Swooping in on Suetonius

“I can’t believe you actually called the White House,” said Lady.

 

“Not once but five times,” I told her. “The first two times I got volunteers who told me they were there taking messages for the president. But they were Republican-Lady-Nice—which is always a terrible thing…”

 

“Republican-Lady-Nice?”

 

“They are insufferably cheerful and friendly. They refuse to be taunted or tempted into losing their temper. The angrier we get, the harder they smile. Awful people, the Nice Lady Republicans.”

 

“So it seems,” said Lady. “Anyway, weren’t the ladies at the White House?”

 

“It took me a while to figure out the scam,” I told Lady. “Google has this bogus number…here, look.”

 

    

 

“That 456-1111 number?” I told her. “That’s the terrible Nice-Lady Republican line. They both refused to tell me where they were located, whom they reported to, and how, precisely, my comments would make it to the orange ear that thirsted for the comments of Marc Newhouse. Undoubtedly, Trump sits at the Resolute Desk each morning…”

 

“So then what,” said Lady, who knows that it’s always a better thing with me, somehow, to move on. 

 

“So then I demanded to talk to the White House switchboard, since I am an American taxpayer calling my elected president … and getting farmed out to a nice lady in Kansas is frankly a lack of respect. The nice lady rattled that number right off and then said she did SO hope that I would have a good day, and I was just as treacly and wished her—gosh!—just the NICEST afternoon possible. So we flashed daggerous (“knife-ish? Stilettoed?” what would make you happy, computer?) smiles at each other through the telephone lines. Then I called the White House, since I had wasted a good twenty minutes with the Nice Republican Ladies.

 

“Why were you calling, again?” asked Lady.

 

It’s not her fault. The last two months have brought an assault on political norms, foreign policy, and the entire government itself. Planes are falling from the sky, or colliding with each other. The entire intelligence community took part in a group chat on an unsecured server, and had a high old time planning the bombing of the Houthis in Yemen. Everybody from the Vice President, the directors of the FBI / CIA / NSA and cabinet members like Department of Defense Pete Hegseth  and the Commerce Secretary are yukking it up, like frat boys on Spring Break. The boys shared flight plans, targets, and the sequence of the attack. Indeed, the attack was a great success, as Jeff Goldberg could tell you. He had inadvertently been invited to the chat a week prior to the event, but had dismissed it as a prank, or perhaps a disinformation attempt. Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, savvy, used to…well, things running as they should. He showed the thread around the office, and everybody thought it was a hoax. And then he sat in a Safeway parking lot and heard news of the bombing unfolding in Yemen. And that’s when he realized that the text thread was indeed real.

 

But that’s hardly the only four alarm fire, since Trump has pissed off Canada to the extent that they are increasing security at the border. That is crazy, of course. But so is Trump, and isn’t that the point? The United States elected a guy who believed that Haitians were eating dogs and cats in a town in Ohio. Of course it’s crazy that we would invade Canada, but so is taking back the Panama Canal. So is building a five-star luxury resort in Gaza. So is taking over Greenland.

 

It's like a relapse, or living with someone who has relapsed. Because just as the drunk forgets how bad it was, the people around him or her forget as well. And Naomi Klein got it right when she wrote The Shock Doctrine: the point is to stun us completely, so that we become numb to it all. Of course, every day has six earth-stopping stories. In any other administration, the idea that we are going to “take back” the canal from Panama, or that Canadians might be amassing at the border would be insane.

 

So Lady is completely right, though her question might better have been…what now?

 

“Here’s what he’s done,” I told Lady.  No need to specify who “he” was, nor did she ask.

 

“Over two hundred Venezuelans get picked up on a Saturday, the 15^th of March. They were shackled and got herded into a military jet. The plane took off, but not before the ACLU got wind of what was happening. So they went up in front of Judge Boasberg, who is old and white and male, so of course I love him.”

 

“Well, isn’t Trump…?”

 

I rise above this statement.

