For the Mothers and for my Eldest Daughter Upon Her Birth Day

In honor of Mother’s Day, and to celebrate the birthday of my superb editor daughter, Molly, I am excerpting here my fifth book, My Summer with Molly, The Journal of a Second Generation Father (which, among other honors, won the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for Autobiography).  For the first three months of Molly’s life, when my wife had to return to work, I stayed home and played “Mom” to her.  Or tried to.  I kept a diary of the experience, which is the basis of the book.

I excerpt below sections from the first and second chapters of the book, “Labor Day” and “Birth,” which describe the labor and delivery of Molly Margaret.  You can read the chapters in their entirety here—and the rest of the book—as well as some others of my books here under the Bookshelf tab of my site (all free!).

The book (and this blog entry) is dedicated to: “Jeannette Elizabeth Stoebe And All the Other Great Mothers, Living or Dead.”  Hats off to you all, and I hope you enjoy the read!

May 12

Labor Day

I think it's started." Timarie's voice sounds of cool grim excitement over the phone.

My watch reads 3:07 p.m., Monday, May 12. "Are you sure?" The baby girl we had taken such elaborate measures to conceive, so she would be born the week I gave final exams, wasn't due for ten days. "Remember, the first one's usually late," I remind her.

"When I saw Dr. Keel this morning, he said I was dilated to one centimeter. Now the pains are five minutes or less apart. They've been that way for about 40 minutes." Her voice is calm, but an underlying tension lets me know that the one thing I have ever seen my 26-year-old wife show any real apprehension over, labor, is close at hand.

"Hold on, I'll be right there."

Driving home from the university calls up memories more than 19 years old. Then, with my first wife, who was dilated to five centimeters and expecting twins, I drove the ten miles to the hospital on legs that handled the accelerator and brake pedals like strands of cooked spaghetti; 40 minutes after I safely delivered her to the emergency room, she was safely delivered of two boys, to go with the 15-month-old boy at home.

I have matured some since then. My legs feel numb but firm this time.

Timarie is just finishing the packing when I get home. Two suitcases holding enough for a migration to Alaska: clothes and underclothes, nightgown, nursing bra, make-up, unguents, potions, backup toothbrush-es, cassette tapes of Mozart, Dvorak, Vivaldi, a baby outfit in pink, a baby outfit in blue (why? had she lost her faith?), receiving blankets, a sock stuffed with two tennis balls....

"What are the tennis balls for?"

"You don't remember?" The look is accusatory.

"Should I?" Has she scheduled a match with the labor nurse?

"You use them as a back massager. Don't you remember them telling us that in class?"

"Forgot."

That wasn't the only thing I'd forgotten from our eight Wednesday-night lessons in Prepared Childbirth Class. I should have just taken a written final and hoped for a "Gentleman's C."

Into Timarie's creaky '69 Cougar I jam it all, including an infant's car seat that rests eerily empty on the rear upholstery, and at 4:20 p.m. we are on our way to Humana Hospital, a mere three miles away and chos en in large part for its nearness. I experience some angina, but the legs remain sound, thick, uncooked linguine…

[25 grueling hours later]

May 13

Birth

…And then-as if to make up for all the painful delay-time-in-a-rush telescopes as the birth begins. ..the disproportionately large head confronting first the outer world as Timarie orders through a cry of ecstatic pain, "Pictures!"

"We've plenty of time for pictures," the doctor says in an authoritarian voice, though I've been cooly clicking off shots through the shifting screen posed by the doctor and two nurses. "Let's get the kid out." And that he does, his hands pulling and easing the new life into the bright light, then briskly going to a suction pump to suck out mucous from the newly operational respiratory system, while I stand stilled in awe.

"Do I have a little squirmer?" Timarie asks in the same ecstatic cry.

I crane my neck, seeing first the child, then the thick, multi-colored elongated umbilical cord I mistake for a split-second as male genitalia on a gargantuan scale. At 3:26 p.m. all is clear...except for the placenta still inside.

"We have a little Molly Margaret,” I burble reassuringly.

"We do? We do? Ooooohhhh." Her moan carries the same thrill, against Molly's first beautifully loud and indignant cries at being.

The new mother is suddenly briefly businesslike. "How does she look?"

"She's fine," the doctor immediately reassures her, inured to such inquiries into the baby's physical condition.

"She's a redhead," I add, stunned by this wholly unanticipated roll of the genetic dice.

"She iiiis?!" The voice of teary ecstasy remains.

Molly continues her angry wails as the doctor cuts and clamps the cord; the nurses wipe my little girl off and wrap her in a towel-like blanket. My mind is clearer than I can remember it ever being. My eyes are seeing and recording beyond what I photograph: the baby's head molded at birth into a loaf shape, like the head of a Yoruba tribeswoman... the strange purple spectacle of the afterbirth... the red trickle-down from Timarie's episiotomy...the little red birthmark on the back of Molly's left thigh... the small patch of blood on her crown where the fetal monitor was screwed in.

"Will you put her on me?" Timarie begs. Dr. Keel sets the squawling infant on her mother's chest. "Hello, my little angel girl!" Molly's cries magically subside. "You've got your father's nose already! Larry, touch the little angel girl" is the plaintive command.

I do, the skin softer than putty. I notice her hands and feet are pale.

"Is that vernix?" I ask Sylvia, having read about the waxy substance that often covers newborns.

"No, just a lack of circulation," the nurse answers. "It takes a while for the blood to get going."

The labor pain gone, what she's worked so long and hard to deliver delivered, Timarie becomes suddenly talkative and begins reviewing the highlights of the ordeal.

"Want to do it again?" the doctor asks.

"Get funny!"

The banter, the clean up, and Tim's sewing up continues, but I leave the delivery room for more exhilarating work. The time has come for Molly to be officially measured and weighed into the world, and I, lucky guy under this new plan for parenting, get to accompany her and a nurse into the nursery. I even get to fondle her in her little plastic crib-cradle between measurings. Seven pounds, 11 ounces is where the scale stops; 19-and-a-half inches long is the tale of the tape.

The nurse affixes the identifying plastic band around a tiny ankle, telling the world that this little miracle is Molly Margaret Meyer. As I've both read and been told, most infants are most alert the hour after they are born. Anxious to meet Mom and Dad? Who's to say?

Molly is sure alert. When I put my face close to hers (and under this new plan there's no shooing Dad off because he might be carrying germs), she appears to study me, the first human face she's looked into very long.

What an honor! Her limbs are long and fair, her eyes are big and a violet-blue...I hope they stay that way.

A little more than an hour after birth, Mom and Molly and Dad are reunited for more picture taking. This time as a family. Oh joy and jubilation! Triumph over tribulation! Elation from creation! Little Molly Margaret is born!

As I'm falling asleep this night, at home alone as I must be, I ask myself what one thing of all things I've learned on this day of trials and firsts.

Curiously, it is that I finally understand woman's age-old hatred of war.

After the gory ordeal is done, after expending all that blood and sweat, fluids and feces and prolonged suffering to bring a life into the world, why spend it so stupidly, so wantonly?

