The Crustiest Old Men in Puerto Rico

They were, with only one exception, the crustiest old men in Puerto Rico.

And believe me—I can tell you. I’ve spent twenty years with these men, these irascible, taciturn (except when provoked, which is almost constantly), grumpy relics of a tradition gone by.

Los choferes de carros públicos they’re called. But don’t imagine that a chofer has anything to do with its cognate, a chauffeur.

OK—the driver (chofer) will be at least 70. He will remember days gone by, when he made three, four, five trips to from Ponce to San Juan (65 miles each way…). His car—most often a minivan—would have had eighteen people maximum.

Oh, and also minimum. Because he didn’t leave until the van was full.

Not a problem if you don’t have a boss with a stopwatch waiting for you.

And if you did?

Well, then you had to get up early, didn’t you?

Well, the people up in the mountains do. Four in the morning. That’s when the chickens start clucking and making sleep impossible. Also when the first públicos leave.

Sensible, really. Why should you be sleeping if the chickens aren’t? And besides, it’s cooler at 4AM. Which is nice, because none of the públicos has air conditioning.

What, air conditioning? When the price of gasoline is near a dollar a liter? (About 4 dollars a gallon….)

But if you are late for work—say, 6AM and expected by 8AM—well, you may have a problem. There are 17 of you in a minivan. It is six-thirty, then seven.

And no one is coming.

Or has come for the last twenty minutes. 

So you wait.

The driver, in the meantime, is enjoying cooling breezes and hot coffee. Also busily pretending that the van of which he is the owner / driver…

…doesn’t exist.

Not bad. But imagine August, or July—which it currently is. Also imagine the humidity—it has rained enough to humidify, but not to cool.

Instantly, on seeing the first drop of rain, everybody will close the windows. 

Why? The windows open out an inch at the bottom—it’s virtually impossible for anything but hurricane band torrents to enter.

But there’s this thing. In Puerto Rican eyes, rain means cold.

Oh, also monga.

OK, not bad, for the first twenty minutes or so. And very fortunately, the 15 co-passengers have practiced excellent hygiene. Only the 16^th has not….

…and he’s sitting next to you!

Tempers fray. People get restless. At last someone calls out—“¡Que nos vayamos! ¡Estamos asfixia’os!” Literally, we're asphyxiating.

The chofer turns the page—he’s on Sports now…. He lights a cigarette. Or goes to get more coffee.

At last, the miracle arrives: the last passenger that can be stuffed into the van. A cheerful guy!

All three-hundred pounds of him.

Oh, and there’s a hitch.

He has a twenty.

Instantly, the chofer who is absolutely not a chauffeur flies off the handle. What? A twenty? Impossible, he can’t change a twenty.

They have this rule, you see.

Nor does the three-hundred-pounder do the sensible thing—go to the same coffee shop and change the bill. Arguing with a chofer is like arguing with a cat.

What, and miss an argument?

The hands are raised, the voices are raised. The chofer walks away in disgust, only to come back and resume the diatribe.

Spectator sports! For the van has now erupted into commentary, laughter, catcalls, encouragement, and fierce partisan side taking.

Invariably, it will be witty. Always, someone will have a mordent sense of humor, dissect the situation, provide the comedy and the backstory.

It’s now 7:30. Remember that boss?

At last, the argument will be resolved. The chofer will agree—¡esta vez solamente!!—to change the bill. Or a passenger will change it for him. The three-hundred-pounder will attempt—catch that verb?—to enter the van.

The vans—as you may know—have two doors, each opening the opposite direction.

But the chofer NEVER opens the other door.

Another little rule….

Which means the three-hundred-pounder is coming in…

…sideways.

Oh, and the empty “seat?” It’s in the very back of the van, an area very justly called la cocina.

The kitchen….

There’s no way the guy is gonna make it.

So he does the sensible thing. He waits for someone to move.

And nobody wants to go there.

Resolution?

Well, there’s a crazy gringo who has decided to sit in the front row of seats.

And who needs to get to work….

And of course, the gringo has a problem. No, not three-hundred pounds, but…

A height of 6’3”.

Which means that he looks like a string bean imitating a football player in a tackle.

Well, it’s an experience. And it taught me a lot.

Spanish, for one thing.

It taught me how amazingly resilient and patient Puerto Ricans can be.

Also how funny….

And it gave me time to reflect, as I did this morning, on days gone by, and how so much has changed.

