Requiem for a Deer Hunter

My NPR Three Minute Fiction Entry--599 words, one joke, and not one but TWO crying characters.

            We went to lunch on Saturday, the day Buddy Cooper died.  My Dad’s sunburned head was dusted with a soft silver peach fuzz.  I listened as he chanted the litany of leukocyte counts and chemotherapies, the cancer patient’s catechism, while my cousin Maria's hands fluttered. 

            Maria was translating for my Aunt May, who was born deaf.  How do you explain leukemia to a 58-year old woman who doesn't even know what a cell is?

            All Aunt May knows is the Miss Deaf America pageant.  She was Miss Deaf America once, before she married Rex who cheated on her and broke her heart and left her with nothing but two hearing daughters.  But that is an epicycle.

            Epicycles are what the ancient astronomer Ptolemy used to account for the observable erratic motion of the stars supposedly fixed in their crystal spheres.  Though the explanation worked in a convoluted fashion, the whole system was based on the false premise that the universe revolves around the earth.  Astronomy has no more need of epicycles, but they are still marvelously descriptive of human nature.

            At 11:30 on Saturday morning, my grandmother, alone in her mauve-carpeted living room, felt suddenly ill.  She went to the front windows and pulled back the lace curtains, looking up at the mountains.  She knew then what we would all learn later: that Buddy Cooper was dying.

            “It’s not so bad, really,” my Dad, an ex-Marine, quipped as Maria signed. “You know what I’ve always said—I may be slow, but I’m weak.”

            I smiled at the well-worn joke, but May looked confused.

            “I went to church once in Provo,” May signed to my father. “I met a man who looked exactly like you, and his father was from Kentucky, like your father.  He might be a bone marrow donor for you.”

            I don't know if that's what May really said because I don't speak her language.  I read once that American Sign Language, contrary to what most people believe, is much more than just a sign/word equivalent for English.  It's actually a highly complex language with a grammar that resembles Navajo more closely than our own. 

            My Dad smiled sadly as Maria translated.  “It has to be a close relative,” his hands said haltingly.  “Like a brother or a sister.”

            “Then I can donate?”  May asked, her dark eyes filling with tears.  No, she couldn't. Her father, who died before she was born, was not my father's father, who died when my Dad was seven of a massive heart attack, just like Buddy Cooper. You see how there are epicycles, and they explain everything. 

            I concentrated on the ice cubes in my water glass, wondering as I tried to freeze the tears coalescing in the corners of my eyes what kind of heat was released as something melted.  Was it heat of condensation?  Vaporization?  No, it was heat of fusion. 

            Mom leaned over and whispered, “I wish that he could just say it.”

            Say what?  She can't say it either.  Death is always unexpected, even when you've spent your whole life preparing for it.

            Buddy Cooper, age 56, in perfect health, had just killed his buck.  “Get help,” he told his young grandson, unable to drag the majestic animal himself.  The boy ran in the direction of the others.  When they returned, they found him on his back beneath a tree, as dead as the deer he had killed only minutes before.  When his wife heard the news, she said quietly, “He was doing what he loved.”

            There are worse ways to die. 

My Turn

This Year, My New Year’s Resolutions Are All About Me

Allow me to be smug for a moment. Because when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, there just is not a lot left for me to do—and I’m not even 40! Hike Mount Whitney? Done it. Natural childbirth? Yep. Learn Chinese? Ni hao ma. Read The Iliad in Greek? Matthew Arnold is entirely correct that swiftness is an essential quality of Homer’s poetry. Learn Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, even the third movement? Tres passé! Solve the Rubik’s Cube? Over and over and over again. Start a non-profit? Sure thing. Write a novel? What the hell do you think my facebook page is, people? (no, seriously, I’ve done that too).

This year’s resolutions are all things I’ve never done before. Since I’ve only got one year left to say I’m “in my 30s,” it’s time to start thinking about Numero Uno, aka my 13 year old son. No, wait, I mean ME!

