A Monday Morning Walk Through Facebook

Well, well, it’s a Monday morning, and isn’t it time to walk through Facebook?

Bloggers get to do this, you see, or maybe we have to, since there are days when the news is so unremittingly bad that The New York Times and El Nuevo Día are merely siren songs for suicide (sorry for that alliteration—all this poetry stuff I’m doing must be rubbing off). So what can I tell you, or rather, in what new ways can I derich your—perhaps/ probably—difficult Monday morning.

Well, start off briskly with this:

Do I have to? Because—talk about a graphic being worth a thousand words—who needs to make that click? I know perfectly well what’s happening, I know perfectly well how I feel about fracking (essentially, frack that), and so why make myself crazy?

Does it get better? Of course not, because then we have to come to this:

Wonderful! Investigated that just enough to know that vegetarianism is out, too, since the storage tanks holding all that highly radioactive water? Do I have to tell you?

Move on to this:

Why isn’t Congress acting? Do you think I haven’t asked myself that question? Of course, and here’s the answer, if you really didn’t know: Congress is not acting because, for the last six years, a bunch of elderly white bigots ostensibly called Republicans have been in a frenzy of obstructionism. You see, the world changed—you see, they don’t. Oh, and guess what? Because here’s what’s next….

Devoted as I am to you, Dear Readers, who wake every day thirsting to read this blog, whose one reason is to wake…oh, skip it. I checked it out and yes, Thomas reasons that Congress can’t establish religions, but that doesn’t mean that a state can’t. So you Mormons out there in Utah? Feel free!

Well, the Supreme Court is taking a well-deserved rest, having busily fucked everything else up for the rest of us, who are going to have to get busy and do stuff like this:

 

Go to it guys!

At last, I have uncovered the reason for the deeply addictifying nature of Facebook, since the site puts you into such a state of catatonic rage—don’t know how they do that, but they got it figured out—that you then have to turn to stuff like this:

Well of course, of course, I had to spend seven minutes of Monday morning looking at the movie references to Wisconsin—you, Dear Reader, deserve nothing less—but having done that, please don’t waste your time. Somebody, after all, has to keep this world together.

But now, I’m saved by Montalvo, who arrives with the news that his poetry is driving him crazy, since he spent five years making the same mistake, namely writing lines of two words each. I’ve told him, the feeling of reading poem like this is just like bumping down the stairs on your rear-end. So it’s time for a challenge: write a poem of four four-line stanzas, with each line being at least eight syllables each. The first line is “Your memory is a silent ghost,” and you have half an hour to do it. Get to work.

Well, can I do that? I decide to try:

Your memory is a silent ghost

That still cries at night, when the wind,

Cold and unwanted, forces itself through the

Cracks of my empty heart, which even now

Has a ventricle for the eyes that saw no one but me,

Before they misted, clouded, became watery, then pus-filled

And at last, all desire lost, refused to see.

A ventricle to, for the voice, which once was only

Laughter, then turned to song, and then

Hardened slightly, turned as somber as mute swans

In a chill Autumn pond, until your voice, as they, fell silent.

I fled, then, to the other chambers of my heart, places

You were little likely to go, places I might have shown

You, but did not.  I slammed the valves shut, cemented them

With hurt, grief, the usual glues of a deadened love.

I waited, alone, in a dusty corner, and listened—

Thump-thump, thump-thump; you knocking insistently

For a while, but each day more silently, weaker, until at last,

Tired of a call never answered, you left, and it was silence

At last.

Pssst… The Minister's Gay

Consider these words:

McConnell matter-of-factly told me he likely helped write Bush’s 2004 remarks endorsing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Even now the gay speechwriter defends that course. “I believed the president was taking a principled position, and the words he spoke on that issue were always reasonable and tolerant. That hasn’t always been the spirit of the debate, but it’s always been the spirit of George W. Bush. There was never a day I wasn’t proud of him and the vice president.”

(Full article here.)

It’s reasonable and tolerant to endorse legislation that restricts an essential human right? And you’re gay, and you’re writing the speech? Oh, and everybody knows you’re gay, since you’re bringing your boyfriend to White House activities?

If any of this makes sense to you, you’re firmly in the closet. Wait—make it stronger—you’re a mote of dust on the top shelf of the closet. But it turns out that McConnell was hardly the only gay staffer at the White House: there were more than seventy of them, a number that has surprised everybody.

