Regret

I realize now that God does not carefully guard those for whom he hears no prayer.  We hand them over to God and trust they will or may grow into honorable men.  They won't.  I think that God is blind, I think he simply cannot see those upon whom prayer does not shed light.  He sees only those who are foreordained, and those others who are blessed by the blessings we ourselves give them.  If God could look upon the damned, and do nothing, would he be good?  Hell is where the damned cannot see God, and he cannot see them.  But they never saw each other during life, either.  It's just a thought.  A possibility -- God after all is not all-powerful.  He can do only what is possible.

I prayed.  But inadequately.  Insufficient fervor.  Not hysterical enough.  God heard but did not understand.  My faith was not that of a small child -- not moronic enough.

I hadn't realized, hadn't stopped to think about how much time has passed.  I saw Joey only in memory, the young boy he had been, and I understood he had grown into a man, but I could not see it.  A failure of imagination, but practical -- I should not torment myself with the unknowable.  The unsettling fact is that he has not changed at all.  The child is father to the man.  Then it was squandering every discretionary penny on pokemon and pogs.  Now it is hookups for threesomes with lesbians.  Just having fun.

Of course I was never meant to see that, such a truthful expression of sexual interests.  Then again, I can have no real expectation that I am even remembered, or that my disappointment could act as an inhibitor of dishonorable behavior.  Just some guy who was in charge for a while, making kids do extra homework.

Well, I'm a little screwed up sexually anyway. Here I am, with an aggressive sexual appetite,  almost completely suppressed.  I manage it at the cost of near-total disassociation from my body.  No perversions or fetishes, but I'm delicate and not getting more open, more trusting as the years pass. It may be morally correct, but it's not healthy.  A life charted for still waters.  So when I get intimations of those I care about acting in a sexually profligate manner, it distresses me.  There's a right way of conducting oneself.  I seem to be almost alone in thinking this.

He's employed, and has stated- if not pursued-goals, and finished high school and went to college.  But he seems not, from my web gleanings, to be the man I would have wished him to be.  I find no pride here, after my however-many years of hands-on training.  What real good, lasting, did I do.  God may be pleased by our futile strivings to do right, but we need more than rewards in heaven.  Maybe it's a delayed gratification thing?  Work motivated by only a promised blessing.  Who needs motivation, when you have faith.

I called him Joe.  He wrote his name as Joseph.  But he chose I see to be Joey again, the silly, sweet, undisciplined pleasure-seeker, a true child of his earliest upbringing, the product of utterly incompetent and passively malevolent adults, mother such as it was -- I have no words hateful enough to describe her -- grandparents who tolerated/practiced incest.

As for Jason, I might have loved him most.  He certainly needed it. But it is as should be expected.  I cannot imagine this assault would be his first criminal offense.   He came back into my home, aimed like a poisoned dart, to destroy it, and he did.  "At least I got Joey away from you."  Why would the man be different than the boy?  Please, be logical.

These are people I have loved.  I wish I never did.  But I did.  And being me, unteachable for all my acumen, I will say, with words, that I love them still. Knowing me, as the complete fool that I am, it's true.  I feel alone, I feel abandoned, but what am I to expect.  I isolate myself, and accept no comfort.  These boys ... well, men, likewise have rejected a right course.  It is an error shared between us, differing only in quality, not quantity.

Uncertainty allowed hope.  Of course there's hope still, hope in miracles, but it's the kind that disregards present reality. This is very hard on me.  Very hard.  Harder than a prolonged and silent death.  All things considered, it would be better if I had not looked.


J

Wake

We watch our sons grow, and hope and work for the best, but it’s like the weather -- you make plans, and then it’s out of your control. I watched my son grow and mature, and when he was very little I was secretly a bit disquieted by how unexceptional he was. Bright and healthy, and a joy to me, honest, kind, but just the vocabulary of a regular kid. I’d use words he didn’t understand, and I’d think, why doesn’t he understand that? -- this is how I talk. But I didn’t press him. We want our sons to be taller than we are, and stronger, and smarter. Well, I did, and you do -- not the case with my own father, but that’s a different story.  Most, however, we want them to be useful and honorable men.  To find what is worthy of respect is a duty, and privileged, and pleasure.

 I went online and searched my boys’ names, my lost boys. I've done this every few years.  Now maybe I found one of them in Fresno -- right age, right name, went to a high school that’s a most likely possibility.  Brown hair, blue eyes, six-three -- check, check, and makes sense.  Inferentially, the right zodiacal sign.  Dim memory confirms the name of a younger brother, now a "stoner".  Involved in video game design, reportedly, which could work -- my boy wanted to design robots.  Went to a state college. Says he's an artist and writer -- ungrammatical, sadly. Says he's the most truthful person you'd ever meet -- ask him anything.

Several pictures, on various sites.  It might be him. This was the boy who -- when he was nine, and just come to me, out of the vast orphanage group home -- lay in a crumple and cried at night because he could not remember his mother’s face. The one who tried to kill him by taking him onto a freeway -- I mean, walking and pushing. The crack whore, seven kids by six different men, who abandoned him to the institution when he was four. And here I am, not sure that I recognize his face. Well, I'm not good with faces, and it’s been half his lifetime since last I saw him, pubescent. It might be him.

Has a son, but doesn't want to talk about it on facebook.  Works in a game store, smokes a lot. "Buddhist." Sometimes silly, sometimes shy.  Just wants "to have fun".  Entered on several sex hookup sites under a user name.  He's looking for "some fun" with two lesbians. Fetishes: tattoos and role play; likes "doggy style" and group sex ("Orgy and/or Gang Bang"). The internet forgives nothing.

But yes, it's him. Growing conviction re the picture.  And I just found the birthday.  I have no plans on initiating a facebook contact -- "poke"?

And I definitely found the other one. Full tripartite name, date of birth. Charged with a felony in another county -- assault with a deadly weapon, other than firearm, with great bodily injury ... carries up to a four year prison term.  Well, he pulled a knife on me once.  He's grown an inch and gained 50 pounds -- heavier than me now. I have to expect that it’s fat. No mug shot. He’ll be 30 in August.

I don’t know what I feel. It’s too buried. All I have available is platitudes, with which to soothe myself? I expect I saved their lives, somehow. I taught the one to read, and brought him up 5 math levels in three months. Seems like necessary preparation for designing video games, or robots.  At least he finished high school, and perhaps college.  The other one, I just don’t know.  At least he's still alive, or was in May of 2012.  But I was steady, and calm, and unflagging in my dedication. I loved them and they knew it. Love is not enough, of course. It’s like weather -- sometimes it brings catastrophe.

I have written in sand.

Getting some painting done, and some cleaning, etc.  Gonna work through the night.  I think of many interesting things.  I should write them down.

Ah.  Here it comes.