We live and we learn. Some days-special days like birth days—we learn more than others.

FIRST LOVE, LAST LOVE

AKA POEM OF LOVE

Did I know to love you then,

When the first life ate

Free oxygen molecules?

If so we've done it more than once,

Lucked into these fetters before

By what must be more than chance.

If not by will then a guiding hand of gods

Not wholly cruel and set on wrecking stars,

But who tolerate feeling and touch,

Are amused by love.

And let us sometimes laugh.

But will they let us pass this

Or any way and love again?

Or still?

—Larry L. Meyer

March 1997

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

Star Dust #6

God is the strummer of the strings

That set all particles in motion,

God is the bursting of the stars that make us

And the dumb dark matter that takes us

As its own, rounding the brief journey of

These mutant wonders after being.

—Larry L. Meyer

11/16/99

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

RIGHT, GERARD, BUT YOU'RE WRONG

I desire to go where springs explode,

To fields alive with greens and golds

Where hills of poppies once blew.

And I ask to live forever,

Promising to stay with the high surf,

Out in the swing of the sea,

Green ever, dumb never.

So there! I quit the haven

For the tireless chop that is to be.

—Larry L. Meyer

9/10/83

For context, this verse is a response to the following gem of a poem, by the singular Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Heaven-Haven

A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,

And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

1864

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

LOVING AVOCADO TREES

I love my avocado tree.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love all trees,

A genetic thing I think

That goes back to Wotan

And I suspect before,

When woods warmed my ancient forebears

As the ice inched slowly north.

But avocado trees and I

Have a special bond that

Ties back to the summer of forty-four

When I as a boy of eleven came

To California and delighted to find

One in my new back yard,

Of not much value, neighbors soon let me know,

Just a seedling with next to no fruit flesh to eat.

But for me it was the best climbing tree

I would ever know, mature with

Thick lateral limbs spread to the

Four corners of our small town compass,

Amply shading the grassless half of our backyard

And the Whittier patio where

Our family of six ate dinner often.

Sure, there was the downside chore

Of raking up the always shedding giant’s leaves

And the ugly round purple fruit with its huge

Seed wrapped in green-to-brown slime.

But Eureka! This was California!

That big seed with its creamy lumpy hide

Was prized by growers as hardy stock

On which to graft more commercial kinds for their groves.

My uncle happened to own an orchard and paid

Me 50 cents an intact pit that hadn’t split for my ugly harvest,

A princely sum of walking-around money

In those pinched times of fin de guerre.

#

Did I say he was my uncle by marriage not by blood?

This owner of three car-part shops and wealthy as we were not,

Confident Calavo gentleman rancher of citrus groves as well

Who lured my machinist father and his family west with promises never kept...

In fact, held Dad in a state of soft suspended penury until his drive dried up.

This entrepreneurial uncle not my blood

Also held FDR in florid-faced contempt

That surpassed even the scorn he saved for his field hands,

“Lazy Mexicans” he’d mutter to a baffled me,

A sheepish noontime dropout

When picking navels at their side.

And yet this lordly man who bossed about everyone

In my world and won my fear and lost my trust

Strangely and unwittingly sealed my love of avocado trees.

Lacking a son of his own,

He gave me gleaning rights to his La Habra grove,

Gave me first comb after the pickers went through

To use my baseball player eyes to spot the slight round

Curves hidden in a leafy roof of twenty shades of green

They had missed…and they missed plenty.

A Fuerte bonanza!  Prized produce

Taken home to ripen on my roof

And sell when ready door-to-door

At the dear price of 40 cents per,

Not chump change for the late Forties.

For four boyhood years

I walked beneath that frog-green canopy

Rent here and there by a thin shaft of sun,

Easy in a dusty silence save

For the rare rustle of a rat in the dry leaves,

Serene in my sacred grove of innocence,

Alone with my green thoughts in my own green shade.

Then I had to exit Eden for the wider world.

My uncle sold his groves and I went off to war.

He died before I came back to find an altered place,

All the groves gone, the old orchard towns spreading

Their stucco crates to house the hordes of pilgrims

Crowding into the Promised Land

That never more would hold such promise.

Dear dead days as some poet said.

Yes, sure, some trees still remain,

Backyard relics of that vanished time

Gracing a family’s table with Persea Americana

In scattered tracts here and there.

But trees in numbers moved south to Fallbrook

Or up north Santa Barbara way,

And when I settled in LA to busy

Myself with doing nothing worth recalling

I went without and sensed the loss.

In later life, on the downside slide off my midlife hump,

I got another tree to love,

One of the backyard kind that gave shade and fruit alike

To me and my second family

In a seaside town not known as kind to Aztec nuts.

This ahuacatl is no premium market fare,

Not your noble buttery Fuerte,

Nor the choice round knobby Hass

(That dark mutant freak first grafted not far

In miles and time from my uncle’s old spread)

That ships so well to distant markets.

No, mine is an elongated lesser breed, pebbled green in its youth,

Then purpling slowly under the summer sun

To reach table grade in its fall-winter ripening,

Nearly as tasty as its betters if you eat it precisely right

In its two-day prime when the lemon flesh softens to near perfect,

Before going into a quick and stringy brown of fast decay.

Yes, the fruit is fine but the shade is better,

The thirty-foot giant is sheltering sky to our small backyard patio

Where my wife’s many-colored thumb has left its floral ring of pleasures

Around a half dozen fan-back chairs from which to watch

The dusk dance of late light through jostled leaves

Hard by the sundown sea.

We’ve tracked 27 years together now

On our separate animal and vegetable ways,

And shared our ups as well as downs,

The gift to me of two girls and a son,

And for it bumper crops in El Niño years

Where from one trimmed branch I could feed an office,

Sorrows brought us close as well

In what might be fancifully called the Tragedy of Three Trees.

A truly mighty stone pine stood a mere fifty feet north

In my neighbor’s yard and thrust its soaring needled crown

Into high tension lines where a local lad reached up

One day and touched his instant death in the company of my son

Who fell to earth shocked but mercifully alive.

Death brought an ambulance and a coroner’s team

Soon followed by many lawyers set on fixing blame.

“Boys will climb trees,” I tried to tell them,

But they argued for a year before the blood money

Was counted out and my insurance was cancelled.

Only then did Edison’s agents come and grind down

The great pine into heaps of sawdust

That left a gaping hole for the sky.

Not five years later came the burn again

Forty feet south in my other neighbor’s yard,

In a shaggy tree that put out small but sweet peaches,

When a trimmer touched his steel blade to the same killer wire.

I heard the noontime zap and went out back to find

A dark young man spread like Christ thrown backward

On a cross of boughs, stiff and dead enough to bring

The close-by fire crew to confirm that sorry fact.

The husk of the poor man from Michoacán

Was removed from our view for who knows where,

To be mourned afar, later on, by strangers to us.

No lawyers showed to find blame for a fee,

The fried peach smoldered for days and lacking

Muster to mount more leaves, slowly died.

That left my tree the survivor of the three.