I had gotten up, taken my walk, and then left to take the público down to Ponce. And why wake up at 4 to do that? So I sat for an hour in the plaza talking to Tico. We had the driver (that’s Tico). We had the van.

We didn’t have the 17 others.

And Tico had made no trips yesterday.

Also none as of today.

So I waited an hour, and talked to Tico, and learned that his father had been a chofer for fifty years. The fare was 3 dollars then. Times had changed. Everybody has a car now.

Then Tico moved off. I sat and waited.

And into my mind popped…

…JackDelano!

I met him only once—but he was our own Eisenstaedt / Dorothea Lange / Ansel Adams. Came to Puerto Rico in the 40’s, under the same project as Eisenstaedt. Went everywhere, just as the others did, and took amazing photos.

I could have waited, but both Tico and I were tired. And hot. So he went home, I went home, and, still curious, looked up Delano. Knew he was good, but didn’t know how good.

He’s major league.

Malaria poster in small hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Jack Delano, December, 1941. Image courtesy of  Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Jack Delano in his studio. Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, 1990. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano)

Dust Bowl Days

It’s a curiously haunting photo, this newly released image from Life Magazine—or is it?

It could be just me—the dust bowl was an unspoken, unacknowledged force in my childhood.

It marked Jack. Born in 1909, he was 20 when the Great Depression hit. He took a year off school, and went out to North Dakota.

No money.

The stories got told. Feeding the newborn lambs: he would sit in one room next to a partly barricaded door. He’d grab the first lamb, feed it with a bottle, and then toss it over the barricade into the other room. Then grab another.

Why? Where was the ewe?

He needed wood for the wood-burning stove. And there was none. He hit on the idea of chopping down telephone poles….

He baked his own bread, and was a bit ashamed of having to. He was caught in the act by a cowboy, visiting, looking for coffee if not a free meal. So Jack threw a towel over the dough, talked to the cowboy. At last, the cowboy spotted the rising dough. “Christ, son, you gotta knead that dough!” shouted the cowboy. Threw off the towel, punched down the dough, and started kneading away.

The stories carried the message—life is grim. You can lose everything overnight. Only the tough survive, and sometimes not even then.

And another message—implicit, not stated. You got it easy. You weren’t there in that cold dark house with the damn lambs puling and needing to be fed and the wind attacking the house and coming through the cracks in the walls and wondering…

…am I ever gonna get out of this place?

Ever get back to the university?

Ever make anything of my life?

“He didn’t think he’d make it,” Franny once said of him in those years. And he couldn’t quite believe that he did.

And what of this family, in the photo above? Here’s the caption:

"Farmer John Barnett and his family are 'Okies' who stuck to their land near Woodward. They have 21 dairy cattle which yield a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett takes care of a vegetable garden that is always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, do plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts eat jack rabbit." Oklahoma, 1942. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Oh. It almost raises more questions than answers. Seven gallons of milk from 21 cattle? That’s a third of a gallon per cow. And that garden—blowing away. Couldn’t she mulch it? Or was it so infernally dry, and so fiercely windy, that nothing could be done?

The jack rabbit—the only meat that they could eat? Here in Puerto Rico there are chickens everywhere in the country. Why no chickens there?

They stuck to their land—why? Nowhere to go? Obstinacy? Didn’t believe it was any better anywhere else?

Mostly, though, it’s the faces that haunt. Barnett—strong and tough and lean. Life has beaten him—does he know it? Can’t look into the camera, and yet his eyes are lifted—as if wishing to see out. His wife, also looking down, is she as submissive as she appears? Does she really acquiesce, as she sees her garden—that is, the food for her family—blow away? What woman would not be full of rage—rage at a man who had taken her to this barren place, who had put her and her children is this position? Rage at a man who had failed to do what a man was supposed to do: support his family.

Each of the children now—so different. Delphaline—and what’s the story behind the name? And yet she looks out at the camera, apparently untroubled, a typical girl. She has none of the tight-lipped, compressed look of her mother.

Lincoln, who I assumed was the youngest. But he appears, instead, the shyest. And then Leonard! That look—wry, innocent, savvy, questioning, impish…what? What is he thinking, as he sits in front of his broken father? Is there some life in him that has been snuffed out of his father?

A photo captures a moment. But life goes on. Jack went on, made a life for himself, got the hell out of North Dakota.

And also didn’t.

Self Sorrow

Well, it was my own damn fault and I knew that, and…

…just made it worse.