 

“So Boasberg, the judge, tells the attorney for the government not to deport anyone until a hearing is held. Don’t let any more planes take off, and turn around any planes that are in the air. There were planes in the air, apparently, but the government said fuck you to the judge. And if the government didn’t, the president of El Salvador did. He posted the New York Post headline about the judge blocking the deportation with the comment ‘oopsie…too late’”

 

I didn’t tell her the worst of it, because we didn’t know the worst of it. I knew that there were three or four women being detained: there were, in fact, eight. The prison, whose only advantage is that it’s new, doesn’t hold women. (The men are “housed” 80-100 deep in cells with shelves but no mattresses, pillows, or private toilets and sinks.) So the plane with the deportees (that should have turned around, according to the judge’s orders) landed, and then a group of government officials went around with a waiver form, ordering people to admit they were part of Tren de Arangua, and ceding their right to a hearing. The plane turned around and took the eight women back to the US. According to them, they never got off the plane in El Salvador.

 

Nor was it just the eight women—there was a man from Nicaragua who ended up with the deportees, but the El Salvador government refused to take him, stating that it would create conflict with a neighboring Central American government.

 

“Boasberg better not catch wind of it,” I say to Lady. “He might ask—something tells me he might—how it is that they can get the eight ladies and the Nicaraguan back to the US, but not the 200-plus Venezuelans?”

 

So that was Monday, of last week. I spent 40 minutes waiting for the operator finally to take my call—“Thank you for calling the White House Comment Line. Your call is very important to us. Please hold on the line, and the next available operator will be with you in turn. You are caller number … twenty-nine.”

 

 Finally I got a human voice, and what did I do? Did I thank him for speaking to me? Did I tell him that he must have been having a hell of a Monday, dealing with people like me? 

 

Of course not.

 

I demanded to speak with the president.

 

“What!!” said Lady. She had gone away for a bit, but always knows to return when the going gets absurd.

 

Several hours had passed, and the pain of the refusal was diminishing.

 

“Of course,” I told her. “Nor is it so completely improbable—apparently the whole presidency is even more ‘flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants’ than the first one. But Trump didn’t pick up, and I had somehow managed to piss off the operator. He hung up on me.”

 

“The White House hung up on you?”

 

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Anyway, that pissed me off, so I called back and demanded to speak to the Chief of Staff.”

 

“And?”

 

“The operator told me that—listen carefully here—‘HE’S not available.’”

 

I have my phone out, and show her my favorite picture of the president and his chief of staff.

 

 

“Susie Wiles,” I tell Lady. “Very much a woman, and with quite an expressive face. Perhaps a bit too much, for this administration. Anyway, I’m busy. I have to do something about Suetonius, who decided to unburden himself only halfway to my Booklet Creator. We have the beginning and the end, but we’re missing the middle of Suetonius.”

 

“A grave problem,” said Lady, with only partial seriousness. 

 

We decide to look on the bright side, and the news from Russia is great. You can see it below, but let me only say, that Putin is quite a guy. Obama, on his first meeting, walked away feeling up-beat, though he later came to say this.

 

Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall [a New York City political organisation] - tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.

 

Not just Obama, of course. There was George W. Bush, who said that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and had seen his … soul. 

 

“You snorted that day,” Lady said.

 

“I did not,” I told her. “Anyway, the only soul he saw in there was the soul of a KGB officer.”

Fortunately, these divisive days are behind us. Trump sent a “special envoy,” Steve Witkoff, over to Russia, and surprise! He was warmly received by Putin, and the envoy—a guy who seems to have no qualifications for the job, though he does know real estate—was initially apprehensive.  No worries, though, since they got along like a house on fire. “I like him,” said Witkoff, “he’s a great guy.”

 

He is, isn’t he?

 

He told the special envoy that he had heard the news of Trump’s shooting at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania last year. Deeply worried for the well-being of his friend, Putin went off to pray for Trump at his local church. Handily, someone was there to record the event, and take a photo of Putin lighting a candle at the altar for his friend.

 

We know this, because we have just spent four minutes and some seconds watching Witkoff explain all of this to Tucker Carlson, who cost Fox News 787 million bucks for lying about voting machines. Then he cost the company another 12 million to settle claims of sexual harassment on the work place. Now he has his own streaming company, which allows him to give free reign to Witkoff, who told the rest of the story.

 

Putin hadn’t just gone to church, apparently. Putin had gone to an artist—“the best artist in the country,” said Witkoff—and had commissioned a work to be sent to Trump. 

 

An important work.

 

A work that would touch the very soul of President Trump.

 

A portrait!

 

A portrait of Trump himself!

 

Both Trump and Witkoff agree—how foolish it is, to be on bad terms with a guy who has the nuclear codes to the second biggest arsenal in the world! How much safer we feel, having two strong leaders who can talk to each other! The interview is below, and watch it—please. And then you might watch Trump in that famous Oval Office meeting—the meeting that started out by Trump greeting Zelensky as he stepped from the car with the words, “Oh, I see you got dressed up today.”

