I would rather eat flypaper than get into it online or in the twitterverse, but my wife’s profession demands that she stay current with issues in the local community, and so, she inevitably comes up against surprisingly rabidly held differences of opinion.  A recent post in response to a well-meaning piece of advice (she reads me the good ones) uses the phrase “in a perfect world” with venom and sarcasm dripping in equal measure each time she uses the phrase, and she uses it in every sentence.  In a perfect world, the writer intimates, the suggested idea might be of value; in our world, no blinking way. With each repetition, however, the sarcasm increases in intensity, aggressively crossing a line somewhere around the fifth or sixth iteration. However obliquely crafted, this is an attack on the person offering a suggestion. It is not uncommon to find a writer in opposition to an idea, but why angry?  If angry, why sarcastic rather than directly confrontational?

Sarcasm interests me because it allows both injury and deflection: ” I never called you a drooling idiot.  I just suggested that there does not exist a universe in which your pathetic inanity might be remotely worth considering.   Have a nice day.”

Of course, there’s a lot of sarcasm out there, most of which is simply part of contemporary habits of language.  Some studies have found that sarcasm is almost a second language, occurring in about twenty percent of conversations, hardly noticed and virtually inoffensive.  “Yeah, right”, “Nice try”, “I’d love that”, and hundreds of other statements are sarcastic in that they are insincere, but so commonly used that they’ve lost most of their sting.  Most of us meet sarcasm often and early on and come to understand that while it is insincere and occasionally confusing, it’s a language we had better learn to negotiate if we want to fit in.  We use it without thinking, often as a comedic counterpoint to conversation, although even sarcasm  used to humorous intent can backfire at times: “No, you look fabulous”.  That might fly as bros shop for tee shirts, but fall flat at a fitting of a wedding dress.  In some instances, we had better mean that the person looks fabulous or keep our opinion to ourselves.

That’s all transactional sarcasm, give and take, sarcasm lite.  The darker, heavier, more bruising brand of sarcasm takes two forms.  The first, and the most confusing is intentional insincerity deployed to create emotional confusion, awkwardness, or embarrassment.  The second is the “perfect world” kind, anger passed off as humor.

To be clear, both of these more damaging forms of sarcasm are about power.  The origin of the word is with the Greek for stripping the flesh, and sarcasm used to exert power is intended to cut.  Anger thinly disguised as sarcasm is an expression of contempt, bullying to create injury.  My powers of diagnosis are fading by the minute, but the link between insecurity, defensiveness, fear, and angry sarcasm seem pretty clear.  Clumsy exertion of dominance is part of the sarcastic attack, but there’s fear at play as well; anger expressed directly takes a stand, is willing to be seen for what it is, and accepts accountability.  Angry sarcasm wears a shabby mask.

Intentional insincerity is harder to deal with.  This is trap-door sarcasm.  A person you think of as reasonably decent asks what you think about the food served at a party.  You answer sincerely, but are met with, “You didn’t think I actually meant I wanted to know, did you?  That’s funny.”  Trap door.  The bottom falls out.  You are made to feel stupid, or hypersensitive, or conceited, or thoughtless in responding to what you thought was an honest question or statement.  There’s no room to respond without playing into the trap.  This is condescension, manipulation, contempt, and cruelty hiding as a joke.

In a perfect world, to borrow a phrase, we say what we mean and mean what we say, and even in this imperfect world, it’s never too late to do better.  Language re-training in our house started when our kids were small.  We saw how the ordinary sarcastic joshing,  teasing, what was essentially sarcasm lite presented by friends, grandparents, strangers who meant no harm, confused and injured our children.  Yes, the occasional sarcastic comment slips out, but not often, and not to manipulate or dominate.  For example, I am baselessly accused of snoring when I drop off while watching television.  I jolt awake and ask, “was I snoring?”  I think you can guess what comes back.

Never too late to do better, family.

Relax.  There’s nothing in this piece about testicles or their removal.

You’re welcome or I’m sorry,  whatever.

