An Atheist Confronts Christmas

Mostly I ignore it. Or laugh at it, which isn’t hard to do. For years I sang all the gringo Christmas carols with the worst possible Puerto Rican accent. “Jingle bells” became “jinger bears;” the “one-horse open sleigh” became the “one-whore open sleigh.”

A few things helped. I didn’t have kids, so I was spared having to do the whole thing—the shopping, the putting up the tree, the pretense about Santa. And in Puerto Rico, Christmas is an entirely different affair.

“Why are all the Christmas carols so sad,” asked a student. I knew what he meant, and tried to explain. “Imagine a time of year so dark, so cold. You’re outside, trudging home, the wind is slapping snow in your face. At last you can see the house. It’s totally dark, but you can smell the wood smoke from the chimney. Your legs are tired from the effort of pulling through the snow. Finally, finally you can see—there’s a single candle burning in the window. You’re home.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“It’s all about a light, a single light, that you see in the darkest time of the year. And there’s no reason for that light—in fact, it’s miraculous. You stare at it, this one tiny flame that at any moment can sputter out. It’s infinitely small. Yet it may become larger, grow, warm you and your family and your neighbors. You can cook. You can see. It’s this small, miraculous, filled-with-potential flame that has no reason, no reason whatsoever, to be in your life. You stare and stare, full of wonder.”

“Silent night, Holy night,” he sang. Or rather, parodied. You could have gone out for a cigarette, come back, and still not have gotten to the third line….

“Look, it’s just something in the culture.”

“But it’s a birth, it should be happy, joyous….”

I never convinced him, of course. He left thinking that we celebrated the birth of his Savior with increased and renewed fits of melancholy.

“Christmas is just the time of year when happy people make the rest of us feel more miserable,” said a depressed patient to me, years ago.

I knew what she meant. We were hanging out by the TV, trying not to watch anything about Christmas. We were ignoring it as hard as the rest of the world was shrieking it at us. Oh, except for that afternoon, when family and friends weren’t visiting.

Who wants to go to a nut house on Christmas day?

So occupational therapy had thrown the “Christmas dinner” two days before. We were on marginal staffing. Anybody who had less than a fifty-fifty chance of harming himself or anyone else was discharged.

I worked a lot of those Christmases, operating under the theory that I wasn’t going to celebrate it any way—why shouldn’t I let someone for whom it meant something have the day off? Let some woman be with her kids.

That seemed reasonable up until a couple days ago. When I looked at a guy whom I had first seen as a kid holding his own kid.

And realized for the first time—I didn’t have that.

And I wish I had.

It’s about how you define it. Kids didn’t come into the equation—they were rigorously excluded. So of course I was working those Christmases. Why sit at home and listen to the sounds of joy and delight—presents under the tree!—that weren’t there? Better to go hang with the depressives in the madhouse.

In just the way that generations of Blacks accepted Jim Crow for years, we accepted that we’d never have kids. We squared our shoulders, lifted our chins, got on with our lives. Some of us got kids into our lives as teachers or pediatricians or uncles and aunts. Some of us pretended we didn’t want parenthood. We had better—or at least more expensive—vacations.

That same exclusion worked for God. For most of two millennia, the Christian churches had some news for us gay people, and most of the time it wasn’t stuff you wanted to hear. So now, in the last 20 years, I can find a church that accepts me, embraces me.

So?

Well, yesterday was Christmas Eve, the big holiday here. All of the family was gathering. I got sick.

Was it psychosomatic? Can you really bring on severe diarrhea just by wishing to be anywhere else?

My doctor might say yes. My stomach says no.

Whatever. It was going to be very loud in a very small place. People were going to sing, play the typical percussion instruments, dance, tell jokes. It would be five or six hours of forced gaiety.

I am, by a definition that got redefined, childless and godless. I cannot see that little flame, that flicker that may die, or may grow and warm and transform and reform us.

I’m outside, looking in. But I leave the following, for those inside.

Odyssey

It was a day when the Puerto Rican Goddess chose her theme with typical exuberance.

“Our great grandfather came to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands as a very young man without a penny. He collected wood in the fields, and then went and stood by the side of the road. Took anything anybody would give him for the wood. He saved and saved, never spending any money on anything, but buying land. He ended up a very rich man, and bought one of the first cars in a town west of here. Then he realized: he could travel for less on the públicos—the public cars. So he sold the car back to the dealer.”

A story a friend, Carlos, told me at the café. We were talking families, and how for the generation of the Great Depression it’s agony to shell out a dime they don’t need to spend.

Now, of course, they can afford all the help they need. But Carlos’s parents are still living frugally, still wanting to pass something on to their children, still worried that they’ll run through their money and be a burden.

“Your mother always wanted to go to Europe,” said Carlos’s father, when Carlos, having reviewed his father’s finances, told him just how well he had done.

