The Ossified Bone

 

Ossification: The process of hardening into bone or a state of being molded into a rigid, conventional, sterile or unimaginative condition.   Webster

* * *

What you’re looking at above appears to be a fossilized leg bone of some long-departed creature. I picked it up while walking our hound dog on the beach. It lay silently in a boneyard of blanched shells and other encrusted castoffs that nature scatters along the shore. I felt like a grave robber.

I scrape the loose sand off. Maybe there’s a message in the bone. It is Sunday, after all, a day for messages, messages to remind backsliders that church still exists despite Covid.  

The word ‘ossified’ immediately comes to mind. How about that for a message? Never give up on the Spirit. Who else could take an ossified bone and render a message?

Today’s beach is empty. No dogs, no walkers, just Bogey and me. He does a lot of sniffing in the edge of the dunes; I do a lot of thinking about the bone in my hand. I look at it, ask, “What have you to say to me today?”  It whispers, “Listen closely.”

Funny, how something multiplies itself while stewing in its own juices. Probably how Kafka come up with the idea of Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering he was a giant insect. Writing naked can do this. But today I keep my shorts on and continue walking and thinking.

Ossification can take many forms. ‘Os’ means bone in Latin, and can be used also in a figurative sense, like something or some concept becoming fixed or rigid. Take opinions, or experiences, for example. We all have them. Kept rigid enough they become a mold of belief that can ossify. Once beliefs petrify, it takes a sledgehammer to break up their concrete foundations.

I had a friend once. Name was Jack. I say once, because he’s no longer among us, RIP.  He was smart, a successful developer. But when the tide of recession ebbed, it revealed him swimming naked in debt. He suffered PTSD after that.

I visited him once. Taped on his desk was a yellow laminated paper. I remember how the conversation went:

“Say, Jack, what’s that taped to your desk?”

“My new investment rules.”

“Looks like a big list of ‘thou shall nots.’

“Right. I made a list of everything that can go wrong in development. Now I never make an investment without complying with these rules. Keeps me out of trouble.”

“Can it eliminate the risks inherent in every deal?”

“Yes. It’s iron clad. I haven’t been in trouble since I made the list.”

“Have you made any new investments?”

“Not yet, the list keeps me safe.”

I left feeling sorry for him. He was safe, yes, but he had ossified and imprisoned his spirit into a solidified and inviolate list of ‘don’t do’s that left no room for serendipity that life has to offer. He never made another deal.

We often get ‘fixed in our ways,’ ignoring any contrary opinions. It’s human nature. Such was the case with two other friends, Bob and George, who were partners. They had put together five-year and ten-year business plans, nothing left to chance. Every move like a chess game, calculated down to the nuance. No other opinions mattered.

I ran into George one day. He looked down and out. I asked how things were going. He just shook his head and said, “Things were great till Bob up and died. Blew up all our plans.”  Such can happen when plans become ossified without calculating on the vicissitudes of nature.

Today both inside and outside DC and the Beltway lines are being drawn, heels are being dug in, opinions are becoming entrenched. Politics roil and boil, dictates. mandates, off-the-wall philosophies and ideologies, doctrines, propaganda and new-deal orthodoxies like missiles are hurled at the ossified walls of status quo.    

We’re not immune. Lest we become smug within ourselves, remember, we all have peculiar affinities that can ossify and harden into impenetrable walls faster than a brick can shatter the shuttered window of every secret sin. Keep the stones handy. You may need them.

 * * *

So ends the bone’s message. Today I return it to its seaside boneyard where Nature will resume its inexorable process of scattering the bone’s desiccated remains back into the sand from whence it was taken. 

Beware, ossification happens. Avoid it. Keep breaking up your fallow ground and live boldly.