I had been looking for a particular sort of book cover to illustrate my reading assignment over the past few weeks, one that presents a book with a cover I find objectionable; this one pretty much fits the bill.  To be honest, I haven’t actually read the Whitman Tell-A-Tale, but I get the jist, as it were.  To return to the reading assignments, I’m not terribly far along in meeting Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge; I’ve just finished White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, the fourth Oyeyemi novel I’ve read in the last year and one that met the category, “a book with a cover you hate.”  Since finishing the book, I’ve found that the more recent editions (2014) present the cover I dislike, whereas, the earlier edition (2009) actually has a pretty snappy cover.  In any case, given the disparity between Oyeyemi covers, I thought I’d entice the casual reader with the portrait of an pre-operational puppy, pretty much a sure thing in the cover trade.

Why read harder?  It all starts with my eldest son, a better person than I from the start and a much more disciplined reader.  He reads the big books, Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest for example, and sticks with them.  I think he’s actually read these two more than once.  To further establish his moral superiority, he refuses to drop a book one started, no matter how onerous the reading of the book may be.  He’s waded through books that caused him real pain, and yet persists.

I’m a less patient, less disciplined, less ambitious reader.  I’ll bounce from novel to novel, dropping those that seem tedious or just not quite right for the reading mood I’m in.  I’ll circle back from time to time to give a book a second chance, recognizing that the moon and stars may line up differently the second time around.  With some goading I did finish Infinite Jest and found myself quite taken with the novel in the end.  Gravity’s Rainbow is on a shelf somewhere.  Maybe someday.

So, my eldest is taking on the Book Riot Challenge, determined to attack every category by reading only female authors.  This is the guy who decided he needed to read a nineteenth century novel by a female author, deflecting cautionary advice and picking Middlemarch and finishing it, so I’m a relatively lazy piece of flotsam by comparison.  Thus, the challenge to prod me into some sort of direction.

We started in the middle of the year and have only five months to sock away the entire list, but even if I come up short, I will have read more deliberately than I have in a long while.  I began with a slight evasion, re-reading Henry V and Loves’ Labors’ Lost, both plays  I’m working with at the Shakespeare Festival.  All of Shakespeare’s work was published posthumously, which is kind of a weasel choice, but I’ve only got five months so I’m going to grab shortcuts where I can.  I’ll double up a few as well when one novel meets more than one criterion.  Five months and I still have my ordinary undisciplined reading to do as well.

The toughest nut to crack, I knew, would be in reading an assigned book that I hated or never finished.  The list was not all that long even though I majored in Medieval and Early European History.  I actually enjoyed The Nibelungenlied and The Song of Roland.  Enough to finish in any case.  No, the novel to be picked up again after all these years was The Scarlet Letter.

The slog was notable at the outset, but as I clambered through Hawthorne’s dark romanticism and randomly digressive style, I found myself warming to him as an author even as I anticipated the heaviness of narrative at the novel’s end.  It’s considered one of the truly great and thoroughly American American novels, and the characterisation of Hester Prynne is more psychologically complex than I had expected, so I am pleased to have spent some time in Hawthorne’s company.  I am not sure I’d like to spend a moment more with Hester’s feral daughter Pearl and Hester’s demon-husband Chillingworth, although each in her/his distance from the norm in any age would have made for a stirring tale of active witchcraft and satanic possession.  Ah, well.

I’ve read The  Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, a terrifying account of how the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway began a process by which lampreys, alewives, zebra mussels, and a host of other non-native life forms have transformed the lakes entirely.  It’s a cautionary tale and one I won’t spoil by ham-handedly describing what Egan presents with such clarity.  That was my book about Nature, so on with the parade.

My book of Social Science was every bit as disturbing, perhaps signifying that the current  graceless epoch is simply a continuation of bad behavior that arrived with the first colonists.  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann describes the murder of at least twenty members of the Osage Nation who held title to oil-rich land that Texas robber barons felt should be theirs.  Twenty is a conservative guess; there may have been hundreds of murders.  It is hard to know that genocide was still a matter of fact in the 1920’s (as were lynchings, of course), but important to put names to those who carried out genocide for profit.