They hadn’t, of course. They had stayed home and worked and gotten places their parents hadn’t—both Carlos’s parents went to the States and got Master’s Degrees, both worked, both believed passionately in getting ahead.

No time for Europe.

Oh, and no money, either.

There were similar stories in my family. Franny’s family were eccentrics, Jack came from salt-of-the-earth Norwegian immigrants. No money there, although there is a hospital ward that my grandmother had donated somewhere in Chicago. And she hadn’t had a car until she was shamed into it by hearing a rumor that the Newhouses were too poor to buy one. So she bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, drove it back, had the tires taken off, and kept it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

And like Carlos’s parents, Jack had been a big believer of getting ahead, making progress, going somewhere and making a life that was better than the person’s who had given you that life.

And then giving a hand to somebody less fortunate—but as hardworking—as you.

Which is why Jack had called up his old friend at the Urban League, sometime in the late 80’s.

He’d gotten it into his head that parents needed to read to their kids.

Well, he certainly did.

There’s a photo of me, somewhere, with Jack lying down on the couch, and me sitting on a pillow above his head. He’s holding the book that we both are reading.

So Jack had teamed up with his old buddy, and they were busy on a project involving filming parents reading a book, visible to the viewer, to their kids. At least that’s how I remember it. And since that had been Jack’s project-of-the-moment when he died, we had asked for donations to the program in lieu of flowers.

As a writer, Jack respected conciseness. He tended, however, to use the telephone as an instrument to explore what he thought. He would call his friend at the Urban League, get the voice mail, and then leave one, two or even three lengthy, pontificating messages. The Urban League guy wrote a warm tribute to Jack after he died, and finally confessed that most of the time, he had only listened to the concluding message.

Right—so it seemed to be a day organized around some simple themes: poverty, getting ahead, hard work and giving back. Which had been as the well the theme of the remarkable documentary I had seen the night before.

On the flimsiest of excuses, I had written an old high school classmate, Emily Auerbach, now a distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We hadn’t been close, but we knew each other. I was a cellist, she an oboist—we shared a lot of Shostakovich Fifth together.

Franny had mentioned her, once or twice, over the years and had attended some of her lectures. And she’s no lightweight. Margaret Drabble writes about Searching for Jane Austen, “Emily Auerbach's approach to Jane Austen is lively, engaging, and thoroughly modern. Like Austen, Auerbach wears her wide learning lightly and imparts a great deal of information in a most enjoyable manner.”

Right, Margaret Drabble—the heaviest of guns….

But I have, as you know, until the end of February 2013 to get my message out. You can have a good, comfortable death at the time and place of your choice. You don’t need to rot away in a nursing home. You can die at home with the cat on your bed on a spring afternoon—just as Franny did.

So it was time to call in whatever artillery seemed at hand. I tracked down Emily—not hard to do—and sent her an email.

Some time elapsed. She replied, apologizing for the delay. My email talking about the book I had written about the death of my mother had arrived…

…on the day Emily had buried her mother.

So it was one of those times that an email couldn’t do it. Time to phone. I did, stammered out an apology, and then began to watch the documentary for which Emily had sent me a link.

I’m happy to say that while I’ve been occupying myself with the daily trot and writing blog posts, some of my high school classmates are actually doing some real work. And no, not on Austen—which I’ve not read, but will—but on the south side of Madison. In a library—The Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Library. Didn’t know the library, but did recognize the building behind it.

The Madison Urban League.

Emily, it seems, never knew poverty, as I—knock on wood—have not. But her parents did, and were only able to escape it through the help of a remarkable institution, Berea College, which was free. So her parents, like Carlos’s and mine, had gone onward and upward, and now Emily was reaching out and giving a hand.

Or a handout. Or homework she had assigned and graded.

It’s called the Odyssey Project, and it’s a free, yearlong, fully accredited university course with the intention of getting people who never would have dreamed of going to the university…

…into the university.

And out, with a degree.

More than a degree. A changed life, or rather, lives. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re a kid, and you watch your mother go from homelessness to university graduate. You think that doesn’t have an effect? Especially when she calls you on your skipping classes in high school.

She’s not big on subtlety, the Puerto Rican Goddess. She paints with a pretty big brush. Sometimes that’s best, I think. Sometimes the message really is simple. You can change lives. You can get ahead. If you’re sitting pretty now, stand up, look below you, reach down and give a hand.

Raf swears that there’s something unique about Wisconsin—its efficiency, its earnestness, its almost naïve belief that institutions and systems can work, and can get better. I scoff at the idea.

Until I see an old classmate in a room with thirty poor people on whom, as a colleague says, “she just won’t give up. She won’t let anyone slip away.”

And Raf passes the Kleenex to dry my tears.   