By all accounts, Bush was a gracious man who, initially, was hardly the most vehemently homophobic Republican (remember Pat Buchanan?) True, two or three years into his term, he embraced the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but he had appointed openly gay people and committed significant funds to combating AIDS in Africa.

Nor was he the only Republican to go to bat for gay people: there was Ronald Reagan, who as far back as 1978 came out and opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have forbidden gay people to teach in the public schools. Here’s what a long-term Democrat said about Reagan:

“Never have I been treated more graciously by a human being. He turned opinion around and saved that election for us,” Mixner said. “We would have been in deep trouble. He just thought it was wrong and came out against it.”

Curiously, after not having thought about the Briggs Initiative for years, it’s cropped up twice in the last two days, since I spent a fair amount of time contemplating Troy Perry, the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination that currently has 222 congregations in 37 countries.

Born in Northern Florida in 1940, Perry always felt the call to preach—his aunt had been a snake-handling pastor in another state. So he got married, got ordained, and had two kids. Then a sex partner outed him at work.

It happened in those days, and the result was predictable: he was immediately dismissed and the head of the church council threatened to tell his wife. So Perry lost his wife—whom he loved—his kids, and his job.

And if all that weren’t enough, when he finally met a guy he loved, the man dumped him, leading him to attempt suicide. After a period of depression, he went on to found his church, with a ministry specifically for LGBT folk.  

It’s always felt a little bogus to me—why should gay people want to associate with a religion that has some significant homophobic baggage? Shouldn’t we get over it, stop wanting to be accepted, stop needing to be religious? And why does it feel that starting our own church is sad, in a way?

That said, Perry has balls of the most polished brass. They burned down three churches—one incident left 32 people dead. And when the Briggs’ Initiative came up, Perry went on a 17-day hunger fast to raise the money to help defeat the measure. And every Valentine’s Day for years, he and his now-husband went down to the county clerk’s office to ask for a marriage license. When he finally got married, he came back to California and sued the state to recognize his marriage.

He’s fought every battle, and seen a number of victories; he also is a shining example of the power of one person to move mountains. And if I have not been given the gift of faith, I can admire someone who has, and who has led his life according to his beliefs. For those of us who are out and proud, it’s hard not to wonder what seventy gay men and women working in the Bush White House might have accomplished.

Ring! Salt Lake Speaking….

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’m definitely having a better Monday morning than are 12 old men in—presumably—Utah*.

These guys have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there was no possibility of dissent.

So that meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark Twain, one of the earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on the Book of Mormon?

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. 

So all of us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball, the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!

But the 70s must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her shelves? Not likely.

So change, when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?

Someone invented the Internet.

Which one person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking, the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers, writing blogs.

Yes—it seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I teach it—but Wikipedia does:

The Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on Mormon issues.[1] The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.

So on 17 March 2013, Kate Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.

Hmmm—let’s see: who was it that said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?

Answer—Victor Hugo….

Astonishing, really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women (also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And why were we all vigiling?

OK—return to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath, here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders called her in for a trial yesterday.

Except not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church transfer her records there.  Here’s what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:

I beg of you not to impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.

In theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing, to do with it.  But it is interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to another blogger, John Dehlin. Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….

Well, if the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?  Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!

Easy for me to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with her loved ones. If not, not.

The church asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life? Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know in a day or two.

Why do I think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?

---------------------------------

*Ever faithful to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average age is 78.3….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29

Two Bloggers and Twelve Old Men

OK—here’s what I hadn’t considered. First of all, the people are really nice: friendly, cheerful, and definitely hard working. Second of all, the church keeps you busy, going from meeting to prayer groups to God-knows-what-all. Remember that they had organized everybody so much that they had to declare a special night for everyone just to stay home? Also, the church takes over the smallest details of your life—even down to that famous underwear….

You’ll know by now that I’m talking about the Mormon Church, which fought like Tasmanian devils against marriage equality in California, then backed off and pretended to get more inclusive when Mitt Romney was running for president, and which now is accusing two of its members of—ah, the horror of it all!—apostasy.

Well, it’s a highly charged word in Mormon circles, since the Mormons, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, believe in the Great Apostasy. You’ll want to know: it’s the belief that everybody and every religion was wrong from the death of Jesus to the birth of their own church.