I’ll be cleansing the palate by turning to my celebrity memoir, Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher.  I’ve got a slew of books associated with recovery from a slew of addictions, so the response to Fisher will likely appear in the wider context of recovery literature (Infinite Jest, Girl in Pieces, etc).

Meanwhile, nineteen books left.

Tick, Tock.  Here’s the list:

1. A book published posthumously
2. A book of true crime
3. A classic of genre fiction (i.e. mystery, sci fi/fantasy, romance)
4. A comic written and drawn by the same person
5. A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa)
6. A book about nature
7. A western
8. A comic written or drawn by a person of color
9. A book of colonial or postcolonial literature
10. A romance novel by or about a person of color
11. A children’s classic published before 1980
12. A celebrity memoir
13. An Oprah Book Club selection
14. A book of social science
15. A one-sitting book
16. The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series
17. A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
18. A comic that isn’t published by Marvel, DC, or Image
19. A book of genre fiction in translation
20. A book with a cover you hate
21. A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author
22. An essay anthology
23. A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
24. An assigned book you hated (or never finished)

A friend of mine is dying.  The news came in the morning’s mail, not surprising, but still terrible.  A fair number of friends are already gone.  Others are fighting hard and some are easing on.  It’s not the only subject of conversation, but it comes up a great deal more frequently than it did even a year or two ago.

This is not entirely unexpected.  Apparently we who make up the first bulge in the population that began booming in the late 1940’s have reached what manufacturers like to call the expiration date, although I prefer to think of myself as perhaps Best Used By 2018, still reasonably safe to have around if properly refrigerated.

All the same, my existential warning system has kicked in, the relentless ticking countdown has moved from background to foreground, and time’s winged chariot has begun hurrying more insistently near.  All of which is to say that I think about checking out a good deal more that I once did, and with a good deal more sticky emotional bounce around.  The bouncing is actually profound as I am intermittently at ease with the operation of the universe in whatever fashion it operates and  determined to place an ego-bound headlock on that universe.  I’d use the phrase, “death grip”, but that’s actually… you know… a contradiction of terms in this case.

It may seem a digression at this point to admit that I have an unfortunate inclination to actually read the information people give me about themselves in sporting the t-shirts that they wear, but one hit home the other day and provides a neat transition from wallowing to wondering.

I live in what my children call a “blue hair” town, a town more crowded with retired folks of my generation than most.  One of my generational cohorts, a not particularly well-preserved representative of the tribe, lounged comfortably in a coffee shop wearing a declaration that may be shared by others of my ilk — “I Intend To Live Forever —  So Far, So Good”

Really?  How good?

Well, although the present is always tough to evaluate, it’s clear that we live in troubled and troubling times; humankind taken as a whole appears to be less kind and unfortunately more human, and trusted institutions seem less trustworthy.  At least, that’s the way it seems to me from what I know is a very insulated and privileged point of view.  I suspect that for most of the world daily life has had more to do with struggling to find security than with anxiously observing the loss of treasured beliefs. and practices. I  have been moderately aware that the chunk of history – the speck of history – that I have lived in has known troubles, but for the most part, I have lived in cheerful oblivion decade after decade; fate plunked me down on a continent that has not seen invasion, plague, and pestilence, and in a relatively small and absolutely insulated corner of that continent.  It all looked very Mickey Mouse Club, American Bandstand, and Yankee baseball to me.  Yes, I saw the horror of war in Vietnam, and yes, I saw the legacy of slavery and racial violence in the United States, but from a distance and with an unshaped conviction that the sweep of progress would inevitably correct inequity, poverty, and the few unfortunate remaining flaws in a nation conceived in liberty and justice, in a nation destined to shine its light on the rest of the world; I believed this good nation would correct itself naturally as reasonability overcame self-interest.