All the more towering now with its flankers gone,

Rough-barked tough for my kids to climb…

But not too high I made sure.

Then came the blindside blow from

My not neighborly Westside neighbor

Who passed on the gift of proffered fruit and morning shade

By taking a chainsaw to its west-reaching arms,

(Perhaps to save him the months’ long sweep-up

Of messy leaves and buds that marred

His otherwise clean and stark backyard)

But my tree buckled, steadied, suffered,

Almost died from a quarter’s loss from whole.

It barely bore for a year or two,

Then came slowly back but not as before,

Dropping thumps on my bedroom roof at night,

The luckless embryos of alligator pears,

In a long summer rite of mass abortion.

The tree is old like me

And its finished fruits are likewise few,

Mostly reduced to one clinging

To the very end of a burdened branch

Which I still like to spot in the late-day’s onshore breeze,

Dancing doggedly in its jungle cover.

So who will go first?

Probably me.

All life stats considered.

So how do you say goodbye to a tree?

This lover does with some contrived cuteness

And homage to the poet in

This fond farewell:

Glory be to thee for dappling things!

—Larry L. Meyer

8/30/09

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

I Would Like to Serve

Where will I be

In 2043....

I mean the remains of me,

Once the rods and orbs and whorls and worms 

Have done their duty

 And reduced me

 To bits of bone and brittle strands of white hair.

 No friend of entropy,

 I'd like to think I lifted poppies or a redwood tree,

 Gave back life as I was given.

 No, make that know, not think,

 For I have that much coming, knowing

 I was not a waste, a dead ending.

I would like to serve a greater purpose,

 Beg to be of some further use,

 On earth if I must, anywhere,

 But preferably out there,

 On the road to infinity,

 My star stuff sentient still,

 My small and willing mind intact,

 Able as I go to wonder what it's all about,

 And know I'll likely never know

 Even the questions to the answers.

At what price you ask.

Okay. I agree to exile,

The supernumerary sent packing,

 Like some inept cosmic clown of low degree

 Sent to herd and count neutrinos in the far out there.

 But if I prove out, bring me back.

 Let me shield the weak force,

 Lend my shoulder to the strong,

 Monitor monopoles for proton decay

 Even though I know no monopole has been found,

 No proton has decayed.

 I just want to be of use.

Should I really please you or yous,

 Reward me with a post

 Near the center of things,

 Even cleaning the cosmic can,

 So I might eavesdrop on future plans

 And where it all began

 And how and why I figure

 In this starry dream of things entire, 

Though the least response be too much for me,
Fall beyond my ken,

 Just keep me around anyway to dust

 The dark matter no one ever sees.

Let me tell you when I no longer wish to wonder.

You owe me that. 

I've only asked to serve.

 —Larry L. Meyer

Summer of 1987

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

Introducing a New Series Close to My Heart

Dear Reader,

I’m back—after a fashion.  The West Nile Virus that I contracted in 2014 (from a mosquito in Huntington Beach) is the gift that keeps on taking; during the summer, my brain was having seizure activity due to the scarring from the virus.  I spent time in and out of an acute care hospital, as well as a couple of weeks at an acute rehab hospital.  I’ve been home nearly three months, here receiving physical, occupational, and speech therapy.  I’m getting stronger in every way, but am not yet ready to undertake researching and writing my blogs.

But…I have a not-so-secret love: poetry.  I love to read and memorize it, and I love to write it.  And only poetry have I, a mainly prose writer, felt deeply compelled to write.  In it, and only it, do I learn who I am or wish to be.

For some time, my daughter/editor, Molly Meyer, and my family have been encouraging me to post some of my poetry on the blog.  I have been reluctant, apprehensive to spotlight such personal work.  I have decided though, as I enter my ninety-first year: now is the time.  I plan to periodically post my poems (accompanied by Molly’s photos), and I hope that you enjoy them.

  SUNSET BEACH

Here I had to come

For whys I scarcely know,

Come back to the sea

After many inland summers,

Come back alone from a mauled middle life,

To pay respects perhaps,

Or heal myself in salt,

Come back to the brine

And the mother behind memory.

I did resist at first.

Absorbed in self and her

And sons asunder,

I ignored its roar,

Turned my eyes from the cobalt chop,

And saw instead the spoor

Of weekend drunks scattered on the sand.

Misery loves human company

And shared misanthropy.

But always at their edge

And oceans catch you lonely,

Sooner or later or in between,

On mornings when the torn fog

Muffles tidal lapping,

At dusk when the bleeding sun

Falls down the slot between island and mainland.

I address her daily and often now. 

Not as friend or even admirer, really,

But as subject and supplicant,

Wanting to get better and grow smaller

With my burdens and shortening days.

Numb to my knees with wading,

I see now at noons

The shining wake Cabrillo left

And the whole mad risk gone wild

On this distant western shore.

Skirting the golden foam of evening,

I intimidate shorebirds,

Squat avocets and straw-legged phalaropes,

To hold myself in nature

And direction down the strand.

And in mornings of resurrection and the light,

I run alone on the glowing sand

Alongside dolphins who teach me

The lesson I learned and lost:

That life is quick and joy

And partly laughter.

—Larry L. Meyer

May 1980

Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND MOTHER’S DAY TO MOLLY

AN OVERDUE SALUTE TO MY EDITOR DAUGHTER

Molly holds her son and my fourth grandson—our shared treasure—thirteen month-old Jamie Alejandro Geroux.  Taken yesterday, her birthday.

What better time to celebrate the brains behind this blog than when Molly’s birthday and Mother’s Day abut?  Yes, she’s been my editor, art director, photographer, and all-around IT staff for the last six years I’m pleased to say.  Nepotism you’re thinking.  Nope.  She’s got her own credentials, beginning with inheriting the copy editing skills of her mother, Timarie, the best I’ve encountered in sixty years in this word business.  In addition she graduated with honors in English from UC Berkeley and writes her own very literate blog, linked here.

There is another literary tie that binds us.  For the first three months of Molly’s life, when my wife had to return to work, I stayed home and played “Mom” to her.  Or tried to.  I kept a diary of the experience that became my fifth book, My Summer with Molly, The Journal of a Second Generation Father, which won the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for Autobiography.  It’s available for a free read here, (as are some others of my books, gathered here), if you are interested.

Mention of the book prompts me to exhume a poem I hurriedly wrote the day she entered our world, when I first witnessed the miracle of birth:

Molly, Dear

What a happy day in May

When little Molly Margaret

Came to us to stay,

Not trailing clouds of glory

But love to show the way.

Little Molly Margaret,

How trippingly off the tongue

Spring those words for this elfin girl

Whose time on earth has come.

I say her violet eyes

Are two of one of a kind,

And the smiles I give her now

She’ll one day repay in kind,

Molly dear, born this day,

Putty wonder from my clay,

Teach me to know anew

The human heart at play.

                        (5/13/86)

REMEMBERING FATHER DAVE

LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH IN OUR NATIONAL SHOOTING GALLERY

Wedding Day in Sligo, Ireland, August 12, 1985.  A young Father David O’Connell unites the writer and his wife in Holy Matrimony.

