HQ 76

It’s a curious thing when the focus shifts, and you peer out again.

It may have started when I heard music coming from Raf’s computer speakers. It was mildly interesting, so I went over to take a look.

And saw the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir performing Testimony, a debut by Stephen Schwartz. It’s all part of the It Gets Better project.

That I did know about; when I worked at Wal-Mart, I used to cruise the news incessantly—ostensibly for articles for the students to read….

(Really, I was just waiting it out until the end—which we all knew was coming….)

So I knew that that poor kid—the violinist at Rutgers—had jumped off the bridge after being outed by his room-mate…and I knew that kids were offing themselves in various ways after being bullied in school.

Then the axe fell, or rather the guillotine, and my head sorta got disconnected for awhile….

So there I was listening to the Schwartz piece—quite nice, quite moving—but…

…not convincing.

Why, I wonder? Why shouldn’t I be convinced by what is a very sincere, laudable goal—reaching out to kids and telling them, “hey, it gets better….”

Didn’t it get better for me?

So I called up Johnny, who knows about who I was, and asked him who was I. 

Anguished—is the upshot. He remembers reading Steppenwolf, and thinking, ‘wow—how did Hesse know my brother so well!’

Darkness Visible—to borrow from William Styron who, I just found out, took it from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

OK—so what about It Gets Better?

I think back to my own days of being 18 or 19—freshly confronted by my gayness, struggling with the cello, battling depression.

What did I do?

I went to the library and checked it out.

HQ76—the Library of Congress number for books about being gay.

So I read…

…and read…

…and read some more.

I was, I see now (and saw then) not a practicing homosexual (frequent term in those years) but a lectoral (invented term) homosexual.

Meaning I wasn’t actually having sex.

Not surprising, since I was the only homosexual in Madison, Wisconsin.

Or so it appeared.

I knew it wasn’t true, of course. I knew that there was a gay bar—The Pirate’s Ship—that I passed every day. There was the 7% Society—a gay campus group.

But I couldn’t get there.

It was a frequent theme in those years—people would ask: “how many times did you walk around the block before you got the courage to go into a gay bar for the first time?”

The answer was never “none.” 

The average was 4 to 5 times.

Right—so they were there and I was there and… why didn’t we connect?

They were reaching out, but I couldn’t grasp the hand offering the help.

Which is—I think—my problem with It Gets Better.

A woman who is vital in my life spent years anguishing over whether she could tell her father she is a Lesbian. Her father knew; she knew her father knew; her father had coped with the issue of his son being gay, and overcome it (not without some struggle).

So what was the issue?

What was my issue?

For I never looked Jack directly in the eye, and said “Look, Dad, I’m gay.”

I showed him the apartment that Raf and I were living in….

The apartment with one bedroom.

…and one bed.

He looked at me, grasped the situation…

…and I waited for the question.

Which didn’t come.

We locked eyes instead….

So maybe I had told him, without telling him. And maybe my eyes had said, “ask, and I will  tell you…”

There were other hands, reaching out. There was the documentary Word is Out—which I saw every time it appeared on Channel 21, our PBS station.

It was fascinating, it was compelling, and…

…I still didn’t know how to get there.

And it was almost a reproach—those brave guys who had crossed to the other side of the river, and were turning back to me, coward and afraid to cross.

But somehow I did, or am.

It never stops, you see.  

Which is why I found myself in the CEO’s office of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico, along with the Vice President for Human Resources, formally telling them that I was married, and that my spouse needed to be in the health plan. And wasn’t it just a bit inconsistent that Wal-Mart, so fiercely embracing diversity, wouldn’t allow that? Just because it was a “him,” not “her.” And then took a walk in the parking lot, to hear my racing heart beat and taste my dry mouth.

Yeah, I had done it. 

And I never, at age 18, imagined I would do it….

But how had I done it?

I don’t think we need to tell kids—It Gets Better.

I think we gotta figure out—and then give them a river chart and oars—how we all crossed the river.