So what have the two Mormons done to get this label thrust on them? Well, John Dehlin advocates for the rights of LGBT people within the church. Kate Kelly set up a group that advocates for the ordination of women, as well as for increasing the role of women in the church.

Both have gotten letters from their local bishops, advising them that they will be tried and face either disfellowship or excommunication. Disfellowship may take various forms, but excommunication is dire indeed: you are erased from the church as if you had never existed. And though the church doesn’t officially practice shunning, your social calendar will definitely be much lighter. Oh, and all those business contacts? You might be leaving a lot of voice mails, and getting fewer returned calls.

And so for these two, excommunication is a major, and perhaps terrifying, possibility. Consider what one writer had to say:

Mormonism is an "all or nothing" commitment, Rosen explains. "If Pandora's box is opened regarding questioning one policy or mandate, it leads to more, because it's all connected. It's not like other religions, where you can accept some parts and reject other parts. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to accept every [church-mandated] 'calling.' You have to go to every three-hour church meeting. If I didn't go [to synagogue] for six months, the rabbi would be like, 'I am so happy to see you.' You can't do that as a Mormon."

Ready for the next paragraph?

Utah has the highest rate of clinical depression out of any state in the country, and the seventh highest suicide rate, according to a report by Thomson Healthcare. Rosen believes the LDS stance on homosexuality contributes to these statistics. One third of her patients are homosexuals who grew up LDS, and many of them were kicked out of their homes.

Well, it’s not surprising that Utah has the highest rate of depression, since wouldn’t you be depressed, attending up to thirty hours of church activities weekly, and having to smile all the time?

Right—that’s unfair, and especially wrong since Dehlin, who is straight, has taken a big risk for those of us who are LGBT. Besides his website Mormon Stories, he also has another site advocating gay marriage. And he’s finishing up his doctorate in counseling at Utah State University—not a particularly easy time to be butting the twelve elderly white male heads that run the church. But you have to admire a guy who can write, as he did in his website:

I believe in many of the central, non-distinctive moral teachings within Mormonism (e.g., love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, faith, hope), but either have serious doubts about, or no longer believe many of the fundamental LDS church truth claims (e.g., anthropomorphic God, “one true church with exclusive authority,” that the current LDS church prophet receives privileged communications from God, that The Book of Mormon and The Book of Abraham are translations, polygamy, racist teachings in the Book of Mormon, that ordinances are required for salvation, proxy work for the dead).

So on 7 June 2014, Dehlin got the letter that he must have been dreading. And the following day, Kelly got the letter as well. In her case, the trial will be this Sunday. In Dehlin’s case, it will be 29 June 14.

And while neither one could be criticized for losing some sleep over the matter, Kelly’s case seems to be particularly acute. Consider, for example, that she got a whole group of women together and tried to enter a male-only meeting on the priesthood at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Here are her heartbreaking words:

I suppose I didn’t realize until I was at the door and physically barred from entering the Tabernacle just how hopeful I was that we would indeed get in. I told the man who blocked us from entering, “I understand that all men, even men who are not members of the church and have no investment in Mormonism are permitted to attend. I am a returned missionary and a faithful Mormon woman and I would like to listen to the prophet in person.”

He simply said, “this session is actually for men only.”

And as difficult it is to read, it’s infinitely more painful to see the clip below.

I’ll never know—which would have been better, to be (as I am) a non-believer, or to grow up in some faith, have it enrich my life, rage against it when I came out, and then, perhaps, make my peace with it? What I do know is that believing in the church, wanting to be in the church, and then being expelled would be infinitely painful, especially in Utah.

And while I very much hope that these two courageous souls can prevail…

…I’m not putting money on it.

Doña Georgina Bids Farewell

Right, so I had some really important things to say about the situation in the Muslim world, since I had spent the weekend busily figuring out what was wrong with the 1.2 or 1.4—don’t remember and don’t care—billion people who practice the religion.

And what’s wrong, you ask? Well, according to the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, the problem with Islam is the Muslims, who…

…but wait, let Manji speak for herself, since—as someone once said of Rachel Maddow—she couldn’t look stupid if she spend a month trying. Click on the clip below. Oh, and by the way, better have the fire extinguisher handy, ‘cause those sparks really fly….