 

Zelensky was wearing his modified military uniform, as had a guy called Winston Churchill half a century before.  

 

“It’s too much,” I tell Lady. “Did we have to make it that easy? Khrushchev said “we will take you without firing a single shot,’ in 1956, the year I was born. And they did it, in 2016, when Trump became president. It took them 60 years, but the Russians have time. They can wait.”

 

“Way too easy,” I am telling Lady. “who knew how easy it was, to end that little experiment with Democracy we’ve been doing these last 250 years. Light a candle and paint a portrait. In fact, we should all do the same! We should all get up every morning and head to the easel, not the office. Everyone in America should be made to get up and produce a portrait of the dear leader every day. Then we could all mail them in, and Trump could lay them all out on the Resolute Desk, or even on the Oval Office floor. That would keep him busy, while Musk cuts most of the government and Vance destroys what’s left. God, we really did make it easy for them….”

 

I’m shaking my head and muttering, now, and quite by myself. It happens that way—Lady has found a friend and is listening to her recite a poem. Nico is talking to his sister in Strasbourg. Even the rabbit who’s waiting for the coast to get clear before going home—well, the rabbit is sleeping. 

 

Nobody is worrying about the fate of American democracy.

 

I’m going back to Suetonius.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

Suetonius in the Missing Scriptorium

Brother Anselmo does what he can with what he’s given, which is why it’s not my fault, and certainly not his, if the bell didn’t go off as usual.

 

Well, not the bell but the cell phone….

 

Which is just the problem, isn’t it? First of all, in any normal monastery, some friar would slip reverentially over to the bell tower, find the rope, and give it a good yank. But here it’s a little box that sucks the life out of the wall each night and then buzzes or plays jingles. Whatever it does, it’s supposed to do it at 6:30, when I’m supposed to wake up. It doesn’t do it again until 7:05, when I have to leave the house. And today the little box decided to sleep in (as did I) and only get going at 7:05. 

 

That’s it—Brother Anselmo gets me out of bed, because I couldn’t do it by myself. I wake up with two certainties, which fall like fire curtains into my day: my marriage of 42 years is over, and my country is gone. There is no reason whatsoever to get out of bed.

 

There’s no reason to stay in it, either. And if I stay in it, I will be depressed. So I invoke Anselmo and he gets me out of bed. It’s not that he wants to—he actually doesn’t think much of me—but he has to. He has to do all this shit because he is the perfect monk, in my head. And even though my head is a late 20^th century / early 21^st century head, Brother Anselmo is still back in Bec, Normandy in 1066 or so. Brother Anselmo is still a monk, not yet the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was dealing with annoying monks, even so, and some perhaps were even worse than I.

 

A notable opponent was a young monk named Osborne. Anselm overcame his hostility first by praising, indulging, and privileging him in all things despite his hostility and then, when his affection and trust were gained, gradually withdrawing all preference until he upheld the strictest obedience.  Along similar lines, he remonstrated with a neighbouring abbot who complained that his charges were incorrigible despite being beaten "night and day". After fifteen years, in 1078, Anselm was unanimously elected as Bec's abbot following the death of its founder, the warrior-monk Herluin. He was blessed as abbot by Gilbert d'Arques, Bishop of Évreux, on 22 February 1079.

 

When your marriage is over and your country has gone away, you need an abbot like Anselmo, and at times like Anselmo’s abusive fellow-abbots. You need to be beaten, occasionally, which for me is nothing worse than being trapped (by my own doing) in my cell, while the life of the monastery continues without me. I stay home, I do not get out of bed, I suffer.

 

I summon Anselmo each morning because I know this. There is, in modern-bound books, that weakest joint, the hinge. It’s nothing but a piece of paper, usually, and it keeps the whole thing together. Until it breaks, and everything falls apart. The first ten minutes of every day are that hinge for me.

 

Fortunately, Anselmo is an old man, too, after these 1000 years plus of his existence. He doesn’t tell me that I’m lazy and idle—but wasn’t that my bladder, only half-full but suddenly growling to be taken to the bathroom? Yes, and since I’m there, I take my medicine, because I might forget later on.

