Friday, January 31, 2014
A Letter from Aunt Mabel
“I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!” Johann von Herder
The other day we found a letter from Aunt Mabel. I thought I’d send it on to you. Humor will have to sit in the back of the bus today.
Times are complicated now that the world is inter-connected. But it was not always so. There was a time when things were simple, decisions easier to make, repercussions predictable. Aunt Mabel lived through these times and into the modern times. Through it all she maintained a resilient spirit in spite of her life’s own traumas.
Her world grew smaller. Sufficient even in her late 80’s, she lived alone, having lost a husband and a son. Her daughter and two grandchildren were the extent of her life’s range of motion. The familiar neighborhood she once knew had changed, not necessarily for the better. Her house was small and obsolete by today’s standards. The possibility of refinance would have been impossible for her!
Like others her age, the house was cluttered with remnants of the past, hallways littered with magazines and newspapers stacked floor to ceiling. Her living quarters consisted of a small living room, bathroom and kitchen. Age has problems with discarding the superfluous in fear that it may again be essential. We know better, but they don’t. Life moves on.
She visited us on the island several years ago. I think the highlights of her trip were the Visitor’s Trolley, the light house and the history of the coast. She was especially amazed at the massive oaks. She drove away smiling, as I recall. We smiled with her.
We received this letter on February 24, 2010. Like other elderly, the script is very small, which is probably metaphorical in some sense. It is included in its original content:
My dear children,
It has been so long since I have heard from you!!! I want you to write me when you can, and tell me all you have been doing.
I still sleep in my recliner every night with all my clothes and shoes on.
When I changed from my old termite company to Terminex, a woman came to my house from Center Point with a big stepladder. She put up two bigger smoke alarms. One over the door that goes to my bathroom, and another over the door into my kitchen.
She also brought a big thing that sits next to my telephone at the end of my living room couch.
She said it was so if my house got on fire, the smoke alarms would go off and the nearest fire station would be notified and send a fire truck to my house at once.
Isn’t that amazing?
Lots of love to you always,
Aunt Mabel
The letter was written on inexpensive note paper with a rose imprinted at the top. Frugality never dies with the aged, it seems. Nor does their penchant for life and amazement. In many ways they are like children, hearing the secret whisper of life speaking to them in the small, simple things they can comprehend. Our generation seems to have lost this innate sense of astonishment in the minutiae.
Aunt Mabel died in 2012, but her letter to us continues to have significance. Yes, her family has moved on. But her memory remains, irrepressible in her zest for life. In spite of the outward appearance of old age, inside her was an indomitable spirit for life.
Isn’t that amazing?
Bud Hearn
January 31, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
The Artist Laughs
Puzzle: Something difficult to understand or explain; a game to test ingenuity or knowledge. A 16th century concept. Origin unknown.
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A jigsaw puzzle…the equivalent of a nuclear explosion of a rainbow. There’s no surer way to drive someone to drink than being chained to a chair trying to assemble one. Metaphorically speaking, it’s a little like life…and a lot like understanding women!
Ours was one of those hate-to-open Christmas gifts, a last-minute Amazon leftover. Like LOV’s (leftover vittles) in your refrigerator---the best has been eaten, but conscience won’t let you discard the remainder until it grows hair or turns green.
We spread it out on the card table and throw the box away. Yes, the same box that has the only clue to the image. Ever try to put a puzzle together without a picture?
Like life, we start from scratch, mostly guessing. It seems hopeless. It incites frustration. Razor-edged tongues lacerate normally benign family members. All agree it’s the work of the devil.
What kind of brain could concoct such a torturous mystery? Can you imagine the mental horror of a serial ADHD personality trying to piece it together? Being lashed to a pyre and incinerated in public would be preferable.
Figuring out these puzzles is cruel and unusual punishment. Somewhere, maybe in caves, bleary-eyed sociopaths sit in cubicles staring at screens. They hear voices from the ethereal realm. Weird designs emerge, flash-backs of Jackson Pollack’s canvasses. Even Einstein would have bitten his nails.
But let’s say you get tired of looking at this silent anarchy and decide to assemble it. So what? Who’ll care? All that wasted time to end up with an image of the Duck Dynasty clan, or the Three Stooges or, heaven forbid, Dennis Rodman, with his diamond-studded pierced lips, kissing Kim Jong-un.
Think about it. Ten thousand pieces of graffiti, screaming for attention. It’s worse than sitting in the smoking section of a truck-stop diner or next to a table of squealing babies. It’s all fits and starts, no-fits and misfits. It’s the proximate cause of spousal discontent.