J

Son

I was having one of those imaginary conversations not long ago, about what an amazing father I once was. That led me to think about how my son interacted to my, uh, other boys, my foster sons. N was cold and aloof with Joe, Joey. Didn't like him at all. Well, Joey was very immature, and needed a lot of handling, and N was used to being an autonomous only-child. A 13 year old need not like an instant 9 year old pseudo brother.

I have no guilt at all about N's displacement as the single sun of a parental solar system. He was given the very most solid of foundations for security, and that he had to learn to cope with a somewhat less ego-stroking adolescence was a long-term benefit. So I maintain.

These ruminations led me to wonder what ever became of my lost boys, nearly 10 years gone now. I don't know. Sometimes I allow myself to approach this subject, and if I come too near, well, reefs and shoals and jagged rocks, and wild wind and seas that remain utterly indifferent to tears. Sometimes I wonder what I would do, if I saw any of them, say, in the mall. But I don't go much to malls. I expect I would just watch for a few moments, then turn away and leave, having said nothing. I might then find my car and sit in it, and weep until I could not breathe.

But maybe I'd feel nothing at all. That's also how I am. Or maybe I'd say hello, although not "hello" -- rather, "Joe." I'd say, "Joe," and smile in a quiet way, still, sociable but barely breathing. The fantasy doesn't go further than this. Small talk, I'd guess. He'd be 23 now. Maybe he has a job. Maybe he finished school. Maybe he's still alive, and prospering -- my love and dedication having taken hold, flourished, undone the evil and corruption of his earliest years. Perhaps the years were redeemed, reclaimed from futility.

Or Jason, the betrayer, 27, father perhaps of 2, perhaps more by now, perhaps none, what with all the choices available to prospective parents. Nothing much to say. Coward, liar, Judas, that I loved.

Then I thought that it would be my son, N, who would see them, one of them, at the mall. Seems more likely. And whatever that exchange would be, if any, my expectation is that N would not tell me about it. "Hey dad, you know who I saw at the mall the other day? Joey." Something I never expect to hear, for all that the encounter might happen.

I don't understand life, its point. I don't understand how people enter into life, our lives, and leave from it, returning or not as chance may have it. I don't understand love, I don't know the purpose of suffering, I don't see how anyone finds the courage to risk the inevitable load of grief that towers over us waiting for some tremor that it may fall. I know that the purpose of life is not to understand it, but to live it, submerged and swept about by the mechanical rhythms of its currents. That's what life is, to me. Submission. It seems pointless.

Oh, pardon me. I got distracted there for a moment. Brooding about disappointments and deceptions and expectations that experience continues to prove unreasonable.

God, who is so great, and has such a small still voice, has patience that surpasses the span of our lives. This is a bad thing. Time runs out for us, and God is still waiting.

It's ironic. We have to be patient with God. Well. Maybe we'll run into him in the mall. Maybe he'll say hello. "Jack."

J

Darkness

In Czarist Russia c. 1861, an agitator for Polish freedom was sent into exile, escorted by a functionary of the court. On the journey the man's infant son took ill. He pleaded with the official that they might stop and nurse it. Don't bother. What is one baby among so many thousands? If it's dying, leave it to die. But that proved unnecessary. The child recovered.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who as an adult learned English and became a novelist. Joseph Conrad, one of the true masters. Does his life matter because he became famous?

The official was correct, of course. Statistically speaking, everyone dies. From a theological perspective, we're all foreordained anyway. All babies go to heaven. Not all adults do. Better to let them all die, then, from the very most and eternally practical point of view. And if there is no God, no heaven, then life is meaningless, strictly speaking. It is meaningful subjectively, as a phenomenon, something experienced, like a mood or a sunset, but its nature is by definition arbitrary, and the arbitrary has no meaning. So either way, God or emptiness, the man is most right who is too cynical even to be cruel.

Yet we know there's something wrong with such reasoning. Even when we embrace it, we know that in doing so we become somehow ignoble, and excuse ourselves by scoffing at the idea of nobility. But we know.

Sometimes we live only because someone else is willing to take a stand, make a sacrifice, risk torment and death itself, out of stubbornness perhaps -- that stubbornness without which righteousness cannot exist. There's only one thing that counteracts the philosophical law of entropy that is the embracing of the arbitrary. It is the decision, often without evidence, that a thing, some thing matters. Call it faith, itself a sort of evidence.

Yes. Conrad. Who gave us a glimpse into the heart of an immense darkness, and encapsulated the experience with a word. Horror. What is that darkness? It is cynical, and practical, implacable and indifferent, scornful and impatient and arbitrary. It is the absence of faith. Faith is the coin of fools. Wise men trust money. But we know there's something wrong in such reasoning.

I once stopped on the road and saved some children. Saved them for a time. Then I lost them to darkness. I still weep when I speak of it. But we cannot let kindness fail just because it brings its own volume of pain. There are many things I would do differently in my life. But the things that have brought me the greatest pain I would do again. I loathe myself for that. But it's what's best in me.

It's not about statistics. Life is not an average. Life is infinitely important.


J

21

It's a birthday today. One of my lost boys. At this point I have no emotion. Oh, I have emotion. Some things I feel perfectly free and right to lie about. Sometimes it's the only way I can approach the truth. This, for example. I never said it was true. It's lies. I already told you I lie about these things. Did you think I was lying? Don't pretend you're confused. Emotions aren't supposed to make sense.

Sometimes I think I could fly. Sometimes I think parts of my body could be cut off and regrow. There is someone living behind my face that I glimpse sometimes in the tension of my cheekbones. I see milky pale auras around people. I see the grain of reality like a photograph on stippled paper. I feel light falling on my eyes like raindrops splashing into puddles. Sometimes late at night as I lie in bed I hold my breath for hours and breathe through my skin. If I breathe too deeply my fingers tingle with heat. I avoid eye contact because the intimacy is too intense. I think I was ordained for greatness and have betrayed my destiny. I think I was attacked as an infant and have never recovered. I think that if I had a former life, it was I who hammered the nails into Christ's wrists.

I think atheists are right in their incomprehension of purpose and meaning. I have a gift of words and a clarity of thought, and these please me but give me no peace. I have a destructiveness that sees every misfortune as a deserved punishment. I have never felt sympathy without an accompanying urge for vengeance.

If all or any of this is true, what am I to think of the love I have given like lava pouring into the sea? We are what we do. Volcanoes pour out melted rock. Otherwise, dormant or dead. No matter that the rock cools. The infinite universe is cold. Yet it ends in fire.

If I weren't so rational I would act on the violence in my soul and think it right and good. But I am resigned to the fact that there is no justice. I think I am. I'd like to know if there is some way to say goodbye, finally, though. I wish there were some single, simple, symbolic thing to say and be done at long last with it. Goodbye, Joey. But there isn't. Is there?