 

Then I go back to the bedroom and make my bed, because that’s what I do every day. Brother Anselmo says nothing, since what is there to say? Today, the bed is filled with lumps and the top sheet isn’t actually tucked in, but that’s not the point. The point is that having the bed nominally made will leave me with nothing to do, so I’ll have to get down on my knees and pray. I do that too, though I’m an atheist. But I’m also a drunk, and for eight years I haven’t had a drop. So that’s a miracle and I get down on my knees, since even atheists can still be grateful. Anyway, I also feel better after I pray, and God doesn’t seem to mind.

 

Brother Anselmo is looking at all this with pursed lips—you can tell he could let out a few telling words, in Medieval French, Church Latin, or Anglish, a word that neither I nor my computer seem to know. It’s what I would call Old (or Olde) English. The point is that Anselmo could let me have it in several tongues, but he’s smart enough not to. I’ve moved on to making coffee, he observes, and I’m putting clothes on, and shoes, even, and that means I have every chance of getting out the door and pointing myself towards the bus station. Brother Anselmo sighs when he hears me lock the door to the apartment and open the gate to the sidewalk outside. He turns, then, to go back to the bedroom, with its badly-made bed. He puts the broken marriage in the closet by the blanket a friend used while going through status epilepticus for a couple of days. The country is gone, of course—nothing to be done about that.

 

Brother Anselmo should be in the scriptorium, of course, but that’s gone, too. Or rather, it may never have been, at least not the way we think of it, or want it to be. Certainly the way I want it to be—because I believe in what used to be called Western Civilization. It’s the glorious history and creation of straight white men standing proudly on the bleeding, scourged backs of women, non-whites, and the rest of the world. But that civilization (or Civilization) was pretty special.

 

There’s Suetonius, for example. I know nothing about him, except that he’s the guy who everybody reads, when they want to know what the Romans were really up to. I’ve known about Suetonius for years, and even though I took Latin in college, I never read him in either Latin or English. I never read the other historians like Livy and Tacitus, either, but they always occupied a higher shelf, somehow, than Suetonius. Actually, Suetonius barely spends any time in the library on any shelf, the Romans are always coming in to grab him before going off to the beach. He’s got the low-down on everybody, does Suetonius, and is just dying to tell you about it.

 

But if Suetonius is going to be around at all—in the library or loafing on the beach—somebody is going to have to write, and that means WRITE. Not what I am doing, sitting at this little table in an air-conditioned room with sugary snacks beckoning me. I am sitting at the table and tapping at the flat thing that we all carry with us, and the inside lid of the box is making words, that are indeed what I intend to say. 

 

Just not what I want to say.  

 

What I am doing has nothing to do with writing, of course, though I think it does. Anselmo would be astonished—I can hit a button called “Enter” and the little words that I think I see (they’re not—they're zeroes and ones) well, the words vanish. To “Enter,” it seems, is to vanish. But what to make of that button Enter, which also says Return? Must you Enter to Return? And what does that really mean?

 

I can think of this, but Anselmo cannot, because he needs the calves to grow, dammit, since the book that William the First (formerly Duke William of Normandy) wants has to be written on something. And that parchment comes from vellum which is nothing but a baby cow that has grown big enough to taste good (for the muscle) and to write books on (for the skin). The book that William I wants may be covered in gold and decorated with jewels. It may even look like this:

 

     

      

Well, if Anselmo is going to produce a work like this, he’s gonna have to get busy, which means he has to roust up that damn monk, Osborne, who even though reformed is no saint. Neither is Anselmo, at this point, which is probably fortunate. There’s a bit of sinning to do on the road to sainthood, which is why the only hide getting tanned is Osborne’s, not the calves—which are Osborne’s responsibility. 

 

So Anselmo forgets going to the scriptorium which is, anyway, not there, and gets down to the barn where Osborne should be feeding and caring for the damn calves. One calf can produce about three and a half sheets of vellum, which means that the process of turning live animals (with their stupid love of their mothers, even if she’s a cow) into something bearing the word of God is long. It involves a lot of cold water, too, which is lousy on the hands.

 

It also stinks, since part of getting a calf from an animal into a book means stacking the hide, letting it soak in limewater (not the lime of gin and tonics), and letting it putrefy. Well, that’s what I call it, since I lived in Chicago in the 1980’s when there was still a stockyard and a tannery in the city. At some point, the hides are piled up on top of each other, and the whole thing is a mess. It smelled completely revolting, even half a mile away in a good part of the city. 

