Notes from a Radicalized Atheist

Must we?

I try to be fair, I try to be respectful, I try to remember that many of the worthwhile things that have occurred over the last couple of millennia are the result either of the church or their believers. And what, I ask myself, have we atheists ever contributed? Have we started soup kitchens, held the hand of the dying, worked with lepers? So shouldn’t I give organized religion a break?

Want the short answer?

Fuck no.

To any nonbeliever out there, it’s been a bad couple of weeks. Consider, for example, the famous Hobby Lobby case, and can I convince you, Horrified Readers, that the religious backgrounds of the five male justices had noting to do with it? That all five of the justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby were catholic (nope, no capitals today, dammit)—that’s a coincidence? Oh, and the other catholic on the court who voted in dissent was a woman—Sonia Sotomayor—otherwise, guess what? It would have been 6 / 3.

Did you know, Hobby Lobby—as yes, I’m addressing you personally, since that apparently is what five people in the US have decided you are—what kind of a crowd you were going against? Because there isn’t one protestant on the Supreme Court (seriously thinking about those caps, too). So you guys walked into the lion’s den and came out unscathed—gotta hand it to you.

Of course, let’s hope your daughter doesn’t work for a closely-held corporation that has strong Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Otherwise, that blood transfusion? Or the vaccines, which oddly enough have gotten prohibitively expensive? Here, courtesy of The New York Times, is the lead from an article entitled “The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs are Soaring:”

There is little that Dr. Lindsay Irvin has not done for the children’s vaccines in her office refrigerator: She remortgaged her home to afford their rising prices.

Guys? Can you imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us?

Now the situation is so bad that a rabid little college in Illinois—Wheaton College—has decided it doesn’t want to fill out a form telling the government that the college is opting out of the contraceptive clause; here’s the Columbus Dispatch on the subject:

The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception.

What’s this about? Simple—the Supreme Court has just declared the right of corporations to impose their religious beliefs on workers.

Nor did the religious right waste any time, because, the day after Hobby Lobby? A whole gaggle of religious groups sent a letter asking Obama to not issue an order directing the federal government to not award contracts to companies; enter The New York Times, again:

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s addlebrained Hobby Lobby decision, several groups wrote to Mr. Obama on July 1 asking him to allow federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their religious objections to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Oh—just for your information, the article is titled “Tax-payer Financed Bigotry,” a statement so pithy that it spares you the need to read further.

Well, we already have the catholic church firing teachers and principals of their schools who have gotten married—to members of their own sex, that is. Oh, and by the way, are those schools entirely self-funded? No nickel of the taxpayers going there?

Here’s a clue:

More than 80 percent of students receiving federal vouchers through the D.C. program attend private religious schools with such civil rights exemptions but no opt-out option for religious instruction. 

Oh, and don’t think, by the way, that all you have to do is worry about federal money, because you also have to worry about what the bastards in your statehouse are doing. Because increasingly, that’s where the action is; consider this, from The Washington Post:

In North Carolina, the state legislature recently passed a bill to divert $10 million of taxpayer money meant for public schools to private schools, including those that “provide an education that is Christ-centered” and teach “the truth of scripture” with “Bible-based facts,” such as: “dinosaurs and humans co-existed on Earth; slave-masters generally treated their slaves well; in some areas, the KKK fought the decline in morality by using the sign of the cross; and gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”

Know what? I’m now radicalized—for (easily) ten years I worked in a company where wearing a gold crucifix around your neck was almost de rigeur, where saying “bien, gracias a Dios” was the standard response to the question of how you were doing. And I shut up because I was respectful, though I admit to fighting the life-size crèche that Human Resources—ladies? Aren’t you guys supposed to be the experts here?—put up one Christmas. But now?

Now, I wish I had turned the company into a battleground. I wish I had said, “god doesn’t exist,” at every turn. I wish I had told everybody that had a crucifix to take it off, because I found it offensive. I wish the whole company had ground to a halt, so that 499 people could have been jumping the throat of little me. I should have duked it out until the end.