I was racing against time. I had an hour to apply for a TED fellowship, and needed to enter the URL for this blog into the application form. And could I do it? No, a back slash was missing, or I had typed too many “p’s” or a “www” was required. I kept diminishing the form, going to the blog, and trying to figure it out. I finally got it—just do a copy / paste of the damn address bar. 

OK—did that, went to maximize the application form, and discovered…

…I had hit the tiny red “x” button, not the tiny yellow diminishing button.

It’s all different on the Mac, you see.

And all my work was gone….

I erupted in fury, raging into the kitchen. I was hungry, my jaw hurt, I had to teach in 20 minutes. I broke down and started crying for…

…my old life at Wal-Mart.

Which is paradoxical, because in some ways I can’t believe I ever did that job. It’s another lifetime ago. ‘Wow, that was the weirdest gig I’ve ever done,’ I often think.

But there I was, sobbing for a job gone away. And I realized….

…it’s mourning.

And always, you think you’re done with it. ‘Got that squared away,’ you think, and then find yourself in tears a moment later, when you flip on the radio and get “Turn, Turn, Turn.” (“To every thing there is a season, a time to laugh, a time to cry….”)

The wise Harry likens it to peeling an onion. You do layer after layer. The onion gets smaller and smaller. But there’s always another layer.

And I had lost 200 friends. Or were they? Weren’t they just students, co-workers, people I knew and liked?

Something in me says no. I sat with these people for hours in my room, hearing their stories, laughing, condoling, crying. I think now of a presentation a student gave, ending with the ultrasound film of the baby she was carrying. You could see the heart beat. Everyone in the room was in tears.

I think of the very tough speech I gave my students after Franny died. A student had just dumped a load of very negative energy because her boss needed a report, thus interrupting her work.

“You know what?  This is not a problem. This is a stupid minor issue. This is an annoyance. I’ve just spent three weeks helping my mother die. That’s a problem. That’s something that took more from me than virtually anything I’ve done. I’ll carry that to my grave. So no, you don’t have stress. And don’t tell yourself that this is a problem. You have a job and you’re healthy and your kids are OK and guess what? Don’t bring this attitude into my classroom.”

The students were shocked.

Right—so shouldn’t I take my own advice?

There’s a difference, I think. I ate something. I took a deep breath. I went and taught my student, and it was a good class. And then another student—also a good class. Then I got a break—two cancellations. I came home at 4, not six. Took another deep breath, went to the computer and re-did the form.

And the Mac remembered my copy. Worked like a charm. I hit “submit” and got a confirmation email in seconds.

It’s fair, I think, to wail. It’s stupid not to. I had been, being the good soldier—chin up, shoulders back. I had been strict with myself—to-do lists, no veg’ing out, no naps or reading or doing Sudoku for hours at a time.

I had imposed a structure, and that was good.

And then I thought—why?  What difference does it make? Why shouldn’t I play Sudoku all day? Isn’t this all so artificial, this “structure” of mine?

Yeah, it is.

But it’s also necessary. Just as it’s necessary to wail, to sob, to cry for a life now gone, and for 200 people who vanished in 20 minutes. We don’t have a word for it—this feeling. It wasn’t self-pity, but self sorrow.

And justly so….

Little Deaths

It seems disrespectful, diminishing to call it this way, but that’s how it occurred to me, this morning.

It’s a little death.

I am thinking of Taí, my sister, who wrote to tell us that she had put her treasured cat—Sajo—to sleep. We scrambled to find her number, Raf called Charisse, then Taí called.

Suffering, of course. She’s a woman who loves animals, and is very, very good with them. When she is here, the food bowls get put in various places, and Taí assumes the role of lunchroom monitor—Loquito has to eat out of everyone’s dish. And he will attack Herrick—not seriously, but certainly not amiably.

Herrick, of course, weighs twice as much as Loquito. He could easily send Loquito flying—and in fact has. I’ve seen it, and cheered Herrick on. Doña Taí, however, puts up with no nonsense from the cat world. “Oh, gosh,” she will say, and fly out of her chair in the dining room to investigate suspicious feline sounds. 

And she is of the belief that yes, cats can be trained. 

My take?

Errr…no.

But who knows? What I do know is that there is something peculiarly bad about a little death. The big deaths—a parent, a spouse, a child—those are agonizing. The death of a pet?

Also agonizing.

As I write this, Loquito is ten feet away. I am writing, he is snoozing—very much what cats do. And the moment I get up?