 

We send off our dead calves to be made into bags for rich women to carry, but Anselmo has another goal. The calves are for the word of God, though what William I wants is the words of Suetonius…and really? 

 

Really?

 

You’re going to kill an animal to get three and a half pages of skin that you will call “vellum,” on which a malnourished and sleep-deprived monk with a bad back from bending over the desk in the scriptorium that doesn’t exist—just to write the words of an infidel named Suetonius? That little calf frolicking in the fields of the Lord met his death for THAT?

 

Anyway, Anselmo stands thinking just for a moment in my bedroom. I am pointed toward the bus station and the bus or the chariot is waiting for me. (I know this, and suspect that the bus is a chariot, since the guy who drives the thing is a monster, since he is blowing great clouds of smoke out of his mouth.)

 

Well, there’s no going to the Scriptorium, since it doesn’t exist, and I could have told Anselmo that, since I’ve a read a book called The Medieval Sciptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages. In fact, the author of the book, Sara J. Charles, dispelled the idea that Brother Anselmo got up and went to work at the Medieval Scriptorium at all. The monks were in their cells, writing their manuscripts, all right—but that beautiful, long, silent room, lit only by an austere northern light in which the monks toiled endlessly and piously, preserving the word of God for you and Western Civilization for me….? That probably didn’t exist.

 

Still, it didn’t keep the author from writing a book about it, which in fact she did. And I read the book, though I also didn’t, since it wasn’t a book (no vellum, no papyrus, no clay tablets, not even paper). It was what might have been a book, if anybody had thought it worthwhile to find that damn Osborne, who should be tending to the flock or at least pondering the lilies of the field. But I read the “book” on the inside cover of another box that sucks its life out of the wall by my bed. The kind of box that has the Enter and the Return button.

 

My e-reader doesn’t have, perhaps, the faint smell of an animal whose skin has been soaked in calcium hydroxide. It also doesn’t need the dull blades and the icy water that will “scud” across the flesh. The only thing I might see on my computer screen is dust—but the vellum will have the pores, still, of where the calve’s hair stood, as it leaned against its mother, in those early days of spring. 

 

The cover of the book can be turned and forgotten immediately—there’s no lapis lazuli to be wrenched from the ground and carried over the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan. The filigree holding the emeralds—how light and fugitive it is! And even the hammered gold will lose its luster.

 

I don’t have such a book as the one I’ve shown you, and perhaps neither did Anselmo, since he was in Normandy and in England, not in Germany, where the Codex Aureus of Emmerman currently lives. But if William I wants his copy of Suetonius, Brother Anselmo is going to have to shake down Osborne, in whatever non-Scriptorium he’s loafing in. And if I want my words to enter and return, I’m going to have to get out of bed to do it.

 

I think we both yearn for the Scriptorium. 

 

           

 

      

Binding Bonhoeffer for Budde

“That was a brave thing to do,” said my cousin Dennis, after I had told twenty or thirty people that I was binding The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of Washington, at a poetry slam.

 

It wasn’t, particularly. Mariann Budde has courage, certainly. She stood on the pulpit in the National Cathedral and said the following to Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and a whole bunch of dignitaries:

 

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”

Trump’s reaction was fury. But who was this bishop, and why had she done something that no one else had done? 

Budde was born in New Jersey in 1959, and then started her career at an urban ministry in Arizona.  Her work there led her to meet a lot of immigrant families. She spent time in Honduras, and there she had a revelation:

I was leading mission trips to Honduras, still trying to figure out where I fit—there, at the margins of society, or at the center of things. I was on a street in Tegulcigalpa and I had this sense—as close as I would say to a word coming to me—that said: Go back to your country and be with your people. 

She did. She went to back to the states and got a Master of Divinity and then Doctorate of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary.  Then she spent a year or two in Toledo as an assistant priest before moving to Minneapolis, where she was rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church fort eighteen years. She was elevated to Bishop of Washington in 2011. 

She made several moves that raised hackles among the comfortable, and certainly the entitled. She got rid of the two stained glass windows that celebrated Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. She replaced them with this, a commemoration of the struggle for human rights:

 

That raised eyebrows, but the howling began when she got up on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church—in Washington, D. C., not Minneapolis. Trump had used the National Guard to clear a Black Lives Matter protest, had marched across the street with his generals in uniform (one of them, Mark Milley, would later apologize for politicizing the military), and had held a Bible up while scowling in front of the church. Budde’s reaction was summed up in The New York Time’s headline for the essay she wrote: Trump’s Visit to St. John’s Church Outraged Me. In that essay, she wrote:

 

…Mr. Trump used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands. That’s why I drew the line, as did my colleague Archbishop Wilton Gregory when the very next day Mr. and Mrs. Trump made an unannounced visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine.

