Folding the Tent

Well, our lease on 2012 is about to expire. Time to pack up and move on. Time is a fickle friend…it never gives, it only lends. And our loan’s coming due.

It’s been an interesting year. But now it’s time to fold up the old tent and find a new spot to erect it. There’s something sad about packing up. Like moving from one house to another…some things are just worn out, past their useful life. We have to leave ‘em behind.

The problem with tents is that they are at best temporary. My favorite recollection of tents is the ‘pup tent’ we used to camp along creek banks, back yards and dense woods. Purchased used from Army-Navy stores, we were warriors on the move, armed with Daisy, lever-action BB guns and firecrackers. We were terrors to small creatures. Now we are small creatures subject to terrors. Life turns tables.

A couple of times a year the carnival came to town. It was exciting, seeing the set-up, anticipating the sideshows with their grotesque and parallel universe of characters. We paid real money to see these tent spectacles. Reminds me of Congress today. At least the carnivals moved on when our money ran out or the novelty wore off.

Life’s like that. Like it or not, it demands we clean up, pack up and move on. Which, on the eve of a new year, is exactly what we’re doing at our house…ruthlessly casting out the old rubbish, making room for the new.

No, The Hearns are renouncing the urge to make rash resolutions this year. Why? A futile endeavor. Like promising yourself you’ll shed those unwanted pounds, only to realize that you covet the chocolate more than you hate the heft. That’s what resolutions are for anyway, to expose the weakness and frailty of human flesh.

Mark Twain was prescient when he wrote in 1863:

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter. We shall reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time.

New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”

Today I’m resolved to organize the cabinet. The photograph explains why. Enough clutter…cast out the duct tape and floor wax and mosquito repellent and empty oil cans and gummy emulsions of suspicious origin that occupy perfectly good space. I keep only the $9.99 Home Depot rubber knee pads. Successful marriages demand husbands keep a pair handy and wear them early and often.

We were forced to fold our Friday Forum lunch tent in October. We had our own sideshow for eight years, a pretty good run. Fed about 22,000 hungry islanders with Chef Mike’s down-home, country cooking, sprinkled with spices of occasional insults and humorous gravy. Alas, it was casualty to Chef Mike’s knee gone gimpy and accentuated by local governmental powers gone berserk. You know, small bureaucratic minds inside of big empty heads on the public dole.

But all sideshows, tents and bright lights lose their luster sooner or later. Like all the clutter we collect and keep. Outta sight, outta mind, you know. We’re like dogs burying bones in the trackless desert sands on the way to Mecca…we’re not coming back this way!

Soon, one short second, an infinitesimally small measure of time, will forever send 2012 packing, DOA and toe-tagged, soon to be buried in history. We can hold a wake for it, look back with longing, but we can’t go back and retrieve the bones we buried there.

Meanwhile, History moves on in its inexorable pace toward an unforeseen and indeterminate conclusion, kept entirely secret in the sole counsels of Divine Wisdom.

Here’s hoping you find pleasant meadows in which to stake your claim and erect your tent in 2013. For your evening revelry, I offer this toast from Benjamin Franklin: “Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let each New Year find you a better person.”

Happy New Year. Bottoms up and Auld Lang Syne!

Bud Hearn
December 31, 2012

Crossing the Threshold of Christmas

Christmas is about to come down the chimney. With time on my hands lately, I’ve been thinking about it. About the improbability of it, among other things.

Christmas is really not something you think too much about. It’s a time of action, of shopping, of parties, of joy to the world, more shopping, family visitations, giving and getting, cooking and eating, especially chocolate, and a lot of Bing Crosby’s Silent Night. Things like that make up Christmas. And if you think too much about it, you would cancel pretty much all of it!

One of my favorite authors, Harry Crews, RIP, once wrote: “Knowing, like thinking accomplishes nothing. Thinking always leaves you precisely where you were. You couldn’t think your way out of a gas chamber or across barbed wire. The act is the thing.” Christmas is like that…it’s just not logical. The finite mind grapples with it. It must simply be accepted and acted upon with stone-blind faith. Maybe not knowing is the better choice.

So I decide to get back to the Christian’s concept, or faith, if you will, of the origins of Christmas. You can read it for yourself in Matthew, chapters 1 and 2. It’s a real stretch to believe in virginal conception. But that’s the threshold we have to cross to get to the rest. Without that, it all breaks down in the spray of a super nova, falling out of a black, impenetrable sky.

Go sit beside your fire, ponder the possibilities of an immaculate conception, the incredulity of it all, and see where it takes you. Around in circles, that’s where. Yet, without it, Christmas is not born. So, it has to be acted on as being a fact, as strange as it may seem. That’s faith, always has been, always will be…a notional hypothesis, a profundity, improbable, un-provable and above all incredible.

Of course, a virgin birth is just one set of steps in crossing the threshold of Christmas. There are the appearances of angels in dreams, encouraging this, warning that. And strangely, we’re asked to believe their advice…talk about blind faith. Today we are offered so many competing ‘celebrity stars’ to follow that we are confused. I’m pretty sure following any of these stars will end in a black hole.

Then there’s the journey of the wise men. Read it. They traveled through the deserts, following a star to locate a baby that had been prophesied for centuries as the redeeming King of the Jews. Celestial navigation has been around for centuries, but this is the only instance of it leading to a baby in a manger. Think about it, night after cold night, in a desert, following a star to who-knows-where. What did they have that we don’t? They weren’t thinking…they were acting. They had faith. Quite a threshold to cross, huh?

