limit on my time, as much as something that opens specific spaces that are “not work” in each day. During the school year, I sip my idle time, and cherish it as something special. I fit in an hour of writing, and it serves as a counterweight to the all the rest of the day’s efforts.

Then comes summer. My schedule opens up, and idle time drinks me down in one single swallow. I can watch six hours of news at the drop of a hat, or nap while old, favorite movies play on Turner Classic Movies, or stand in the kitchen and pet the cat who likes to eat on the windowsill while being petted. The three hours it takes for the dishwasher to sanitize bottles passes while I walk for gelato; I could eat gelato for days. Work, work of any sort, gets in the way of lazy naps. Licking a postage stamp would take too much effort. Small balls of cat fur collect on the carpet; I give them names.

What happened to the grand plans? Wasn’t there a romance I was going to undertake? Don’t I have the outline of a novel festering somewhere? When will I install a properly working garbage disposal? I have scads of miles built up on Southwest, aren’t there friends I haven’t visited in years?

Nothing. Inertia wraps its warm comfortable fingers around my wrists, and holds me tight with the insistence of a dirty secret: I love to be idle. Nothing to do is my idea of heaven, and I can do it with sluggish zeal. Do less! Do less! Forsake your obligations and practice closing your eyes! This is not “genius at work” time, unless I am the genius of laggardly living.

But then I do this, I write about it, and the spell is broken. How did I forget words, the deeper determined secret that I tried to deny, and which surface from even this short (and all too long) dormant time and claim me? I may not be the self-ascribed martinet of the school year and yet I feel compelled by word and dream to get back to it. And so I do.

Loss and Connection

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is a tart response to the steady procession out the door.  First she loses keys, then houses, then cities, two rivers, and a continent.  She writes, “Practice losing farther, losing faster.” And finally, “you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).” And that seems about the right order: keys, houses, cities, rivers, continents, you.

I have to admit that I’ve lost my fair share of people along the way. I have no friends from elementary school. I have a few acquaintances (thanks Facebook), but no profoundly important bonds from high school.  I keep in intermittent touch with a couple of professors from college, but all the people I played bridge with at lunch or in the evening, my swimming compatriots, or my more fiery friends from that rich time of awakening have gone. I retain only a single connection from the lost years while I worked in restaurants. Until the age of 28, the only people who remained constant in my life were my father, my mother, and my brothers, and I could no more lose them than I could lose my opposable thumbs, my kidneys, or my hair. Oops.

Somewhere along the way all that changed.  And it wasn’t the people I was meeting.  I figured out a few things about myself, and started on my life’s work. I am happy, overjoyed really, that I have friends who I met on the first day I started graduate school at Binghamton, and that in the thirty years since then, I have built, and been built into webs that extend across the country and onto other continents. Even if I disappeared today, if sudden tragedy erased me, those webs would remain, and my juncture would remain too, if only as a bright memory.

Still there are losses, certain “you’s” who spin away someplace else, who collided with my life, briefly or for longer times, and then left.  In the ramshackle castle of my heart, I have a dozen rooms of voices and gestures belonging to this you or that you who received and returned “I love you” from me and to me.

I can imagine rekindling almost any old friendship.  Bruce, Steve, Kevin? Trevor, Barry, Pete? Beth, Paul, Wendy, Cliff, Neil, Jean, Miriam, Ted? Sure. I would be delighted to hear about their lives, to listen to their stories, and discover where they have been, what they have learned, the best meals they have eaten.  I would sit them all around a table and cook a stew of memory.  But those women with whom I have shared at least a glimpse of my most intimate self, for whom I carved hearts into scallops (and filled those hearts with pesto), or alongside whom I have sat quietly on glacial erractic boulders, or who kissed me until days turned into into weeks, and weeks turned into years?  I think I have lost them.

Maybe it’s because break ups are just that—a break, a tear in the web of connections.  If a declaration of love is tantamount to an assertion of meaning in the universe: there are stars! there is hydrogen! the miracle of leaves! radio waves! elephants! cellos! then the end of love threatens to cast all of creation into some alternate universe where everything delicious tastes like burning tires.  Of course it doesn’t. Of course that is overly romantic. It is just turning a page.

What universe do you live in that anything can be set aside so blithely? I cannot.