 

She was asked to give the benediction at the second night of the Democratic National Convention in 2020. There, she prayed for the “grace to do something big for something good."

 

You can argue that she already had. In fact, she could have been working Ruth Gordon’s maxim: Courage is like a muscle; we strengthen it by use. Budde presided, along with Gene Robinson (the church’s first openly gay bishop), at the internment of Mathew Shepard in 2018, twenty years after he had been abducted, tortured, chained to a fence and left to die.

 

Mathew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student who met two guys in a bar. By the end of the evening, Shepard was, as Wikipedia puts it, “beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on October 6, 1998.^[1] He was transported by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries sustained during the attack.” One of the guys pleaded guilty; they were both convicted and received life sentences in prison. Shepard’s death, along with a black man, James Byrd, who had been dragged by a truck for three miles on an asphalt road and then decapitated, were the impetus of the hate crime bill passed in 2009.

 

Dominick Dunne once wrote that victims of violent crimes die twice: their physical death, and then the smearing of their intentions and actions by apologists and lawyers, eager to get their clients off the hook. Mathew Shepard was no exception: there was no hate involved, some said, the two guys were just after his money. It was robbery, gone very wrong indeed. Other people alleged that Shepard was a meth dealer, and hardly as innocent as he sounded. The vitriol was so great that Shepard’s parents took his ashes and kept them for two decades. To bury them in Wyoming, they felt, would be an invitation to desecrate the grave.

 

Shepard had been an Episcopalian, and Budde stepped in. She interred him in the Cathedral, steps away from Helen Keller and other dignitaries.

 

As I watched Budde last week addressing Trump, I thought of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Budde had confronted Hitler, and the question of how a civilization so, well, civilized as the Germans had come to embrace Naziism.  I thought of what Bonhoeffer had said about cheap grace, and checked my phone to see the quote that everybody trots out, because it’s so good and so true:

 

 

I thought about all of that, and then I remembered that I had met my own Matt Shepard. I met him in a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, and we talked the evening through. We were both in our late twenties, we had an instant connection, the sex that ended the evening was tender and sweet. He had fallen in love with another man whom I knew—a German professor who had moved to Minneapolis. He was deeply in love, but also lonely, and he found respite for a bit in my arms.

 

Or in other’s arms, because he was killed behind the Civic Center, in a little alley leading to the stage door. It was an ideal site for fleeting pleasure, or murderous rage.

 

I thought about that man, and myself, and then I went off to bind my book at the Poet’s Passage. They have an open mic every Tuesday night, and I like to bind books with other people about. But first I had to introduce myself, and explain why I bound books in the first place. What is there about books? 

 

I gave the simple version. I once sat with a group of guys and the question came up: what did you do when you first realized you were gay? A couple people went out and got drunk. Several told their closest friends, and swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. There was a suicide attempt.

 

“I went to the library,” I said.

 

Nobody could believe it.

 

“Well, I had a problem, and I needed an answer. And smart people have the answers, and then they write books. And somebody collects them all, and they put the books in the library. See?”

 

It made complete sense at the time.

 

The problem is, it still does.  

 

And so I am binding Bonhoeffer for Budde. I am also binding it for myself, and for the man I loved for an evening who lay behind a Civic Center in a pool of blood.  I’m binding it for the woman who took the ashes from the grieving parents, found a little space in her cathedral for them, and then filled up the church with a couple thousand people.

 

“She did me a favor,” I said, as I concluded my little talk, and then thought, ‘why in the world did I say that?’

 

Now I know.

 

Notes on Childhood

 29 Sep 2021

 

So who was that little kid, and why did the cello have anything to do with it?

 

Oh, and what does Dr. Nicholas Coleman Pickard have to do with me, or you?

 

Well, simply put: my mother was raised by a Victorian lady. And I know that now because I know about Dr. Pickard. I have recently been wading through the family history, trying to find out who everybody else was. In the process, I found a clue to who I am.