Ignorance was comfort if not bliss, and I regret having plonked along so blithely unaware of the hardships of others and, more notably, feel foolish for believing that civility, tolerance, the celebration of progress and inclusion was inevitable and universally admired.  Having seen behind the curtain in a nation I no longer recognize, I’m also in danger of feeling simultaneously responsible and entirely overwhelmed.

I’m stuck.

I don’t know everything, never have, and that’s been ok as long as I felt certain that enough bright people knew enough and enough generous people gave enough, and enough brave people did enough to keep the world from skidding into chaos.  I trusted science and the rule of law, which in hindsight was an abdication of my own responsibility for environmental crisis and the perpetuation of a discriminatory system of justice.  And now …?

I didn’t intend to give up the reins; I look around and, with the exception of the usual cast of imbedded plutocrats still mucking around, impossibly young people are bright enough, and generous enough, and brave enough to try to pull the tattered fabric back together.  I don’t quote Satchel Paige very often, but his question rings through the decades:  “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

Old enough to know I’m old enough.

I have always been moved by the last scene in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play that has fallen out of favor but which speaks to the human condition in a way that resonates with my own experience in the world.  It’s a play that breaks the fourth wall and operates without props or scenery.   The various characters have contended with the things we contend with and have celebrated the things we celebrate.  At a funeral, the living stand and speak; the dead sit  in rows facing the audience.  They observe the living and respond with pleasant objectivity to all they see.  What strikes me is that in this moment a group finds itself made up of whoever happened to die within the same era.  They may not have had much in common along the way, but end up in the same place.

I’ve thought of this process as similar to my experience in the supermarket.  I walk through the door, others are there or enter later, and at some point, we all stand in the check-out line.  Let’s assume I’m in the express line (15 items or less) with a loaf of bread and a can of soup.  The person in front of me has piled the conveyor belt high with produce, soda cans,  slabs of bacon, candy bars, deodorant –  obviously waaaaay more than 15 items.  Life as it is.  What to do?

Higher life forms than myself have suggested that choosing not to object or express annoyance is acceptance; not noticing is serenity.

Life is happening all around me; I’m delighted with much of it and on the verge of despair with much of it.  I summon my inner Frank Costanza and shout, “Serenity now!”, but the reality is that I’m in the check-out line, however fervently I wish to be somewhere on Aisle 12 looking at hamburger buns.  My job today, I think, is to look around and actually see the people around me.  They may be in my line; they may still be cruising the school supplies.  No matter.  I’m pretty sure we are all in this together.

You can try to paint an entire generation with the same brush, but we who call ourselves Boom Zero, those born between 1945 and 1950, have relatively little in common with Boom Lite, people born in the 1960’s, after I had started high school.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t spend hours listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio, didn’t buy savings stamps in school, didn’t wear coonskin hats, didn’t have to “duck and cover” in the classroom, didn’t play games like “Rich Uncle” or “Mystery Date”.

I’m sure their lives have been rich and full, but when it comes right down to it, we don’t really speak the same language.  They probably wouldn’t say they had it “made in the shade”, and I never felt even remotely comfortable using the word “groovy”.  Did their parents worry that their children would become “greasers”, “JDs” (Juvenile Delinquents), “hoods”?  Did they use Vapo Rub to make sure their DA (Duck’s Ass) stayed firm in high winds?  Did they use Vapo Rub?  If they were on the road to perdition, did they use a “church key” to open a Blatz, a Rheingold, A Piels, a Schlitz, a Ballantine, a Carling Old Style?  Did they go to “sock hops”?  Did they think Shelly Fabares and Paul Peterson were just dreamy?

We think not.