As we all know, sudden, violent deaths by gunfire have become commonplace in today’s America.  You wince, shake your head, then unwillingly accept it as part of the random absurdity of modern daily life.  Unless of course the victim is personally known to you—and the killing becomes front-page news—then the shock and grief of it hits you full force.

That is how our family took the five-shot murder of Auxiliary Bishop David Gerard O’Connell at his home in Hacienda Heights on February 18, 2023.  Nearly three months have now passed since the apparently motiveless murder of our family friend, and the shock is slowly subsiding for me, leaving the residual sorrow that feeds on memories.

It was at her sister’s wedding rehearsal in Long Beach, at St. Maria Goretti Church, that my wife-to-be Timarie met Father Dave in 1982.  She was a college junior, and he was a 27-year-old Catholic priest still fresh from Ireland; it was a case of friends at first sight, as they immediately joked and laughed.  When she subsequently introduced me to the soft-spoken, florid-faced guy blessed with what you would call “persuasive charm,” I quickly became a friend as well.

Timarie and I decided to get married in 1985 in Ireland and go on a self-guided W.B. Yeats pilgrimage, which included checking out the “Yeats Festival.”  Timarie wanted Father Dave to marry us in the Catholic Church, and we timed the wedding with his returning to the Emerald Isle for his summer vacation.  Great plan!

Our great plan didn’t work out quite as imagined.  First off, the “Yeats Festival” turned out to be the “Yeats Summer School”—more a scholarly event than the setting for a joyful wedding celebration; my bad.  (And Father Dave had chronic car trouble driving north from his home in Cork and barely made it to the church on time.)

The night before the scheduled Monday-morning ceremony, at our Ballincar House Hotel pub, Timarie charmed an Irish couple (who were in Sligo to attend the Yeats Summer School)—Kieran and Evelyn Byrne—into being our Best Man and Matron of Honor in the morning.  The pair also happened to have a daughter made to order for the role of flower girl.

So on the sunny late morning of August 12, 1985, in the little village Church of St. Nathy and St. Brigid, in Achonry, County Sligo (the hometown church of Father Dave’s seminary friend, Father Jarlath Cunnane), Father Dave hitched us up far from any madding crowd.  I was amazed at how calm, competent, and unflappable he was as he smiled his way through our memorable clown show.

[You can read the full version of the wedding day, as written in my memoir My Summer with Molly, here. I also want to share that Monsignor Cunnane, aka Father Jay, gave a perfect, heart-wrenching eulogy at Bishop Dave’s Funeral Mass (at 53 minutes on the YouTube recording).]

Exactly nine months and one day after the wedding, Timarie gave birth to our daughter Molly, and Father Dave later baptized her at his church in southern Los Angeles.  He administered the same sacrament to our second daughter Madeleine (1989) and son Franz (1992), also at South L.A. parishes.  That would strengthen our already well-established family association.

Father Dave and I had our differences on theological matters, but that did not mar our friendship.  He didn’t have time for abstract debate on eschatology or how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; his mission was far more concrete, carried out on the mean streets, where his burning passion for Christian action found its outlet.  How? 

Feeding the hungry poor of his several parishes over 35 some years, tending to their sick, comforting the desperate and the depressed, brokering peace between gangs, even finding shelter for the homeless—including those broken families whose undocumented breadwinner had been deported.

My wife Timarie had been an early recruit to join his crusade on behalf of the city’s underclass.  In his soft voice of gentle persuasion, Father Dave asked her to help him fill out holiday food baskets for his parish.  She agreed, and that began 30 years of her running a one-woman food drive in northern Orange County to help feed his flock.

She was but one of many persons and groups that Father Dave had enlisted in common cause.  Talk about your organization man!  Modest as always, he plied his subtle and considerable leadership skills to talk others into forming teams to join him in serving and advocating for the urban poor and powerless.

In 2007, with our daughter Molly finishing a college semester studying abroad in England, we decided to meet her in London and make the three-week trip our family’s “Less-Than-Grand Tour” of Europe.  First stop, Ireland.  Cork specifically, Father Dave’s hometown and where he met up with us at our B&B.  There followed an enlightening whirlwind tour of southern Ireland where, to my astonishment, most everyone knew him.  I remember saying to him over a glass of Harp at the Blarney Woolen Mills, “You seem to be on a first-name basis with most of Ireland!”  In his self-effacing, quiet way he responded, “Ireland is a very small country.”  Vintage Dave.

In October of 2014, I became suddenly ill, was rushed to Hoag Hospital, and lapsed into a coma for five days, the victim of mosquito-borne West Nile virus that had attacked my brain.  I was out of it.  But Father Dave was not.  When Timarie told him of my condition, without her asking, he rushed down from L.A. to administer Last Rites…without my knowledge and unnecessarily, as I happily learned later.

Word of this “saint” in the City of Angels apparently reached Rome and Pope Francis, who as we know has steered the Church more toward service and kindness and away from power and politics.  No wonder he found his man in Father David O’Connell, that fearless practitioner of applied Christianity, and saw to his promotion to Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles Diocese on July 15, 2015. 

Timarie and I were surprised and flattered to receive an invitation to his September 8, 2015, installation at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  Need I say the ceremony was long and lavish with pomp and circumstance to spare?  The music was powerful, uplifting.  I thought it was probably a little much for humble street priest Father Dave.  When the ceremony ended, now Bishop Dave, with his two fellow auxiliary bishops, slowly led the ecclesiastics—clad in all their finery—from the altar and down the center aisle toward their Cathedral exit.

My wife and I were seated on the west side aisle near the rear when the new bishop spotted me from about ten feet off.  He broke from the procession and walked over to me and shook my hand.  I was moved, flustered, and embarrassed by the gesture.  To be singled out so.  But that was Dave…the pageantry could wait when you spotted an old friend you hadn’t seen since administering him Last Rites.  What a guy!  (The Mass of Ordination and Installation of Auxiliary Bishops for Los Angeles has been memorialized here on YouTube.  You can hear one of Bishop Dave’s customary eloquent and inspiring homilies at 2:21, and at 2:34 you can see where he veered over to greet Timarie and me.)

We attended the banquet that followed and shared a table with Bishop Dave’s brother, sister-in-law, and nieces and nephew, freshly flown in from Ireland, and Bishop Dave—when he wasn’t circulating among the celebrants.  At one point, he came over to where I was seated and asked me what I thought a strange question:  “Larry (it always came out as “Leary” with his accent), what was that Yeats poem about everything being blessed?”

He had never asked anything of me, and I was momentarily puzzled that it should be some words of Ireland’s greatest poet.  

“It’s the end of his ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul,’” I said.  “It goes:

‘When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast,

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.’”

He was animated as he wrote the words down, as though he was experiencing some mystic’s joyous culmination in seeing the sentiment of his chosen personal motto, “Jesus I Trust in You,” received, reversed, and returned to him by Christ himself.  I had never seen him in such high spirits, so fulfilled.

