Passing Game

Bracing for the blow is useless. It will hurt no matter how often the intellect insists that it's in charge and that matters are well in hand. Might as well practice in a casket. Open the lid. Close it. Feel the confines around your shoulders. Maybe a giggle will break the spell. But it won't accomplish what can't be achieved, no more or less than play acting at non-existence or practicing grief could.

The pickle brine will eventually evaporate. So will the bath of bleach that I used to submerge long, wiry strands of poison ivy vines in my backyard. So too will my days and my memory in the minds of survivors when enough years have flown. Even immediately, attention cannot and will not be paid, despite the plea of the wife of Miller's Loman. Ones who remain must think of themselves and the business of life is life, to paraphrase liberally from the ever pithy President Coolidge.

The secret is to love and to understand. "Forgive everyone everything" said Morrie of "Tuesdays With Morrie."  He also spoke of this issue of attention. None of us ever got enough of it, he asserted: that loving nurturing touch, like no other, the enveloping and sweetly enfolding embrace of our mother. Well, try to return that …perhaps to that very mother who may be feeling like a child herself as her world contracts, more superannuated than perhaps you shall ever be.

Super Bowl Day approaches. The escapism is so palpable it's nearly laughable. Ritualized substitutes for warfare are very comforting and watching large grown men assault each other for sixty minutes on a mid-winter's Sunday lets us shout or pout with heavenly or hellish yo-yo-ing emotions that we imagine transport us to the rarefied realms of those who are truly alive. The memory of a bloodied, bald man kneeling on a football field of half a century ago, tells a different tale. Raw courage or dawning enlightenment of futility's sway and the enfeeblement by time: what wisdom exactly did Mr. Tittle harvest that day and how did he characterize his place in the football world at that moment?

Everyone dies and everyone loses. First and foremost, we lose our lives. But we lose most everything along the way. We lose money, we lose spouses, we lose sweethearts, we lose parents, we lose our home, our favorite automobile, our appetite, we lose friends, we lose touch, we lose our hair, our teeth, our memory and sometimes we lose our sense of humor, irretrievably. Another view tells of change being the only thing of permanence, this ironic dependability we are encouraged to welcome by the infuriatingly and supposedly well adjusted. This is a kind of mocking conceit, much like the saying "sincerity is the most important thing and once you learn how to fake that, you've got it made."

We are too flip, too eager to express how clever we are, whether it's a succinct comment on a Facebook thread, a tabloid headline or some well turned phrase on the lips of a late night television talk show host. True clowns make us uncomfortable; we are more inclined to mistake venomous taunts and cynical assaults for mirth. Self-deprecation is not cool. Opening the heart to share its blood with others is avoided like a plague.

So, what's a road to consider?  Prepare to be a fool without seeking pity. Know that you are one of the race of men and like those leaves that Homer described: brightly growing on the tree of life for a brief while and then tumbling, tossed, crunched underfoot and finally crumbling food for the earth. Live and love until you're called and know that neither the memory of your spiritual gifts nor the gifts themselves will ever die if you have truly touched your survivors and they in turn have been moved to teach and touch theirs.

Listening To No Sound

Making believe: what are the choices? Clarabell did not speak. A not so distant cousin of Harpo Marx, less libidinal and subversive, with no sinister, Semitic leer, the unheard clown made clear, across nearly thirteen years of television shows that he was a harmless mute and that his power resided somewhere other than in his vocal chords or in his verbal intelligence and that cerebral communications through the wonder of human language was not the path he could or would choose.

Silence. It is feared, cherished, misunderstood, compelling, disturbing, comforting, thought provoking and attractive. Spiritualists, others who meditate, psychics, thinkers, poets, scientists, the compassionate and the scheming, dreamers and builders, prayerful persons, despondent ones, patient ones, so many different souls: they all utilize silence and the best of them employ it not as a manipulation but embrace it as appropriate to the moment: an opportunity to think, to withhold what could be a thoughtless outburst or a needless filler of an uncomfortable interval of embarrassing imaginings that "chit-chat" might cover up and render neutered by a banal or yawn-inducing remark.  The pregnant pause never grows old. A heartbeat has no home without its partner, the interval of no thump, no reverberation. Lightness without the dark and beauty without that which is horrific: we somehow knew of black holes before our august scientists informed us of the stupefying concept of them and we somehow know that our pulses mimic something in the universe: a tension and a release that echoes down time's corridors to  unseen horizons.

But again, how do we hear what makes no sound?  Dreams seem to be an offer of a path to travel. It's a treasure hunt, but what are we seeking?  We do not want the noise of waking hours, the distractions of appetites, cares of maintenance, finances, the posturing for fame and displays of pride and self-adulation. We want a place of refreshment, the quiet yet rippling brook, the empathetic and yes, the empathic friend, the mildness of a loving father, the sleep undisturbed with hortatory alarm clocks tossed out of bedroom windows, as the ancient riddle for juveniles explained, by the moron who wanted to see time fly. Are we really so superior to this mental defective, or do we not so secretly envy his liberating antics much as we find a kinship with Clarabell's mischief with his seltzer bottle or his rubber bulbed horn. Ah, the horn…like the dog's bark, he does want to speak, but the words do not come. It's the inexpressible. We all come short of a certain eloquence, no matter how silver tongued we or the world imagines us to be. But we must try. This may be the beginning of prayer.