I feel something now. It's not much. How sharp can it be after so long? The eternal boot smashing a face. An eternal knife plunging into a heart, or an infinite series of hearts. The mountain of God is a pyramid of death, Aztec cosmos Milky Way as a river hot as lava, red as blood. They are right to find no meaning. Not because there is no meaning, but because it's just too painful to see that far. That far and no further. Eye contact with God. It's too intimate. We can't help but feel. It must be a good thing.

But I don't feel much. I know it's a mistake. But look at what I'd feel, if I did. I can't face it alone, is all. Just another way that I've forsaken my destiny. What, I owe you an apology? You should be more sympathetic.


J

Narrative Truth

Writing, what I do, here, is just communication. It's all storytelling. What bees do: I dance because there's nectar over there. What birds do: I sing because I want to mate with you. What humans do: I speak because I want to be understood. It comes from a need around which we are built.

This blog tells a number of stories. The stuff about politics, increasingly rare nowadays, is about justice and common sense. The stuff about science is about truth and reality. The personal stuff is about trying to become whole. I use a number of voices to tell these tales, postures and attitudes that matter the way key matters in music, major and minor and somewhere along the scale, melody unaltered by mood, but affected. It's part of the art, and it might as well be arbitrary.

The personal stuff is generational. The past, fathers and sons, and the emotional present, and the uncertain future. We handle it, when it's horrible, as if it were in boxes, by dissociating. This isn't me. That didn't happen. There is a cost to feeling nothing, but the benefit is that we can continue as we are.

I don't think of myself as a very generous guy. You of course should argue with me, since I've given you so very very much, but you'd be missing my point. I don't give gifts, and that's gauche. Sorry. Buy your own damn ties. But I don't see it in terms of social graces. When I see a need that I can help fill, I fill it. Someone would benefit from a book -- I give them the book. Giving books is a sort of imposition, of taste and upon time, but I'm thoughtless that way. But if someone has a hard situation, I see what I can do. It's not gifts. It's friendship. Is there a debt incurred? Only the responsibility that one friend feels for another. It's never because of the thing; it's because of the motive. The people who care about us buy something from us with that emotion. Call it loyalty. And tenderness.

I looked to see if you emailed me today. My box was empty.

What ever happened to Joey? I'm getting ready to tell that story. I'm going to do it as fiction. He's going to end up dead. Sorry. But maybe he really is dead. How would you know? How would I?

Jason said, once, in the aftermath, "At least I got Joey away from you." That was confusing to me. He had an agenda? Yes, it seems. "Why would you want to get Joey away from me?" I asked. He did not answer. "Get something on Jack," his mother had told him, and sent him back to my home. I don't even remember how I learned that. A lawyer, probably. "You don't deserve this," Jason said, later. He had a conscience after all. No courage though. Neither do I, anymore.

One of the times Joey left me -- the last time -- in a bureaucratic turmoil ... how can I say this ... one of his caseworkers told me she'd asked him if he wanted to see me. "No." "Ah," I said, "that's good. Let him move on. It's never been about me." Then she said she hadn't known whether or not she should tell me. She was right to. It was a sort of relief. I understood it completely, and I don't need to be needed. I need to help people move past need.

And if several years later Joey overdosed on some unlawful drug and died while weekend home visiting with his crackwhore mother, how would I know about it? These things don't make the news, and I've been in hiding, so no official channel is open to me in such matters.

And if I happened one day to see someone getting into a red Volkswagen Rabbit convertible, and if on a whim I took it into my head for some reason to follow that car to a very large and shabby apartment complex, with skewed and ill-lit hallways, and I chanced to learn somehow the particular apartment she entered, well, what of it? Do you have knowledge of anything in my past that would make you suspect I was capable of great and brutal violence? I do not carry a baseball bat in my car. My hands are large and very strong, but the cold sagging skin of a drug addict's scrawny neck holds no interest to me. No investigation would find my skin cells underneath anyone else's fingernails. And I would never work violence against a woman. So what are you thinking?

All of this is fiction, of course. Fiction is the truth we tell with lies. Writing this, I feel nothing.


J

Eviction

I haven't been feeling like I want to do a lot of writing here. Can't say why. An emotional contraction, perhaps. At the same time though I'm feeling restless. I've got some things that are ready to post, but I'm not feeling it. There's a big thing about Jesus that I'm rolling around in the back of my mind, one of those big mystical insights that I get sometimes, that organizes and explains the world. About the cross and its effect on the universe. I thought of it the other night, then the next day had to reconstruct it -- that happens a lot, where really cool ideas just fade away and nothing comes of them. Maybe I should keep a notebook.

Anyways, this restlessness -- it made me do a little flipping through these pages, to see if there was anything worth bumping up. Politics? It's a different time, now. Islamism? My son is returned from the wars, safely for a year almost now. And it's out of the news, and I've said enough on it anyway. What other themes have I had. Well, me, of course, and my tireless self-obsession. That brought me to this thing then. Is it about me? Not really. I'm just a character in the melodrama. The tragic tool, the fool, author and object of these events, unfocused yet intense. What seems to be honesty in me is really self-righteousness. I'm almost as tired of myself as I am of politics, and islamism.

Anyway, this, from a year and a half ago.

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

I came across, recently, some pornography. I've seen it before, of course. With J, my boy from Juvenile Hall, I had to confiscate some pretty hardcore stuff. He was showing it to a twelve year old at the time. It's not about emotion. It's about doing what is right. I said, later, A man and a woman is one thing. A woman and a zucchini is something else. I said it to B, my then downstairs neighbor. She was good friends with J, twice his age and twice his size, literally -- mother of a nine year old boy who tagged along with my boys. I seem to recall that little K got an eyeful of the porn too. Before I walked in on them. But I walked in pretty quick -- they had supervision they didn't know about -- and it's the sort of thing that can be handled without trauma or drama. Later, privately, there might have been a quiet conversation. But maybe words can't put out fires.

There was some drama attached to that whole situation after all, though, as I recall. Oh yeah, I remember. This was shortly before J made his girlfriend pregnant -- I'm told they had sex within fifteen minutes of first meeting. "How did that happen?" I wondered. "I'm still trying to figure it out," he replied. Isn't that a hoot? Ah, youth. Oh, and he made B pregnant that same month. B -- you remember ... my 300 pound downstairs neighbor? I used her for inspiration in my hilarious The Funniest Story. Waste not, want not, eh? Here, let me just wipe away the laughter. Anyway. So there's a way that I'm a sort of a grandfather, twice over, maybe ... I say maybe because a woman does after all have a right to choose. I'm not quite sure what J needed the porn for, what with all the heavy action he was getting.