In a hurry? Forget it. It’s designed to make you fidget and irritable. Even your dogs will slink off.
Logic? In your dreams. It’s like life itself…fits together one piece at a time. Hours are years. They drag by. Like a runaway nightmare, a slight icon slowly emerges, a corner here, one there. It gives hope, like a golfer’s hole-in-one shot. It keeps him coming back, spending more money, wasting more time and seeking more bragging rights.
Don’t try jumping to early conclusions. Or taking shortcuts. Totally useless. It’s like trying to read the dealer’s poker face in a high-stakes game of Texas Holdem. Or identifying animals in ever-changing swirls of cumulus clouds on a hot summer day.
We attempt to guess the Artist’s mindset, the motive and the construct model. It’s inscrutable. It only leads down dark alleys. Each seemingly irrelevant piece has a set purpose. If one’s left out, the image distorts. In the distance the fat lady croons, “too soon, too soon.”
After we have suffered enough, our puzzle yields some final clues. The picture resembles a rust-colored Mojave sand dune. Illusions of movement hint of a hot spirit, always blowing like the wind. It creates and recreates the dune’s character. Something strange lies solitary atop of this pile of dust. It’s a sun-bleached bone. It resembles a human rib.
A few more pieces remain. We get excited, but still perplexed. They begin to fall into place. At this stage it’s usually easy to come to a reasonable conclusion of the puzzle. But not this one. The shining gold segment is waiting for its cameo performance. And it gets it.
**********
We gather around the table and flip a coin. It decides who concludes this marathon assemblage. The winner, with a degree of flourish, inserts the golden fragment. It forms a perfect halo over the rib bone.
Etched into the bone is a simple caption. It reads, EVE. Somewhere in the distance The Artist is laughing….
Bud Hearn
January 27, 2014
Illustration courtesy of Leslie Hearn, who now has several books of her sketches available. Let me know if you’d like one.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Kiss Off
Euphemism: a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
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A man and woman sit at a two-top table behind us and argue. Words are sharp and harsh. The woman comes unglued.
She lurches forward. A wine glass shatters on the floor. “Kiss off!” she screams and storms out of the restaurant. He sits there in stunned silence along with the rest of us. Like him, we feel violated.
It’s a euphemistic moment, nothing more. She used watered-down words to convey a more vulgar idiomatic expression of what was really on her mind. We all do it. Evasive verbiage tends to keep the fist fights down and homicide rates low. Without it, divorce lawyers would rule the world.
Society seems to insist that we tiptoe around the use of absolutes. We’re a culture of ballerinas, spinning in circles around a linguistic brass pole, teasing and taunting but avoiding the harsh reality of ugly truth.
Our enemies, the accursed ‘politically correct’ police and their minions, the media, stalk us relentlessly. We hide behind words. Creative euphemisms cloak us. Like draped nude marble statues, we disguise offensive communications. Yet, stark naked reality is still underneath, just diffused.
Dig in the rancid compost pile of political circumlocution. You’ll find plenty of these veiled camouflages. They comprise the bulk of political discourse. In the halls of government, a lie becomes a spin; a problem becomes an issue; an economic collapse morphs into a market correction. Only the ruthless will defrock the hideous nude and expose the nasty fiction.
Clever fairy tales of euphemistic lingo are found lurking in the germy hallways of the medical industry. These inventive deceptions are the offspring of Eupheme, the ‘good-speaking’ nurse of the Greek Muses. Mental illness is now mental health. Death insurance is now life insurance. To die is to pass. Code Blue masquerades for cardiac arrest. Pain is now a pinch, illness is under the weather and a breakdown is an episode.
Pull back the sheets of sexual sidesteps. Will you be shocked to see that adultery is simply slipping around? The old standard of doing it has become sleeping together, and a loose woman is changed to an experienced one, always much in demand.
Take a quick peek through the keyhole of courtship. Inside that bordello you’ll find that your place or mine? is a fading linguistic leftover. It went the way of mini-skirts. Its more direct replacement, albeit brazen, is let’s get it on. Hey, time is short and opportunity is fleeting. Let’s hook up is an impotent one-liner.
Fooling around is so, like, passé now. You’ll sometimes hear occasional slips of the tongue that shroud this cover-up. It’s whispered among the last vestiges of conservative Puritans, most of whom continue to refer to sex as just a mythological theory. Lately they’ve been disguised as disgruntled Democrats still hung up on the shafting they got from the hanging chads.