Reasonable?

Done with it!

Coming Soon—A Puerto Rican Sonnet!

“I’ve been reading up on sonnets, and I’ve decided I like the Shakespearean sonnet better than the Italian,” said Montalvo, who, until he had the misfortune of bumping into me, had happily whiled his time away with free verse. Here’s one example:

Magic Trick

Your memory

Can’t be forgotten…

Those eyes

Will always be

Remembered…

And my feelings

Will never

Die.

Montalvo has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half, with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short lines: get in, get to the point, get out.

“It sounds almost like a haiku,” said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought. Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:

The wren


Earns his living


Noiselessly.

His response?

“What’s a wren?”

It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.

“No pierda,” I tell him. We’re going over one of his poems.

“Hunh?”

“I really think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”

Well, he’s unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s. So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come back with the answer.

“It turns out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.

“So what did they tell you?”

It was, I’m sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda sounds better,” but not by much.

“Has anybody told you about the subjunctive?”

“Sub—what?”

So we did the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the words that are daggers to the heart.  

“It’s totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do. Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”

16 to 21, his current age: five years.

And what have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus “you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what a contraction was.

Or there was the Saxon genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom and did a little drilling:

“The house of Montalvo?”

“Montalvo’s house!”

And speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words derived from Latin?

“Marc?”

Well, then it was time to get down to some good examples:

“Defecation,” I tell him.

“Ummm, Latin?”

“Shit,” I say.

“Anglo-Saxon!”

“Intercourse,” I say.

He’s so excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come from?”

He’s bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure (which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.

Who knows where this is ending up?

Behind the Scenes at the World Cup

Anybody who has read this blog will know: I don’t get the whole thing about sports. As proof of this, I report my initial reaction to one of the first games of the FIFA World Cup, which I saw on Father’s Day at my in-law’s house:

“The problem could easily be solved—and it surprises me that no one has thought of it—if the two teams would just cooperate. Whoever happened to have the ball at the moment would be perfectly free to put it wherever they want, included in that little netted area. That done, they would give the ball quite courteously to the other team. That way, everybody would be happy, and the scores would be phenomenal—can you imagine it? You’d have games with scores of 333,633 versus 975,813—and the crowd would be delighted, because apparently the big deal is to shout “GOALLLLLLLLL!” So the entire country would get laryngitis and could stay home in bed sipping hot tea, and resting their vocal cords—a nice bit of secondary gain. So who wins? Well, we total up both scores, and if it’s larger than a set amount, both teams win!”

Guess what?

Liany, Raf’s sister and a Montessori teacher, absolutely loved it. But the rest of the family?

Well, they were acting a bit more like the crowd that—inexplicably—had gathered in the lobby of the Fine Arts Cinema, which has a little café and, more importantly, a large screen television. And it was standing room only—every chair was taken. By chance, just when we arrived there, the Argentinians scored a goal, and the crowd erupted. Given that we were there to watch an opera, it wasn’t necessarily a god sign.

“Marc,” says María, a 20-year old who works at the café, “do you ever get the feeling that it’s just too much, the world? The corporations and the news media control everything, and the little people of the world are forced to pay more and more and are being manipulated by the media into being silent and thinking they’re happy….”

Was it time to sneak in the backdoor of adulthood and tell her that every generation has felt that way, has wanted to change the world, has been idealistic, and when she was older….

No.

I had spent twenty minutes, you see, watching the goings on in the slum, or favela, of Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, which in fact is getting a little ethnic cleaning done to it while the rest of us are enjoying the World Cup. Consider this quote:

In a bid to try and make the country appear much more socially acceptable to the influx of oblivious visitors and dignitaries who will be flying to the country to watch the games, the Brazilian authorities have forcibly evicted thousands of people from their shanty towns and gunned down others on the streets indiscriminately.