The girlfriend was outside of my control -- J's crack whore mother had visit time, and, well, she was a crack whore, so of course she provided J with what he wanted. But B -- that came as a little bit of a surprise. Ah, innocence. I thought she was on the same page with me, re supervision. Nope. Her page was pornographic too.

It's a funny story, isn't it. The kicker is that I tried to keep the police out of it, but the crack whore saw perceived-advantage to herself in going a different route. That's not the kicker, though. Before B moved out, she told the landlord she was leaving because of me. I fought it of course, but I was evicted. When I speak of injustice, this is not what I have in mind. This is nothing. Just a kicker. A surreal glimpse into how twisted the world is. But we know it's twisted. We just don't expect it to be twisted with us. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.

Ah well, that exhausts that brief episode in my life. Lesson learned.

As I say, though, I recently came across some other pornography, in a different context. Gets you to thinking. A father once told me that his pre-teen son would masturbate until he was "red in the face." How did he know? I know a fifty year old man who earlier this month went to the Philippines and married an 18 year old girl he'd met online. Theoretically it's not a bad idea. He wants to be happy. But my lord, what is he thinking? And here I am, a man with quite a powerful sex drive, and no mate, and no expectation of ever having one again. What do you do with that?

For all our fine intentions and fine words, we find ourselves outside looking in. Evicted. Exiled. Alienated. Alien.

Well, I came across this pornography, and it just made me sad. It's a glimpse into the lonely and pathetic soul of just about every one of us. These wretched slutty people putting on their show, and all but those who are eunuchs by choice or nature lining up to watch. We wouldn't even look twice, except they're naked. You know what naked is, right? Vulnerable. Intimate. What does that have to do with pornography. They're opposites. Degraded. Self-absorbed.

Alas, paganism got it right. The most powerful gods preside over sex and violence.

As for J's magazine -- with its animals and its airbrushed anuses (I can only assume airbrushing) ... and didn't women used to have body hair? -- I was careful to dispose of it so that it wouldn't be found by some child. People do enough damage to each other deliberately, without obvious carelessness adding to the problem.

___________

Why dredge this up? Well, FP has been my wailing wall for three years now, three years and five days, it seems. What's changed. Me? Circumstances? I hardly know. I was thinking tonight, as I often do, about the need that humans have for one another. And I thought of two horses, each in a different field, who stand next to each other anyway, with a fence between them, necks intertwined. Even the hermit needs someone else, needs God. There is no violence committed, no degradation, against self or others, that isn't about the perpetrator's place and relationship to the rest of humanity. Pornography isn't about bodies, it's about people treating themselves as bodies. We know this because the accompanying fantasies always involve the idea of someone else's emotions.

My boys, my lost boys? One would be 25 now. One would be 20. I think about them less frequently now. I know it will come back, the grief, the rage, but some of the space is filled up now with time and further experience. Is this a kind of peace? I'd think that peace requires something more active than just the dulling of pain. And I know that further experience will bring to me more pain, perhaps finally unbearable. And on that happy note, I bid you adieu.


J

Vale

I've referred to Jason, my boy from juvenile hall. I won't dig into that wound too deeply. But in the years that I knew him, not a month went by that he didn't precipitate some sort of crisis. He tried to set some car tires on fire, at one group home. At another he went on a rampage involving a knife that got him sent, finally, to the halls. In the later boot camps he spent no small amount of time in the box, as they called it. And when he came to me, he thought he'd continue the pattern.

I won't rehearse his sundry misdemeanors. Enough to say that I figured out within a few weeks that he would not learn anything from justice. Punishment would not work. So I'd forgive him. Sometimes there would be consequences, but they were far less than called for. They were never administered with emotion, and I always forgave him, in a way that he knew it was true.

He'd never lasted anywhere for so long. It's like he couldn't find a way to sabotage the situation. After a while there was a way that he could think of his lasting as a sort of success. He started to get the idea that he belonged. Of course it was all me. What, you think I'm modest? Being a father is what I was born for.

When he would succumb to his irrationality and fear and need for flight, as happened not infrequently, I knew that I really didn't have any power at all, to keep him. We are all free agents. My only path, with him, was to love him, and forgive him, and accept what came. I really do forget how many times, even with me, he ended up involved with the police, or in the halls again, or whatnot. But I kept going to court and getting him back. And the judge -- mostly the same one -- really got it, and was on the same team. A rare thing.

My point is, when these crises came, and I had to look into the empty place of his despair, that hurt me as much as it did him, even if he didn't feel it -- when these times came, I had a thing I'd say.

Jason, I'd say. I love you. With all my heart. I've taken you as my son, and that will never change. But if you have to go, then go. You'll always belong to me. I will never stop loving you. Go in peace.

One of the last times I ever saw him, he said it to me. Go in peace. He didn't mean it.

Today that phrase came back to me. There doesn't have to be drama. We can part ways without anguish. Sometimes we never do get a chance to make our final farewells. Sometimes we don't get a chance to make peace. That's what open blue skies are for. We stand in the bright sunlight, face turned upward, breathing, and say goodbye to the wind, trusting that it will carry our message to those for whom it is meant. They'll never hear it, but how much poorer the world, without the effort.

So then. Go in peace.


J

Leap

This is the day that Jason came to live with me. I say he came, but I went and got him. Out at one of the juvenile halls. This is also the day I lost Joey.

February is such an unfinished month. Where I am, the trees are just thinking about opening up their leaf buds. I planted elms, 28 years ago. One of them, in the open ground, is in full burgeon. Another grows out of a small square of dirt in the cement. The only leaves it has are left over from last fall. Today I was wondering why that would be. I figured it just wasn’t getting enough water. All its roots have to travel so far, under the driveway and sidewalk and street. All that cement must make a difference.

I know a cat that lives on the roof. They go crazy, it seems. But no, not crazy. Just true to their genes. Some are born mild, some wild. It doesn’t have anything to do with where they’re born. A friendly cat gets eaten by coyotes. A cat with wild genes will be friendly to a few people, but only because they’ve been tamed. That made me think again today that cats only like you because you give them pleasure. We’d like to think all that rubbing up against us is love. It’s not. It’s just them spreading their scent. They have glands by their mouths. It must feel good to rub scent glands on pant legs.

And the house if full of dogs. So and so is out of the country again. Only three of his dogs are left. They wait by the door all day hoping someone will come home. Then they trail after like sled dogs. One just stands and waits patiently to be petted. One runs in small circles, over and over, smiling and glad that it’s not being beaten. It came from an abused puppyhood. The other one is just along to be a part of the crowd. As with almost everyone, it’s mostly about food.

Well, I suppose that's the point of it all. Just looking for something to keep us going. Last a little longer. We're all February, every once in a while prolonging our days. It's only proper. The alternative is regret. Regret over unfinished lives.