How ironic that a holy man known throughout the greater Los Angeles community as the “Peacemaker” should be senselessly shot dead by a disturbed handyman with no known coherent motive. 

Ten years back I experienced a similar attack of shock and grief at the gun death of a good friend.  Some of you may remember the murder of Dr. Ron Gilbert, a Newport Beach urologist who was premeditatively shot to death in his office by a stranger.  The story made local headlines; turns out he was a victim of mistaken identity by a disgruntled patient.  Ron was one of my doctors.  Ten years before his killing he diagnosed my stage 2 bladder cancer carcinoma and cut it out.  In the recovery room he came over to my gurney and said, “You are a lucky man.  You had cancer, you didn’t even know it, and now it’s gone.”  (I’m even luckier now, after 20 years of being cancer-free.)

The killings of Bishop Dave and Dr. Gilbert freshen my memory of a summer day in 1968.  A travel writer on assignment, I was aboard an Alitalia 707 flying from New York to Rome, chatting with the plane’s head steward.

He was an engaging young man, talkative, with a friendly but slightly combative style.  It wasn’t long in our discourse before he steered the talk to the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

“Why such violence?” he asked me.  He filled my pause with his own answer.  “You are such a young and violent country…the way we were during the Renaissance.  We used poison, now you use guns.  Why do you love your guns so much?  Maybe you will grow up.”

I wanted to protest and defend my country, but I was tongue-tied.  We are a violent people and guns are our great enablers.  And we show no signs of growing up.  Only of growing worse.

Our gun nuts tell us that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”  Such sophistry.  They miss the point.  Guns in the hands of shooters endanger everyone—the so-called “equalizer” empowers any loony with a grudge to mortally vent his rage.  How many drive-by knifings have you heard of? 

Yeats writes in another poem—“Lapis Lazuli”—of “old civilizations put to the sword.” Our young civilization prefers the gun. And when we go, the cause of death will be ruled a suicide.

MY TEN TIPS ON LIVING TO NINETY

A NONAGENARIAN AT LAST!

CELEBRANTS:  Your blogger celebrates his ninetieth birthday with his youngest grandson, Jamie Geroux, who marks his ninth month on planet earth.

First, deepest thanks to all of you who sent me those kind words and birthday wishes on my 90th.  I am both grateful and humbled.

I should also like to thank my GP, my cardiologist, my neurologist, my nephrologist, my urologist, my hematologist, my oncologist, my dermatologist—as well as the countless surgeons who used their knives on my carcass—for their parts in getting me here.  Finally, and chiefly, thank you to my wonderful wife Timarie, to whom I’ve been married 37 years, for all of her loving care.

Beyond their contributions, to what do I owe my longevity, given the less than vice-free life I’ve led?  Beats me.  Luck to be sure.  Maybe you could partly attribute it to good genes.  According to the 23andMe folks, my haplogroup is I-M253, which is fairly rare and traces back on the male side to some dude who left his bones and SNAPs in a Finnish cave 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.  That makes me a descendant of Vikings, I guess.

To celebrate my 90th as a frustrated do-gooder still looking for a mission in life, I thought I would pass along to you my ten top tips to living this long.  (As a disclaimer I feel obliged to remind you of the wisdom passed down to us by the actress Bette Davis: “Growing old is not for sissies.”)

1. Eat Your Fruits and Vegetables.  As soon as I saw as a young child animals grazing in the field, I refused to eat any meat put before me.  No amount of cajoling by my mother and father could persuade me to break my vow not to eat animal flesh.  Then at age eleven I dared to bite into a hamburger.  Hooked!  Instantly I became a red-meat carnivore for many decades, before my vegetarian daughters nagged me back to a healthy diet…a modified Mediterranean light on meat.  Learn to love salads.

2. Avoid the Infantry.  When your country goes to war and you are called to serve, volunteer as I did for the Air Force.  That was during the Korean fracas.  Yes, I survived without a scratch in Japan as a weatherman, attached to the Ninth Fighter Bomber Squadron that sent F-84s into North Korea to hit secondary targets.  No flying for me.  Yet I got the same Korean Service Medal as those true heroes in the Second Infantry Division…many of whom did not come home.

3. Don’t Smoke Tobacco.  If you do fall into that pernicious addiction, try your best to delay its start and to quit it early.  I speak from sad experience, having lost my father and two younger brothers, none of whom could give up cigarettes.  I did quit 38 years ago, but still score a wheezy 93.5 on those blood oxygen tests.  Let me tell you it’s particularly painful for an oldest brother to outlive his younger brothers by thirteen and fifteen years…so far.

4. Control Your Intake of Alcohol.  You might rightly challenge my credentials to advise you on this subject. Yes, I confess to having had some trouble with booze; indeed it took me all of 65 years to become a teetotaler.

   Born into a family of Germans, beer was always present in the fridge, there to sample as an open gateway drink that helped bring me out of my youthful shyness.  No harm, no foul with the suds.  But by age 18 I had graduated to the harder stuff and I gave them all a try; it became over the years a cleansing process of giving each of them up.  Sake took one hangover.  Scotch tasted like rat piss…no problem kicking that.  Bourbon briefly became the drink of choice until I became employed in the corporate world and one’s after-lunch breath became an issue.  Vodka in all its serviceable disguises came forward to fill the void.

   Then, in my mid-thirties, I discovered the Bombay gin martini.  There is a saying that two martinis are too many, and three are not enough.  So true, so true.  My last one was at age 76, but I can still smell that wonderful aroma from time to time and momentarily feel that happy glow within.  At age 83 I quit chardonnay under Doctor’s orders and that was it, the end.  I’m seven years booze-free now and don’t miss it at all.  Advice?  Don’t wait as long as I did to quit killing brain cells and escape those morning hangovers.

5. Don’t Drive Drunk.  This is a no-brainer.  Get a sober spouse or friend—or call Lyft—to get a lift to your favorite crash pad.  Don’t insist on driving yourself home, then stop en route for a nightcap.  You’re safer taking night swims in a shark tank.

6. Gamble Minimally.  All things in moderation, the sages say.  An annual trip to Las Vegas to enjoy blowing your tax refund is OK.  An occasional friendly game of poker or cribbage with friends is preferable.  But more than one a year of those Vegas trips can be costly and portend a growing addiction to the wheel or the slots, to the dice or the cards.  Or all of them. You know the odds are stacked against you, and the House always scores big over time.

   The same is true of playing the ponies, as I did for a third of my life.  The government and the track take big bites out of that parimutuel pool and leave a small pie to be carved up by the winning handicappers.  Though I was a reasonably good handicapper, it took me many years and much time wasted to confirm that sad fact that you’ll overall end up a loser.  Even then it didn’t dent my love for those beautiful thoroughbreds—so much so that I actually bought small shares of three colts.  Training, stabling, and feeding Azure Blues, Wait for the Wind, and Tell a Story soon convinced me horse racing was indeed the “Sport of Kings”— because only royals could afford the costs.

   If you just have to “bet” on something, be smart and look to the stock market where you can win by putting those restless bucks you have into an index fund with Vanguard or Fidelity.  Here the odds favor you, and the long-term payout may come in handy at retirement time.

