Evening Haiku

The evening's haiku
Refuses to be written
Until the evening.

Mmm...Sushi

Hit the all-you-can-eat sushi lunch @ Tokyo today with Tara, Ruthie and the Wonton. Ruthie and Gehrig declined to partake, (Ruthie had teriyaki,) but Tara and I got our money's worth. Now for twenty-four hours of raw fish belches.

Can't wait to go back.

And Another

Convention center

One more of these meeting rooms

The coffee is free

Evening Haiku

All day with the boy

One eyelid shut, one open

One long, happy wink

This Ought to be Interesting.

Friday night in bed my left eye started to hurt, but I was mostly asleep so I didn't think much of it. When I woke up on Saturday my eyelid was a bit swollen, but not so badly that I couldn't live with it. It's Tuesday morning now and the eye is swollen shut. It leaked some kind of goo all night, (I was asleep though, and didn't think much of it,) which acted as some sort of cement. I spent a half an hour when I got up today with a warm, wet cloth trying to dissolve the glue and get the eye open only to find, when finally I'd freed the lids, that the swelling is going to keep it shut anyway. (I look like Boom Boom Mancini.) Drat. Plus it feels like someone's constantly crushing out a cigarette in my eye, (or what I imagine that would feel like). Double drat.

So my depth-perception is minimal and so is my vision past my nose on my left side. At least I'm off work today, except that that means that I'm watching (or half-watching) the Wonton. He doesn't seem to have noticed my difficutly yet, (I wondered if it'd scare him,) but I expect that he will the first time I bang him into something. I prefer to spend these days alone with him reading and writing (no 'rithmatic!) but today is looking very much like a movie day. It's time for him to see The Godfather anyway.

And yes, I've been to the doctor; he mostly just shrugged.

Some random observations (if that 's a concept you're comfortable with):

**Over the Rhine's "Bothered" moves me.

**Only two more days until Sushi Day.

**It was fun to watch the Yankees come back and beat the Mets in the bottom of the ninth Sunday night, but they're still not very good right now.

**This is funny.

**"Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime." From All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren, (which I can't quite get into).

Bulgarian Proverb

"If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water."

It's Been a Rough Week at Work

Me: I think I'm just gonna go jump off the freaking roof.

Burton: Don't do that today -- we have a meeting.

Josh Woodward's Songs are Worth Checking Out

And this is cool.

Oh yeah...

...this is my son with an ice cream cone on his head.

Resurrection

One afternoon when I was in college I had a long talk with a girl I'd been dating. Or thought I'd been dating. Or had been apparently very confused friends with. I suppose we'd been hanging out for a little more than a month, which was plenty of time for me to become attached. We'd gone to the park and out to eat. Had hung out at my folks' house, where I lived at the time. I'd had girlfriends before and this relationship certainly had enough of the symptoms to lead me to believe that I had another one. The whole incident would teach me that just because a girl puts her tongue in your mouth doesn't mean she likes you and I decided that if the world was ever ready for a small hardback edition of Ben's Book of Wisdom, this would be Number One, centered nicely on the page and without irony:

"Just because a girl puts her tongue in your mouth
Doesn't mean she likes you."

Now, it's embarrassing enough to admit that there was a time when I could so clearly imagine quoting myself. It's even more embarrassing to admit that I found out from several marginal acquaintances that young lady in question, (who had been strangely less affectionate in recent days -- I leaned to kiss her good-bye in the car one night, as I had a dozen or so times before and always with reciprocity, and she offered me her cheek; I'm slow, but I'm not stupid,) had been out several times in the past week with another guy, which explained a lot, but wasn't very encouraging. It also begged the question, (when) is she going to mention it to me?

It became pretty clear that she wasn't going to say anything at all, but just act goofy and standoffish, as if the whole thing never happened, and hope that I'd just drop it and go away. Well if there's one thing I'm no good at, it's dropping it. I approached her one afternoon in the hallway -- it was a place and a time at which we used to meet regularly to hang out, but rather than waiting for me, she was standing with a group of friends laughing (I was sure they were laughing at me) as if there were no reason at all to expect Anyone Special to show up there looking for her (which apparently, there wasn't). When I approached she offered me a flippant, "Hi," to prove to her friends just how passe I was. I squinted through her lightly-offered meanness and said, "Can we talk?"