J

Sacrifice

I want justice. I cannot have it. I want vengeance. I may someday take it. It's unlikely now. I have not planned for it, and I will not look for it. But what if I should stop some rainy night to aid a stranded traveler, and that person turned out to be an object of my wrath? What cold rage would not spring instantly from my heart and meet the monster with monstrous violence? I do have a taste for blood.

What is crime? It's a breach with the pact between the citizen and the society. By this definition, crime is relative. What's wrong in one culture is right in another. All tribes have laws about property -- those of which it is claimed otherwise still recognize ownership of individual tools or jewelry and the like. They all have laws about murder. Even when assault on the stranger is as casual as the throwing of a stone, life within the tribe is protected. The patterns are different, but the concept is familiar. Obvious.

When an individual breaks the law, he violates the social compact. He has removed himself from his obligations, and he is removed from the full protections that society is supposed to ensure. He imperils the freedoms by which a liberal democracy defines itself, and becomes subject to the coercive and punitive power of law. He is, then, an outlaw -- the original meaning of which was not merely a law-breaker or a brigand, but someone who was denied the protection of law and society-- as much outcast as outlaw. Nowadays, criminals are not subject to individual retributions, but rather to the vast "corrective" agencies of the state. It's probably more humane. Not too many people are suited for life in the wild woods. Obvious.

That's all well and good. Society has the wherewithal to protect itself from the incorrigible. But what about when it is society itself that breaks the contact? What recourse is there for the victimized individual against a criminal society? When there is no justice to be had, what is a man allowed to do about it? Not obvious.

Alas, we have no power. In the face of the implacably impersonal mechanisms of civilization, we have no power. We must hope for the notice of the influential, and appeal to the whim of the powerful. We must become supplicants no more to the ideals and theories of liberal democracy. Rather we must revert to the more ancient ethos of the tribe.

The other option is to extract a private justice. Vengeance. We pay lip service to how wrong it is. Justice has been defined, you see, as belonging exclusively to the state. Is the state, though, the only agent that has such a claim? Is there no justice but what government says it is? This is, technically, an insane idea. We do not vote on reality. It is what it is, and whether or not we agree with it will have no effect on the facts.

This becomes unarguably apparent when we recall the simple truth that it is politicians who make the laws, and lawyers who interpret them. The first group has many members whose primary qualification for their office is that they are good at being popular. Members of the second group are renowned for making themselves sound right no matter what side of an issue they argue for. Justice is in the hands of such people. Obvious.

What then is justice? I've talked about it before. It's important to me. One of those rare and valuable things that I flatter myself I have wisdom enough to appreciate. Justice is an equal and appropriate response. If your child is murdered, you do not kill the child of the murderer. It is an equal response. It isn't appropriate. Only the guilty should be punished. If you commit a crime, the state attempts to evaluate its gravity, and it tries to balance the scales held by the Blind Woman by imposing a counterbalancing punishment.

Usually, incarceration is the answer. Pretty stupid. How is the victim compensated? Punishment isn't the whole of justice. It only increases the amount of suffering in the world. This is as it should be. Evil actions should cause pain to those who commit them -- a pain equal to that of the innocent victim of evil. But the harm to the innocent should be undone, if it is possible, if means for doing so can be conceived. When property is involved, we might hope for some approximation that will replace what was lost. When lives are involved, the solution is inevitably ignored. Can't bring back the dead. Thus, there is no justice. Obvious.

And what about when the criminal is society itself, or when society refuses or neglects to punish the criminal? Well, I've said it. Vengeance. Public, and so punished by society, rightly or wrongly -- or secret, and so inherently cowardly.

There is a final choice. We go through the futile motions of appealing for redress to the uncaring world. We dig into the secret places of our souls and draw out the savage who understands the blade and the bludgeon. Or we learn to forgive, forgive even the thing that harms us most.

None of them seems satisfactory to me. I want vengeance. I'd settle for justice, if it existed. But haven't I been a victim too many times, that I should lay myself again on the altar of self-sacrifice?

No. No, I haven't been a victim too many times. We can never be victim enough, it seems. We are met with an impersonal or vindictive world, and no pleading and no rage can secure any reprieve from its casual sadism. The Buddhists almost have it right. Life is suffering, and its cause is desire. The answer however is not to cease desiring -- it's to accept the suffering. We desire justice, and peace, and love. Shall we not desire these things? If we cannot find them, or any combination, shall we conclude they are not worth seeking?

In a world that hates what is fine and right, those who love virtue will always be victims. Almost always. So no, I haven't been a victim too many times. I will always be a victim. And if on a rainy night I should come upon some agent of destruction, I would feel my heart break again with a grief I had thought buried in time and ashes, and I would act as my love of virtue demands. Obvious.


J

Nausea

There are many things I write here, that I do not share. I do not think that you would want to see them. But there is madness in the air tonight, and I'm feeling disrespectful. So let me unlock the chamber of horrors, and we'll take just a peek.


It's night. The house is dark. The front door is not locked. Inside, now the light is on. The air is still and stifling. The heat is on and almost unbearable. The goldfish in the tank are dead, floating on the surface.

A call. No answer. Silence like heavy breathing closes in from the walls. Through the door to the hall. Another call. Silence. The bathroom light is on. Water spills onto the floor from the tub. In it, beneath the water, a naked body rests suspended, face submerged. The knees are bent. Hair sways in long trails, stirred by the splashing flow. The mouth is partly open. The eyes are open wide.

A reaching out for support. A turning away. Movement down a hall. Through a bedroom door. The light is on. Strange shadows. A chair is on its side. From the ceiling light, from a belt, a body hangs. Naked. Pigeon-toed. The mouth is filled with tongue. The eyes bulge. Everything is still.


Meaningless, of course. It means nothing. What could it mean? It might mean anything. Nothing.


It's day. The door stands wide open. The screen is torn. Flies circle in the center of the living room. The smell of feces fills the air. Black stains cover the carpet, trailing to the kitchen. The walls are swathed with red splatters.

In the kitchen, one of them lies curled on a side. A thousand stab wounds shred the shirt, once white, now blossomed scarlet. The other lies face down, crosswise over the legs of the first. The knife has fallen from the hand. The pool of blood spreads no longer from the wound in the neck. Cut throat.


There. You see? Meaningless confusion. I confuse the issue, just to be cruel. I like to be cruel. It makes me feel powerful.

No. I'm sorry. It's just that sometimes I can't sleep. Sometimes I have dreams. One after the other. Then something wakes me up.


J

What I Learned By Listening

I've forgotten so many of the finer details. It's understandable, given that I have striven to not think about it. Striven, and failed, but succeeded enough for what was sharp to become dull. I suppose that's what alcohol is good for. Give strong drink to those who are dying. Well, we're all dying. But I don't drink. I must have found some other anodyne. They come back, sometimes, the details, blunt now, more cudgel than blade -- but this is progress, since the bleeding has stopped and any blows might be merely glancing, if I'm fast enough. And there are lessons in it, by which others may profit.