He’ll fly into action. He’ll follow me wherever I go. I, of course, will be scolding him.

“Don’t wag your tail! Wagging your tail is prohibited! Strictly prohibited! Ridiculous!”

Why do I tell him this?

Because he pays absolutely no attention. In fact, his whole body language is screaming…

…fuck you!

Which amuses me. I was a nervous, inward child—the nerd who never misbehaved, never even whispered, when the teacher left the room. Loquito? The kid who jumped up and started writing obscenities on the blackboard.

Loquito is also my creator spirit. The person who writes, who plays the cello?

Loquito.

Irrepressible, intractable, fearless, silly—whatever I do creatively is felinized (can’t be personified, can it?) by Loquito. And so in those months when I was struggling, it was Loquito who got me through, showed me the way.

Taí—of course, was worrying in Tobago. I felt her love coming through. Raf was frantic but working in Hato Rey.  He was, and is, the constant in my life. But Loquito?

He was making me laugh. I’d watch him under Raf’s computer table, playing with cables. He’d be knocking the clumps of kitty litter out of the scooper as I cleaned the pans. He’d be crouching behind a picture resting against the wall—waiting for something, anything, to pounce on.

And he would ALWAYS be there. 

That, I think, is what makes the little deaths so hard. Yes, I loved my mother. It was definitely a big death. But she lived and died three thousand miles away. I called her every morning and most afternoons, those last years. The moment a vexing grammatical point presented itself, I thought to ask her, and could not.

But she wasn’t woven into the warp and weft of my life—as Loquito is.

As animals are.

“Cloudy!” called John once, when I visited him in New York. He was calling my mother’s cat, now a New Yorker. “Mr. New is going to work, honey! He’ll be back! Mr. New will be back at seven, honey!”

Mr. New?

“He does this every morning,” reported Jeanne.

John shot me a nervous look as he walked out the door. Mr. New was wearing a three-piece suit and carrying an elegant leather briefcase. He’ll make his calls and write his emails and scream at other people’s attorneys—if he has to—and then come home. 

Home to a cat who—trust me—has not missed him. The work clothes will be shed, dinner started, the TV turned on. Cloudy will jump into his lap, be stroked, patted, caressed, addressed. She will be a cat.

Why do I think it’s our animals that make us human?      

OK—Brothers

“OK, let’s get together and end the friendship,” said Harry.

What?

Had I heard correctly? These words, from a man with a skill for friendship parallel to Yo Yo Ma’s skills on the cello?

What had this man never done for me? 

The hours he had driven to see me, talk with me, console me.

My definition of a friend?

A cold night in January in Wisconsin. Raf had left from Chicago the day before. He was leaving for Puerto Rico, a place I had decided I could not live.

Nor could he live anywhere else.

It was over between us.

We had two wonderful weeks together—we who had been together for five or six years.  But Puerto Ricans—many of them—can live in the States but…

…not flower there.

He needed to come back. I couldn’t live there. Over Christmas in 1989 he came to Puerto Rico, found a job, and then came back. He packed up the apartment—we looked at the empty rooms together. The taxi was on its way.

“It’s going to be hard to find someone as wonderful as you,” he whispered.

My heart was breaking. The ride to the airport was agonizing. Seeing him to the gate—you could back then—was wrenching. I chose not to wait to the bitter end, kissed him, and turned my back.

The gate was at the very end of the terminal. Walking back, fighting sobs, I had the surreal sense of being in a film. The corny airport music was swelling, the credits were rolling…

…the movie was ending.

OK—so what does this have to do with Harry?

The next day—after another sleepless night—I got on the train.

To go see Harry.

It’s a weird thing. The train doesn’t stop at Madison, but at a little town thirty miles north. And though it was only seven or so in the evening—it was pitch black. The station was closed. I waited by the side of the road.

Now, of course, I’d pull out my cell phone. Gentle Readers, there were no cell phones in 1990.

I waited some more. The man I had cherished and held those final two weeks was in a land of warmth and family and sunshine. I was the one vertical thing in an intensely dark, cold, black expanse.

You can imagine the thoughts….

But the one thought I didn’t have?

That Harry wouldn’t come.

Late?

Well, yeah. Harry always knew one place that sold this great bottle of wine—wonderful! And you have to pour it into a broad dish so that it can breathe and then—WOW! The taste, the texture. Incredible!

