Bliss

I had a dream once during the Cold War – I must have been in my late teens or early 20s, so around 1982 or so – in which there was a nuclear explosion.

In fact, it was a nuclear holocaust: the whole world went up in flames. I remember in my dream seeing the mushroom cloud, and then my senses went dark in the dream, like I was falling asleep while asleep.

Moments later, it seemed, I awoke in a small, dark closet, like one of those guardhouses in front of Buckingham Palace. It was similar in size, and it had an A-frame roof and a door with a knob on the inside. It was pitch black inside.

I opened the door and walked outside, into a circle of children who were holding hands. There was bright light and warmth, like a summer day. The children were singing, and all around was a cultivated garden, flowers everywhere. I joined the circle, and I remember being…happy…really happy. In that circle.

I don’t know how long that part of the dream lasted, but the image has stayed with me these past 25 years, vivid as ever. I can still feel the circle of children around me, singing, after the world disappeared.

photo: jwestveer

Slimebag

At first, I felt like a real slimebag.

A man approached me as I drove up to the curb at Starbucks and asked me to roll down my window.

“I’m out of gas. I’m so humiliated to ask, but can you help me with a couple dollars.”

I’m sorry, was my reply.

I always wonder about these exchanges. I didn’t trust the dude from moment one. He had a vibe that said “scam” all over it. I parked and walked into Starbucks. This guy preceded me and without looking back, held the door open. I paused, then entered and sheepishly said “thanks.”

“Oh,” he said, noticing it was me, “I didn’t actually mean to … help you.”

So now I feel like total sh#@. You gotta understand, I normally take great pleasure in giving money away. My wife’s a saver; I’m a giver. We make a good balance sheet. But now I’ve had the door held open by a guy who I turned down because he had Scam Face on, and he rubs my face in it. Stupidly, because I feel guilty, I remain silent. I repeat in my mind good comebacks, something about my having grown up in New York and getting taken one too many times. Fed up with it.

I order my coffee with him standing less than five feet away. Great. A coffee that would practically get him a gallon of gas, if he indeed needs it.

I sit down and he is milling around the place, looking at CDs, coffee mugs. Then I see him start to walk out, a wad of bills in his hand – where did this come from?! – backed by a bill that was at least a ten if not a twenty. He gets into a car on the passenger side, driven by a young guy, baseball cap on, smoking a cigarette, and they drive off.

I am enjoying my $1.84 coffee, thank you very much.

Country

Traveling in Charlotte, North Carolina today and tomorrow morning. Folks around here pull for Carolina. Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels. I went to NC State. Wolfpack. Arch rivals.

My exposure to life at NC State in 1981 began with my freshman roommate. I recall getting the notice in late spring during my senior year of high school – upper east side of New York, going to college in the south, and my future roommate’s name sounded…black. Or so thought some of my cousins, who were from New England and therefore even more nervous of blacks than I was.

Turns out he was a more WASPy southern version of me than even I was. Guy dressed himself straight out of page 92 of the Preppie Handbook. Green wide-waled corduroys, button-down blue oxford cotton shirt with the breast pocket starched shut, so the “girls can pull it apart…they luv it.”

We would go to Crazy Zack’s together. It was the local bar/dance place, where students from the neighboring girls’ colleges – Meredith and St. Mary’s – would frequent. Most of the girls I knew at State wouldn’t be caught dead at Zack’s. Way too preppy. All the frat guys went there. They played “beach music,” which centered on Motown, R&B, and swing, and did a dance called “shagging.” (I think you know, Dear Reader, what the British call shagging.) It’s a wonder they did this dance in Baptist territory.

We’d go to Zack’s, and they’d have 16 oz. cups of draft beer for a PENNY for women, in order to get them in the doors, and then $1 drafts for guys. After I befriended a girl at State who actually didn’t mind the place, she and others of us from State would go there, and the women would stockpile the beers along the shelves running around the dance floor. One time, there were like 30 to 40 beers lined up – a total cost of less than fifty cents – for us to consume after Happy Hour was over. (We wonder why localities outlaw happy hours….) (I have stopped drinking and now have enough money saved for an IRA.)

WASPy roommate #1 moved into a frat house second semester, and I got the polar opposite in fall of sophomore year.