Junk Mail

It must have been the weakness brought on by two days of non-stop diarrhea. Otherwise, who can explain it?

Why would I buy a book about RickyMartin? 

It was something about Jack, I recall—he used to do this weird stuff. I can still remember the letters from Westinghouse and the funny little corporate trademark they had. And whatever happened to Westinghouse? Where’d they go off to?

Well, things are appearing and disappearing in a strange way, lately. Starting with Sonia—sorry, she’s not a thing, I know that. But there she was, big as life on my morning walk, looking at me as if she’d seen a ghost. 

Maybe she had….

So we agreed that we had to talk.

That we did yesterday, after I had been rescued from Rock River (Río Piedras) by an angel (Ángel) who took me home. In his BMW. 

No, not for what the iguanas do so well. This is a respectable household, sex toys on the carpet notwithstanding….

And he didn’t rescue me from the river, although in a sense he did. It was pretty much a river—just flowing down, not sideways. It was a water zero (aguacero).

Now where was I?     

Oh—Sonia, whom I met with Nicky, yesterday. And the curious news that Whitney Houston is dead. Wow, I said—that terrible voice has been stilled! News to me!

“Whitney Houston is dead,” I remarked to Sonia.

“Yeah, two months ago….”

Oh.

Well, no stranger than learning from Cousin Ruthie from Minnesota but in Chicago (and at the Drake Hotel, no less!) that Romney had won the Puerto Rico primary. We don’t actually vote for president, but we do go to the convention. Well, why not? It’s a party—in several senses of the word—and we do parties well down here. 

OK, I was struggling to hold up my end of the conversation with Cousin Ruthie, but I was able to keep up by mentioning that Rick Santorum was, apparently, a family man, a Christian, a believer in tradi….

“A lizard!” said Ruthie.

Oh. They hadn’t mentioned—or boomed—that.

Or maybe they had.

OK—so Whitney Houston has gone the way of Westinghouse, apparently—or maybe they’re both still going strong. I don’t know.

I do know that I started out talking about Ricky Martin….

And that there’s a book entitled I (yo) in Spanish and the same book entitled Me (me) in English. Written in English—I did check this—by a Puerto Rican (Martin, or Martín) living in Gringolandia to be read by me, a gringo living in Puerto Rico.  

Oh yes, and I had bought the book because I really thought that I should get going. Stir about. Get moving on this failure project, because really, it seems the right thing to do.

Jack would do it.

So Jack wrote to Westinghouse—shouldn’t I write to Ricky? But what would I say?

That’s why I bought the book.

Gotta find out something about the man….

Well, I learned that at Wal-Mart—direct marketing.

And it started out well enough, for Ricky, it seems, is completely in tune with and connected to his fans through…

Twitter.

WHAT!

No. 

I mean, NO!

I am not gonna join Twitter and tweet to Ricky. And hope that he tweets, or twitters, back. It’s gonna be a letter.

But what to say?

Well, here goes….

Dear Ricky,

First an apology. For years, you were the butt of a joke between Raf and me at 12:01 AM on the first day of the January.

We’d gulp the twelve grapes, down the champagne, and then say, soulfully…

“and may this be the year that Ricky finally meets the girl of his dreams!”

That was snide.

I’m sorry.

We do it all at our own rate.

And curiously, our lives seem to be running parallel, but on different tracks.

And in opposite directions.

I’m a classical musician, you’re a pop star.

You’re famous, I’m not.

You’ve written a book about me (yo) and I’ve written a blook—apparently—about my mother.

You’re interested in giving better lives to third-world kids.

I’m interested in giving better deaths to ancients (ancianos).

So that’s why I wrote the blook, and that’s why I need your help.

Your voice is louder than mine….or at least carries farther.

We have, Ricky, you and I (not me) only one year—actually now nine months—to get the word out.

You can cheat the nursing home.

You can slip away from the party, go home, and die in your own bed—all quite legally, morally and comfortably (more or less).

Ricky—read my blook, as I have not read yours.

Who knows anything about me?

Sincerely,

Marc Newhouse

Jack woulda done it better….