Take, for instance, B. You recall B. Big Mama B, like a great Neolithic venus, mother and lover and goddess to all who come before her? Of course you do. I was thinking about some details, today, some further details, and thought you might enjoy hearing them. A few moments of pleasure reading, and perhaps a bit of wisdom along the way. It is good for us to share with each other our insights, don't you think so too?

One of the details that time has blurred, is how the subject even came up. But I remember standing in the living room and asking young J, "Then who are you having sex with?" Odd, isn't it, that I don't remember the context. I don't think it was a reference to his mother-provided girlfriend. I seem to recall that there was a girl who went to his non-public school, whose safety and virtue I was concerned about. Why was I so sure there was something going on? I just don't know anymore. I can't say I'm highly intuitive, although I think I am -- maybe I'm like the Delphic Oracle -- when things are bad enough, any horrifying statement is bound somehow to be true.

It had gotten to the point, it seems -- in this conversation -- when it was clear to me that sex was being had. That seems to have been, somehow, established. Do I remember it? -- had he just said, "Not with her"? I think yes. So I asked the next logical question. "Then who are you having sex with?" To which J -- after a guilty I'm-trapped-he-already-knows pause -- responded by pointing to the floor. Incredulity. It took me a full two seconds, then incredulity. "B?" B lived directly beneath. "Yes."

Well. That explained why he wanted to do his math homework with her. "Oh, she helps me." It seemed an odd friendship, and I will admit that I felt some undercurrent of misgiving, but there was a fourth grader and a husband living there, and she was a truly not-attractive woman, and not just because of the weight. She looked like Rembrandt in drag. And I'd had many conversations with her, trying to help her with behavior mod techniques for her obnoxious little boy. Who loved me because I was firm but gentle and set boundaries for him while at the same time making sure that he felt respected when he was in my home. You know -- I was healthy with him. He was an unlovely child that I was kind to. He was a mess. That should have been a clue.

I don't remember the timeline, but sometime I would have asked how this circumstance had come about. "Well, we were sitting on the couch, just talking and joking around, and I said 'Fuck you,' and she said 'Fuck you' back, and, well, it kind of grew into that." I must have missed that ploy when I read my brother's copy of How To Score With Chicks back in 1973. But I've filed it away. Maybe I'll meet the woman of my dreams someday, and now I'll have the verbal judo to break the ice.

Once he'd come clean, J seemed to enjoy the honesty. I suppose that's a good thing. As you will know by now, I am Mister Integrity, so we descended the stairs, myself with J in tow, and rapped upon her door. "B, we've got a little problem that maybe you can help us with. J here has given me the surprising news that you and he are having sex." A little sideways smile, and a quick laugh, and she was really quite pleasant. "That's ridiculous. J, why would you say such a thing." "B, don't lie. You know it's true."

And we sat on the stairs in the courtyard taking in the fresh summer afternoon air. A nice little conversation, lasting about ten minutes, B, and J, and myself. I didn't say anything. I just listened. Because I didn't know what the truth was. J was a habitual liar, making an almost unthinkable charge. If it was malicious, it could be ruinous. So I just sat there, listening to them reason it through. I didn't know. I waited until I did know.

Here's what told me. This is why I'm telling you. After many evidences and objections, she said, finally, "Why would I do that?" Her tone was so reasonable. It was such a rational question. But it convinced me that she was lying. And I said, interrupting, "Well, thanks for your time, B. That's all. I have to tell you, now, that I do believe J." "But he's lying." "I don't believe you. I'm sorry. Come on, J. Let's go." And we went up the stairs and into our home.

It just rang untrue. It wasn't a genuine, an honest way to respond. That's not how falsely accused people defend themselves. Not in that context. It was playacting. It took ten minutes of silent observation for it to click in that one statement. That's how intuition and insight and inspiration work. A little slow, a little too late, but there it is.

Yes, the police became involved. J and B denied it all. I kept my mouth shut, never lying, never misleading -- the detective just didn't ask me much. I told him that Jason had made this claim, and I shook my head helplessly. He told me it was what they call a go-nowhere case. It came out, somehow, that B was pregnant. She said she'd keep it. But it would look nothing like her poor betrayed very dark skinned Filipino husband. She became very depressed, with much silent weeping. I felt no pity for her. I never did speak to her husband about it. Then they moved.

Why did I protect B? Well, first, I didn't know yet that she was slandering me. But that doesn't answer the question. I suppose it has to do with my view of punishment. Will it do any good? If I think it will, then I'm for it. But it hardly ever does. Maybe mercy hardly does any good either. Maybe hardly anything does any good. But all jail does is increase the bureaucracy. And criminal records just ruin lives. There should be justice. There should be some appropriate response that balances the scales. Fuck a twisted teenager and go to jail? It is punishment, true. Betray a husband, and a neighbor, and get a criminal record? Would that ensure future virtuous conduct, more than what did happen? Nothing can ever balance the scales. There is no justice.

Well, there are two justices. Flogging, which nowadays is only theoretical -- oh, and executions. And then there's God's justice. That's not theoretical, but it isn't time-sensitive. What is sown in spring is reaped in the fall, but a thousand years is as a day to the Lord. His ways are not our ways. Yada yada, for our purposes. Hell isn't soon enough. One might suppose that if the innocent can torment themselves for being innocent, perhaps the guilty must find some way to inflict justice upon themselves. I don't think God has a sense of irony, though, to have made us that way.

I believe that's it then. The story of the love affair of J and B, and how it ended. If it did end. Maybe they ran away together, eventually, if they found each other again, and if they're still alive. I wouldn't know.


J

Jason

Should I have loved less? Should I have walked away after the first or third or fifth failure, the tenth defiance, the hundredth betrayal, washed my hands like hygienic Pilate of an ugly and hopeless situation where no one could win, most certainly not me? Should I have been the agent of severity and justice? -- trusting that mercy has its place only to a point?

I loved him with all my heart. I saw him first as a lost and forsaken, a fatherless and homeless boy, institutionalized, medicated, hopeless and despairing. And every Saturday I'd bundle my small family into the car and drive to the faceless gray sea to the place where he was kept. For months and months. And because I was the only adult on the surface of this planet who seemed competent and trustworthy to care for him, the court gave him weekend home visits with me. Home visits. Who the hell was I?

I was the fool who loved him.

How many times did I go into some court and stand before some judge? Each time the boy messed up, escalated his misdemeanors, moved from one warehouse to another, group home, psych ward, lockdown, Juvenile Hall, bootcamp. I'd bundle myself into the car and drive across the long valleys or over the mountains or into the desert every weekend, so that he would always have someone to visit him, so that he could always know that someone was always coming ... I'd forgotten that. It was deliberate on my part. Faithfulness matters. And finally, when nothing else was left, he came to live with me.