Lutherans flee in horror at the mere suggestion of erectile dysfunction. The church canon now permits only the use of ED when referring to this male malady. The blue-pill cure is worse than the forbidden-fruit curse. It has resulted in unwelcome late-in-life consequences for senior citizens. Ed is now the most popular baby’s name in Minnesota.
Once Churchill was chastened at a dinner party in Virginia for asking the butler for breast of chicken. He was reprimanded by a somewhat starchy lady for using such a vulgar term as breast. When asked what he should have said, she replied, “White meat.” It’s reported that the next day Churchill sent the lady a corsage with the message, “Pin this on your white meat.”
Such an indecorous word like commode is still looking for its substitute. So far only the call of nature has survived the stigma. Forget groping or crotch…people are aghast at their connotations.
Personally, I prefer the double entendre euphemisms. Say what? An unfamiliar term? Then test the words boy, bag, spade and stud in public. The meaning will instantly become obvious.
**********
Euphemistic legerdemain will continue unabated. When the last syllable of time runs out, I like the soft French finale, “Manger les pissenlits par la racin,” eating dandelions by the roots. It’s a superior dismissal to kiss off!
Friday, January 10, 2014
Curse of the Conundrum
“…far off in the pine woods, night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering, along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes, but the Power that moves through the world and makes our hair stand on end was keeping the answer to Itself.” The poet, Tom Hennen, wrote these words. He had obviously confronted the curse.
**********
It’s a new year. Fresh. Full of possibilities. Things are new, but not all things. Conundrums abound. Many remain unsolved, riddles without answers, enigmas of confusion.
‘Conundrum’ is a word coined by Thomas Nast, the cartoonist. Among other inventions, he created the symbols for three notable conundrums: an elephant representing the Republican Party, a donkey depicting the Democrats and a fat man with a white beard in a red suit, Santa Claus. Imagine such labyrinths of illusion.
Who will crack the Gordian Knot of cogito ergo sum, that great equalizer of man’s puny significance? (Probably a woman!). “I think, therefore I am,” the Eternal Mystery. It stalks us relentlessly.
Rene Descartes did his best to solve life’s mysteries in 1641 while enjoying a plat du jour on a bench near the Sorbonne, watching young French women stroll by. Some say it was the combination of a double cognac and the prospect of romance that aroused the epiphany. Anything can happen in Paris.
Sooner or later you will meet a conundrum. You’ll be forced to take a stand, to decide once and for all that you actually believe something.
Forget about religion. It’s too esoteric. Or government. It’s too big. Besides, sooner or later you’ll elect a clown who’ll explode your thesis of political theory. Huey P. Long will appear to have been a rational, though a raving, lunatic. Religion and politics are related.
It’s best to believe simple things. Like rain is wet, cold is cold, hot is hot, because sooner or later you will experience this. Sooner or later you will discover that the IRS is a horde of thugs, not a nice bunch of choir boys, even though they refer to you now as a ‘customer.’ This conundrum is a spider’s web of horror.
Dogs are predictable conundrums. It’s a good thing to believe that the primordial urges of dogs are best experienced outside of the house. Because if not, well, sooner or later an epiphany will appear on your white rug. You’ll scream over and over, “Oh, ‘S…’”, the word of choice coined especially to give adequate voice to your true feelings.
While dogs are predictable, not so with women...they’re complex puzzles. Unless a man has mastered the miracle of walking on water, all attempts to clarify conundrums with respect to the gentler sex will simply open the gates of Hell.
Sooner or later your preacher will discuss his conundrums. Things like the black-hole church budget, your poor tithing history and the recent sightings of you with someone other than your spouse. Such things cast dispersion upon him and the church. Avoid contention. Sit on the back pew… last in, first out.
Sooner or later you will find the toothpaste tube squeezed from the top. You will blame your spouse. The indictment will be denied. The day will be a disaster. Toothpaste is a leading cause of divorce in this country. Same is true of a spouse’s bad-hair day. Pretend not to notice, much less discuss, unless you want to reap the whirlwind.
The thermos-jug riddle ranks high in cold-case conundrums. Three philosophers were overheard debating inexplicable phenomena. One said the miracle of birth was the most obscure, unresolved mystery. Another disagreed, saying that intergalactic space travel exceeded all boundaries of thought. The last man said the thermos jug was a marvel. The debate raged.
Finally, out of frustration, one man asked, “What’s so special about a thermos jug? It only keeps things hot or cold.” To which the erudite gentlemen replied, “How do it know which?”
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As for me, I’m hung up on the question of why all men think women find them attractive. Cogito ergo sum usually resolves this dilemma…until she speaks!