All of this comes to mind as my daughter, still horse-crazy after all these years, will be spending the afternoon doing what she likes best, riding a bunch of different horses to make sure they are exercised and generally pampered.  This job, if in her case it is a job, is called hacking.  Hacking is also used to mean something like pleasure riding, a perfectly acceptable, even gentlemanly, occupation.  In my earlier days however, at home and at school, hacking around meant acting without purpose, larking about, essentially goofing off.  Hacking around with friends was virtually all we had to do in a town that had an intellectually ambitious bookstore but no pizza place, movie theater, or Dairy Queen.  So, that was good hacking, but the term was used with different impact by my teachers who described lackadaisical, attitude impaired clowns in the classroom as  hackers. We hackers, we happy few, formed a band of brothers we thought forever branded by the term, and yet, the disapprobation appears to have disappeared almost entirely.

And then.

Say, one was committed to a life of academic lassitude, happily hacking around in mindless schoolboy distraction.  What to do when called to account?  How to survive the slings and arrows tossed by cranky teachers and coaches?  One, and you know who that one most certainly was not, might hang one’s head, vow to do better, and buckle down from time to time , just to stay out of the line of fire.  Or, counting on invention and charm, one could attempt to spin a tale so compelling that the admiring teacher was simply swept away, forgetting to drop the well deserved hammer.  A much less taxing enterprise.

We called that artful distraction a “snow job”, by which we meant that somehow the combined weight of charm and tangentially possible although certainly dubious information might bury the listener as if he had wandered into an Alpine avalanche.  We also used the term “snow” to indicate a semi-reputable con job, such as convincing a sucker friend to buy the car we knew to be near its sad end by touting features that had nothing to do with its performance.  “You’ll never see a car with a tint job like this baby again.”

The avalanche metaphor was also appropriate to the more genteel use of the word “snow” to indicate headlong, helpless, relatively sudden, and probably impermanent infatuation.  My recollection is that we were first snowed somewhere in the late middle school years and remained capable of being snowed into our college years, or at least, into my college years.  Being snowed was a more intense form of infatuation, more mature than puppy love and less creepy than obsessed.  I suppose there were instances in which someone who had experienced being snowed could become love-sick, but the first stage carried no whiff of pathology.  Being snowed was great with no real expectation of sustained relationship.

Have a crush on?  No, crushes were cultivated like courtly love, emotional but in the abstract.  Smitten?  Closer, but being snowed did include the sensation of being swept away.  It doesn’t matter now; that phrase too has been swept away.

There’s idle nostalgia at play here, obviously, and fun with words, but there’s also the recognition that language shapes experience as much as experience shapes language.  Kidspeak, slang, lingo, reveals something about the time in which it appears.  We were, I was, trying to differentiate our experience from those of the generation holding sway.  They had their words; we had ours.  There were a lot of us, seventy-six million born between 1946 and 1964, so our voices and our sensibilities probably lasted longer than those of previous generations.  And yet, we’d be appalled to hear the creaky phrases we used so happily a half century ago.  Yeah, and no one ever really said “groovy” with a straight face.

… today, I’m celebrating tumbling kids and guys with chain saws, and a small town that turns out to cheer those who bring hope.

I’m heading to the 4th of July parade in town.  It’s a wonderful jumble of marching Cub Scouts, amateur hula dancers, the 4H club, people dressed as butterflies chanting “Migration is beautiful”, yoga teachers, Shakespearean actors, softball teams, militant vegans, kazoo bands, mimes, and a host of other specialized and important enthusiasms.

It’s small town, and earnest, and kindly, and hopeful.  I love it.

But I’m also aware of how mitigated my fondness for the 4th has been by events and attitudes in the last two years.  I’m wearing red and white shorts and a blue shirt, have flags out at home, but I’m aware that the flag, like the anthem, has been weaponized, turned into a partisan body slam.

Patriotism has been hijacked by partisan politics for a very long time, but it is only recently that I pause before looking for my flag to wonder in flying it, do I put myself among those who think football players are “sons of bitches” for bringing attention to the shooting of young black men, do I put myself among those who think Muslims are dangerous, who think that people seeking refuge are criminals to be confined and separated from their children.