Or hey, Marc, there’s this movie, see, and you’ve got to see this scene where the hero wakes up and he sees the same damn thing every day and then he realizes….

Right. So Harry was at the liquor store, buying me a special bottle of wine, or getting this INCREDIBLE piece of steak—aged 3 weeks—or searching for this movie I’ve gotta see. He was also on his way.

And there appeared the headlights, getting closer and closer, and then stopping.

I got in. The car was warm. His daughter Chris was in the front seat. In five minutes, all the tension cracked, and we were having yet another of what we always had.

A completely silly conversation.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I just love these moments—these incredibly nonsensical silly moments….”

“You know,” he said, turning serious, “I think life is really made up of the small, little moments. Not the big, dramatic events but the small, ordinary events. Maybe that’s what’s most important….”

He taught me this, as he has taught me so much else. And how many little moments have we shared?

Or bottles of champagne? For January had passed, and it was summer of the same year. I was making a spaghetti sauce that is still remembered. Harry was climbing the back steps.

He had gotten another promotion!

Amazing—a guy who can get a promotion, without actually having a job.

Although he did—sort of. He was a shoe salesman, my philosopher friend, on the south side of Chicago. Not a welcoming place—he more than once found himself physically kicked out of shops. Oh, and there was the time his car got burgled—and he found himself out five hundred bucks of right shoes.

(Shoe salesmen apparently only buy the right shoe—not necessary to have both shoes if you’re selling wholesale….)

So yeah, he had a job, but he was onto something bigger. The TV station—part of the largest chain of stations aimed at the Hispanic market. And they were hot for Harry—the possibilities were endless, the market booming, he had every qualification. Call next week.

First bottle of champagne.

We went to the thrift shop—Harry had the notion that he had to have a light blue shirt with a strong red tie. We shined shoes.

Next week, hey that position? Well, unfortunately there was a hitch. But not to worry, because there is another position available, a position that Harry was ABSOLUTELY made for, and incredible, because…

It paid TWICE as much!

Second bottle of champagne.

Well, it went on and on—that bibulous summer, and Harry went higher and higher, scaling unbelievable heights in a meteoric career that left us—and only us—astounded. He was at one point vice-president.

Also broke. And the rent was due. And Chris was starting university that fall.

And Harry?

He asked me to read him the cards, one night. And sure enough, I pulled Death.

“It doesn’t mean what you think,” I said. “It’s about spiritual transformation, psychic change….”

I didn’t know. Harry was out there alone, driving dark roads at night. About all he had was his life insurance. Chris could go to school on that.

Someone always pulls you back—I learned that a couple of months ago. But sometimes you get pretty far out on the edge.

And now, this good man, this great friend, is proposing to kill the friendship? After all of this? Then I got it—he’s just called to report that he’s buried three good friends in two weeks.

“Right, I understand,” I said. “It’s OK. We’ll be brothers.”

Snit Time

I freely admit it. Yesterday, I was in a full-blown snit.

Not pretty, I have to say. And not cool, unlike the cause or object (haven’t decided which) of the snit.

Which is ironic, because I bought the damn thing out of sheer vanity—yes, I do have some—and it has done exactly what I wanted it to do.

Be cool.

All right, no fool like an old fool. The hero of this piece is a 2500$ piece of excrement called the MacBook Pro. I bought it and fell in love with it and was instantly intimidated.

The first problem was turning it on.

Does anyone remember a time when machines had buttons that said—in red letters—“power?” Or maybe “On / Off?”

This elegant creature before me has an almost invisible circle on the right side of the base. Within it is a tiny grey circle—virtually indistinguishable from the aluminum case—broken by a vertical line.

It’s characteristic Mac. If you know it’s there—great! But for the rest of us?

Take the little tiny dots that live under the programs on the dock. Doña Taí pointed them out. “When they’re illuminated, that means the program is running.”

Oh!

I hadn’t noticed them.

The same is true for the devices. I had to have an iPod, and of course was intimidated by that as well. What I didn’t know—until I pressed it by mistake—was where the volume was. I mean, come on, Steve—a device to play music with no volume control? Hunh?  And how come everyone else had theirs blaring, and mine only whispered?

Worse came when for no reason whatsoever the track jumped—I’d be in the third movement of a different symphony. What? Even crazier was to hear the B Minor Mass and get the resurrection before the crucifixion.