Todd was from Bahama (pronounced “buh-HAY-muh”), North Carolina. The name derives from the first letters of local family names Ball, Harris, and Mangum. Population in 2007 is 3,304. Assuming a spawn rate of approximately 1.5% per household per year, when I was in college in the early 80s, the population was probably around 600. (I just totally made up that number…but I remember Todd giving me a figure in the hundreds.) (Todd was also one of the smarter students I met; a zoology major with straight A's and a wicked-good control of facts about nemotodes.)

On the first day we were in the dorms in sophomore year, before I met Todd, one of his friends came by the room looking for him. He had blue denim overalls, a red t-shirt, and a large belly. His black hair was cut in bangs.

“Todd here??!!”

“Uh, no…”

“Well, you tell him when I see him I’m goin’ to roll him in a mud hole and stomp him drah’ !”

He walked off.

OK.

I’ll tell him that.

Just the way you said it.

photo: nadsenoj

Gasping for air

As the ocean waves washed over my dad’s head, only bobbing up now and then for air, gasping on a day when the waves were larger than normal, my three-year-old frame clung around his neck, my legs dangling over his shoulders onto his chest, him grasping me by the shins, not able to wipe away the foam when white water rolled in at us.

He would say, “Get ready…take a breath!” and we’d punch through a wave, usually my head clearing the top of it but not always. We went to where it was deep, even where he was on tippy-toes.

I laughed and laughed.

I held onto him around the jaw and put my chin on his head. His whiskers, unshaven on a Saturday morning at the beach, scratched the soft palms of my pre-school hands. His head felt secure on top of a solid body. A dad’s body.

At night he wore his green and white checkered seersucker jacket with the tie that my mom made out of fabric she found that matched the jacket. He wore a yellow shirt, and a photo showed him beaming next to my mom, her with a black-and-white dress and a red carnation, standing on our front porch, getting ready to go to a cocktail party. She was smiling, too.

photo: weirdvis

"pabo"?

We made Mom actually “kick the habit” of smoking cigarettes back in the mid-1970s when those American Lung Association commercials aired showing people jumping in the air and clicking their heels together like The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. She did it after getting out of my grandmother’s beige Mercedes – circa 1960 model – and walking into her parents’ Warwick, Rhode Island home. She actually jumped, though I had never seen her feet leave the ground at the same time, and it looked to Jim and me like she clicked her heels. She was smoking again in a day or two. She also didn’t quit after Jim and I immersed a carton of her Virginia Slims in a sink full of water and then proceeded to put it back in the drawer where she kept them, which happened also to be where she kept her underwear and lingerie.

When she finally quit, after two sessions of acupressure, and when I was flying to Madrid in 1990 and speaking with some Spaniards at JFK airport about my family, I said, “Mi mama paro a fumar pabo frio.” (I thought I was saying, “My mother stopped smoking cold turkey.”)

They looked at me somewhat horrified and then laughed. I always thought it was because the phrase “cold turkey” was not idiomatic for them, and they thought I was speaking literally.

Recently, I used an online language translator (Babel Fish) and this literal translation was given: “My breast unemployment to smoke pabo cold.”

It’s amazing they let me board the plane.

photo: dan72

best_mom

Philip's legacy

I don’t want a Porsche.

Really, I don’t.

I saw one crossing in front of me as I took a turn over the north Beverly railroad tracks – that cumbersome intersection of Dodge Row and Route 1-A North where, if you hit it wrong, you can sit for 4 ½ minutes (I’ve timed it) waiting for the red-and-white wooden crossing guards to lift even though the southbound train is not even in the station and you are sitting south of the station, like it’s nowhere near the station and then you sit while it sits and you sit and you sit…and you can’t even sing along to that awesome Dierks Bentley song on the radio because the person next to you is figuring out what to do with their time, too, and you would feel like a fool singing like Dierks and trying to hit those high notes and your neck screaming veins popping out while your driver-neighbor is basically seeing you have a seizure in silence behind two panes of tempered glass – those railroad tracks… and I saw this maroon Porsche with a black whale’s tail and, in fact, it did look like a large mammal, albeit a really fast large mammal. And I thought: I am pleased as punch with my silver Toyota Corolla that gets like 200 miles to the gallon – city – and that fits my 5’9” frame just fine, thank you.