It is estimated that at least 40,000 poor people have been gone (sic) missing from the militarized favelas; while kids were killed with impunity in the ghettos which were then occupied by the police, who, according to insiders, later bragged about the amount of people they murdered.  

Or consider this:

Some in the stands vented their frustration by cursing President Dilma Rousseff, whose government footed a good chunk of the tournament’s $11 billion cost. Rousseff, who’s seeking a second term in October, can at least boast that the event came off without a hitch, contrary to what many expected. “People will be in a bad mood for a few days, but the Cup won’t decide the elections,” says João Augusto de Castro Neves, an analyst with Eurasia Group, a political consulting firm that gives Rousseff a 70 percent chance of winning.

I consider María, sitting in front of me: she’s not sleeping well, she’s not eating well, she’s depressed and anxious and worrying about what will happen in Puerto Rico. The effect of the economic crisis is beginning to be felt: the electric company has until the end of the month to figure out a scheme to restructure its debt, and if it doesn’t? Will they start selected blackouts, as rumored? Cut payroll, as feared? Who doesn’t have a relative working for the government? She talks about her fears, and soon is in tears; I get up to get a napkin. Later, in gratitude, she’ll bring me coffee.

I consider the people of Maré, who are getting used to the police bursting into houses and shooting anybody who might be a drug dealer. The people who have been displaced in order to have the stadia for these games built. Oh, and was there a report that stray dogs had been killed because it would be unsightly for the tourists? Think I remember seeing that….

Being an adult gives you experience, so I can trot out the speech that my mother once gave, about seeing so much progress in her life. Especially in civil rights, and rights for LGBT people, we’ve made real progress, if looked at over the decades. So I tell María that, and she looks unconvinced.

I’m not convinced, either. Both of the young women who spoke with me today had the same desire: to change the world. That’s good—I felt that way too, and most days still do. Everybody should want to change the world, especially at age twenty. I did.

The difference?

I believed I could do it…. 

Anything but Bland

Well, in the clip below robbed from YouTube, there’s a little note: “comments are disabled for this video.”

‘Gee, I wonder why,’ I thought, as I imagined the comments. Half would be shrieks of vitriol, the other half would be raving panegyrics, and, in between? A void only slightly smaller that the Milky Way.

Which is how it should be, I think, and also how—someone tell me if I’m wrong, here—it increasingly isn’t. And I’m thinking this after bumping into my older Puerto Rican brother, Pablo, at the opera yesterday.

We had decided to take Montalvo to the opera, or rather to the rebroadcast of the Metropolitan’s Otello, Guiseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera. So there Pablo was: the man who had morphed over time from a landlord into a brother, who had provided more than a shoulder for me to cry on after lost auditions and the occasional marital spat. He’d been a constant source of encouragement, as well as the source of some amusement; once, during a session of extremely vocal sex coming from the second floor, Raf and I had played the last movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, turning up the volume at the climax, all the better to spur them on. Pablo had loved it; his anonymous young companion fled the house.

“I’m getting tired of Renée Fleming and that damned smile,” said Pablo, last night at the opera. “She’s perfect, but she’s bland….”

I knew what he meant. I had felt it myself, but had also changed in my feelings about Fleming: after seeing an interview with her, I had been impressed with how remarkably candid she had been, how much she had paid for her career, and how she had been afflicted with extreme stage fright. And is it her fault that she had done the Herculean job of becoming technically and musically perfect, as well has polishing her image to a diamond shine? Have we all done as much? Now she has to listen to us call her bland?

Pablo’s words, however, had stuck, and in the middle of the “Willow Song,” which has the word salice—Italian for willow—I could help thinking: couldn’t she do more with it? Each time she repeated the word, it was all exactly the same—lush, ravishingly beautiful, poised. What would Callas have done?

“She ruined us all,” said Pablo, giving us a ride home, and referring to Maria Callas, the great American-born Greek soprano whom you loved or whom you hated. Did she always deliver? By no means, and when it was bad, it wasn’t bad: it was awful, terrible, wincingly embarrassing. You wanted to crawl under your seat, or out of the opera house.