7. Get Married and Stay Married.  Yes, married people live longer than single people.  This is especially true for males of our species.  Of course in this turbulent day and age you’re likely not to get the right mate the first try.  Take heart.  In this land of second chances you are entitled to a second chance at finding a wife for life.  No third chances, though.  Strike two and you’re out.  If you botch the first two, you were meant to become an adult orphan, and die younger than the average.  But as compensation, you will drive a fancy sports car, eat out a lot, have profound philosophical chats with your cat, and avoid a pitiful expiration in a nursing home.

   Here’s a bit of final advice to serious spouse-shoppers: ladies, resist getting hitched to a sharply dressed short guy who’s a great dancer…a type not to be trusted; gents, don’t go seeking a bride after midnight among the Beer Bar Barbies…such behavior can be habit-forming.

8. Avoid Stress.  It kills.  Or so goes the common wisdom.  Yes, you can meditate.  Practice mindfulness…whatever that entails.  I tried Tai Chi with great success before I encountered that great curse of aging—loss of balance.  For myself, I’ve found the best way to avoid stress is leaving the corporate world with its claustrophobic cubicles and Byzantine office politics.  Try working for yourself at something you enjoy, even if it means fewer bucks in your 401K and a smaller pad to maintain at retirement time.  It also brings a longer life to waste goofing off and enjoying grandkids.

9. Nourish The Soul.  A few folks may merely listen to the music of J. S. Bach every Sunday morning to find that nourishment.  Many, many more regularly go to a Church, Temple, or Mosque to meet their spiritual needs, ensemble.  An even larger number of us find spirituality in the outdoors, far from the madding crowd.  Call them pantheists, sons and daughters of Gaia, or just plain old nature lovers who have their own holy places—places where you feel both humbled by the boundless immensity around you and comforted in the acceptance that somehow you belong here on earth.  These are places where you are an undistracted witness to the wonder of life pulsating around you, evoking distant memories of an Eden that was or should have been.  California is blessed with a surplus of such sacred places.  For the fit and high-minded, their choice might be a multi-day trek along the Sierra Nevada’s John Muir Trail.  More down to earth, try a hushed and pious walk through the cathedral of towering trees at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.  Those of more austere mind might consider camping a full-moon night on the vast, now silvered lunarscape of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.  Close to most is a night hike alone along the foamlap of Mother Pacific, and hearing in her rhythms and roars a hearty welcome home.  Sacred places are where you find them.

10. Keep Moving.  I didn’t come up with this simple bit of advice myself.  Every doctor I currently have (that’s nine at latest count) tells me the same thing: move.  As long as you’re moving you’re alive.  Of course most of us have our own preferred exercise program.  (Maybe preferred isn’t the right word but I’m at loss for a better.)  My daily regimen consists of 30 minutes or three miles on a recumbent bike, and another 30 minutes stretching, twisting, bending, and lifting two-pound arm weights.  Yes, your energy wanes as you age, and it gets harder by the day.  Adjust!  Lessen the resistance on your torture tools.  Space out your exercises in time.  Just don’t sink into your couch and watch telly all day, while your blood pools.  Move!

Th-that’s all, folks!  But then you already knew all this and you want your money back.  Sorry.  All blogs here are final.  And besides I can’t remember where I put your money.  Hey!  Go easy!  Even with Prevagen, you can’t be expected to remember everything when you’re 90!

SHOULD WE HELP THEM PACK?

Prepare for a Chilly Reception

It’s been two weeks since the college football bowl season ended and the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins disgraced themselves on national TV. I thought by now they would have reversed their plans to defect from the PAC 12 and join the Big Ten where the big bucks beckon.

Still going to make the move? Really? After the Bruins lost to an unranked Pittsburgh Panther squad in the Sun Bowl? And the mighty Trojans, arguably with the best quarterback college football has seen, were whipped by the Tulane Green Wave in the Cotton Bowl? Tulane?!

In view of the pair’s ignominious performance, you’d think they’re better off staying at home where it’s safe. I am no pigskin know-it-all, having played only one season of high school JV football, and played my position of split end very poorly, but what I saw of the two bowl games tells me that both teams have a lot upon which to improve before they join the burly boys of the Midwest. First, they must give up on arm tackles—they are even more useless against the brawny bruisers of the Big Ten than they were against Pittsburgh and Tulane. Even more importantly, both teams must learn what to do with kickoffs or punts received between their goal line and their twenty-yard line. Don’t stare at the ball as though it were a meteorite dropped from heaven; don’t fumble it. Catch it and run with it.

Come on you guys, are you seriously intent on joining the Big Ten? If so, pack your parkas. Take plenty of wool socks. Add some extra longjohns. And be prepared to serve as doormats for Spartans and Cornhuskers and the like when they stomp the December snow off their cleats.

REQUIEM FOR A QUEEN

BREAKING OUT FROM WRITER’S BLOCK

Queen Gypsy with her rescuer Maddy at their favorite spot, the beach.

Sorry for the long absence.  I had a stroke a few months back, and that brought on a case of writer’s block that made me a reader rather than a writer.  Several half-finished writing projects were put on hold while I gave in to enjoying the hard work of others.  You see, reading is an escape from writing, and can bring fierce feelings of guilt in a writer.  So what do you do?  Ignore them as best and long as you can.

Leave it to the death of a dear one to shock you out of that block…jolt you back to the real life you’ve chosen for yourself.  Last Tuesday we lost the queen of the family, our 16-year-old Golden Retriever.  With many ailments and unable to rise, she was euthanized by a vet on our living room carpet while we watched through a downpour of tears.

A rescue, Gypsy had an unusual backstory.  Our daughter Madeleine was driving through Compton one day and spotted an emaciated stray trapped between two lanes of moving traffic.  An animal lover without equal, she stopped, parked, and, dodging cars, retrieved the filthy, bedraggled beast from peril, put the creature in her car, and drove home.

“You’re not bringing that animal into this house, Madeleine.  We’ve already got a dog, a cat, and the canary.  Take it elsewhere.”  My patriarchal authority was on the line.  That line was severed quickly.  That very evening Madeleine and my wife Timarie tub-washed the dirt and grease off the pup; the next morning they took her to the vet where she was checked out.  After de-worming and treating her for fleas, the doc told us she was un-chipped, malnourished, three to five months old, probably a Golden Retriever or a Retriever mix.  She also had a slight limp from damage done in her right rear quarter, probably from a brush with a car.

Really?  Could she be a pure-bred Golden…that can cost as much as $3000?  Lost and not found by the owner?  We decided to check on her breed with Mars Veterinary, which for a modest sum will examine a saliva sample and give you your dog’s breed from its DNA.  I swabbed her mouth and sent the saliva off.  Sure enough, she proved to be a purebred.  Really?  Running loose on the mean city streets? Somehow Gypsy Rose, as we named her, seemed to know she had aristocratic roots.  When, with Madeleine’s loving nurture, she’d been rapidly restored to health, the dog wasted no time letting us know we were put on earth to serve her.  Her sense of entitlement amused us all, but we went along with the gentle, amiable lady with a short but murky past.