A Broken Vessel

Your writing is elliptical, said Susan, my new sister.

Well, if so, then my music is too.

For today, the music she played was another Beethoven symphony—the 7th.

Nor does the “she” in the sentence above refer to Susan.

So, after the walk this morning, I reread the last posts of this blog, and it confirmed it.

What?

“Soy escritor”. I am a writer.

I said it first to the cab driver who explained my mother’s death, in physiological terms. Why don’t you feel hunger or thirst after the first three days of fasting?

And why hadn’t I asked myself that before?

Well, the explanation, to those interested, has something to do with bears and hibernation. Bears stock up and fatten themselves, and then use it all up during their hibernation. 

We do part of the process too—we have a natural trigger to eat and drink. But Franny trod the path of bears. Not fat to begin with, she began to lose her natural trigger to food and drink quite soon. And entered?

Mystery.

And why was I taking a cab?

I was hungry to see my old boss, who had mothered me for so many years.

Oh, and also to see the dentist, to see what could be done about a writer’s mouth.

I had fixed one thing, you see….

A broken vessel. 

Who?

‘It was,’ I thought, ‘living in a state of fear.’

That amused me, so I played with it. Was it a fly-over state? If so, were there people who simply don’t fly over it—who never know fear? Do some people come—maybe to go to the University of Fear—and then go off somewhere else?

Don’t know. What I do know is that yesterday, I visited it. And what a subtle place it was: things appearing that I’d not seen, sizes of objects changing around, interactions skewing slightly.

I came home and wrote about it, and felt a little better. I sent it to Taí, who politely said it was disjointed. I worked hard—doing a post, then rewriting a section of Iguanas. The Zanas were giving me problems—what to do with them? 

The trouble was I wanted to put in more pictures of them than I had of other friends—just as dear, just as devoted. And Franny wouldn’t have liked that. Well, I solved it, but it took me two hours.

Let me state it simply—my abstract from the thesis of UF:

I feared I was losing my mind again, and that I would become a chronic nutcase, always moving in and out of insanity.

And it did look to be the case. Even the things that could be explained were inexplicable. The post I had written, that disjointed thing? Somehow, it had been sent without the ending. 

Speaking of deletions, I did something in a document, and poof—it was gone. I panic and call Taí, who tells there is an “undo” button I click. 

And how many times have I clicked the “undo” button in my life?

My finding in the thesis: my fear was making everything worse.

Well, I’m going out on a limb today, and let the gods be tempted.

I graduated.

And have just done—actually for the first time in my life—commencement.

The first step came at the supermarket, where I stood with my good recyclable bag. The nice cashier, with whom I always speak Spanish, sees my bag, looks away, and then puts an item in a plastic bag.

“I’m crazy,” he says.

In English.

“No, you’re not,” I say.

I don’t have to explain, do I?

Half an hour later, the sun is setting, and illuminates a quite dead bougainvillea. Rather, it irradiates it, and it is now gold. 

I mean real gold. 

Think wedding bands.

And I do not think this is crazy. I know other people do. I know that I can live in their world.

I just have another passport.

Or diploma?

I smile and play Sudoku. And I decide to cheat—which is possible, electronically. The Sudoku is on my iPad, and any wrong number is immediately rejected. The device makes a disgusted sound, and the wrong is counted against you. It adds a new dimension to the game. Oh, you get a score, too.

Well, that’s useful, because I have been testing my mind. Can I still think? Is the logical component still there?

First cheat—and the number sits placidly on the screen. Second cheat—the same. I cheat four times, and yes…

‘Ah, the Puerto Rican God,’ I think. ‘She’s not subtle….’

Nor was she today, at commencement.

Starting my walk, I realize: I’m tired of chamber music, and am definitely not into lieder. I play the only symphony on my iPod.

Beethoven’s Fifth.

And as much as people sniff at it, I love it. More, it has come into my life always at crucial moments. 

So we’re off, Beethoven and I, and we’re walking by the sea. And the Puerto Rican God has provided quite a nice setting. The sky is dark, there is a storm at sea, the waves are high.