Right, then I had to worry about “Islam—A Religion of Peace or Violence?.” So there Christopher Hitchens was—do I have to tell what side he was taking?—butting heads with Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The problem? Hitchens I understood completely, but Ramadan? Well, I guess you gotta be religious to get it….

So that meant that I had to watch a documentary about Islam, during which I learned that the only reason we have this thing is that Mohammed spent 22 years going into trances, much of the time alone in a cave. He then came down and dictated the whole thing to his buddies, all illiterate, so what did they do? They memorized it, and then, a couple decades after the death of Mohammed, the third Caliph—or somebody or other—decided it should be written down. So there was a great to-do, and versions were checked against each other, and there had to be two eyewitnesses, and now we have the Koran, WHICH IS THE ABSOLUTE AND FINAL WORD OF GOD. See?

In fact, so immersed was I in the Muslim world that I had gone into the website of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), since Manji had mentioned that the imams, contrary to what one sheik averred, had not been quick to denounce the September 11 attacks: they had to be pressured into it. And since the sheik, Ibrahim Mogra, was connected to the MCB, it was definitely time to look into that. Oh, and the MCB describes itself thus, on its website:

The Muslim Council of Britain is one of the UK's largest and most diverse Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools.   

There is, of course, nothing about the Nigerian group Boko Haram, which abducted close to three hundred schoolgirls over a month ago. But I did find this ringing denunciation, which all of you out there should take to heart:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms the act of violating a place of worship by the recently formed extreme far right, anti-Muslim group, Britain First. The most recent incident occurred at midday yesterday, where the emboldened action by three middle aged men and woman entered one of the largest Islamic institutions in the country, wearing their shoes and trampling on prayer surfaces to carry out their misguided propaganda. This has left many members of the community angered and disappointed with the inability of the government and the authorities to curtail this type of thuggish behaviour.

Guys? You really shouldn’t make it so easy….

OK—it’s clear, I realized, that these girls are never going to see their families again, and why not? Because the Muslim world either doesn’t want to or is too craven to speak up.

OK—so what about men? What would happen if all of the world’s men—except for the 1.2-billion-divided-by-two Muslims—stood up and said that real men didn’t do this to their daughters, their wives, or their mothers.

Well, when the going gets tough, Marc makes a tee shirt, so here it is:

Pretty cool, hunh? Wow, that would put the fear of Allah into those bastards!

So I was scratching a hole quite deeply into my head thinking about all this, when Mr. Fernández called, proposing a trip to the beach. And I realized: a trip to the beach would do more for me than I could do for the 300 schoolgirls, or even the 1.2 billion Muslims. So off we went.

And I’ve woken up, today, to the startling news that our local power company didn’t have the money, last Friday, to buy fuel to make electricity? Why? Because the Justice Department raided the purchasing department on Friday, seizing records and looking for irregularities. And then the banks got nervous and revoked the line of credit. So that meant that they had to scamper around and transfer 60 million bucks to pay off the debt. Oh, and here’s more interesting news:

“Claro que no les podemos pagar a los suplidores, si entre el gobierno y las corporaciones públicas nos debe casi $300 millones”, manifestó el ambientalista. “La misma gente que anda criticando la Autoridad es la que la ha llevado a la quiebra”.

(“Of course we can’t pay our suppliers, when the government and the public corporations owe us almost $300 million,” stated the environmentalist. “The same people who are running around criticizing the Authority are those who have brought it to bankruptcy.”)

‘It’s too much,’ I think. ‘I absolutely cannot be responsible for 1.2 billion people who are driving all the rest of us crazy because they believe something dreamed up in a cave in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t be responsible for the power company, which didn’t have the money to buy fuel, despite the fact that the electric bill comes in at 400$ a month, and anyway, it’s the start of the week, and if I’m feeling this way today, how am I going to be on Friday?’

So I turn the page and get this:

Yup, Puerto Rico strikes again! Because one of our zany habits, much beloved by some, sniffed at by the humorless, is to have wakes—called in Spanish velorios—with the dead displayed in various and characteristic positions. And this charming lady—who had wanted to be waked wearing skates, but settled for her wedding dress instead—is doña Georgina Chevroni Lloren; the funeral was yesterday,

It all started with El Para’o, or the standing one, who had bragged to his enemies that they would never see him lying down. So what did he do—OK, what did he instruct be done—after he got eleven bullets shot into him? Take a look!