Gypsy was true to her breed by being food-motivated, and she seemed to have a clock in her head.  If meal time arrived and she hadn’t been fed, we could expect a volley of loud peremptory barks, ending only when she got her victuals.  (Queen or not, she was also known to swipe a burger patty when no one was looking.)

She also had an advanced case of selective hearing.  Summoned back into the house from her favorite front lawn lookout she’d feign complete deafness, but open a bag of corn chips two rooms off and she’d be at your heels in no time to claim her share.

I can’t personally verify this because I have a weak sense of smell, but the rest of the family was unanimous in agreeing that her golden coat exuded a sui generis sweet smell, like waffles in syrup.  So befitting for one I came to call the Dowager Queen of Dogdom.

She was a stubborn monarch.  She claimed the right to plop her bulk down wherever she pleased, which in the house was invariably the busiest junction between rooms, not to be disturbed.  That earned her the position of the family’s middle linebacker.  She also expected to be brushed and stroked often, and have all her other sybaritic wants met on demand.

On the plus side, she was serene, generous, gregarious, with not a mean bone in her body.  She was both a people person and a dog person.  Yes, she loved everyone…save employees of the postal service.   Above all, she loved children, and her daily walks were slowed by much petting from neighborhood kids and more-or-less constant tail-wagging by her to acknowledge her adoring subjects.  Halloween was her favorite day of the year.  That’s when she would joyously greet the trick-or-treaters at the front door before bolting to the street to meet the parents.

Gypsy loved car travel. Like Chauncey Gardiner, she liked to watch—bicyclers, pedestrians a block away, passing cars (some deserving a rueful bark, no doubt triggered by that memory of a clash before we got her.)

Dog Beach in Huntington was her favorite travel destination.  Indeed, it was the heart of her domain, where she would announce herself with a leash of commanding barks as she strolled through the crowd of lesser canines in their frolic.  “Large Marge is taking charge,” was the way my wife put it.  Eventually Gypsy would do her stately wade through the surf, head held high, ignoring dogdom’s hoi polloi milling about her in the foam.  Times of great joy…to be remembered.

Here pictured farther north in Tomales Bay.

But all Queens are mortal.  And Gypsy had more than a fair share of physical problems.  The hip affliction from before we got her grew worse with time, requiring some expensive surgery that left her with an even more visible limp.  And later, to my amazement, she became a factory for non-malignant tumors; from one of her surgeries the vet removed no less than 22 fatty tumors from her body.  Yet she remained our stoic, uncomplaining queen.

In her final year Gypsy suffered increasingly from seizures in which her body went catatonic, punctuated with spasmodic thrashing, lasting from two to ten minutes.  The final one came three days before that Tuesday when, encircled by members of her grieving family, she breathed her last breath.  Some borrowed words from the Bard surfaced in my mind: “Good night, sweet Queen, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

If there is a dog heaven, Gypsy has probably arrived there by now and is standing in the short line reserved for royals, waiting to ascend the next vacant throne…to which she is certainly entitled.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERARD

Let me wish here a happy birthday to my second favorite poet in the English language, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born July 28, 1844 in Stratford, England. I remember as an undergraduate at UCLA Professor Nisbett told our Victorian Literature class that Hopkins was “either the greatest of the minor poets in the English language, or the least of the great poets in the English language.”

I favor the great classification, but wherever you place him he was an outlier in the English literary canon…a different kind of poet in most every way. Frail and fastidious, and thought to have had bipolar disorder, he was a deeply religious man who converted to Catholicism, then became a Jesuit priest who ministered to the English poor of Liverpool.

Hopkins had a radically different idea of what English poetry should be, from words to rhythms. He advocated using Latinate words sparingly, if at all; instead, he urged going back to Anglo Saxon and Norse words even if they were archaic, and inventing your own words if they seemed to fit. (Note in the Margaret poem below the apparent neologisms “leafmeal,” “unleaving,” and “goldengrove,” then go to the dictionary and see how they all seem to trace back to Hopkins.)

He believed poetry was meant for the ear, not the eye. It was, in his words, “speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.” He certainly practiced what he preached in his slim body of work, and his poetry is heard in its harsh music of words of one and two syllables, heavy on alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hopkins as a poet was that he was not published in his short lifetime of 44 years. Nor did he wish to be. His friend Robert Bridges followed his friend’s wishes and kept his work private…until 1918—29 years after the poet’s death. Thankfully, they have trickled out ever since.

Hopkins’s fresh and distinctive style has influenced poets ever since, most notably T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and W. H. Auden. (I have always assumed that the Margaret and Felix celebrated below were parishioners of his.)

Spring and Fall:

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! As the heart grow older

It will come to such sights colder,

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight that man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Felix Randal

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,

Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome

Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some

Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended

Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some

Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom

Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.

My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,

Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,

When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,

Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

THE FALL OF THE HIGH COURT

Court-Ordered Calamity

Sorry to have been absent from the blog for so long.  Had a few physical problems that I believe are behind me now.  Thus emboldened, I did want over to express my puzzlement over the July Fourth just passed.  In my neighborhood the explosives were louder and lasted longer than ever.  Was there really that much to celebrate?  Or were the “celebrants” just warming up for the violence to come?

As some of you know, over the last twelve years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that our country is coming apart at its visible seams as our culture wars expand and our politics fragment further into hostile culture blocs.  What makes such calamitous divisions more likely are the recent reactionary decisions handed down by our runaway Supreme Court.  In a mere two weeks it banned abortion rights, weakened gun laws when the nation has become a coast-to-coast shooting gallery, curbed the EPA control over fossil-fuel polluters, gave public taxpayer money to religious schools, and sanctioned public prayer at football games, thus violating the Founding Fathers’ dictum of separating church and state. 

What might be next?  Banning contraception in an already overcrowded world?  Ending gay marriage?  Stripping all rights from LGBTQIA+?  Encouraging global warmers to burn on, thus triggering an unintended early Sixth Mass Extinction when SCOTUS’s more modest intent was merely to return us to the Middle Ages?

I know you don’t like to read or hear such depressing sentiment.  Sorry, but I guess I somehow got the Cassandra gene and can’t stop warning of a national apocalypse ahead.  Soon.  Maybe this November.  If not then, more likely November of 2024.

In the interim I’ve decided to devote my research to answering two nagging questions.  How did we get the far-right, out-of-touch, politicized Supreme Court we have now?  And how to give another try at killing the Big Lie that just won’t die...that the 2020 election was stolen from the Donald and his legions of Trumpenproles.

Til then.

MY FAVORITE POET

Happy Birthday to Ireland’s Finest

Forgive me my self indulgence here, but I was an English major and continue to be a poetry lover. So I couldn’t let this day pass without remembering my favorite poet in English—who is Irish—born June 13, 1865 on the outskirts of Dublin. No surprise that it should be William Butler Yeats, widely considered to be the greatest poet writing in the 20th century, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924.