"Sure," she said, with equal flippancy, and we started walking.

What started out as a directionless walk so that we could talk revealed itself as one last journey together to the parking lot and my car, more out of habit, I'm sure, than of a desire on either side to end up in my car together. (Didn't it prove though, I demanded later, and silently, that something had indeed happened between us -- two people don't just auto-pilot to some guy's car for no reason, do they?) We rode to my folks house -- a ten minute ride -- and by the time we got there, I had as close to the whole story as I ever got. Pretty simple really. She liked the other guy better. I was convinced for a long time that it was because he took her to better places, but the fact is, she just preferred him to me. That's much harder to live with.

She gave me all the standard lines; the one that killed me was, "You're a great guy." Not what you want to hear. Then what's the problem? I wanted to ask her, and maybe I did. At any rate, I was smart enough even then to know that this isn't the kind of thing you talk someone out of and after we'd talked long enough at the house for me to be as maudlin as I could, (she seemed content to let me get it out of my system,) we got back in the car, (a blue '86 Olds Calais).
When we got back to campus I dropped her in front of her dorm, leaving her, no doubt, with either some biting piece of sarcasm designed to show her just how much pain she'd caused or some pitiful mumbled gratitude for the previous weeks. It's either sadness or euphoria. At any rate I drove to a secluded part of the parking lot and absolutely came apart. Bawled like a little girl. Or like a twenty year old college student who just wants someone to love him. Sobbing, shaking, chest heaving, breathing uncontrolled, snot everywhere.

And then I happened to catch my face in the rear-view mirror. It was awful. Embarrassing. Messy. Weak-looking. Out of control. Not cool. Not cool at all. I decided in that instant -- right there on the spot -- that I was done crying. Not just over this particular episode either, but forever. It became a kind of a mission for me. A movie would touch me and I'd beat down the feelings. A friend would share something painful and if the part of me that could cry woke up, I'd attack it again. Over and over, until it was dead. It took years, but by the time I was married, I had successfully killed that part of myself, (which I don't recommend).

I don't remember now what motivated me to change. Undoubtedly it was connected to the safety of the love of a Good Woman (which I'm certain I appreciate more for having suffered through the Other Thing), but I don't remember what the specific catalyst was. Maybe it was watching Titanic -- the timing is about right -- which still makes me weep every time I see it (yeah, I know...). Whatever it was, somewhere along the line something in me began to be okay with being Alive again. Problem was, I didn't know how anymore. I'd spent so much energy for so long trying to kill it that it's taken years to resurrect it. Years and movies and books and music and conversations. To this day, one of my tests of a movie is whether or not it "gets me." Quickest way to my Favorites list is to make me weep. I'm a sucker for the melodramatic, not because of its inherent artistic value, but because it continues to help me to be Alive again -- to undo the damage I did to myself.

I have a friend who seems to think that reading books that the world calls "fiction," (that's a word we don't use much around here,) and watching movies is some kind of distraction from Life, by which I think he means it's a distraction from wallowing in some sort of Calvinistic feelings of guilt. (Along the lines of the statue they erected to honor Maude Flanders when she died -- "She taught us the joy of shame and the shame of joy" -- but I digress.) But for me it's been just the opposite. I'm more Alive than I was before and one of the benefits of being an actual person Alive in the world, (and I have to be careful not to let it become the goal in itself,) is that I'm more available for the people around me.

We're talking a lot about grief around here in recent weeks. People we love die. Some we can see coming, some have already gone and we're still reeling. For some of us, it's the death of a marriage, or of a belief system that we'd grown comfortable with. There's lots of emotion near the surface among us lately, (although it's not all unpleasant by a long-shot,) and you can do what you want, but these days I'm inclined to take it out and handle it. To get a little dirty. My friend David says that grief is a real thing that refuses to be ignored -- and it seems to me like we might as well go ahead and engage it.

And apparently those who mourn are blessed too. Not because they mourn, but by virtue of their Living in this Kingdom. This Kingdom where Life is the priority and where it shows itself in ways that are myriad and not always lots of fun. Kahlil Gibran's Prophet says, "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain," and he's right. And in that sense, joy and sorrow are the same thing. And if you're looking for an umbrella label to go over both of them, which I don't recommend, you could do a lot worse than "Life."