Contrasting nicely with the tenderness of the work. Because it is tender. Wistful. Wondering…

And it begins to rain and I am getting wet and I return home.

And the third movement is ending, and I think of the story, probably untrue, of the little boy.

He’s hearing that moment at a concert, and turns to an old man and says “I’m afraid.” The old man takes his hand.

And then the fourth movement crashes in and I step from the area of partial visibility of the sea to open visibility and…

(I can barely go on…)

There is an enormous wave assaulting the stone wall of the fortress that guards the city. And I say…

“STOP IT!”

To the Puerto Rican God.

I walk home, the music joyful until at last I am yards from the entrance to the city. I glance to my right, and see a sturdy wooden door. ‘I’ve not touched the door,’ I think (my homage to Franny)—and dismiss the idea as ridiculous. But I do, anyway.

And somebody gives me the diploma.

Who?  

Damn

I took the usual walk today, and all was OK. There were no iguanas doing anything irregular (for us, I mean) and the Old City was filled with tourists (also behaving, in their fashion). “Curious,” I thought, “I could fit into that group.” And indeed I could—even the tour guide was a gringa.

But why should I think that?

OK, up to El Morro and all was well except that I didn’t just touch the door, as I do in homage to Franny. Instead, I just walked in.

Well, maybe it was the pain in my hip, which of course might have distracted me. Hips, you all remember, playing a big part in those last days….

Right, so I walk down to inspect the ceiba trees (that’s silk cotton to you) and they seem bigger. Well, I do know that trees grow, but that much in two days? That’s when I saw them last.

Hip still hurts and I rest for a bit, and see a cat in a tree. ‘Oh, Cloudy,’ I think. That was my mother’s cat, and yes, the tree cat did resemble Cloudy….

Now I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before, and that’s pretty interesting. What were they? Can’t remember now.

There was a very big caterpillar, brightly striped with black and yellow. They hang out on the frangipani bushes, and do some real damage. But why was it so big. Why had the ceiba tree been so big.

“Damn,” I say, again invoking Franny. She used it, though judiciously. “Am I becoming the worst of gay men—a size queen?”

So I walk past the governor’s mansion and see that traffic has stopped. The governor, or his wife, or maybe just the hairdresser (out to get some goo), is leaving. This requires stopped cars, four cops, and two huge SUVS, with blue lights flashing. I see nothing remarkable in this. Why?

Go home and do the emails—my normal thing. But it seems that the computer, with whom I’m normally on good terms, is doing funny things.

Errrrr… or I?

Well the photo I was trying to save posed a problem. Raf’s family—where do I put them? I consider, briefly, putting them in the folder labeled “birds”—no disrespect here, it’s where I put a lot of stuff I don’t know what to do with. If I’m just gonna use an image once, that’s where it goes.

Why do I do that?

And why birds?

And just now, Raf calls, and says simply “I can’t log in.” I’m completely stumped. His silence tells me he’s stumped—by me.   

We figure it out. I had mailed him, ten minutes before starting this post, the family photo. He was supposed to enter the site of his mother’s alma mater, log in, and upload the photo.

Shouldn’t I have known that?

Hip hurts, and I think of Franny, and how, really…  It was never good again. The hip, I mean. Do I need to specify that?

Don’t know if I’m clear.

And then I think of her, how she stopped walking and began to, well, shuffle. And she was never again, I think, free of her hip.  

She always knew it was there. It was hurting or aching or just there.  

And then I think, well, that’s just like my mind. I went crazy. There were park rangers doing manhunts for me.

I’ll never use my mind as I used it, unthinkingly, before. 

Also like my mom….

“I’m falling down the rabbit hole,” she had written.

Made us cry….

And I have written, too. Is it catharsis, people ask? Well if it was, or if it was supposed to be, it didn’t work.

Her hip.

Her mind.

Is this my rabbit hole?

Damn!