The little iPod has a shuffle button, you see. And just by making a sudden movement, it jumps merrily to a random track. Oh, and by the way, Steve, notice my use of the word “tracks?” Some of us use the iPod to listen to something other than hip-hop, reggaeton, and the rest. “852 songs” my iPod is reported as containing. Wrong—there are rhapsodies, partitas, suites, and lied as well.

So there I’d be, on my morning walk, and bing! I was six movements from where I had started (musically speaking).

It turns out the iPod has a tiny elegant icon next to the “play” arrow.

And I have relatively big fingers.

So that drove me nuts for weeks—until I devoted an hour or two (OK, have that nowadays…) to learning how to disable it.

But it was nothing like the problem with the iPad. This device has this cool feature—it shifts from landscape to portrait depending on how you hold it. Totally cool, except when—as I did—I tried to open an attachment John’s secretary had scanned sideways. It opened fine, but the screen kept changing every time I flipped the device. The document was always sideways.

“Oh,” cried John, “I know what to do about that!”

He was excited to be able to tell me.

“Put the iPad very gently on the side of the table. Then, tiptoe to the OTHER side, and read it standing up!”

Right…and don’t breathe on it, either.

I suppose Steve would manage to look cool doing that in public, but me? The guy who can barely balance a tray of food?

Nothing, however, is as terrible, as awful, as infuriating as iTunes. That iPod I have? It’s synched with another computer.

Now dead.

And apparently, there is no easy way for me to sync to a new computer without losing…

…those 852 “songs.”

I’ll tell you what this feels like. High School! Remember the cool kids—the kids who never got acne, who had the right cars and clothes, who got the right girls? (OK, not a big issue for me….) That’s what the Mac experience is all about.

And guess what! I’ll never graduate—never! I will ALWAYS be 17, pus-filled, acned, gangly, and seven-footed (most of them tangled with the others….).

So, Steve? This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go find—if I can—my computer whisperer. I’m gonna have him rip out the guts of your beautiful machine. Then I’m gonna put the innards of a decent machine—Toshiba, maybe—in your gorgeous, eviscerated beast.

And look totally cool in the coffee shop!

Extreme Something

“In our family, when we don’t know what to do, we have a cup of coffee. When we don’t know what to think, we write.” Words I once wrote in Iguanas.

Well, I’m doing both.

The coffee is next to my computer. But where is Anders Behring Breivik, the source of my confusion and need to write?

In Oslo, awaiting sentencing.

You remember the guy—the extremist who blew up a government building in Oslo, drove to Utoya, crossed by boat to the island, and shot up and killed 60 students involved in a political youth camp. It happened on a Friday in July, 2011. I was at “work”—quotation marks because I was really just waiting to be laid off, and hence doing nothing. So I devoted the day to reading the news of the atrocities as it came in.

Madness or evil, I wondered at the time.

And it’s a case where knowing more means understanding less. Two court-ordered psychiatric evaluations have been done—they disagree. The first stated he was psychotic—both at the time of the killings and at the time of the evaluation. The second report claims he’s sane. The trial has just ended, and it riveted Norway. Sentencing will be on or before August 24.

The prosecution claims he’s crazy—and with good reason. Norway’s jails focus on rehabilitation—but they really mean it, unlike the US. (One-third of black American males between 20 and 50 are in prison? Ouch!)* Oh, and maximum sentence length in Norway is “only” 21 years. Breivik is 33—that means he’d be in his mid-fifties when he got out. Still time to do some real damage. Some more real damage, I mean….

The other problem is the other prisoners. The concern is that Breivik could start spouting off his militant anti-Islamic rhetoric, and form right-wing cells (sorry, couldn’t help it) in prison. So the Norwegians—bless them—are seriously considering putting him is isolation. But there’s a problem—it denies him his basic human rights. So, with paradoxically the same logical-to-the-edge-of-craziness that characterizes Breivik, the authorities are proposing to hire “friends” who will come in several times a day to…

…play chess with him.

(It’s a digression but I can’t help it. Does anyone remember Laura Hernández who got stuck in a Dominican jail for a couple of years? And the jail, with the dirt floors and no food—the family had to bring that in….)

OK—prosecution says he’s crazy. Defense says he’s sane. Anders argues—among other things (apparently he wrote a 1500 page manifesto—remember Mein Kampf?—that lays it all out)—that this violence was a necessary wake-up call to Norway. Their culture, their very identity is under attack! No, not openly—but slowly, insidiously by you-know-who, the folks in the burkas and the head shawls.

Hey, sorry, but someone had to do it.