And so it is with special joy that one star flickered back onto the horizon.  After nearly twenty five years, I sent this old friend a message “Went on a date with someone who so fabulously reminded me of you.” We chatted back and forth and she sent me a draft of the book she has been running away from for as long as I knew her. Finally running into it, she has uncovered connection after connection, and as she does, she bounced between them amazed and perplexed, delighted as a child who has discovered the art of skipping. At some penultimate revelation she declared that she had uncovered a miracle, to which I responded that she is, was, and always would be a miracle. She answered, “Well that made me cry. We had something so special. And for you to still be in my in my life is another miracle.” Thank you, my now distant friend, for helping put the universe back into order.  Keep writing.

We are all miracles. Loss only makes me feel that more keenly now than I ever had before.  But not just loss: my daughter, my students, my friends, a Sondheim song, everything, everyone.  Once I felt unequal to the task of acknowledging and praising the miracles that were all around me.  I kept them at a distance and felt flustered, off-balance, and awestruck when they accepted me into their orbits.  When they drifted away, I accepted the loss, almost as glibly as Bishop does in her poem. After all, what was I but some strange satellite from some strange universe?  Even Bishop’s advice, “Write it,” seemed to make the world and the process of loving and losing little more than the material for writing (which, I am half ashamed to say, it can be).

Loss is a disaster and no disaster, because it casts me back out of myself, and so deeply reminds me that I am not the center of a weird universe, but part of something larger. In his poem, “The Cleaving, “ Li-Young Lee calls us “a many-membered body of love.”  So I am reminded, and so I write, part of the miracle and a miracle. A contradiction and a multitude. Brian Brennan for the moment and in perpetuity. My heart fixed here, back in the web, part of this and every other universe, spinning in every direction, and open.

Texas (a poem)

On my birthday, of all days, I feel the absence of my friends–those souls scattered across the world like the no longer tightly packed leaves of my heart. A long time ago I wrote a poem about them, and so heading to the day, here it is.

Texas

In the evening, between the blur of work
And the final call of slumber
We wear red hats.
We sit on the bench. We take
the field. We stretch into position.
We wear red hats.
The opposition—such as it is—wears
hats of blue, black, or even green.
We wear red hats.
This goes on. Balls are thrown.
We catch. We hit. We sit,
and wait for chance to take a hand.
We wear red hats.
The night provides possibilities.
What did we do all day?
Who knows? We cancelled checks.
We bought farms. We wiped spit
from the trumpeter’s lip. We organized
a trip to the land of hats, where we found what?
Robes of white? Wooden shoes? Electricity? Vision?
Yes, yes, yes, & yes again. And
red hats in sizes to fit our various heads.

The world is composed of cowhide & ash.
We wear red hats.
The world is composed of teletype & ink.
We wear red hats.
The world hurtles forth, two seamed & sinking.
We wear red hats.

You go home early. We play on
in our red hats.
Each side takes a turn. The game
continues hours into night.
The night waits for days, weeks—
there’s ice in the stands.
We wear red hats. We can’t stop.
The opposition languishes. We give them
red hats. What cheers apply?
GO RED HATS! DEVASTATE THE GAME!
ANNIHILATE DAY! PLAY MORE!
WEAR RED HATS!

Grass grows around our ankles,
tickling our knees, topped with red hats.
The ground is a mystery.
The umpires resort to rules.
How many red hats to a side? Which one
of you is the pitcher? Should the manager
wear a red hat? Arguments ensue.
“Stop being so shrill,” he says. “This isn’t
opera. Break into bloom.”

The roses wear red hats.
Coffee and Coke wear red hats.
Garibaldi wears a red hat.
Eisenhower and Eichmann wear red hats.
Red-hatted love takes red-hatted hate
in a ten-minute ballet called “The Red Hat.”
The red-hatted director of the planetarium
puts on a show of red-hatted stars
and the ancient constellation “Red Hat Hercules.”
Borofsky’s famous lost painting “Jesus,
Mary & Joseph in Red Hats” is traded at auction
for a box of rare Etruscan red hats.

What good will it do to turn the other way
when men in red hats greet you at every base,
slap you on the back and wish you, “Good Luck”?
The world isn’t about knuckleball or double play.
The world isn’t about morning glory or ceramic tile.
The world isn’t about to fall into our outstretched mitt—
Though, wouldn’t that be nice? Miteinander befallen.
The world isn’t about red hats or anything else.
The world slides away out of the zone
leaving us hitless. Struck out.