Varying Worlds

Where it all started I don’t know. Could have been the walk this morning, where Franny turned off the music again and started up the Goldberg Variations. Not my choice, but hey, it’s her walk (so said because I fell recently, and am now limping slowly…).

Or it could have been yesterday, when I got a call from Raf’s mom—could I help her send an email? Of course, and there I was—a son with an aging parent! Not quite Franny of course—and by that I mean no disrespect to Ilia, whose name I have now taught the computer. She’s equal, but not the same. Anyway, it’s all…well, the same. (The son and aging parent business, I mean….)

“We’re at a point where decisions have to be made,” she said, after I had calmed her down, written and rewritten her 60-year life story since graduation from Case Western, and read it to her four times, to assure accuracy. Oh, and then heard her call Cleveland, where she spoke to a nice young guy—William. At one point she had to hand the phone to me, and it wasn’t a language issue. Or rather, it was. He was talking passwords and updating profiles. She was just speaking her very good English.

OK, that done. Maybe it was the title of the friend of Franny’s who had written to me to thank me for sending the blook. He wrote from work and I peered at his name—“The Reverend Jeff….”

Well, I knew that, of course. But wow, talk about wearing your religion lightly! His wife had been the beacon of the Morning Glories, and Jeff himself had been there as well. He even took her to see the prairie. Yet never had he breathed a word of God. Or perhaps, never had he not. I don’t know—it’s confusing in my mind.

But I do think of the Failure Club, and the work I gotta do. So I hit him back and tell him I’m a man with a mission. I gotta get every man, woman and child to know about how Franny slipped away from the party and went gently home to rest. And skipped the nursing home in then process.

He responds within minutes, with a couple of possible contacts. And I feel a pressure in my shoulders, just like those days at Wal-Mart. Gotta go to work!

Which made me remember, perhaps, the day they canned me. The elegant Human Resources lady had read the letter—“your positions have been eliminated”—and really, that was no surprise. It was just the train coming closer, as I lay tied to the tracks. So why did I think…

‘…but I was just having fun!!’

Yup, I was back playing with friends, and Franny had come to scoop me up, and it was time to come home now, and well….

I was just having fun.

Well, now it’s time to get back to work, ‘cause I definitely have to write or call these guys and make contact and put myself out there and ask a favor, albeit for humanity. Write a book in which I tell the world that I almost heard voices, that I was gonna off myself, or even that I was gonna off Franny? Oh, that I can do.

Call a stranger? Nah!

‘Well, it’s started,’ I think, or shudder, and go off and take a walk. Franny’s walk.

I begin to consider the various ways I can get the message out. 

Scene One—the setting, a brightly lit shopping mall, Plaza las Américas 

Characters—a large crowd of shoppers, with one gringo

Dialogue: Gringo: “Con permiso, señora, pero mi madre muerta tiene un mensaje para usted."

It’s so ridiculous I’m NOT gonna translate.

Well, we have—that is Taí and I—better ideas. In fact, I like the idea of wearing a t-shirt I have designed in my mind. A photo of a nursing home interior, and elderly lady in a wheel chair, her hand grasping out. A nurse walking by, paying no attention. Above the photo? The words “Occupy? No *%#!%^ way!” Below the photo, the title of the blook.

I could do that, I think. It would be fun.

Well, I or Franny or we continue our walk, and guess what? A gay cruise is in town, and the Old City is full of gentlemen of that sort, as a friend used to say. And one of them is a charming couple. The man to the right is young and skinny (as I once was).  The other is examining the hanging roots of the ficus tree (as Raf still does.) And for reasons completely unknown, I decide to greet them.

“Buenos días, caballeros” I say, and that’s not all. I give it a Madrid spin, growling out the s as a sh and making the double ll sound like sherry sloshing in a glass.

They don’t respond but attend to their business: being young, happy, and—I do hope—in love.

And it hits me—wow, they’re living in another world! Or rather, the world that I lived in, at that age, is for them a faraway place. They told their parents that they were gay—the parents nodded and went back to the TV. They take a gay cruise, not because it’s gay but because it’s fun.

Different worlds.