Well—Norwegian thoroughness. I spent some time—though admittedly as a kid—in Norway. Norwegian women—charmers! Norwegian men?

Well, guys, just a little…

…dull.

But organized. And Breivik was that—renting the farm, buying the six tons of fertilizer needed for his bomb, laying the groundwork for what he hoped would be his message to the world. He may have had a thinking disorder, but clearly not a planning disorder.

But sane?

There was an accepted standard in 19^th century British law for determining legal sanity: would the prisoner have committed the same actions if he had had a policeman standing next to him? (Think it was Burke’s Rule—damn, wish I had Internet!)

Well, Breivik called the Norwegian police twice from Utoya, attempting to surrender. The police, for whatever reason, blew him off. So he kept wandering around the island, killing kids.

OK—so he’s sane. 21 years of playing chess with paid friends and he’s out. What happens if he’s declared insane? 

Paradoxically, because in Norway some psychiatric disorders are considered incurable, Breivik could be held for the rest of his life in a psychiatric unit. So it’s 21 years in prison if sane, potentially life in a madhouse if he’s nuts.

Well, in Puerto Rico we might see it in another way. I once, in an unthinking moment, confessed that I was suicidal to a student.

“Ah,” she said. “That just means you’re not listening to God. And do you know why! You have a demonio! I know, my sister-in-law had one!”

It was therapeutic, actually. Made me so mad I stopped being depressed….

OK—maybe extreme. But one does get the feeling—since psychiatry seems to tell us so little here—that we should turn elsewhere.

Like where Breivik turned? Because he’s an arch-Christian (my apologies to Christians, who could rightly argue that he’s anything but!). But no matter, it could indeed be that there is malevolence, as there is madness. Seventy dead kids is a pretty strong argument for evil.

As well, there’s the real question—does it matter? Sane / insane—who cares? What does it matter why he did it? Stick him somewhere—anywhere!—and forget about him! Sure, Norway is a rich country—but the rich don’t stay rich by spending foolishly. Like hiring chess players for killers….

No good answers, here. So then the question becomes…

…have we asked the right questions?

*No, dammit, I haven’t checked this fact—no Internet. But it’s something outrageous….

The Climate Inside and Out

Rain, today, and at last. It’s been the second driest June in history—day after day of unrelenting heat, and milky blue clouds (the result of Saharan dust in the upper atmosphere.)

It’s a relief. After cold and rain in both Wisconsin and London, I was ready for hot and dry. Well, it’s the old story: the gods punish us by giving us what we want….

The inner climate has turned as well. I revisited the piece of music—and the writing that went with it—that haunted me in the first week of March.

The d minorPiano Concerto of Brahms. 

It was—like Winterreise and the late quartets of Beethoven—music that I’d been waiting to get into. And like the other works, it’s not conventionally pretty music. 

Nor was my experience with it pretty. I willed myself to go back to that moment of madness—my first panic attack in December of 2011.

Why? Is it rational to revisit the irrational? Wouldn’t a sane person do anything to avoid a return to the world of utter insanity?

Can’t say. I could tell you that I had to go back to see it from the other side—the other side being sanity. Or I could say I had to master my fear that the madness would return by tempting the gods, daring them to fling me into the whirlpool again. I could say I had no choice.

Possibly true, all of the above. None of them feels right.

I only knew, that first week of March (also the first week of Lent) that I was operating on blind faith—and the love and faith of a sister in Tobago. And Raf, who worried silently all throughout the period.

OK—site and setting. El Morro, the oldest of the four remaining fortifications the Spaniards built. It’s built—as is its sister in Havana—at the mouth of the harbor. It’s huge. It is not—by design—inviting. It was early morning—seven, perhaps—and raining / overcast.

And yes, for the fifty minutes that Brahms takes to finish his struggle I took to finish mine. I went back—I was on the same road (though technically not) as I had been. True, there were no cars speeding past me.

There were lashes.

I was being scourged, whipped…and purified.

I came home and wrote the experience as I’ve not written anything in my life. Actually, I didn’t write. I took dictation.

A week of exhausting struggle followed. I relearned everything. How to do the dishes. How to do a copy and paste. How to book a reservation on Expedia.

I practiced a mindfulness in that week that was excruciating.

“And how are you doing,” said my doctor, a week or two later.

“How many movements of the fingers does it take for you to log in and see your email?” I asked.

She was baffled.