• I resolve to spend $250 on new clothes for myself someplace other than a thrift store. They don’t even have to be on sale.
• I resolve to buy myself a new iPad rather than buying one for my son and taking his old one, as he proposes.
• I resolve to figure out how all my 40+ friends manage to look like they are 29 and to do whatever they do, even if it involves injections of deadly toxins.
• I resolve to go to Mexico. While there, I will not learn to speak fluent Spanish or construct an orphanage. I will sit on the beach, cerveza in hand, and read a novel. The novel will not be War and Peace. It will be some fluffy chick lit confection that Oprah loved.
• I resolve to stop selling my services and abilities short. When people want a project bid, I’ll include overages to account for the inevitable scope creep. Not many people can write 10 engaging articles on everything from financial services to spine surgery to tattoos with a turnaround time of three days. I am one of those people, and I deserve to be paid accordingly.

My son says I’m much more likely to succeed with more conventional resolutions (e.g., “run a marathon,” or “cure cancer.”). I say, I'll see you at Anthropologie. Just as soon as I lose ten pounds. 

No Place Like Home (Alone) for the Holidays

This Christmas morning, while other parents stumble bleary-eyed towards the tree, only to collapse on the sofa as their progeny create mountains of torn wrapping paper in the formerly immaculate living room, I’ll be tucked beneath my down comforter, reading a good novel. While other parents mediate the inevitable “her widget is cooler than mine” fights and try to control the sugar-crazed demons their darling children have become, I will be sipping a cup of coffee and listening to classical music.

There are certain advantages to split custody.

There are even more advantages to being single. But society never talks about them, perhaps in the interests of species survival.  Here’s the best one: at the end of the day, no one, and I mean no one, is the boss of me. If I feel like staying up all night to read, I can. If I want to get up at four in the morning to work on a paper or grade exams, I can. If I want to eat nothing but raw vegetables for a week, or if I decide I want to see a chick flick, then change my mind at the last second in favor of an action movie, I can. There are no other egos to cosset and console, no foreign languages of “he-said/she-said” to navigate, no mysterious hurt feelings to try to understand. There’s no “we are”—there is only “I am.”

A single friend of mine confessed to me yesterday that he always gets glum around the holidays. “I’m sure you can understand,” he said. “It just seems like everywhere I go, I’m constantly reminded of how alone I am.” At the same time, another married friend of mine is contemplating divorce because he has never felt so lonely.  “I’m waiting for someone to define me,” he said.

When will these people realize that being alone IS being whole, that the person who defines you is yourself, that getting divorced almost never solves your problems—in fact, if you have children, it creates untold new ones?

I can certainly understand that the world we live in WANTS me to feel gloomy because I’m all alone beneath the mistletoe, most likely because I’m not doing my part to contribute to the excessive consumption-orgy that Christmas has become. And with Jerry McGuire as my guide, I know I’m supposed to feel like half of a whole, stumbling blindly through the world looking for someone to “complete me.”

Thing is, I feel pretty darn complete. I have a great job, brilliant children, a Steinway piano. I have a book list longer than Santa’s, and I work at a place where I can get the librarian to buy my books for free. Nearly three years post-divorce, nearly one-year without any sort of significant other, I have woken up to discover that I’ve finally grown entirely comfortable in my own skin. Like Whitman, “I celebrate myself; I sing myself.” And I don’t need that song to be a duet.

If we aren’t careful, it’s easy to slide into ritual patterns and passive behaviors during the holidays. This probably explains why, rather than trying to pursue any nascent autumn relationships I’d been exploring with potential partners (one guy actually made it to four dates!!!!), I’ve put them all on holiday hiatus. I want—no, I need—to be home alone for Christmas. I’m looking forward to a day all by myself, a day when I really can’t go into the office, even though I will probably want to.

Of course, the day after Christmas, when my four little jewels tumble into my apartment demanding presents and covering me with kisses, I’ll be pretty happy—in a well-rested, relaxed way. It’s not often a girl gets as lucky as I am. I can have my Christmas pudding and eat it too. Once you have children, you are never truly alone in the world. But if I ever do decide I want to let someone into my already complete life and heart, I promise I will never ever try to define him. The greatest gift is having the chance to define yourself.