And I come home and think of Jeff, or The Reverend, or whoever he is, and the work I have to do.

Or the play?

I just wanna have fun. 

No Surprises Here

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve known about it for years. I once told my friend Sonia about it.

“I’m a person of lakes, not oceans. Hills, not mountains. It was too much for me….” Referring to Puerto Rico, of course.

And I thought I’d gotten used to it. The clouds still bother me, occasionally—they drift by in the wrong direction. (‘trade winds,' I think, and dismiss it….). The trees drop their leaves in the spring (Raf explained it once—it made no sense, but it was an explanation…). Oh, and the air? Anybody getting off the plane in San Juan knows it’s different.

OK—so what about the two fucking iguanas I nearly stepped on just into my morning walk? And yes, that’s literal—the iguanas were copulating. Nor did they move—though I was 18 inches away from them. And why were they on the sidewalk in front of the Athenaeum?  

OK—move on, Marc. Now we’re at the capitol, and I notice a couple of statues with purple veils over them. Well, better than yesterday—one of them had a noose around its neck (though, come to think of it, can a noose be anywhere else but…oh, forget it.) Well, it doesn’t take Raf to explain that. It turns out that today is Presidents Day, ignored in the States, ardently celebrated here by some. (And I’m NOT going there….) The current government is busy putting up statues of presidents who have had anything to do with Puerto Rico—such a sneeze in a southerly direction. They were installing the statue yesterday. The noose was attached to a crane.  

Things are OK until I meet a homeless lady, edentulous (couldn’t help it—ya know the word, ya gotta use it…), selling a quite lovely collage of sea shells, coral, and vegetation. We speak, I give her some money, and she says “we’ll sit and chat one day.” This seems likely—an unemployed man, a homeless woman, well, why shouldn’t we?

And all is well at the beach, where—I’m happy to report—at least the waves were drifting in the right direction. I sit and look about, and notice for the first time a bunch of crabs moving on the rocks. “Do I have to write about them?” I say out loud. Are they my new iguanas? And what will the title be? Love, Sex and Crabs? Sorry—getting cute here.

Absolutely everything is fine on my return home, barring the fact that I am thirsty. Luckily, I have my water bottle with me, which I have refilled at the beach. So what a surprise to see a shower head with water streaming out of it! Perfect—I refill my bottle.

(To be fair, this is completely understandable—the shower head is attached to a granite block which stands in front of steps leading to a beach. Well, it isn’t a beach, but people swim there. Oh, and we build stuff but never maintain it. See?)

“My my,” I say, “I seem to be walking with Anna Russell.”  Remember her? The lady who said “I’m not making this up, you know….”

I get home and all is perfectly fine until I click onto my email, and discover an eruption of vitriol caused by…well, I’ll not say his name. Pat is seething. Susan is burning the granola. It seems, I reflect, that only I have been moderate about this gentleman. I think the strongest word I used was “annoyed.”

‘It’s really better than Iguanas,’ I think, imagining a new book filled with yesterdays’ post and the responses to it. Though there would be certain sameness to it….

But here I must stop—I feel the need for a Klonopin.

Teach Me to Care and Not to Care

Well, it started out OK—the day, I mean.  I had slept well, the morning coffee was better than usual, the sky was blue and the morning walk wonderful.

The trouble began, as it so often does, with the computer.  Or in this case, with an anguished email from a cherished sister—Taí!  She has spent three hours undoing some stupidity I had done on the Iguana blog.  Even worse, she APOLOGIZES, claiming the error is her own!

 I feel terrible. I write her an email stating my priorities, the first three of which are: 

1.    My mental and physical health (note the order)
2.    My relationship with Raf
3.    My relationship with my family—of which she is a part, and a BIG part

Relax, dear Reader, it worked out OK. She calls moments after an email I write, we laugh, we are each of us so relieved about…the other!

So it was a failure! A stupid, time-consuming snafu that worked out in the end.

Or was it? Adopting the new philosophy of the Failure Club—which has still not responded, and how am I supposed to read that?—maybe it was a success. (In our terms, not the Failure Club’s….)