“It takes me three. I type a ‘g’ in the address bar and the computer suggests ‘gmail.’ I click on that, and it takes me to the gmail page. As it’s loading, I move the cursor to the area where ‘sign in’ will appear. I type ‘m’ into the username and the computer remembers marcnewhouse333. The cursor is in place—I click on that. The computer remembers my password. I press ‘enter.’ That’s how I get my email….”

It was like being a stroke victim—relearning the things we do automatically every day. And it took an immense will.

I failed, mostly. That’s fine—that’s what Buddhists do. 

I learned some things.

There is no time. Someone always pulls me back—away from the speeding cars or the abyss of pure insanity. That I’m here to serve. That my talents have value.

I’ve lost most of that, now. (If you could see my apartment, you’d know….) But enough remains.

The Glorious Whatever

Is it a symbol or a symptom?

Everybody else has uncomplicated relationships with everything—or at least so I imagine. How would I know?

They live in normal houses and have normal wives and sure, the kids are probably smoking dope, but kids do, don’t they? I did. Still would if I could.

Auden wrote about it: “When there was peace, he was for peace. When there was war, he went.” That’s a rough quote—the damn Internet is still down. Can’t google it.

They drive their lives by me, standing at the bus stop, waiting for the achingly late yellow bus from Caguas. That’s fine. I’ve nothing else to do, and it gives me time to think. Anyway, I don’t have enough money for a car (not true, I have the money—I’d rather go to London….)

So I don’t have a normal relationship with anything. But today’s the Fourth of July—Independence Day! Should be able to get this right, right? 

Well, I could do a rough approximation. There’s a Walgreens up the street—they’d probably have the sparklers. Supermax certainly sells wieners. But Mr. Fernandez—would he eat them?

Yeah, with hollandaise sauce.

Well, I’d scarf them down, of course. But that’s only because of the drug I’m taking—Remeron. Two hours after I take it, I descend to the level of a seven year old demanding his Lucky Charms. There’s nothing I don’t eat—or crave.

But it does seem that the day warrants a serious piece. Think of it—a gringo living in OurIslands and Their People. Yup, I’m serious. That’s the name of the book—actually, it’s two books—that came out in the first decade of the 20^th century. (Hey, the 20^th century—remember that!  Sorry, digressive here….). Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands—all those lovely little gems that were gonna get stuck on the crown of American imperialism. It was meant to be instructive about their islands and our people, although that doesn’t seem quite right. 

I’ve lived almost more time in Puerto Rico than in gringolandia. Shouldn’t it be Their Islands and Us?

Well, well—it makes for jarring reading. Puerto Ricans are a friendly people, we are told.

True.

We / they are also…um….

Lazy.

Well, it doesn’t quite get put like that. I mean, post-Victorian manners dictate a gentler approach. But read between the lines. It’s right there.

I thought about this this morning, as I was annoyed by the construction / reconstruction / demolition / remodeling of the building across the street—nobody quite knows what’s going on there….

Point is—something was going on. And it wasn’t Puerto Ricans, but Dominicans. Working on…

…yup, the Fourth of July.

Not surprising—a decade ago, we had Dominicans working in the apartment above us on Christmas Day.

And the Dominicans lack the post-Victorian genteel manners of Our Islands / our islands. They have a word for us boricuas. Los mantenidos.

Literally, the kept. As in a kept woman. 

Well, why not?

It was a frequent theme in classes—those days gone by when I had a job. What in god’s name were we doing to ourselves? Getting up at five in the morning and taking the sleeping baby to mamita’s and coping with the corporate craziness and going home and studying with the oldest kid while cooking dinner—ok, cancel, we stopped at KFC or ate at mamita’s house—and putting our tired carcasses in bed at midnight and God it’s only Tuesday and…

…driving twice a day past the caserío. 

…which had cars newer than mine in the parking and satellite dishes and they only pay 5 dollars for electricity and do you know what my last light bill was?

Right. Once you got on this bus, you stayed until the school bell rang.

Many times, past….

Sin vergüenza, raved the students—no shame. 

Well, we were paying a high price for our vergüenza—that was for sure. Because however much the Puerto Ricans—those people in our islands—didn’t work in the first decade of the 20^th century, we were busting ass in in the first decade of the 21^st.

Well, a third of us.

Other third works—here a good Puerto Rican throws up his hands and paints invisible quotation marks—for the government.

Hah!

And the other third lives in those caseríos….

Being kept.

And quite well.

It was a paradox as curious as a gringo living in their island.