The Great Yorkshire Pudding Race

Well, it was bound to happen. Even I can’t maintain high dudgeon and moral righteousness endlessly. So when Susan sent me the email, I was secretly relieved. Enough Connecticut, enough gun control! Time to read about The Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race.

Which takes place in a little town of Brawby in North Yorkshire. Which has in turn a pub—well, wouldn’t it?—with a view of the village pond. And there, Simon Thackray in a questionable state of sobriety or ebriation (lump it, computer!), dreamed up the idea of a Yorkshire pudding race.

Well, if you have an idea like that, you gotta do it—anybody could see that. So he went off to the village baker, who put together five giant Yorkshire puddings—each with enormous quantities of eggs, flour, and milk (sorry for the lack of precision for which this blog is famed, but the damned Internet is screwing around again…).

Oh, and yacht varnish on the outside.

Now then, a nut with an idea is nothing exciting. What I love is the rest of the gang, which instantly goes along with the idea. The baker obligingly bakes the giant Yorkshire puddings. A poet friend composes a half-true, half-fictional saga, which he declaims around town. The little kids don their life jackets and set to paddle.

Does anybody at any point say, “hey, what the hell is this? Are you nuts? I’m not letting Billy sail in that damn thing! Get a job!”

Oh, by the way, the race has a beginning but no end.  

Well, things seem saner in Europe. Just look at the Spaniards! A Madrid advertising agency has just made Cecilia Giménez—you remember, the 80-year old grandmother who touched up that fresco of Jesus to such notable effect—its chief creative director.

Makes sense, when you think of it. She did catapult to the world stage, doña Cecilia, with that work of charity, which evil-minded people called Ecce Mono.

Well, she certainly can stir around a bit. She’s on Twitter! She has a Facebook page! And now she’s selling on eBay.  Here it is:

Not bad, hunh? Reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle, somehow. And it’s definitely true that landscape painting seems more her forte than portraiture. At any rate, it can be yours for around a thousand bucks, which the good doña Cecilia will donate to a Catholic charity.

Not too into giving a thousand bucks to the Catholic Church?

Right—skip it. Use the dough to go the next Yorkshire Pudding Boat Race….

My Crazy Country

It’s one of those weird things about living in a place that is and isn’t my country.

I ran into the story on El Nuevo Dia’s online edition. So I read in Spanish the story of an eleven-year-old kid who took a gun to school in Utah. He was brandishing it in the playground at recess, and threatening to kill a group of kids. They took the advisable step of alerting the teacher, who, along with several others, approached the kid and asked for the gun. The child gave it up, after saying that his parents had suggested the idea—never too early to keep a kid safe!

Right—so now we have parents giving guns to their eleven-year-old kids?

My original reaction was ‘nah, can’t be.’

Now, I think it’s probable.

Until you meet one, it’s impossible to imagine the depth of craziness of a gun fanatic. Or the level of fear and suspicion that they exude. And for anyone wondering whether the fabled frontier mentality—trust no one; shoot first, ask questions later; hate those bastards in Washington; you get the picture—is dead, I can tell you, it’s not.

And it leads to the question—will we ever change? How long has it been since the Pilgrims, whom even the Dutch couldn’t put up with, came over to a virgin land, and here we still are, centuries later: just as extreme, as antisocial, as suspicious and untrusting as they.

Look, there’s a lot to like in my country. Living in another land, another place, gives you that perspective. And—a nod to Mr. Fernández here—the fifty states manage to weld some very diverse cultures. Rural Iowa versus Las Angeles Watts, for example.

But there’s a group of us that are very, very fearful. They really think they’re under attack, that their existence is threatened. They’re convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, and that their kids are gonna be forced to watch Satanic sex films in kindergarten, the way things are going. And suggesting that anybody put any limits on arms is psychic castration.

Right—so we have the crazies. The rest of us? We’re tiptoeing around them.

Maybe it’s sensible—these guys do have guns, after all.

But when an eleven-year-old takes a gun to school because his parents—gee, was it his mother or father?—suggested it, and I read about in Puerto Rico but not on CNN, and nobody apparently is talking about it or discussing it, well, maybe we have gone too far.

It’s a serious question in my mind. Should we stop being reasonable? Or rather, should we start?

I had thought, earlier in the week, that we could at least have a dialogue on assault weapons, background checks at gun fairs, psychiatric evaluations, etc.

But now I think having a rational discussion with a true gun-lover is impossible. And maybe it’s time just to say fuck it, this is crazy. In other words….

You don’t have a right to own a gun. Period. And the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to individuals but to the right of the people collectively—you hear that?—to form militias to protect themselves. And guess what? That applies to hunting, because listen—man is not the only living creature on this earth, and no, you don’t have a right to kill them either. So right now we have a choice between protecting children and mollifying a bunch of crazies who are seriously armed and whom we’ve put up with all these years.