He got Cs on his report card. You cannot believe how proud I was of him for that. He knew it. And he was proud. He'd never done so well. I taught him to drive. I let him ride his bike to school. You cannot know what that meant to him. Of course he was not trustworthy. When he lied, and stole, and rebelled, I was patient, and I forgave him. This was a boy who would never learn from justice. Justice had nothing to teach him. It had ruined him. He always thought he'd won, when he got justice. Because he hadn't given in. But mercy was something new.

My mercy is no soft thing.

He almost made it. He had a chance, and it almost worked. But there is evil in the world, and she has a name. It could be that I would forget mercy. It might be that I would extract justice. You have no idea, the violence I have harbored in my heart. Evil is what violence is for. God damn that vile evil cunt.

Shocked? Who did you think I was? Did you take me for some whole other man? If I couldn't say such things, I'd have to go find her. Crack whore is a quite literal description. What would make you think I don't know all about hatred?

But it's all theory, now. Everything was lost, and I was broken. The months have turned into years, and this is the most I've ever spoken of it. Of course I did so many things wrong. Regret would devour me whole, if I didn't occupy myself with manic exhaustion. I have fled from the presence of God as Adam fled the gates of Eden. What was my crime, for such condemnation? Where did I sin, to feel such shame?

I loved him with all my heart. I took him as my son. God needs such fools, that hope might be brought to the hopeless. I'm sure sometimes it works. How could we continue, otherwise?

Should I have loved less? Yes. No. He's still my son.



J

Joe

It's been a bad few weeks, aside from the lift I got from hearing from my son. I just haven't been able to sleep. I'd sleep for an hour, then pop awake and be up until I got a final few fitful hours. Well, that's been going on for months. Dawg, that's wack. Didn't help that I've had chronic back pain -- just a tweaked muscle between my shoulder blades, but it will not go away.

Well, more pain than just that. Let's see, I'll make a list. Both my big toes, one jammed a year ago and still iffy, the other swollen from a month ago. My left heel -- I went running last week for the first time in a month (and me a runner) -- just an easy couple of miles, and woke up with a nasty pain that's still giving me a limp sometimes. Both my ankles -- three separate new clicks and a pain, compliments of an overly enthusiastic purple belt, taking advantage of a poor innocent little white belt like me. Both my knees, one from when I was 17 -- every morning I pull it in and there's a huge pop -- the other getting better, from a loud bone grind (like a gunshot) and a long limp from March. Some sort of tweaked tailbone, right side -- 'nough said. Both wrists, left, from a few months ago -- a little nerve compression... nothing permanent; right, from a couple days ago -- it'll be better in a week. Stiff fingers -- almost like I suppose arthritis is, but it's just from holding on too tight for too long (I have calluses on the backs of my knuckles -- what's up with that?). A bit of tendonitis inside my right elbow -- from the one-armed chinups -- effectively gone, but I'm mindful. A weird pain on the outside of that same elbow -- back after ten years -- the doctor said then it was arthritis ... after all, I was in my mid 30s -- ha! it went away ... but now it's back. And it's not arthritis. My left collar bone, and my right shoulder. A perpetually stiff neck, just from muscular exertion. Achy back, for the same reason -- sometimes it takes me a while to stand up straight. And a constant systemic achyness, from being 47 and exerting myself vigorously for 15 or 20 hours each week in a sport that's meant for young guys to learn.

That's what's going on now. No complaints. None at all. Just a little discomfort. If it gets to be too much, I'll take some time off to heal. Really, I will. Of course I'll do strength training, but that's different. And I'll run, great distances. But that's different too.

Why do I drive myself so? It's almost as if I'm compelled, operating under some grim and desperate directive. Too bad I'm not more introspective, so I could figure it out.

None of these petty pains and minor discomforts is what keeps me awake. Just that back thing. But I realized a couple of days ago what it was. I had a similar insight in March -- these moments of self-revelation are important to us. We're all anthropologists of ourselves. So. Something horrible happened in March. And something horrible happened in the middle weeks of October, some few odd years ago.

Just about ruined me.

I had a boy once, a foster son. I moved to adopt him. But that's another story. He came to me when he was nine. He'd been in a gigantic foster home -- read "orphanage" -- since he was four. He could not read at all. He knew three "sight words": the, little, and children. Hm. I guess that's a sort of reading. He couldn't tell me what two plus three was, without using his fingers. Really. He tantrummed every day, so violently that he had to be restrained. Literally. Headbanging. The tears would shoot from his eyes -- actually leapt from his face. Projectile crying. Truly. I'd never seen such a thing. Or heard of it. Or dreamed it was possible. He had an alphabet of labels attached to his file -- ADHD, ODD, SED, EH.... Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Severely Emotionally Disturbed. Educationally Handicapped -- whatever the hell that is.

So. The lad was a mess. But I'm the guy who takes in strays (here for the end of that story, and here for the beginning). So after the two weeks of "honeymoon" -- supposed to be six weeks, but reality trumps theory -- he showed me a bit of his soul. It was beautiful and joyful and bright, and full of pain. This is kind of hard to write.

He sobs into his hands, sounding like a man learning how to speak. What great distance has he run, to breathe so hard.

It took me a couple of months to figure out what to do. Despair? Never. Never never never. Never. No. Patience, and love, and more patience and more love. Then more love. And patience, and love.

But that's not enough.

The key was math. Give this boy a skill. Math is a "concrete," a measurable and highly incremental skill. Smart kids are good at math. Self-esteem is founded on accomplishment. I'm smart because of what I can do. So if you ever have to tutor someone in math, do yourself a huge favor and use the Saxon series. Anyone who doesn't should be poked in the eyeball. In four months, over the summer, he moved from testing at kindergarten to fifth grade level -- 5.1, actually. Above grade level.

When we started the lessons, it would take him hours. We'd sit at the kitchen table and he'd rummage through his big bag of dysfunctional behaviours, and I'd wait him out and he'd get the lesson done. Hours and hours, sometimes. Later, he'd get done in twenty minutes, on his own. I remember I had the nickel jar. Nickels are big. Big silver nickels in a tall skinny jar. Get it? Every minute or so (variable schedule) that he was on-task, he'd hear a nickel dropped into his jar -- bonus money, don't you know. A bribe. I paid him to be good. Positive reinforcement. The American way. Don't leave home without it. He'd trade them in every week for bills, and squander it all on Pokémon cards. Well, it was his money. He earned it.