So, I stand in a shaded street in Ashland, Oregon, under two unfurled flags, captivated by the kids showing off their tumbling, and the guys on the fuel coop float waving chainsaws used to provide free wood in the winter to warm those who need help, and the guy dressed as a recycling bin, and the Booming Broadway Dancers, Baby Boomer Women striking Broadway poses with jazz hands as they march, and the dogs dressed as Uncle Sam, and the employees of the free clinic tossing toothbrushes to the crowd, and the bagpipers marching crisply as the temperature soars, and the several hundred music teachers in town to attend a workshop at SOU who sit on three separate floats playing perfectly, and Oregon’s Senator, Ron Wyden, greeting children perched on the sidewalk, and marching bumble bees representing Ashland, “Bee City”.

Rumor has had it that a great marching band and drumline has been practicing in South Ashland for a few days, so my son and I walk to the area from which the parade begins.  The Vanguard Drum and Bugle Corps from Santa Clara, California have assembled at the end of the parade, waiting for the space to add a marching band, a drumline, drill team and flag tossers to the mix.  A single drum sounds clearly, and in an instant the entire group is marching, bugles and tubas sounding out the Star Spangled Banner, the Washington Post March, El Capitan as the drums roll, rifles fly, flags twirl.  At the end of the set, the band marches silently as the drums continue, playing a complex, and wonderfully funky, contrapuntal march, thirty drums of differing sizes and tones playing so smoothly that it seems a single drum is carrying the tune.

We walk back to the heart of town alongside the band, catching something extraordinary as they repeat their performance.  I stop at one point and realize I have goose bumps on my arms and legs.  For a moment I have my America back.  I am proud of the conviction and purpose the marchers brought to the day, I am moved by the statements endorsing peace and respect.

I completely understand the intention of the woman walking by us with a large sign asking, “What are you celebrating?”  I get it.  But today, I’m celebrating tumbling kids and guys with chain saws, and a small town that turns out to cheer those who bring hope.

I won’t go to the concert tonight or to the fireworks display; I am content to remember a 4th of July on a human scale.  I’ll make sure the dogs don’t get rattled by the neighbor’s small burst of firecrackers, and remember that we’ve come through tough times before.

“Love … is not a mystery.  It is not poetry, it is not pure, it is not sacred.  Nothing human is.  Love is simply the time you spend loving.  There are no other rules.  That’s it.”

Once again I’ve been knocked sideways by an author and a novel, and once again I am reminded that I actually have not thought every thought I will ever think.  It’s one thing to be out of ideas for the moment, and a far more disturbing thing to think that I’ve thought ’em all, that’s it, no new ideas coming my way.  Inside my head, the same old same old.  Then I read or hear or see something that is delightful, or profound, or terrifying, or comforting, and badda bing, badda boom, the brain is engaged once more.

Today’s brain supplement comes from Rebecca Kaufman, author of The Gunners, a novel about which I had  heard nothing.  I can’t remember how it came to me or how it moved to the top of my pile of books to be read immediately.  The novel is oddly uneventful and understated; the author generously introduces us to her characters , all of whom are friends from a suburb of Buffalo, none of whom lives a particularly dramatic life, and then pretty much steps out of the way.  I would describe Kauffman as an unobtrusive author, a quality that went unnoticed until I found myself unable to put the book down and unable to explain why I was hooked. Nothing wrong with obtrusive; an author’s distinctive voice is generally part of the impact of their work. Salinger is an obtrusive author; Hemingway, McCarthy, Foster Wallace, all distinctly present in every sentence.

I was entirely ready to puzzle through the distinctive impact of reading a compelling book by an author who remains indistinct when I got sidetracked by one of the very few  reviews of The Gunners, this one written by Lily Meyer entitled, “the Gunners seems simple at first but keep reading”.  I had and wondered if Ms. Meyer’s experience had been similar to mine.

Yes, her response to the novel echoed mine, but she quickly asserted that contemporary female writers rarely express emotion so bluntly, making reference to an article by Claire Faye Watkins entitled, “On Pandering”, in which Watkins argues that women are trained to write for men.