And guess what?

I’m going with the children.   

When the 87% Don't Matter

For reasons that should puzzle no one, I’ve been worrying my head about gun control.

It seems most people favor it. The Brady Campaign—right, of course I’m choosing my preferred choir to sing to me—comes up with a figure of 87%. Well, that seemed abnormally high, so I decided to check it out.

Apparently, we can agree on some stuff. “71% of Americans believe that stopping gun violence is ‘a very important’ goal,” says the study, done by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and the Tarrance Group in 2008 for the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Right—did they ask about motherhood and apple pie?

Things get a little trickier the more specific you become. Almost 60% of Americans favor stricter laws. 87%—probably where the Brady bunch came up with the number—favor background checks on guns bought at gun shows. Oh, and 89% believe that we should prohibit gun ownership to people on the terrorist watch list (really would like to talk with that 11% who think that suspected terrorists should have guns…or maybe not…).

Here’s the conclusion of the report:

This survey shows that many Americans overwhelmingly favor common sense measures to cut down on the prevalence of illegal guns in the country. While most Americans support gun rights, people view their support as compatible with targeting illegal guns and fighting gun violence. 

Hey, great! We’re all pretty much on the same page. We can clear up a few loopholes—c’mon, guys, you gotta do a background check in a shop but not in a show???!—maybe have a little pitched battle about assault weapons, pass a nice little bill and still get home for lunch.

Wonderful!

What’s the problem?

Not the opinion of the American people. Two days ago I signed a generic petition appealing for gun control. I was somewhere in the 58,000 area. Goal was 100,000. And last time I checked, it was going strong with a new goal of 350,000.

So what’s missing?

Sorry—just couldn’t help it.

And neither can the congressmen, either—who are sucking, most of them, from a very full teat called the National Rifle Association. Which is spending five to ten times more money than the gun control groups.

So with so many Ben Franklins on or under the table, who is gonna vote for banning assault weapons? Remember, a politician’s first job is to get reelected.

So the click of a mouse on an Internet petition may not be enough. Readers of this blog, stay tuned. My next project?

whoownsyourcongressperson.com  

969,133,413

No, it’s not the amount of money that we as a nation go deeper into debt ever minute.

It’s the number of YouTube hits for a song called “Gangnam Style.”

Well, the computer has just red squiggled Gangnam, and for once I’m comforted. Someone, or something, is as unhip as I.

Well, if 969,133,413 people have watched, shouldn’t I? Am I missing something? Doesn’t a blogger have a responsibility to his international audience to keep himself up to date with modern culture?

I go roughly from Gregorian chant to Part / Lauridsen—is that enough? Shouldn’t I check out the latest trends in pop culture?

Well, I happened on the whole thing through CNN—a gentleman in England dropped dead of a coronary while dancing to the song. So I became curious—was there something particularly lethal about it?

The first indication that something was seriously bizarre was Wikipedia’s article. Guess, Gentle Reader, how many citations the article had!

Oh—and keep in mind that the song was released on 15 July 2012. That means it’s been around only five months.

I fear for you if you guessed too high. There are, in fact, 341 citations backing up what is one of the longest articles I’ve read—OK, skimmed—on Wikipedia.

This is the story that you—presumably—know and I didn’t. The song is by a South Korean performer named PSY. Gangnam is an exclusive area of Seoul.

Well, I took 4 minutes out of an otherwise productive life to watch it. And here, stripped of the hypnotic beat, the flashing lights (anybody prone to migraines should think twice about watching this), the blatant and annoying sexuality is the essence of the piece.

Yup—nothing. Zilch. Nada. It’s the musical equivalent of bubblegum, and it lasts about as long.

And what’s wrong with bubblegum?

Absolutely nothing.

I chew it, occasionally, and find it mildly pleasant. I don’t, however, expect it to be in any way nourishing. I wouldn’t replace with food as my steady diet.

Now, dear Reader, guess how many citations there are for the greatest song-cycle in the canon of Western Music (love that pomposity—wanted to use the word “canon” for years….)—Winterreise?

39.

So? Why should it matter? In fifty years time, no one will remember PSY, and no one will much care.

But I worry about kids that assume this is the only music there is. Or indeed, that it’s music. It worries me that people—adults, scholars, writers—encourage this belief. It bugs me that people assume that all music has equal value. Or worse, that there’s something condescending about a person who says, yeah—there’s a difference.

My other worry?

That kids’ view of the world is being shaped by this video. Nothing about it has any semblance of sense. It’s random, ridiculous, hypnotic and erotic.

It’s as far away from a narrative as it can get.

At age fourteen, with adolescence and a world looming ahead of me, would I have wanted a message like this?