So if you’re alone this Christmas, my advice to you is this: start defining yourself. And if you’re with the people you love, read the definitions they’ve written in their lives, and try to appreciate them for who they are. We are all broken, but with grace, with forgiveness, with charity, we can become something beautiful—a community where people can be both together and alone in peace and harmony. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think that maybe, just maybe, that’s the real meaning of Christmas.

Paradigms Lost

What happens when symbols lose their meanings?

It was a discouraging evening, to say the least. As I entered the scores for my students' second art history exam, the one covering the art and architecture of Greece and Rome, I faced the sort of existential crisis that every humanities teacher confronts on an increasingly regular basis: what exactly is the point of this course?

Sometimes, learning for the sake of learning just isn't enough. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy doesn’t, for example, put food on the table or pay for prescription medication.

I know that better than most, since I was a Classics major. No, not classical music, though I do know how to rock a harpsichord. No, not Shakespeare, though I also have a decent grasp of iambic pentameter. Classics, as in everything connected to "the glory that was Greece and the splendor that was Rome." Classics is the uber humanities degree, the equivalent of Aristotle's Prime Mover of academia. "Because I say so" only wins arguments when you can plausibly claim that you have read and possibly even understood not only Aristotle in Greek, but also the German commentators on his texts.

Seriously, what is the point? What can you do with a humanities degree, besides ask "Do you want fries with that?" in five languages, two of them dead?

Harvard English professor and Pulitzer prize winner Louis Menand’s libellus, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, is not as incendiary as its title promises. A fascinating treatise on the development of the modern university, Menand traces the two-phylum core vs. elective evolution of General Education requirements, the rise of professionalism, and the largely unconscious process of homogeneity that the professionalizing of academia has inflicted on its practitioners; i.e., people like me.

But while Menand poses some interesting questions, he doesn't go all the way to the conclusion I want. What is the role of general education in a for-profit career college like the one where I run a general education program? Why does my school, which focuses on practical education with immediate post-graduation earning potential, require its bachelors degree seeking students to take a two-term course in the History of Art?

    My school follows the prescriptive core model of General Education, wherein the university determines which courses students “need” in order to become well rounded health care administrators or accountants. History of Art is one of the few upper division GE courses we offer, and from the start, my students complained about the course’s rigor.

But is this really rigor? On that second test, fewer than one in four of my students correctly identified the Parthenon. Not a single one could tell me who built it, or what it signified. Art and architecture depend on a common language of symbols. If my students cannot correctly identify the building that signifies the cradle of Western Civilization, what does that say about them? About me? About our culture?

    The day after the test, I walked into the classroom. Without a word, I projected a picture of the Parthenon on the screen. I turned to the class and said, "I've been thinking about this class, and about what I want you to take from it. And what I want is this."

    I gestured to the iconic, classic, Doric stricture that in many ways defined western civilization. "I need you to know that this building is the Parthenon. I need you to know that its construction was contemporary with what many scholars consider the dawn of our Western culture. I need you to know that this temple to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, was constructed by the city-state of Athens, where philosophy, democracy, geometry, logic, literature, and western art was born. I need you to see its culture’s influences all around you, in our own buildings, in our own literature, in our philosophical and political thought.”

    What happens when paradigms are lost, when, as Archibald MacLeish famously asked, “images, though seen/no longer mean?” That is the point of requiring an Art History class of the world’s future accountants and healthcare administrators. Learning about the humanities is learning about what makes us human. We few, we happy few, the humanities majors, are "the heirs of custom and tradition" that began with a building on a hill in Greece more than 2500 years ago. But we are also the ones who push the boundaries of what is possible in human thought, because that is what humans do. Why General Education? Why the Parthenon? Because we are human. Without a knowledge of our own humanity, without the language of our customs and traditions, we cannot hope to accomplish MacLeish’s call to “Invent the Age! Invent the metaphor!”

I Quit!

Everyone knows that I am really a robot running perpetual Pollyanna programming. But once in a while, I have one of those days, weeks, months, years, f*@ing decades, when I need an update or six for my reframing module, and there’s no IT guy in sight. Yes, of course I have to do my own IT. I have to do my own everything.

So.