That passage from The Prophet reminded Ruthie and me, independent of one another, of the movie Shadowlands (another one that "gets me"). Near the end, Joy's cancer is in remission and she and her husband Jack have taken a vacation to a special place and there she reminds him that it won't last -- that she's going to die. He tells her he doesn't want to talk about it; that he's happy and doesn't think they should spoil what time they have together, and she tells him, "It doesn't spoil it -- it makes it real." "The pain then," she tells him, "is part of the happiness now. That's the deal." And he kisses her in the rain.

And I don't know now, all these words later, what any of this has to do with a sort-of girlfriend who sort-of broke up with me twelve years ago. Except that Life is the point. And Life isn't Life when you're isolated emotionally from the people around you. And that you can't participate emotionally in the Lives of the people around you (meaning you can't really Love) if you can't participate emotionally in your own Life. And that for all the damage that I did to myself in an attempt to escape from that particular humiliation, Resurrection is a real thing.

Grief carves room for joy. That's the deal.

Good for Me to be Reminded

Seeker: "Teach me the way to liberation."

Zen master: "Who binds you?"

Seeker: "No one binds me."

Zen master: "Then why seek liberation?"

And by the Way

These guys make a nice pinot noir, if that's what you're into.

Not What You Want to Hear

So we've been taking the Wonton to have his picture made once a month at one of those places in the mall where people take their children to have their pictures made. You go, you wait, they take the pictures, you kill an hour while they develop your pix and then you buy what you want.

We're sitting in there a couple weeks ago waiting for our turn to roll around when a mom and a daughter come in to see how they've done. The girl looked to be around four or five; the mom was older. They walked in and the employee who'd been working with them looked at the little girl and at the recently developed photos in her own hand and said, "This cannot be you; this is beautiful!"

Say Hey

This kid kills me. I absolutely cannot believe we made a person.

Had a Blast

Ruthie, the Wonton and I went here on Thursday. Our first little field trip as a fam. It was a great early (first) Father's Day. Does this mean I'm getting old?

The Luckiest

An 105 year old man died in Great Britain this week.

He'd been married 80 years.

His widow is 100.

He's Right

Me: "Lemme see that scar from when you laid your arm open with that razor blade."

Earl: (Shows me the scar -- about a quarter of an inch wide and an inch-and-a half long and surrounded by dots where the stitches went. Nobody who was there that day had ever seen so much blood; Earl though he was going to die. It was bad.)

Me: "Wow. I thought it'd be worse."

Earl: "It was worse at the time."

Book Report

Read The Hotel New Hampshire. Liked it.

We'll See How This Goes

Ruthie and I planted a vegetable garden in the backyard Saturday. Mostly it's an onion garden, but there's some other stuff in there too. Not that we garden or like vegetables much, but there it is. Just a small one for starters; if we manage to get anything to grow we may enbiggen it next year, (hopefully in time to get some tomatoes in).

Railroad ties are heavy.

This is Exciting

"London - A popular campaign that mobilised millions of people to demand that rich countries lift Africa out of debt, poverty and disease has scored a stunning victory..."

Streams are Smart

"By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, 'There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.'"

From The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne. (Chapter Six, In Which Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In)

Anybody Know...

How many pennies you can put in an otherwise empty five gallon water bottle?

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hoo-Hoo!

The Wonton is three months old today.

Any Suggestions?

What do I get my dad for Fathers Day?

Seriously

Anybody want a (kind of a) dog?

Currently Reading

The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving. I'm enjoying it more than the last two Irving books I read, (A Widow for One Year, and The 158-Pound Marriage,) both of which I liked.

And now you know.

There.

Don't you feel better?

Saddle the Chickens, We're Riding Out

The Wonton slept throught the night.

But I'm Just One Person

Do something.

By the Way

I'm reading Thich Nhat Hanh.

Dude's cool.

Ugh.

Every once in a while it still comes up.

Today, after we've worked together for the better part of six years, my boss discovered my secret past. (It's not a secret, but it almost never comes up.)

"Yes, Ken," I said, "I'm an ordained minister, (and a recovering Fundamentalist)."

"I would never have guessed that," he said.

Which is a compliment.

But now he smiles when he sees me,

And calls me, "Monsignor."

Why...

...would I rather sit at the computer for an hour and e-mail a conversation back and forth than talk on the phone for ten minutes?