 

 Bud Hearn

September 20, 2021

 

Dirty Laundry

 

“Kick’ em when they’re up, kick ‘em when they’re down, we need dirty laundry.” Don Henley 

* * *

It’s a dirty, grimy world out there. Plenty of dirt to go around. Nobody misses out. People sling it every day. Touch anything, touch anybody, verbally or physically, dirty laundry. 

Detachment avoids contamination. Back off six feet, mask up, be seen, not heard. Avoid contact. Keep your eyes in their sockets. They’re a wandering menace, prone to take you on a trip your body can’t handle. The stench of dirty laundry follows closer than a smelly shadow.    

Everyday words are dirty laundry. Not just expletives, but regular, household words. The dirt in the heart taints them. Words can collect dirt almost as fast as a Wuhan scientist can disappear. Their slime can coat you quicker than a politician can say “fully paid for,” or “build back better.” 

Pick up the morning paper, wade into the mucky world of words oozing with shallow insincerity, “I know you’re hurting, and we’re all in this together.” Tell that to someone whose house Ida just blew away, or whose spouse died of Covid or whose son died in Afghanistan.    

“Dirty little secrets

Dirty little lies

We got our dirty little fingers

In everybody’s pie

We love to cut you down to size

We love dirty laundry.”   Henley again

Here’s a week’s worth of dirty laundry, heading for the cleaners. Decorum prohibits me from sending the photo of the stuff I’m too embarrassed for someone else to wash. It’s hard to know if my wash jobs work in the first place.  Too much detergent, or too little.  Just pour some in and hope for the best.

Our washing machine is state of the art, a technological masterpiece. No, Alexa is not connected so it won’t respond to voice commands, which may be a good thing. It might give me some rebuttal, like, ‘load too big, too dirty, try swimming pool.’ Besides, the dial is complicated, too many choices.

I examine it intently. Normal, casual, bulky, silk, delicates, wool and on and on. I scratch wool off the list since the time I washed a wool blanket that the dog had used for his bed. It came out the size of a handkerchief. Some lessons are expensive to learn.   

Despite its complicity, it beats the days of old when dirty laundry had to be washed by hand in boiling caldrons using ashes, Borax, lye soap and stirred with a stick. I always wondered what function the stick played in washing.  The answer was in the instructions for our washing machine.

Washing machines have what’s called an ‘agitator’ to break up the dirt in clothes. It’s superior to the old method of beating clothes on flat rocks down by the river to loosen the grime. Now it’s all done in a neat, enclosed environment, quietly efficient. Agitation can break up a lot of things.

In the afterdays of REA in the ‘50’s when electricity finally lit up most small towns, I barely recall the rollers used by my mother to squeeze out the final water from the clothes before they headed for the clothesline.

Yes, a clothesline in the back yard. Didn’t everybody? They say sun drying clothes makes them fresher. It was certainly better than wearing them soggy. And back-yard clotheslines were a young boy’s delight on Mondays (always wash day). What better thrill than to observe the neighbor’s 38 double-d ‘delicates’ blowing in the breeze and fantasize over the contents.   

But back to today’s washing machines.  There are four basic functions: Prewash, Wash, Rinse and Spin.  Each speaks for itself in function. Throw in the dirty laundry, hit power and that’s it. The machine does the rest.

Ah, yes, the ‘Machine,’ the ubiquitous Newspeak washing machine. These media machines spin uncontrollably, on air waves, screens, tweets and ink. They whitewash all dirty laundry, scrubbing clean all thoughts, words and deeds with warp speed and efficiency. They cleanse all inconvenient truths.  Muckraking can be sanitized and sterilized whiter than a convent of nuns, bleaching the tiniest stain of detail from fiction, failure and delusion.

After thorough washing and sufficient spinning, the cycle concludes.  Mission accomplished. Dirty laundry is nice and neat, ready to hit the streets again.

                                                       * * *

And what is the upshot of all this washing? “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” Dirty laundry, down the memory hole.

He that hath ears to hear, listen up:  Read between the lines.

 

 Bud Hearn

September 8, 2021