But when she was good, equally, she wasn’t good, she was glorious, magnificent, stupendous—you know, all those adjectives that oddly tend not be applied to you and me. Presuming, of course, you could stomach the voice. Here is the critic Rodolfo Celletti’s assessment:

The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thick sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable.

Well, my take is shorter: the voice is otherworldly. If a will-o-the-wisp could sing, it might sound like Callas. Hearing her voice, I think of the sound of geese flying overhead: it’s a sound that encapsulates the chill of autumn, the cold marsh water soaking you feet, the reeds rustling and the smell of burning leaves.

Well, it was all something to think about, and we may have to, since, Montalvo’s reaction? Well, he dozed off a bit for the first part of the opera, but it was hardly surprising, since in the time it took for Raf and me to arrange the napkins in our laps, raise the glass to toast, and glance over at Montalvo, the lad had polished off a large salad, a large mofongo and a large plate of rice and beans. So there were three empty plates—had he licked them?—and there was Montalvo, waiting with dog-at-the-table patience for me to feed him French fries. Such a repast requires a little nap.

But who cannot like Otello? It has, after all, Iago (hah! That my computer should be such a Philistine!): a man so evil you could smell the sulfur in the theater. And Montalvo, having learned that we’ve just joined the 21^st century by subscribing to Netflix, asked afterward if the service had operas.

“Think so,” I said.

“I’m gonna watch ‘em all,” he said.

Well he may, because in addition to hearing opera? He’s written a villanelle, and it’s good, though lacking the—as he called it, he was angry at the time—“motherfucking iamb thing.” So it’s occasionally-iambic pentameter; here it is:

Summoning Strength

Power comes from a need not a desire,

Protect and save yourself from certain death.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

My fists will turn into earth as hard iron

Exerting all my energy with breath.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

My feelings of love will never expire,

And until I die my soul will express.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

I will always find the need to require

Strength that is needed at moment’s request.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Risking your life for another to aspire

Love and sacrifice— erupting through flesh.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

Why has hate and fury lead this to transpire?

Break free from the chains and let your soul dance.

Power comes from a need not a desire.

Light shines through the dark in the form of fire.

Bless'd be the Name of the Lord

“Can you believe this shit? Look at this—unnecessary line breaks, no punctuation, and what does it mean?” Montalvo, my young son, read me the poem, or rather, showed it to me, since poetry, Gentle Reader, now comes through the phone. Then we got to the comments, after first noting that the offending phone-poem had had over 100 likes.

Well, Montalvo had certainly fomented a firestorm: was it the reference to “illiterate morons,” that had so deeply troubled the unduly sensitive? Or maybe it was the reference to the careful writer—which he, following my lead, abbreviated TCW—that had so riled the paper-thin skinned. Whatever it was, the social networks were not burning, not blazing, but exploding in flames. Think fire in a rum plant.

“Can you believe what morons my generation are?” asked Montalvo, and I took a moment off to contemplate subject / verb agreement. So I barely registered when he said, “Christ, my fucking generation will fucking kill poetry, the way we’re massacring it….”

Right, so now it’s time to swing into paternity—a land I’m traversing frequently, these days.

“You know, there’s a lot of bad poetry out there, and sometimes the worse it is, the more it sells.”

“Is that what you meant when you said some people won the Nobel Prize who shouldn’t have?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is obsessed with the Nobel Prize, to the point of reading the list, just to see who’s there and who’s not?

“Shit, I haven’t fucking heard of most of these guys—I gotta start reading these dudes, figure out how they did it….”

I suggest that he might print out the list, add a few blank years, and then write in his own name. This idea he ponders seriously.

“How can people be such morons!” he explodes, and goes on to tell me about Raju, an elephant in India, and a prisoner for 50 years, who was recently freed. So the elephant freaked and started crying, and now the “experts” are wondering: were those tears real?