I suppose this realization was all the more surprising because I had just come from my occasional joust with All Things Financial. I am talking about the Thursday morning 7:30 a.m. breakfast in downtown Boston with business folks, about 50 or so, down at the club where all the old-money from Boston congregates. I can’t name the club here or I’m sure to get sued by someone for some reason some day. But it’s the kind of club that has a Resident Cat to keep away the mice. It makes the place seem very OldWorldly. And you sit downstairs and pretend to read the Globe while you sip your coffee from a china cup, but really you are only interested in the sensory feeling of reading the newspaper while sipping mild coffee in a club where there’s a Cat and where the halls have been trodden by the likes of Paul Revere’s personal financial advisor. Because you know he made a killing from that famous phrase, “The British are coming…!” and trademarked it and now his estate makes $4.95 each time someone says it. (I am kidding, of course, but I have had a LOT of caffeine this morning, starting at 4:00 a.m. when I got out of bed wired that I had finally sent off my manuscript for printing and couldn’t sleep anymore.)

I realize that I have had only two paragraph breaks in the last 457 words (nifty tool, this Microsoft Word).

So I’ll give you all a breather.

I sat on the fifth floor of this Club, eating breakfast with 49 other men – it’s an all-men’s breakfast and Bible study. I introduced to the group a friend of mine who was in town visiting and I happened to mention his former association with the federal government and how he managed a multi-hundred-million dollar program, and this made me feel somewhat…important. I’ll admit it. By association, mind you.

I was like, Hey, this friend of mine made multi-million dollar federal grants to non-profits, and I make sure that my water bill is paid each six months to the Town of H____ for $110 a pop and I think I done good.

So there we are, on the fifth floor, looking out over the Boston Common, absolute beautiful New England spring day, the Red Sox are creaming the Yankees in the standings so much that the Bronx is staging a Day of Mourning (again, just kidding; again, way too much caffeine here), we have been sitting and standing and chatting and sipping and watching the Cat and thinking about Paul Revere’s finances (or at least I have) and my priest is doing the devotional this morning, out of the Book of Acts, chapter 8, and it talks about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. (Those of you not familiar with this passage probably are wondering why this sounds so incredibly odd – I’m telling you, it’s a fascinating story of Philip meeting this leader, in fact a principal financial leader, of Queen Candace’s kingdom in Ethiopia – the eunuchs were often put in charge because they were trustworthy around queens – and how hundreds of years before that Queen Sheba had visited Solomon and how it is thought that she brought Judaism back to Ethiopia… perhaps that doesn’t trigger your pistol, but I think that sweep of human history type of story is awesome. Or, it could be the caffeine.)

Paragraph break.

We had a wonderful Bible study and as I drove back to the North Shore where I work, I sang unimpeded to Dierks Bentley’s CD “Long Trip Alone,” which grows on you and once it does you realize there’s not a weak song on it. Then I picked up yet more caffeine – since I still need to make it through my work day – and saw that Porsche with a whale’s tail.

And all that exposure to money and cats in clubs and unparalleled views of the Common and eating quiche with silver forks next to guys who run federal programs and still others who manage billions for Boston’s elite somehow didn’t impact me when I saw that Porsche. In reflecting, I thought more about Philip.

And I thought about that eunuch. He got baptized that day by Philip. And his life changed. And he went back to Queen Candace with a new message of new hope.

And today, I know a man who lives in Addis Ababa who studied at the school I raise money for and he left behind his wife and two children for two years to get a masters degree – the Ethiopian government wouldn’t let his wife leave the country because she was a medical doctor and they couldn’t do without her – and he came here totally sacrificially and studied and got his degree and now he leads a Bible college.

All because Philip baptized a eunuch two thousand years ago.

A Porsche doesn’t go any faster over railroad tracks than does my Corolla.

photo: ncrotty

Strong on the outside

His personality – even his psyche – seemed to present itself in an “exoskeleton” kind of way.

His armored exterior was formed with a substance that prevented “dessication” and a “sensory interface with the environment” (Rf. wikipedia), and while he looked calm and controlled on the outside – evidenced by hair that was tightly in place with gel, a tie whose knot did not move from the Adam’s apple, and a smile whose presence was unrelated to circumstance – his insides were soft and mushy, susceptible to corruption and even deterioration were it not for his exterior shield. He lacked any internal structure for formation and definition, and he was underdeveloped, given his close relation to the invertebrates and the phylum of arthropods.

photo: gzed