This image, by the way, I lifted from an article called “Dead Men Standing….”

That’s when it hit me, since we had joked about all this in those days when I was pretending to teach English at Wal-Mart.

“Yes, I intend to be waked in this very room,” I would assure the students, “in fact, in this very chair!”

“You do, Marc?” The students would lean in and peer into my eyes.

“Absolutely, I intend to die with my boots still firmly planted in the fertile fields of Wal-Mart! Others may retire, but mine is a passion, not merely a career. I may very well die in this room, but if not, I’ll certainly be waked in this room! And one day, however many decades it will be, you’ll walk in and see me….”

Here I would raise my hand with my index finger pointed to the board, and then…

…freeze!

Ahh, readers, life had other plans—it so often does. So what to do?

I run over to the other shop, where Lady is busy blow-drying a casita, and sit patiently, thinking, as I wait—shouldn’t I be doing something serious? Doesn’t the Great American Novel still wait to be born? Would Hemingway or Tolstoy have wasted his time this way?

At last the house is dry, packed, and given to the tourists—it’s time to show Lady the print edition of El Nuevo Día.

“Just in the event, “ I start, and Lady gets it immediately. She begins slapping my knees with the paper, and then puts it over her head as she roars with laughter.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Puerto Rico,” I tell Lady, who has just told me that Georgina has gone viral; she’s sitting all over the web.

“You think it’s true that García Márquez said ‘they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico?’” I ask Lady. I’ve looked it up a thousand times….

Lady pauses, and then comes up the answer…

“…well, it’s either true or it should be true….”

Good enough for me!  

Jus' Misbehavin'

It was another day in the café, and this time’s annoyance, for Lady,—owner and house painter—were the religious people.

“Can you believe it? They wanted me to customize a house, by putting this piece of scripture around the door. So I had to figure out—how to place the words for maximum effect, visually, but also for the meaning of the text. And it took me an hour or so, and I finally got what was the best design. So now they just called me, and they don’t like it; they say it looks too crowded. Oh, and guess what? It’s too crowded, but they want me to ADD more text! Can you believe that?”

“Working with the public...” I say, “It ain’t easy….”

“Right, and now they’re over at the other store, and there’s poor David, who’s half-atheist, and they’re grilling him about what church he goes to. So he tells them—he doesn’t go to church, which did to them what the red cape does to the bull. So they’re telling him there’s only one path to salvation, and David has to start stuffing his face with food, even though he’s not hungry, so as not to be able to talk. So now I have to go rescue David, and deal with the religious people, and change their little house, by adding more text which will make it—somehow—less crowded.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Lady brightened.

“Hey, why don’t you come with me? You could give me cover!”

“I’d probably misbehave,” I said. “With few exceptions, I can’t deal with heavily religious people. I make the Jehovah Witnesses crazy every time I pass them on the street—which is about seven times daily, they’re everywhere—by shouting my heartiest ¡Buenos días! followed by soy ateo. It makes them crazy….”

Soy ateo—I’m an atheist.

“Right,” said Lady, “OK, it would probably be a violation of fire code, or something, to have you guys together in the store. Pity, though….”

Well, I had been occupying myself with Jessye Norman for most of the morning, and was ready to take a break. First, though, it was time to check in on Naïa, to find what she had gotten up to.

“What is this, a siege mentality?,” I asked, since Naïa was sitting on a couch surrounded by six plastic chairs placed in a semicircle.

‘I don’t know what that is,” said Naïa.

I keep forgetting she’s twelve.

Well, I guessed right, because in fact Naïa was fortifying herself—and her dragon—from an imminent attack from her archenemy—for the purpose of this game—Alexia, also equipped with a dragon.

“Excellent idea,” I tell Naïa, “and putting the red pillows on the seats of the chairs will make, as you rightly pointed out, a standing-on-the-chairs attack less likely to succeed. But I can identify six gaping areas of vulnerability….”

“Don’t tell her,” said Naïa.

“I already knew,” said Alexia, who obviously didn’t.

An hour later, I came back to discover an additional six chairs, which had been placed on their backs, with the seats covering the space between the legs of the chairs in front of them.

Then I went to the grocery store, and, while waiting in line, thought, ‘well, why not?’ 

So I headed off to the other store, and gave Lady no chance to greet me.

“Excuse me, is your name Lady?”