Dear Art History Students who decided to contract the Test Day Flu this morning: You missed a life-changing lecture on art and forgery and the nature of the real, spearheaded by a discussion of the Getty Kouros (as made famous to the non Classical world by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, a little gem of popular science). You don’t feel good enough to take a slide quiz? Well I don’t feel good enough to let you make it up either. I quit. Go complain to your Department Chair. Oh wait, that’s ME! Sucks to be you, lazy students.

Dear Progeny of Mine who cannot be in the car together for more than five minutes without erupting into screams that make a Japanese horror flick seem tame by comparison: No, you cannot ever have computer time again. Not ever. Your “I love to fart on you” song may seem whimsical or even clever to you, my dear seven year old. But it makes me want to throttle you. And you, the 11 year old in the back, if you even touch your brother again, I will call your parole officer.  I quit! Let the state take care of you and your compulsive inability to stop poking people.

And five year old, please only cry like that if you are facing imminent death—not if you drop your lollipop on the car floor, where it joins a two year food supply of discarded candy, fruit snacks, and cracker crumbs. Believe me, life will throw you much tougher challenges, and at this rate, you will be nothing but a fluffy cheerleader who drops the ball at the first sign of a chipped manicure.  

Finally, Mr. Teen Hero in the front seat, blasting your music through your Skullcandies, if you take the name of Our Lord in vain one more time, I will tell all your facebook friends that you are really listening to Justin Bieber instead of Linkin Park. I mean it. Oh sure, you say “Jesus Christ…is my savior.” But you damn well better say it like you mean it!

[PollyannaPrograms is asking for permission to update your files…Accept…]

Oh my! Today was such a lovely day! I spent the morning in class discussing one of my absolute favorite topics, art, forgery, and the nature of the real. The afternoon was pure quality time with the kiddos—they are real charmers, and so clever! They love to compose songs in the car, my middle sons are so affectionate with each other, my daughter knows that lollipops are not good for her, and my oldest is really developing a meaningful relationship with Jesus. I just don’t have the time to be negative. I quit being a Debbie Downer. I’m back to being everybody’s sunshine gal!

October 23, 1994 Valediction

October 23, 1994

Austin, Texas 11:30 p.m.

A delight, finally to hear Victor Borge in concert. John kisses me at the door, a polite, thoroughly proper peck. I do not invite him in. Do I love him? I am not sure. I am not even sure it matters. I put on Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” I open John Donne’s Meditations, specifically, the seventeenth. “When men die, they are translated into a better language.” I hunker down. The words with their creative spellings blur before my eyes.

The phone rings. Blink. I do not answer. As long as I do not answer, my life stretches out in two directions, unblemished, full of memory and possibility. Past: the golden days his high pitched laugh he swims and saves my doll swept out to sea his helicopter lights blink over the beach the red Volkswagen churns its wheels through a swollen creek that pure clear tenor voice sings try to remember the kind of September when the Saints go marching in we play catch in the twilight it’s okay for girls to play softball every place that George Washington ever slept books bought for me in airports tears stream down his face as he reads it is a far far better thing I do now than I have ever done physics explains the mysteries of the universe.

Ring. Blink. I do not answer. As long as I do not answer, he is here with me still. Present: methyl ethyl ketone perhaps I’ll get a chemistry degree we could learn chemistry together it explains the mysteries of the universe how can O.J. be guilty he has such a nice smile Jesus could never be a Republican I wanted to buy you a car for graduation but your mother wouldn’t let me you’re either engaged or you got into the University of Texas at Austin you sound too happy it must be Austin do you love him does he love you we never liked those other boys you deserve someone extraordinary you are extraordinary no it doesn’t hurt not really I’m just tired Jesus didn’t deserve what he went through either he will heal me I will be healed.

Ring. Blink. I do not answer. As long as I do not answer, he is not dead. Dance with me at my wedding sing to my first child accept me when my tenuous grasp on my faith dissolves yes there is more for me than Occam’s Razor read Plato’s philosopher king again with me you’ll see that Plato’s forms explain the mysteries of the universe and we will recite Goethe in German and sing once a jolly swagman do not go gentle do not go waltzing matilda without me into that good night.