Obviously, after this commotion, any creative work is impossible. Or is it? Ah, the Romantic idea of creativity sprung from tumult, despair, confusion. I should surely be able to do a nice Beethovenian post here, right?

My shrink (to put words into his mouth, which he would hate, but hey! I pay him) might say no. Though it now occurs to me that I don’t know what he’d say. He’s a bit off the norm, as shrinks go, and may not subscribe to the idea that creativity has any link to a peaceful, contemplative state.

And shouldn’t I know something about creativity? I wrote a book—well, sort of—and I’ve played the cello. Some of the time it was easy, sometimes hard. Some times I felt great afterward, most of the time no.

But now, slowing down and thinking with the gut, I begin to think that the only test I have for creativity is the feeling after the fact. The revved high that makes me fly through the streets, after I’ve put down the cello, to do whatever chores I’ve appointed myself. The streets and the irritability—people are getting in my WAY!

Even more, the feeling that the work is still going on—the cello still being played in my mind, the writing still spilling out on the mental computer screen.

Like the Justice of the Supreme Court: I can’t define creativity, but I know it when I feel it. (OK, he was talking about pornography….)

Mostly, it’s other people, and especially myself, who block my creativity. A friend makes a comment—and, worse, a positive one—and I then am not writing, but addressing a friend. A cello teacher named Crietz infiltrates my psyche just as his cigarette smoke did my nostrils—he becomes the Crietz figure.

These people are GETTING IN MY WAY!

And how to tell them—fuck off! Is it THEIR problem that I let them in?

OK—so it’s me. Now the trap is…

…that it’s still another person—ME—blocking the creativity….

“Teach me to care and not to care,” I wrote in the last post.

And this morning, it was another line of poetry.  “…the great heron feeds…and does not tax himself with forethoughts of grief to come.”

I think this because the iguanas have all but vanished, on the morning walks. There is, however, a snowy egret.

Whose thoughts are not of grief to come.

Grief—or, here it is again—failure. Yes, I have seen egrets stab the water, extract the fish, and gulp. More often, they simply stub their nose. Or beak…

And if I enter their life, and they find me troublesome—well, they soar away.

Ah, so it’s NOT the people. Nor is it the mind—or at the consciousness of an external presence or world.

Nor do I know why an egret feeding should be an act of creativity—or creativity itself.

I just know it is.

And I know, as Wendell Berry did (words in other peoples’ mouths again, Marc!) that what…?

The thought is gone. The parenthesis in the sentence above, coupled with the worry about how to apostrophize people, chased it away.

Or perhaps—sent it soaring, its white wings catching the golden sun, and morphing it to white?

I want to be on those wings, feeling heat and breeze and excitement and the fish below and my nose or beak…

…not caring for the stubbing.

Three Failures and a Chair in a Tree

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I was saying on my morning walk, as I peered at the ocean roiling below El Morro. But I could equally have said…

“…what is the correct understanding?”

For I had completely bombed in my classes yesterday, after an interesting day of failure on Sunday.

OK, I now drop the ironic tone of previous posts. Anything—until further notice—comes from the gut, not the mind.

I have never wanted to be a teacher—I’ve told you that, right?—and I have never taken it much seriously. I do show up on time. I am as groomed as I get. But beyond that, I don’t do much. I observe the students, just as I observe the iguanas.

But on Sunday—that would be the day before yesterday—I had written a post about failure. And had had a successful day studying it. Then, it was time to work.

OK—the worst task first. I attacked the kitty litter boxes, and thought while doing so that the wash was next. But there’s a rule —self-imposed, but still a rule—in the house that one cannot proceed from one room to another without carrying something (generally, dirty ashtrays or coffee cups). It’s a big house; it’s the only way….

In this case, it was not a dirty ashtray but a dirty sex toy. NO, not my sex toy but the cat’s. Yes I provide them, although I do not GIVE them. I quite properly deposit my dirty underpants in the laundry basket. Smith, the cat, retrieves them (it?) and moves to the most public area of the house, always on a rug. There he proceeds to….