“Last time I checked!”

“You don’t know me,” I said, “but they told me at the café that I could find you here. And that’s…”

I glance down at the casita, the little plaster house that Lady has painted, complete with the offending scripture.

“WOW, is that beautiful,” I exclaim. “That’s LOVELY! Did you do that? That’s incredible. And what’s the verse around the door?”

“Luke 17:4,” or some such thing, says Lady, who begins to rattle it off to me.

I’m nodding my head all the time.

“I know it well,” I breathe, my voice sopping with earnestness. “Ah, that verse has been with me in my darkest hours! How often, in moments of spiritual desolation, in the very darkest night of the soul, in those moments of spiritual anguish, when I most questioned the path that I had taken, that very verse accompanied me—nay, rescued me—from spiritual oblivion.”    

I pause to take a breath….

“It’s a masterpiece,” I tell Lady. “An unbelievable piece of work. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have seen it.”

Lady has recovered.

“Thanks,” she says, “I like it myself….”

Right, so I dash off, after fictitiously getting permission to play my cello at the café—“would it be ok…..?”—and having glanced at a very confused, as well as religious, woman.

An hour later, I’m playing Bach, after first noting that the siege has been lifted, or maybe the dragons have been banished—anyway, the forts are gone and the chairs are back to being chairs. So I work my way through G Major, get through d Minor, and then am in the prelude of the C Major when it happens.

A two-year old toddles in, looking intently at me, her round face framed by blonde curls. The Gerber people completely screwed up when they passed over this kid for the one on their bottles, and a note to any Renaissance painters out there…

…you’re seriously going to have to reconsider how you’re painting your cherubim.

So she watches me, intently, and that’s permitted, since part of what I do, pretentiously speaking, is audience building. And who doesn’t like little girls? So, she stares, and then begins to…

…pee.

All right, that’s a first, so what to do? Well, I take my cello to the bathroom—another first—and grab some paper towels. Then I go back to the little girl, who has taken off her little panties and is trying to mop the floor with them.

“No te preocupes”, I tell the little girl. “Pero ¿dónde está tu mamá?”

Don’t worry, but where’s your mom?

A woman appears, and says something I don’t get. Then Gaby, from the café, appears with some little red flip-flops. Next, Elizabeth appears, and she gets the mop. At this point, the girl has vanished.

“That lady shouldn’t have that child,” says Elizabeth. “She can’t take care of her, she’s retarded or crazy or something.”

“Some asshole got that poor girl pregnant,” says the normally pacific Jorge; it’s the first time I’ve heard him swear. “I see her pushing her daughter in the stroller down the middle of the street, right in front of the Hacienda building. And the traffic is totally backed up behind her….”

“That’s horrible,” I said, “shouldn’t we report?”

“Don’t know,” said Jorge. “They’ll come and take the child away, but where will they put her?”

“You know what she did when I told her ‘no?’ She was about to sweep some ceramic houses off the counter, so I bent down and told her ‘no’—firmly but gently. And then guess what?”

Elizabeth puts down the mop and begins slapping both sides of her face with both hands, saying ‘NO’ with each blow.

“That’s what her mother is doing to her,” say Raf, when I tell him hours later.

‘Life is so damned unfair,’ I think. ‘There’s Naïa, whose one worry is of a dragon snatching, and then there’s this little girl, and can you imagine—if she’s pissing on the floor in a café—what her house looks and smells like? And there are two people—Edwin and the woman I don’t like—who are homeless, and sleeping in the most comfortable corners of the café they can find, probably because they’re up all night. And then there’s Elizabeth, who hasn’t gotten child support for months, and who decided it was too much trouble….’

‘And the worst of it? It’s all around us, and we go blind to it. Remember that study of people walking past their closest relatives, who were dressed up as street people? There’s so much out there that we’ve trained ourselves not to see, and everyone knows this woman can’t take care of her child, but we all do nothing, which is the most heartbreaking thing of all.’

‘It’s some screwy world,’ I think, ‘Raf and I can’t even get married in Puerto Rico, much less have a child, but this woman? Not a problem—she can have as many children as she wants. So it’s a question: a cherub walks into my life, pisses on the floor, and what to do—report it to the Departamento de la Familia or not?’

I learned a long time ago: I have more questions than answers, and that’s the way it should be.

But I wish I had the answer to this question….