Ring. Blink. My hand stretches out, unbidden, to pick up the receiver. “Hello?” In that moment, the scream starts, somewhere near my solar plexus, the scream that shatters my world and its assumptions, the scream that says the one who made me no longer exists, yet I am still here. “I’ll make the flight arrangements right now.” Scream. “Bereavement fare.” Scream. “Sometime late tomorrow.” Scream. “I love you, too.” Scream. No one can else can hear it. My father is dead.

In Defense of Liturgy

Cogs in a Machine or Notes in God's Symphony?

If you’ve heard my ex call me an alcoholic party girl, he’s totally right. Case in point: I spent the majority of my weekend (Saturday evening and all morning Sunday) attending Mass at Holy Apostles, where I play keyboards in a Catholic band. Somehow, I think this behavior adds exponentially to my coolness factor, but that’s another essay.

This weekend, I dragged a talented young percussionist friend of mine along who has never been to Mass before, in the hopes of convincing her to join my 9:00 a.m. group, which has music, but no rhythm. She found the experience disconcerting, to say the least. “It’s scary,” she said afterwards, “Watching all those people do the same things and say the same things—it was like you were all brainwashed.” She has a hard time reconciling the fiercely independent—dare I say anarchist—friend she knows with the woman who stands up, sits down, kneels, and holds out her arms at all the appropriate times and can recite the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer from memory.  

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not a Catholic (yet). I was raised Mormon, and I am bringing up my own children in the faith of their fathers. And I’ve spent plenty of time without the inconvenient ties and binds of any religion (unless you count the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, and when you take into account the fact that members’ tithes pay for a pirate ship, you definitely should not discount the Pastafarians!). So how did I end up at the Catholic church, taking RCIA classes and providing music at one and sometimes two Masses each week for almost a year now?

The answer is simple. I love liturgy.

The very thing that my friend couldn’t stomach—the repetitive phrases, the recited lines, the constant reinforcement of the same old dogma—is comfortable, soothing, and simultaneously intellectually stimulating to me.

I’m not saying you should love liturgy, or that your own beliefs (or lack thereof) are wrong. But I think there’s a strong case to be made for Catholicism. I can’t make an argument that has consumed 2,000 years of thought in one blog post—but I can share my response to my friend and provide a brief explanation of how liturgy functions in furthering my own search for spirituality.

I see the same things my friend saw at Mass—but I interpret what I see very differently. To my mind, all of us—and it’s a pretty diverse bunch (on Saturday evening, for example, the 1000+ Holy Apostles crowd included everyone from the State Governor and his wife to a group of African immigrants)—have made the same conscious choice to come together as one community, in a tradition that spans thousands of years and has its roots in the last supper a Jewish rabbi shared with his friends before he was murdered by Romans.

My friend saw cogs in a machine. I heard notes in God’s great symphony.

In his magnificent treatise, The Phenomenon of Man, that great scientist and devout Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin sought to explain his own paleontological discoveries that supported the secular theory of evolution by proposing a grand theory of cosmic theological evolution called Omega. For more than 20 years, I have thought about Teilhard’s work. But not until that conversation with my friend did I truly grasp its significance. What if every individual managed to attain the highest degree of individual excellence he or she was capable of? And what if all those individuals then joined in a community of believers, whose purpose was to unite their individual talents and skills to create a perfect world, to eliminate the problem of evil once and for all, to truly sing a new song to God?

Oddly enough, this week’s readings and homily dealt with theodicy, or the problem if evil in the world. My own life is consumed with the problem of evil—the disasters that befall us by chance, as well as the ones that befall us by choice. The liturgy—the comforting repetition of a Hail Mary, or the exhilarating proclamation of the mysteries (“Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!)—serve a cognitive behavior therapy function for me. I don’t ask you to understand it. I only want to make you aware of the power of words, repeated, for weeks, for months, for years, for centuries—words which were spoken  by one who may have been the Word, in the beginning.

I will be the first to admit that I am faith-challenged and probably always will be. But by saying these words each week, I choose to place myself in a community that spans the centuries, that finds its roots in a stable, a manger, a star in the sky. “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist,” Teilhard wrote. When we say these words at Mass each week together, we are not mindless cogs in a machine We are, as Teilhard defines us, “collaborators in creation.”