“Fifty fucking years, those bastards have kept the elephant, and for twenty-five of them, at least, he’s had shackles with spikes on them digging into his flesh! And those morons are asking if the tears are real? Don’t they know animals have feelings? Fuck!”

“More feelings than some humans do,” I tell him, but guess what? One of the amazing things about the Millennials is that they appear and disappear, or maybe it’s just that they’ve mastered shifting instantaneously time and space, since Montalvo is now cadging coffee from Carly, and asking him and Amil if they believe that we’re alone in the universe. Such questions vex the young….

And now I have to tell him that we people are committing exactly the same atrocities on our own kind as we perpetrate on the elephants. Look at all the prisoners we lock up for years, if not decades, and then release onto the streets. And then I think of the famous scene from The Shawshank Redemption—you know, the one where the prisoner blasts Mozart’s Sull’aria out through the speakers in the prison courtyard. It’s a knockout—and we decide to watch it simultaneously, each at his own computer. It’s a totally Millennial thing.

So I watch as the music soars over the prison courtyard, and is it because Montalvo has some experience of prison courtyards, having liberated—though slightly less legally than they did Raju the elephant—a blue Macaw held captive by its “owner?” Or could it be that the music, some of the most celestial that Mozart ever wrote, is itself getting in? Anyway, my young son’s eyes are widening, and he’s murmuring, “fuck,” under his breath. Tennyson one day, Mozart the next!

Well, that’s a nice introduction to opera, and probably necessary, since Montalvo is joining us tomorrow for the Met broadcast of Otello, and has graciously accepted the invitation by announcing that he’ll go, since there’s no dress code.

“I hate dress codes, don’t you?” he says, as I’m writing away.

“Of course not, I love them,” I tell him; who says only kids get to be contrarian?

“Why,” he asks.

So we have a little discussion about the benefits of decorum, of how having a social map often, surprisingly, gets you to the destination much faster and easier than not. Then you can go home and have a drink, see?

So he sort of gets that, and I go back to writing, and then it’s time to read a poem that he wrote yesterday, when he was felled into the abyss of despair and depression. What was wrong? He couldn’t even tell me, so miserable was he when I had called him yesterday. That, of course, immediately made me start worrying—not for nothing am I my father’s son: had Montalvo formed another mystical relationship with an avian? And if so, had it led to the same result? I worried for five hours until I called him before bed; “I’m much better,” he reported.

Right, so what was the problem?

“Matters of the heart,” he said.

Remember that? You’re 21-years old, and love is an emotion that they just came out with yesterday, and they haven’t got the formula quite right, or they’re mixing it all up too strong because, damn! Think martinis on an empty stomach after a night of no sleep!

So I read the poem, and we talk about it, and Montalvo decides: it’s going first, the first poem in his book!

“BAM! It’ll hit those motherfuckers like a twenty-ton weight! Man, those dudes won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about! I mean, they’re gonna be saying, ‘what the fuh???’”

Would the careful writer—sorry, that’s TCW—allow that to pass? Of course not, so now it’s time to suggest that readers generally have a lot to do, and if they’re doing you the honor of reading your work, shouldn’t you put in the work to make it as clear as possible?

Does the point get through? Probably not, but I’m getting it, now. The best a parent can hope for is not a pressure hose, but erosion. You’ll see the effect in a couple of centuries.

So back to the writing, and then Carly comes by, and Montalvo has to have him read the poem—the gist of which is that love is all encompassing—out loud to us. Carly does, and likes it well enough to go recite it to his girlfriend, currently bearing their child. I go back to writing.

“Father!” explodes Montalvo, “this is a major moment in my life! A man is reciting my love poem to his lady! This is momentous! They should just give me the Nobel right now!”

Carly comes back, and reports—the girlfriend loved it!

“YES!” cries Montalvo, “PANTIES OFF!!”

Carly agrees: it’s a PANTIES OFF poem…”

Back to writing.