Cannibals wait in the stands
threatening us with dinner and midnight snacks.
They wear no hats!
We wear red hats!
We were victorious long before your sons became daughters.
Our chances look good: “80/20,”
the team doctor prognotes.
“Wait!” he says, taking off his hat,
“I mean 20/80.” Then chases the batboy
across the field, yelling, “Lunch!”
Should we take off our hats? Join
the cannibal doctor in ritual feast?
Or should we play?
“PLAY!” shouts the team, pulling their hats
tight around their ears.
“PLAY!” shout the cannibals, who take
red hats from back pockets.

I wish you would wear a red hat.
We could give up winter together,
assemble our nine, and be
World Red Hat Champions.
No one, not even Nolan,
can put us down in order.
In your ear? In your ear!
The rally is afoot!
Hits come like fireflies. Runs
torrent into morning.
All day the day begins again.
We wear red hats.

The Wrong Side of the Bed

Some days it feels like there is no good side of the bed. I wander into the day with storm clouds surrounding me, and then the day just adds more; I go from grey to absolute darkness. Everything that people say, even people that I love and respect, just strikes me as wrong. Nothing is where I have put it (I work in spaces that I share, so this is—growl—fairly typical). It is too humid. Help that is offered is the wrong help, or worse, unhelpful. My face works itself into a deeply lined scowl. People charitably comment that I look tired. I know the code. I look angry.

In general, I am a happy man. I can find my way to a good feeling by hook and by crook. I take joy from a cup of coffee, and from the sound of my daughter’s voice. I rarely find myself in the place the Violent Femmes describe in “Add It Up”; in fact, just singing along (“Why can’t I get just one fuck…”) makes me laugh. The universe is like a perpetual gift-giving machine designed by the best toymaker ever.

Except. Except when the black clouds of contrariness gather around my head. And then storm. (It’s so bad that I cannot even manage complete sentences to describe the feeling). The first flash of anger brings attendant feelings of self-loathing and despair; I have failed again to keep the thunder at bay. This of course leads to more anger—at myself, and at whatever the temporary cause of it may be. Call worship service boring? Rage. Complain that the smell of cookies in the oven smells like something burning? Rage. The Juniors and Seniors decide to ditch detention on a day I skip an important meeting to sit for two hours with their recalcitrant selves. Rage. I can hear my mother, “I’ll wring your neck.” Thanks mom. Rage.

Anger is my forbidden emotion, and because in the atlas of my brain I have marked it taboo (here there be dragons), I am less familiar with the terrain than I should be. Okay, that’s a lie. I am terrifyingly familiar with anger. I walked over that ground for years as a child and adolescent. The flags of my furies unfurled when something or someone contradicted or existentially threatened the foundations of my moral universe. When I was a boy, those foundations were fairly straightforward and limited, and resulted in squalls of “That’s not fair,” which could pertain to the most trivial (“He has more soda than I do!”), to the substantial (“How can you throw him out of school weeks before graduation?”). The dictates of fairness required an even hand be dealt to all, and later incorporated a sense of esprit de corps (were all in this together). I clove to these rules tightly and took the breaches seriously.

And what isn’t fair to a first born son? We, who stand at the vanguard of the moral universe, who plunge into the morasses that our parents design into swampy labyrinths, who seek strength and consistency and meet frailty and disorganization—or worse hypocrisy. I learned early enough not to get angry when I encounter something that doesn’t simply challenge me (lesson from sailing #37: learn to confront challenges: sea-sickness, rain, rash decisions, doldrums, incapable crew, broken ribs; with aplomb. Because another challenge is coming in 5, 4, 3, 2…), or disagree with me. In fact, I run toward, perhaps too giddily, challenge and disagreement. It wasn’t always so, but learning to be gleefully devastated from time to time helped me become a good student, and (so I hope) a better man.

As I aged, I learned to grasp the essentially contradictory nature of life. I embraced Whitman’s charge: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” On the flip side, I expected others to embrace it as well. I attribute my general buoyancy to the multitudinous sea of possibility in which I swim, but I recognize that others must swim in narrower straits. Must you? Really? On stormy days, I do too. I feel as if I am repudiating myself, reneging on the promises I have made to myself and to the universe, failing at my calling and failing at my life’s sole purpose. I want to run away, and live cabin-bound on the rolling ocean, in the thickest forest, on the side of a stark and forbidding mountain.

On rare occasions, I draw on this narrower, “fatal vision” as Macbeth calls it. When I play poker, for instance, I find it easier to put on the fierce blinders of aggression. Sometimes when I write, I close the larger windows to focus on just this pane or that pane of vision. When I teach, I rein in my big confusing mind so that my students can see what it is like to walk on one path in one direction with singular purpose and clarity; that is the lesson they must learn now. After these experiences, I feel drained, in part because I have intentionally disconnected, and the angry hand is the one that flips that switch.