….I’ll not say. But I can only say that he makes a quite distinctive sound as he goes about it, and that, of course, prompts me to shout…

“FOR GOD’S SAKES! YOU ARE SICK AND DISGUSTING! PUT THAT FILTHY SEX TOY AWAY, OR AT LEAST DO IT IN PRIVATE!”

Words, I realized a week ago, that my new neighbor must have heard, as she was smoking a cigarette on her balcony. (It’s Old San Juan, remember? All the doors are open here….) She gave me, well, a special look hours later on the street….

Still thinking somewhat about the wash, I then went to address a few words (why bother? guess it’s just habit) to the cat.

Right. He was in the bedroom where, well, the bed was unmade.

OK, did that, and then saw—you’re not forgetting the wash, are you?—a book on the floor. Well, that’s not right, I thought, as I frequently do. I picked it up and headed to…

You get my drift?

I did eventually do the laundry, some hours later. But observing as I was the trifling failures in my most proximate agenda, I had quite a successful day. Things got done—they often don’t.

Buoyed by all this, I got right down to work, the next day, writing an assignment for the students. It’s something I never do. Worse, is was on conditionals, something I like, and which can be fun. And should be—I generally sing “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner!” Unbelievably, everybody in Puerto Rico knows it, though of course in Spanish. So we sing it (in both languages) and go on from there….

In this I am bested by former co-worker, a Spanish teacher who taught the gringos to sing ojalá que llueva café, café AND made them dance to it. Alas, it was in the days before YouTube—she’d be famous, or at least viral, by now.

But no—I had to prepare. All for my students….

The look on their faces still pains me. They didn’t understand.

What were they doing wrong? How could they fail me, their teacher?

I did the only thing possible.

“Would you please,” I said in my most teacherly tone (and yes, computer, teacherly is a word—stop with that damn squiggle) “do exactly what I do?” I then held the accursed assignment high in the air, turned it face down…

…and slammed it on the table.

“I think I’ll not charge for this class,” I said, “although in fact there is something to be learned here….”

We went on to discuss failure—how it teaches you so much more than success, and how prevalent and necessary it is in nature.

They thought I was nuts, of course….

Well they’re probably right.

And it reminded me of my two other failures, as a teacher. The first, years ago, in my earliest attempt at teaching. Three teenage boys, three books on the table. A nervous and novice teacher.

Fatally, the books were…

… Jane Eyre

For boys? For Puerto Rican boys? Look, it was a setup, I now see, but I only made it worse. Now, I might possibly be able to do something with it. (“OK, it’s crap—we all know that….”)

Second failure—in my first week teaching at Wal-Mart. I was hardly inexperienced, and they certainly knew me, and how I taught. Was it the life size portraits there in the building of Sam Walton, staring down—looking so much like Jack, on his most dispirited day?

And now a third failure.

OK, so now we’re at today. I get up, I take my walk, I touch the portal of El Morro (and no, I don’t know why, I just have to), I turn back and see…

…a white plastic chair stuck firmly in an almond tree. (Yes, we have almond trees in Puerto Rico—they’re just not the same. Get it?)

The image stays with me for the rest of the walk—two Beethoven quartets long (my current metric, as we said in Wal-Mart). It’s with me now. Nor do I know why….

Perhaps because it was an amazement, an undoubted success. No one, I hope, had a work order to put a white resin chair in an almond tree (which, speaking of colors, turn an amazing russet at this time of year). Nor—no offense intended, my Puerto Rican audience—would it ever have been executed . Or so well, at least.

And no, no one had cared—not the tree, not the chair. Certainly not the municipal government. Perhaps it was the wind that blew the chair into the tree. More likely, it was the students from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas nearby who had, on a whim, placed it there. Maybe—ah, that’s it!—it was art. But nobody had cared.

Or they had, in a careless way. And so….

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I think. And then wonder…

…Is that the correct understanding?

Poster

Poster: Photography and design by ©Taí Fernández