 

Consider: my grandmother was born in 1883. Queen Victoria died in 1901: my grandmother would have been eighteen when Her Supreme Majesty (a little nod to my husband, who takes this all very seriously) died. But the Victorian Age—however you define it—lingered in the United States, and all of the colonies much longer. 

 

And so my mother was raised by a Victorian, and in a Victorian house. Or at least, something close. And then she was raising me, in the late 50’s and 60’s. Which meant:

 

Rules: lots of rules. I got up at exactly the same time and ate the same meal and said the same things and went to school on foot, which was perfectly safe, although I now know that it wasn’t. But because we didn’t know it wasn’t safe, it was—and if you can understand that, then you understand the 50’s. The classroom had the damn flag of the United States (we’re coming to that) and we said allegiance to it. The little desks were magical affairs: the seat was joined to the desk, which opened up so that you could store all your books, papers and school supplies in there. And whatever else you might want to stick in there, because I had found these neat leaves on the way to school and I thought I could use them if I had a science report. To stick on the cover. Which needs to look really good, since the report is going to be pretty “C” material. Why? Because I will have spent all my time making the cover (much more fun), and not doing the report, and if you can understand that…

 

…then you understand me.

 

So there are leaves in there, and also the orange that my mother put into the lunch sack a couple of weeks ago because I really need Vitamin C. Or because my mother needed someone to eat the damn orange, since she had bought it and now she has it and nobody else is eating the orange so here it is. In my sack. And not just an orange, but a MORAL OBLIGATION! Because oranges are not cheap—not in the midwestern United States in the year 1965. No, they actually are making a transition from being the rarity of my grandmother’s day (her one Christmas gift—HER ONLY CHRISTMAS GIFT-- was often just a simple orange, which she would peel reverentially and then section carefully, and then offer to her dear brothers and sisters the pieces. They would say no, of course, but how dear, how sweet of your blessed grandmother to think of them BEFORE HERSELF. She didn’t expect thirty brightly and expertly wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree! She didn’t wonder if this year you would actually get a BIKE, and not some stupid underwear. OHHH, YOUR GRANDMOTHER…..

 

The problem being that I hate oranges. Actually, I don’t—they taste good on my mouth. But I don’t like peelingoranges and I don’t know why. I just don’t. My hands get sticky and it’s too much work….

 

TOO MUCH WORK! WHEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAITED AN ENTIRE YEAR…..

 

So I can’t throw the orange away, because that would be like spitting in my grandmother’s face—and I really love my grandmother—and now the orange has assumed the moral weight of the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and every other sacred text ever written or indeed ever to be written by man.

 

And giving it away?

 

HAH!

 

So of course I put the orange away in my desk, as something that I will definitely eat when I have achieved the moral purity and devoutness of soul which the orange demands. Which means I am waiting for nirvana and did I mention that the orange appeared two weeks ago? Or maybe more, because I really don’t remember when I put the orange in the desk. But it is sort of odd that every time I open my desk, people start saying, “Phew, what stinks around here?”

 

Well, well—guess some other people haven’t achieved nirvana either! Picky, picky! Always have to have their noses—quite literally—in other people’s business!

 

Though it is odd that I actually haven’t seen that orange. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be an orange at all.

 

Though I certainly can smell something.

 

Anyway, I probably can’t see the orange because in addition to the leaves, there are some other things as well. Newspapers, since some kids have started to wrap their books in newspapers, and is that cool or is that nerdy? Not sure, but one day when I was verging toward the “cool” end of the judgment, I grabbed some newspapers, just in case. When inspiration comes, you know….

 

So there’s that and several other lunches as well, because the peanut butter sandwich that I negotiated for as an unrelenting part of my lunch in place of the damned fried eggs my mother wanted to give me for breakfast ….well, I’m tired of peanut butter sandwiches. And I’m still fighting the issue of those damned eggs. Why did I have to eat them every damn morning? Who set that rule? Why not sugared doughnuts, which is what Sven’s mother gives him, sometimes.

 

Sven’s mother is Swedish.

 

   Well! That answers that, since we are Norwegian, and the Norwegians hate the swedes (lower case mistaken but now intentional) because the swedes stole all of our iron and then forged steel and then became a bigshot in the neighborhood and conquered Norway and held us in hideous subjection for years until dear Queen Maud—who was, by the way, the daughter of her Supreme Majesty—married Olaf or Knut or somebody and let us be independent as well as loyal subjects to Her Majesty.