Now, my wife never much subscribed to the notion of ‘wise men.’ Every Christmas she manifests this belief in an embroidered hand towel placed in the guest restroom. It reads: “Three Wise Women would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, brought practical gifts, and there really would be Peace on Earth.” I leave this to you to contemplate while sipping on your eggnog.

Add to all this the political intrigue of King Herod, a brutal, stalking arch-enemy of all that might threaten to usurp his kingdom. Viola, you have a story so full of improbabilities even the new Sherlock Holmes couldn’t untangle this Gordian knot.

As children, we debated endlessly the reality, and improbability, of a jolly, fat man in a red suit who mushed reindeer and descended chimneys, delivering gifts to all good little boys and girls. Always we heard, “They receive who believe.” We didn’t get it, didn’t question it, but only believed. We were never disappointed…until we figured it all out. Ah, the immense wonder of children!

These are some steps leading to the threshold of Christmas. Every year we have opportunity to ascend them, and cross again into that heavenly mansion of mystery, where miracles never cease. But we get there, not by thinking, but by faith.

This year we will have another opportunity to cross the Christmas threshold. I hope you will join me in the child-like wonder of it all…they receive who believe.

Then shall our voices ring together with the Heavenly Chorus, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King!”

Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Bud Hearn
December 20, 2012

Uncle Elvin's Epiphany

This week has me hanging out at home. I’m waiting on healing and being force-fed, like a pate-bred Christmas goose, the news about a ‘fiscal cliff.’ After my femur has just given birth to a new titanium hip, a fiscal cliff would rate only a mild inconvenience.

I’m thinking about December 21, 2012. Doesn’t resonate with you? Then check the Mayan Stone Calendar. That’s when doomsday dawns, the climax of civilization. Apocalypse Now! Whatever.

Last year, Climax, Georgia got on the map when Uncle Elvin predicted a world holocaust would occur on May 21, 2011. He’s really nobody’s uncle. People in the South assume identities. He didn’t devise this date of doom. He’s a political opportunist, a shady sort who lives in the shadows, digging up dirt and details for dinero. He had done research on a California nutcase, the Reverend Harold Camping.

Remember Rev. Camping? He spent millions on billboards predicting The Rapture with money gleaned from carcasses of his cult’s groupies. His prediction failed, at least in this hemisphere, anyway. He recanted after experiencing visions of the afterlife from inhaling hallucinogenic herbs. Expositors of such hoo-hah often receive recompense commensurate with the prognostications of this rubbish.

Millions have been manipulated with this same scenario…doomsday’s coming, get ready. Just guessing, but I’d say ‘getting ready’ means cashing in and buying a ticket out of the coming conflagration. Money is the motivation for most scams.

Mt. Vesuvius in year 79 was a biggie. Pompeii was enveloped in ash, whole bodies engulfed and mummified, lying spread-eagle in the streets like cast-off stone cadavers. So sudden was it that no one cashed out, but the Italians are now cashing in with tours of the devastation. There are perils of staying anywhere too long. They say it inspired the prototype for the popular Pompeii Pizza Ovens. ‘They’ say a lot of things.

Halley’s Comet came close in 1910. It incited a short-lived panic. The sale of indulgences in the Catholic Church hit a record high following the speculation that the comet’s tail contained a gas that would ignite the atmosphere and snuff out all life. Well, it didn’t happen. But the frenzy did open a door for disciples of the Green Movement to successfully plunder the national treasury by preaching carbon emissions. Hysteria is a terrible thing to waste.

A prominent TV evangelist envisioned a Freaky Friday scenario of his own, prophesying utter destruction in 1982. He went live on his $7000 Money Club to tuned-in nitwits that Armageddon was imminent. Nothing happened, except the usual worldwide violence, a stock market crash and several tsunamis. He’s now dean of intergalactic studies at Oral Roberts University.

The True Way, a Taiwanese cult established by Hon-Ming Chen, predicted God would appear on American cable television on March 31, 1998. God didn’t oblige. He was being entertained by the Clinton impeachment proceedings on C-Span. Chen dodged crucifixion because his follower’s visas expired before they could accommodate him. Be careful with predictions.

The list is long. Remember the Y2K hoax? That swindle emptied the vaults of entire nations with more efficiency than a snow storm will empty Budweiser from the shelves of stores. People are very predictable! But back to Uncle Elvin.

He looted the locals on Camping’s soothsaying. His high-tech billboards belched smoke, predicting The End with thunder and flashing lightning bolts. His junk yard became a shrine. His pond burned mysteriously, like Vesuvius. Visions appeared in the smoky heavens. Caravans of pilgrims clogged the compound, like Nevada’s Burning Man Fest. Brinks set up a bank. Hollywood showed, Disney offered cash. May 21, 2011 drew nearer. Panic ensued.

But Uncle Elvin cashed out early, which, coincidentally, coincided with the last day of his probation. He ceased imitating Jackson Pollack’s drip art of punching pin-holes in eggs and blowing out the contents on canvases in shapes of Mother Mary. He sold out to Disney and left town like he arrived…late at night on Trailways. After May 21, 2011, Climax attempted to change its name to Toad Suck. But Arkansas beat them to it.

Uncle Elvin? Well, in typical American tradition he was reincarnated as Mo Elvinsky, and joined the Washington PAC firm of Deadlock, Leech and Filch. He’s now Counsel Emeritus in the West Wing.

Stone carvings or fiscal cliffs notwithstanding, as for the future I will augur this with certitude: Taxes will thrive, my dog will still beg food and on December 21, 2012, the winter solstice will return. How’s that for accuracy?

What’s yours?

Bud Hearn
December 13, 2012