Though not Catholic, Yeats was an Irish patriot and served as Senator in the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. More importantly, he was a central force—both as producer and promoter—of what is called the “Irish Renaissance,” with its remarkable florescence of plays and poetry.

Yeats was prolific and wrote on a broad number of subjects—Irish folklore, politics, nature, art, daily life in Ireland—but he is perhaps best remembered for his verse on aging and his own mortality. Here I reproduce the last half of “A Dialogue Between Self and Soul,” in which his Soul gives his Self the bad news of the nearing end; his rebellious Self wants none of it and demands to live on no matter what price he pays. Sometimes called the poet of “tragic joy,” Yeats makes his case for life here in his incomparable way.

A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND SOUL

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t'other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it

Five hundred years ago, about it lie

Flowers from I know not what embroidery—

Heart's purple—and all these I set

For emblems of the day against the tower

Emblematical of the night,

And claim as by a soldier's right

A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows

And falls into the basin of the mind

That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,

For intellect no longer knows

Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—

That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

Only the dead can be forgiven;

But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,

A blind man battering blind men;

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN LAUREN BOEBERT?

KNOW YOUR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPERSON

YOUR CORRECT ANSWERS TO POP QUIZ #2

1.  A, True, Louie told the world that he was leaving his secure seat in the House to run for Texas Attorney General to save Texas, and that by doing so he would save the nation.  Sorry to report though we are all lost, because he finished a dismal fourth in the state’s primary.  

2.  D, All of the above is the answer.  Cawthorn will be missed by all fans of the theatre of the absurd and the NCFMH—North Carolina Friends of the Morally Handicapped.   

3.  B, As strange as it may seem, Marjorie meant to say “Gestapo,” which Nazi Heinrich Himmler headed—in addition to the SS which he created.  (It’s a common error to confuse the two: both start with the letter “G” and end with the letter “O.”)  Greene continues to study for a retake of her Eighth Grade Vocabulary Test.

4.  C, Jesus clearly failed to read the Book of Leviticus 13:46, which says: “He shall remain unclean all the days during which he has the infection; he is unclean.  He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”  Lauren must have dropped out of Bible School as well as high school.  Yet she remains a model for us all, demonstrating that almost anyone can become a member of the House of Representatives.

5.  A, Brooks said it to the crowd on January 6, 2021, just before the GOP mob of Trumpenproles stormed the Capitol Building.  We don’t know how many asses were kicked, but we do know that at least five folks died.  The Alabama congressman skipped the actual assault and has since broken ties with the former president.  Mo is running for the open Senate seat in Alabama, where he placed a distant second in last Tuesday’s primary.  Mo finished with 29% of the vote to Katie Britt’s 45%.  Number of asses kicked?  Still uncounted.

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN LAUREN BOEBERT?

KNOW YOUR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPERSON

1. According to Loony Louie Gohmert, GOP congressman from Texas, he gave up his safe House seat to run for Texas Attorney General because he wanted to

a.  Sacrifice his future to save Texas so we can save the Union

b.  Escape a subpoena from the January 6 Committee

c.  Leave a legislative body where nothing ever gets done

d.  All of the above

e.   None of the above

2. North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn

a.  Has been accused of insider trading

b.  Has made an enemy of North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis

c.   Was defeated in the state’s primary election

d.   All of the above

e.   None of the above

3. Republican Congresswoman from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “gazpacho”

a.  Is best when served hot

b.  Refers to a favorite of Heinrich Himmler

c.  Comes from a recipe “borrowed” from Julia Child

d.  All of the above 

e.  None of the above

4.   Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert said last month “Jesus did not comply with lockdowns.”  Why didn’t he?

 a.   He was away fishing for rainbow trout in the Sea of Galilee

b.  His divinity protected him from contracting any virus-borne disease

c.   He hadn’t read the Book of Leviticus

d.  All of the above

 e.  None of the above

5.  Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is best known for his immortal words

a.  “Today is the day American Patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!”

b.  “Death before dishonor!”

c.  “The Crimson Tide will forever roll!”

d.  All of the above

e.  None of the above

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE?

KNOW YOUR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPERSON

YOUR CORRECT ANSWERS TO POP QUIZ #1

1.  C, Mark Twain gave this unflattering description of our legislative body.  He also wrote that “Fleas can be taught nearly everything a congressman can.”

2.  B, a Staccato 9mm handgun.  That’s the second time he was busted for the same offense.  Do you think the wheelchair-bound freshman congressman was flying to one of those GOP coke-fueled sex orgies he was invited to…maybe to mete out punishment?

3.  E, “None of the above” is your correct answer.  Seems Marjorie meant martial law.  She ain’t up to snuff with her spellin’ and such.  But she’s pretty good at her sums and takeaways!

4.  C, Yes, it had to be the weed.  How else could you have something concrete (COVID-19) “mutate” into a political abstraction (communism) that preceded the disease in time by more than a half century?  OK, so Lauren dropped out of high school…she plans to go back and take her GED.  So there!

5.  D, Scott’s paretic fantasy comes from too much dining in the bat cave.  Poor guy!  Yesterday he got his subpoena to appear before the January 6 Committee.

YOUR SCORE

Five right = A  I bet you’ve been reading The New York Times.

Four right = B Dang!  You thought it was Hemingway.

Three right = C  You tied Marge.  Playoff scheduled for next week.

Two right = D   You’re in the running to take Madame Boebert to the Grand Junction Ball!

One right = F+   Suggest you give up watching Fox.

None right = F-  Have you ever thought of running for Congress?

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE?

KNOW YOUR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPERSON

POP QUIZ #1

1.  What American writer said: “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

a.           Gore Vidal

b.          Ernest Hemingway

c.           Mark Twain

d.          All of the above

e.           None of the above   

2.  What is North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s concealed weapon of choice when boarding a commercial aircraft?

a.           An AR-15

b.          A Staccato 9mm

c.           A Smith & Wesson .38 Special

d.          All of the above

e.           None of the above

3.  When Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Congresswoman from Georgia and a January 6 Insurrection co-conspirator, asked if President Trump could impose “Marshall law,” she was referring to:

a.           Justice Thurgood Marshall banning unsupervised coitus in Supreme Court Chambers

b.          George C. Marshall, father of the Marshall Plan that built a free Europe after WWII, doing the same in Ukraine

c.           Marshal Matt Dillon who ran the bad guys out of Dodge

d.          All of the above

e.           None of the above

4.  When Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert said “COVID-19 mutated into Communism a long time ago,” she:

a.           Revealed a long-hidden truth that rocked the academic world

b.          Put herself in serious contention for a Nobel Prize

c.           Had some real bad shit in her bong

d.          All of the above

e.           None of the above   

5.  Republican Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump in a conspiracy that involved:

a.           Meddling by the ghost of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez

b.          The treachery and treason of former CIA Chief Gina Haspel

c.           A switch of Trump votes to Biden in Italy by Obama

d.          All of the above

e.           None of the above

Answers on Friday.

Four Weeks Old Today

Our thanks to all who helped welcome our grandson Jamie Geroux into this world.

New life brings new hope.