Bud Hearn
January 10, 2014
Illustration courtesy of Leslie Hearn
Friday, January 3, 2014
Moving On and Moving Mountains
It’s 2014. The dead Christmas tree is recycled, the holiday decorations are mothballed and Handel and his Messiah are tucked in. Everything moves on.
Barely ten hours into the new year of 2014 and I’m already a basket case. Why? Like Janus, January’s namesake, I’m looking both ways…a foot in the past, a foot in the future. I’m conflicted. Moving on is essential.
Every year, the same…drop this, grab that. Which? Decision is impossible. So what happens? Not much. Easier to wait for deadlines and emergencies. They always arrive.
I check out last year’s resolutions, a ball and chain I hooked myself to. No good intention goes unpunished. All best-laid plans compete with the tyranny of the urgent. I find the list, all ninety-eight of ‘em. It’s written on the back of a church bulletin.
I review it. Success in two. Not bad. I no longer say ‘wuz’ and ‘fixin’ to.’ Not a complete failure. The big one remains, ‘Clean out the garage!’ It’s been on every list for nine years straight. It’s my mountain to move. It mocks me, the reminder of an old girlfriend I couldn’t shake loose.
Procrastination is the mountain… tomorrow, always tomorrow. My promise reeks of a shallow sincerity. Familiar? I postpone the job and visit my pal, Marvin. Moving mountains needs incentives. I lack even one.
Since his ‘ex’ left, Marvin lives with his dog. He’s the source of amusement and weird wisdom. He rides a bike backwards. Says he learned the trick from Pickrick, a former governor of Georgia. Safer to view life looking backwards, he says…like reading the end of a book first. It eliminates surprises.
Marvin talks a lot to himself and to Brutus, his dog. Claims it’s a consequence of PTSD…post-traumatic stressful divorce. Today they’re playing chess. Bonding.
“Hey, Marvin, whatcha doing?” I ask.
“Reading Scripture, playing chess with Brutus,” he says.
“Dogs don’t play chess,” I say.
“Brutus does. Beat me twice today.” Brutus lies there like a stuffed animal, half asleep, one eye open, disinterested.
“Explain this insanity,” I say.
“Well, when it’s his move, I ask, ‘Knight or Pawn?’ He looks at me, nods one way or the other. It’s dog braille. I know the signs. Worked it out with a computer algorithm. Slick, huh?”
Some things defy logic. I skip it and move on. “Is that your Bible? Sorta beat up, I’d say.”
“Gideon. Found it in a fleabag motel. I was hiding from my second wife. Been a Godsend. It helps me move mountains. I give the Gideons money.”
“Be more specific,” I say.
“OK. See this verse by Matthew? Says if you’re a mustard seed you can move mountains. I felt about as small as one in those days. Pity-party hang-ups. I needed two divorces…my wife and the past. I got both. Now I’m a mustard seed.”
“Do you believe a mustard seed can move a mountain?” I ask with a laugh.
“Amen, brother. Even Brutus can move mountains.” (Marvin proves insanity exists.)
“Convince me,” I say.
“OK.” Marvin goes out, moves his pickup by the back door. Brutus jumps up, barks incessantly for ten minutes.
“OK, dude, what are my options here? Beat the dog senseless or move the truck?” Marvin asks. I shrug. So he goes out, moves the truck. Brutus stops barking. They retreat to the chess table.
“See? No problem. Dogs can move mountains. Even ants can move ‘em. Mountains are relative. Size is irrelevant.” Marvin says, grinning. “What’s your mountain?”
“Haha, cleaning the garage. It’s that or divorce,” I say.
“Listen, for every mountain there’s a mountain mover. If you’re a mustard seed and join MSA, Mustard Seeds Anonymous, you’ll move mountains. Nothing’s impossible for a mustard seed,” he says with conviction.
Marvin and Brutus resume their chess game. I leave. Marvin lives on another planet. Who ever heard of a mustard seed mountain mover? One can’t make this stuff up.
Driving home, the cell rings. It’s Pedro. I answer, “Holla, que pasa, amigo?”
“Need dinero,” he says.
“Wanna clean my garage?” I ask. I feel both of our mountains begin to move. Maybe there’s something to being a mustard seed after all.
I swing by the pet shelter, adopt a dog named Mac. Someone else’s mountain is moved.
No New Year’s resolutions for me. I’m simply moving on. Mountains will move. Good luck with yours.
This year, I’m gonna teach Mac to play chess. Look out, Brutus!
Bud Hearn
January 3, 2014
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