So, when the grey days come unbidden, from a bad night’s sleep, or illness, or some twist of half remembered dream or memory (do I have to wake up with THAT strange bedfellow today?), I feel less myself, at odds with the world, looking, like Ishmael, for hats to knock off, and eyeing ships bound for sea with untoward desire. But, the day passes. I remain a free man. In the morning to come, every side of the bed glistens with possibility again, and I am once again myself.

Indignation

I ran around all the time as a child. My mother showed my brother and I the door early in the morning, we came back for lunch and were signaled when it was time for dinner. We wandered over the countryside, in and out of creeks, over train trestles, into corn cribs, for miles in many directions. We hung from creepers high in trees. We dove off construction equipment into puddles of thick mud. Our lives were idyllic and unsupervised. We ran through stores, charging up down escalators and down up escalators. We waited in cars while my mother shopped, and we waited, untended, doors locked to the outside, because we ran through fancy dress stores and raised havoc.

At dinner time we sat and ate quietly because children were to be seen and not heard. We scarfed down our meals, partly from boredom, partly because we did not snack all day and were legitimately hungry. Then we sat while my parents talked. We fidgeted, just as we fidgeted at the St. John’s chapel on Sunday mornings. On Sunday’s, at least, we would ride with my father after church, and he would take us to the News Agency in Paoli, where, if we had been good, he would buy each of us a pack of trading cards (Batman, it was the 60s) when he picked up the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. We fought over prized cards.

I read the indignation that people heap on this parent of that parent, or this child or that child, particularly around the incident at the Cincinnati zoo. But indignation over parenting (or childing) is not limited to that event. A girl’s skirt is too short, or his teeth are crooked, or her hair is dyed, or his pants are too short, or he cusses, or she chews gum, or he doesn’t say “sir,” or she runs down hallways. And mom works, or dad works two jobs, or travels away from home, or sleeps late on Sunday, or doesn’t go to church, or mom doesn’t bake cookies for school, or doesn’t volunteer at church, or spends time in her studio, or runs out of gas on the way to the store. Or brings rambunctious kids into a store, or a park, or a zoo.

My objection is not of the “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” variety (although, come to think of it. What the hell? We swam in neighbors’ pools without adult supervision. There but for the grace of whatever, any one of us could have gone.). My objection is to random acts of indignation: the knee jerk blame response. And sure, there is plenty in this life that is blameworthy: acts of intentional cruelty vile enough to stir rage. Occurrences that general good will could prevent if there was enough political and social fortitude to solidify into meaningful action. But sometimes there is simply tragedy, unplanned, stupid, and even if entirely avoidable, but ineffably tragic.

There is, in the common place daily existence we lead, an element of danger and potential tragedy. Bicycles. Cars. Cars! Streets. Creeks. Trees. Rock walls (not those pristine indoor creations that kids climb while tethered to safety supports), but walls of layered rocks that separated the playground from the roundabout where the buses waited at the end of the day. We climbed them while we waited for our bus to arrive, our slender seven year old fingers finding purchase as we scaled twice the height of our heads. And if there is still such a wall somewhere, I know some eyes are scanning it to find a path to the top. We learn, begrudgingly or blindly, to accept the danger, right up to the point it raises a scaly hand to snatch away a life or rudely injure a young and blameless arm or leg or eye.

As a parent, I understand the impulse to protect, and know that I wish no awful event to befall my daughters. (Someone reading this right now is charging his or her bile to new, but not unfamiliar heights: your daughter should suffer what she suffered.) What limits do we insist on placing on our wild things? All of them? Really? The only unbounded possibility is the extent of grievance we wish to express. And maybe it is just because we cannot regulate out or shame away or sternly reprimand the tragic element of life, we superproportionately feel, what? fear? grief? anger? Which we transform into salty indignation. And for those who feel fear, I have no words of consolation, because there are no words to console against the stupid and the random chance of danger. I can write, “You’re not alone,” but in that moment, you are alone. Fear isolates us. Indignation gives us a kind of strength, and, at least, a voice against calamity.

Still, remember. Protect what you can. Plan as much as you are able. Eliminate the horrible. If that means no zoos, if that’s what it takes, fine. If that means fewer guns, if that’s what it takes, then remember that more children died in gun events than at zoos. But somewhere, some danger waits. Sadly, even now, even with Neosporin and emergency rooms. And when it comes you will welcome sympathy, and it will be your due.