 

SO! WE’LL HEAR NO MORE ABOUT THE SWEDES!

 

Anyway, that explains the other lunches with the peanut butter sandwiches and the leaves and the newspaper and the orange, which is in there, obviously, but not. In fact, there’s a whole lot of stuff in my desk, not just the ghost or the divine essence of the orange past or…

 

…it really does kind of stink, doesn’t it?

 

Oh, and the teacher, Miss Steensland (who I like because she is—guess what!—Norwegian) has smelled it too. And now she is telling the class how proud, how very proud, she is of this class, because we are the neatest class she has ever taught (and she started back in the days of dear Queen Maud). Nor does she mean “neat” in the sense of “cool.” No, she means orderly, well-arranged, tidy, clean, spotless, immaculate, without stain or blemish and…do I need to get the thesaurus? So that’s why we are about to have…

 

DESK INSPECTION!

 

Oh fuck, I say, even though I can’t say it because I didn’t know the word because I am eight. But I’m saying it now, still cowering at the thought of Miss Steensland (who will undoubtedly tell Queen Maud, who very likely will include it in one of the many, many letters that she writes to her dear mother, HER SUPREME MAJESTY)

 

So the blood is pounding in my ear and my mouth is dry and my palms are sweaty but wait. I’ve played this rodeo before so I quickly arrange all the books—which have shredded leaves all over them and in them (don’t know how that happened)—in one organized pile. Then I find the one largest and emptiest dead lunch bag, and put all the other dead lunches into that bag. So now I just have one “lunch,” which I will toss after lunch break is over. I probably won’t eat anything at all today, which is a little upsetting, but I won’t upset Miss Steensland and the Queen and Her Supreme Majesty. Who is very, very happy because Mindy Peckham has presented her with just the cleanest desk, and all of her colored pencils are arranged in order by their place in the color spectrum. So that when Mindy is consulting her color chart, which she has carefully taped to the inside of the desk drawer (such a nice touch), all she has to do….

 

OH, Miss Steensland is so happy!

 

So she moves away from Mindy and now is only two desks away from me, and so I squeeze the damn lunches together as hard as I can and that’s when I hear something plop and…

 

…it’s the damn orange!

 

Yes, now seriously shrunken. It looks, I observe, strangely like a walnut, though blacker and a lot smellier. Really putrid, in fact.

 

Whew, does it stink!

 

Of course, it could also be a shrunken pygmy brain….

 

So I’m thinking about that, and then I realize that Miss Steensland is standing over me. 

 

“And what do you have, Marc?”

 

So I remember salvation, which appears here in the form of a hole, an inch in diameter, which is cut into the metal bottom of every desk in the entire world, including mine. So I grab the shrunken orange / walnut / pygmy brain and I stick it in the hole and put the bag of dead lunches (and some newspaper and leaves that really did get shredded, somehow) over the orange and I slam my fist down.

 

Hoping it will fall, I will catch it, and put it in my crotch.

 

It doesn’t fall.

 

It gets stuck in the hole.

 

Which Miss Steensland can see and so can all of the class, because she has summoned them all over to look with horror at what a messy desk I have.

 

And now, I have not only failed in my obligation of the Holy Orange, more sacred than all the prayers and mediatations that have been offered up to Christ, Buddha, Om, Mohammed and the Great Spirit. Now, I have descended to the temporal level, the everyday level, and I have killed any joy that Miss Steensland might have had in her decades-long teaching career. Not to mention…

 

DEAR QUEEN MAUD AND HER SUPREME MAJESTY!

 

But no time to think of that, because guess what! Miss Steensland has had to do the one thing that in HER ENTIRE LIFE AS A TEACHER she has never had to do. And there is now the maintenance man, standing over me, and he is watching me empty my desk of the books and the pencils and all the stuff that should be there (including that color chart that we all made and that dear Mindy…). And now he is lifting the damn desk, with its newspapers and leaves and dead lunches and most especially the more-and-more odiferous orange. There is no hope for the desk--“you’ll  never get the stink out of the wood,”--the maintenance guy tells Miss Steensland. So he’s taking it straight out to the dumpster.

 

Oh, and they give me a new desk!

 

Can you imagine!

 

A perfectly good new desk to a terrible boy who destroyed his old desk and the lives of his teachers, ancestors, Queen Maud and Her Supreme Majesty.

 

That was my childhood.