He learned his times tables in about a month. I invented a way of teaching cursive -- skipped right over manuscript writing ... it's a baby skill, and why waste time with letter-reversals? He learned it in about six weeks or so, as I recall. Bright boy. Not Educationally Handicapped at all. Why would they say such a thing? Stupid Incompetent Fucks. Oh, was that me? How uncharacteristic. There must be some emotion involved on my part. I'm usually so staid. The adults involved in his previous educational career and general maturation process could not possibly be faulted in any of this.

And I had him in Scouts -- Arrow of Light. And I had him in Hapkido -- four or five belts up -- there are so many I don't remember the color ... white, yellow, orange, green ... I think green ... maybe blue. And so on. It was about symbolic and real accomplishments. Look at what I can do.

After about nine months the tantrumming behaviour became utterly extinct. He'd learned to recognize it, and he learned some coping skills. Humor helps. He was partially mainstreamed from the non-public school into the public school after one semester. He was totally mainstreamed the next semester. He was ready for algebra in seventh grade.

And so on.

That's the end of the story.

And here it is, another October already. How time flies. Such a bracing time of year. I love this weather. You know Jewish tradition has it that the world was created in October? I can believe it. For these few weeks, the sky scintillates. Like looking into a baby's eyes. You could fall in love.

What? Oh, you think I can't sleep because of something about Joe? No, not at all. Nothing horrific happened regarding Jojo in October.

But you know, now that I think of it, Joe did have a brother. But that's another story.



J

Runaway

I understand Hamlet. He wasn't mad at all. He wasn't wrestling with his conscience. He was religious. It's not that he couldn't make up his mind. It's that he had proof of an afterlife, yet he still grieved. Old Hamlet's Purgatorial ghost. To be or not to be? It's hardly ever performed with understanding. It's a fancy way of talking about suicide. So why is it a speech? He's not introspective, not philosophical. He's depressed. He knows what death is like. He's not declaiming, not musing -- he's talking to himself. Why don't they get that? I guess because they're acting.

The name Hamlet comes from Amblodi, Icelandic for madman. But in the play within the play, the prince is named Lucian. Lucid. Sane. When I noticed that, years and years ago, I thought it was pretty interesting. Shakespeare had a son, you know. Hamnet. Funny. Except that the boy died before Shakespeare wrote the play. If I had a son who died, I don't think I'd name my greatest tragic hero after him. But maybe I would.

I've been thinking about one of my stories. Real life stories. Toying with the idea of writing it up. But they're so painful. When I sat down to write, just now, I had no idea where I was going. Usually the case. It seems I'm going to tell one of my stories.

Hard to tell a story without using any details.

After a long nightmarish series of escalating crises, one of my boys ran away. Good riddance, you'd think. But that's not how it works.

That's the end of this story.

There are other stories, of course, from later, when he was found, as it were. And what happened. Much worse stories. Pointless, as far as I can see. The point of the fascinating running away story that I just entrusted to you, is this. When he was gone, I went and lay down on his bed. Nothing Michael Jackson about it. Just a way of grieving. I know a woman who kept her dead husband's old sweaters, because they smelled like him. Hamlet kept his father's ghost. I kept my grief.

I used to tell them, no, they weren't the sons of my body. They were the sons of my heart. I hope that's how God feels about us. And here I am, a runaway. Does God grieve for me?

Oh damn. Another story. A little more detail, in this one. Yes, I have a father. When I was sixteen he told me he regretted that he'd named me Jack, because that was his name, and he was sorry he'd named such a faggoty little nothing like me with a real man's name. What if his friends saw me -- how embarrassing for him. Huh. Seemed kind of harsh. No, he didn't drink. It sounded like his real opinion. But maybe he was just angry. About something. For some reason. We might excuse it that way. We all say hurtful things, sometimes. I guess the fact that I read books was the basis for his "faggoty" judgment. And I listened to Classical music. Some might call that faggoty. I would hope that was his meaning. I'm afraid it wasn't. In fact I know it wasn't, but that's another story.

Nine years later I was living in Australia, and had a new baby son. Got news that my father had just had another son too, by a recent wife. Now, guess what my father named his new son, twenty five years after I was born. It hardly seems possible, doesn't it. Is it even legal? Jack. Jack. I, Jack, have a half brother, younger than my own son, named Jack. Isn't that funny? I'm dying.

I'm sure he didn't even remember his little critique, his pep talk from a former decade. He had a convenient memory. I think he grieves for me, now, after his fashion. But that's because he's getting old and he hasn't seen me since the early nineties. Well, we did meet by accident once at the hardware store. My son was just going into the Army.

So you'll understand, then, why I took being a father so seriously. I'm not capable of forgetting. I remember the JFK assassination. I remember toilet training. Anything with an emotional content, I remember, vividly. Ouch. It's like electricity. I have an inconvenient memory. Alas, my view of fathers was shaped long before I became one. So it's hard, always been hard, to trust God. I have lots of stories. That I can't forget. And always, later, somewhere in my awareness was the decision, the resolve, the fierce determination to honor the sacred duty of fatherhood -- to cherish the precious and vulnerable child that had been entrusted into my care. God, I can barely write this.

Everything is so ironic.


J

Somalia

That's the name I gave to the cat, the starving cat I found a while back - or who found me. He died today - well, technically yesterday. He was very old, and the vet said he just shut down. It happened in a single day. So he lasted a month.

We are sad, because loss makes us sad. But we understand that this is the order of things, and we never invite anyone into our lives without the awareness that they will leave us, or we will leave them.

Today - well, yesterday, technically - would be the 18th birthday of someone I loved with all my heart. Why, that's about how old Somalia was. But this boy that I loved was a bright and beautiful soul. Very damaged, because there is evil in the world, but he overcame so very much.

Not a day went by, that I didn't tell him I loved him. And showed it. But I do have a regret. I don't recall telling him how much I respected him. That used to torment me. But I'm over it. I don't have to be perfect, in my communication. I remember his many tears, but I remember his laughter too, and there was more pleasure in his company than frustration. But it is important to annunciate these truths, about love, about respect. Saying them makes them more real. "Let there be light" - and there was light.

So Somalia has died, and gone into the dust, or the air, or where ever it is that cats go when they die. We save our love for people, but we hone our capacity for kindness, and tenderness, on such dumb and dignified animals as Somalia.



J

Mens sana in corpore sano

Something horrible happened today. Not today - some years ago now, but this is the anniversary. Happy anniversary, Jack. So I found myself raving to myself, alone, talking outloud mind you, storming and fuming and rehearsing my rage as if I'd perform it someday for an audience. Bravo! Encore! And then I came to a moment of self-awareness, and stopped, and asked myself, Why am I ranting like this? I mulled over the mystery for a bit, and then realized the date.

Who would have thought that the spirit marks the calendar. A soul is branded with pain, the scar deep as bone, and it throbs like a variable star ... a clockwork universe of anguish. Not all behaviour is hormonal, it seems.

Miserere nobis.


J