“Hey, Marc, how’s your writing going?” asks Montalvo.

“Interruptedly,” I tell him: if you haven’t guessed it, this post is being written in real time.

“Hunh?”

But now Carly is back, reciting his own poem, and Montalvo is liking it so much he’s sharing it over Twitter.

‘Nine more years,’ I think. Age thirty is the currently accepted age for when the adolescent brain at last, finally, after-having-driven-everybody-nuts-for-years, cedes to adulthood.

Nine years…

Think I’ll make it?

Then I remember a line from the Bible—Job, maybe?—that went something like “…and the Lord sent the locusts, bless’d be the name of the Lord.” I could tell you, but apparently Google hasn’t read the Bible.

‘Aha,’ I think, ‘I totally get it now…’

Crossing the Bar with Montalvo

“What a motherfucker,” said my young son, referring to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

We had spent forty-five minutes analyzing “Crossing the Bar,” and the first problem was what it meant. And on the off chance that you don’t remember it, here it goes:

 Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

It was all Mr. Fernández’s doing, since in one night of lessened sobriety, he had waxed lyrical about the poem. And “Crossing the Bar” was the poem that Tennyson always wanted anthologists to place last, a fact about which Mr. Fernández makes much.

“OK—so what’s the business of ‘sunset and evening star?’” I ask Montalvo.

“He’s talking about nighttime?” says Montalvo.

This, Gentle Reader, is to what we’ve come. (Sorry for all these twisted constructions, but Mr. Fernández has taken to reading the blog, after which he showers me with bracing criticism….)

“I’m in the sunset of my life,” I tell him.

“Hunh?”

“What does it mean, ‘I’m in the sunset of my life?’”

“Damn, I hate it when you ask those questions!”

OK, we figure out about the sunset of my life, then we have to find out what this whole sea / boat image is about.

“So he’s taking a trip somewhere?”

Right, we sort that out, and then it’s time to figure out the rhyme scheme.

“I don’t get this ABAB stuff,” says Montalvo.

For this they invented paper and pencils, and we write down the last word of each line. He gets it, and that’s when we get to the most fun—meter, in this case iambic pentameter.

“Man, he did all this shit and I didn‘t even notice it! One fucking dude!”

So he drifts off to cadge some coffee, and I start to write the first line of a stanza:

            When first I saw the young Montalvo smile

Well, he’s on top of that like a sailor on a you-know-whom, and he does quite well, which is good, because you know what? His goal—modest though it is—is first to become poet laureate, and then to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; his motivators, as we used to say in human resources, are a bit more external than internal. To this end, Montalvo has the acceptance speech all planned out.

“I’m gonna stand up there and hold up the trophy and say, ‘YO, BROTHERS! NOTHING TO SAY, GUYS! MONTALVO RULES, MAN! I BE THE BEST! PANTIES DOWN, LADIES!!!’”

I’m speechless, a state which occurs less frequently than the sun darkening at noon with roaring lions pacing the streets of the city. But I do point out that we’re in public.

“PANTIES OFF, LADIES!”

Did I mention there’s a lot of rough in this diamond?

But a glimmer of a shine as well, because now we’re going over his poetry, and he says it:

“Man, this poetry is crap! I can’t believe I wrote this. This is AWFUL!”

“It could be improved,” I tell him, and then tell him about the opportunity / problem thing at Walmart.

“There are no problems, just opportunities….”

Won’t repeat what he said: there’s already been too much profanity in this post.

But now it’s time to go back to being supportive, because he’s looking at me, almost with tears in his eyes, and asking not if he’s going to win the Nobel, but if he’ll ever be a good poet.

Yes, I tell him. Otherwise, why would I be doing this?

We go back to work, ripping apart the poems, joining up the line breaks, eliminating the dreadful dashes. At last we can take it no more, and he’s still a bit discouraged, my son.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “Tennyson didn’t win the Nobel Prize either….”