“I wanted to write something Cormac McCarthy would like, something Thomas Pynchon would come out of hiding to endorse, something David Foster Wallace would blurb from beyond the grave.”

Meyer also cites Lili Loofborouw’s work in The Virginia Quarterly in which Loofborouw argues that if a novel seems female, readers are unlikely to find it brilliant or noteworthy, and this was where the sidetrack comes in.  Meyer’s point in the review is to admit that she undervalued Kauffman’s novel because the writing seemed simple, and that her  ability to read critically had been undermined by a lifetime of reading with an ear to the voice of the male writer.

I hadn’t considered the distinctive voice to be a characteristic rarely found in work done by female authors, but it’s certainly an idea worth looking at more closely.  My first impulse is to use my own experience as the universal lens, noting that I read a lot of contemporary fiction, almost exclusively the work of contemporary female authors, and, being male, what’s that say about me or them ?

There are two immediate observations to be made. The first is that I like authors who traffic in emotion and the second is that I like authors who make me think.  David Foster Wallace is gone and I’ve been intimidated by Pynchon, but I am waiting for the next McCarthy and the next Kazuo Ishiguro, and the next Paul Beatty.  I am also waiting for the next by Heidi Julavits, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Eleanor Catton, Helen Oyeme, Donna Tart, and now, Rebecca Kauffman.

Here’s a moment in The Gunners that I will find instructive and comforting.  Alice, an indelible, tough, flawed but irrepressible character, has arrived at a wedding having had to put her dog, Finn, down.  Alice confesses that Finn was essentially a bad dog, stubborn, cranky, and, she has to admit, stupid, but, “when the time came, I held his tired gray face in my hands, and I said, You are the perfect dog.  You are perfect.  You can rest now. You were always the perfect dog.”

Simple.  Love is the time we spend loving.  Simple.

“If the only prayer you say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough” – Meister Eckhart (1260-1328).

I’ve written about the central place of gratitude in a life well lived, but haven’t carried the discussion to the expression of thanks.  Unspoken gratitude is an important part of self-reflection and necessary to living relatively free of resentment, but the act of expressing thanks has significance and reveals generosity of spirit in honoring those who have helped us.

So, two stories about thanks that mattered, both of which come about as the result of my wife’s initiative.

My wife is an exceptionally competent person and apparently has been from birth.  These days her expertise is primarily made manifest in her work with dogs and with the people who own them, but she remains as well an inveterate educator, a gifted teacher, intuitive and creative.  Generations of math impaired students have  recovered from math paralysis as she took the time to observe their work thoughtfully in order to find their particular difficulty with the subject.  In earlier careers she was an EMT and an athletic trainer, all of which is to say that she is particularly able to offer varieties of help in exceedingly diverse moments of crisis.

About twenty years ago, she returned home from an early morning dog training session in Santa Paula with a terrible story to tell.  She and our daughter had been driving into the rising sun, aware of the effect glare and intense flickering sunlight could have on drivers when they saw the car they were following begin to weave, then swerve, careening from one set of guard rails to the other, then spinning, rolling and crashing.  As the car began its erratic swerving, she called 911 and reported an accident in the making.  She slowed and put on her flashing emergency lights, alerting the cars behind her and pulled up behind the crash.  When paramedics arrived, she delivered a concise account of the events surrounding the accident and a detailed report on the man’s condition.  Based on her assessment of injury, she thought the driver was unlikely to survive.

I’d seen her leap into action as a trainer and EMT, of course and had been driving on a country road in Ohio years earlier when an accident took place in front of us.  I had still been gaping when she jumped from our car and quickly got to work.  I wasn’t surprised, then, when she told me of her early morning’s challenges.  There was a bit of adrenalin charge left for her even after the long drive home, but for the most part, ho-hum, just another day on the road.

The story I want to tell is about her, obviously, but more particularly about a phone call that came on Christmas Eve.  An unfamiliar voice asked if she had witnessed an accident on the lonely road to Santa Paula.  The driver introduced himself and described the critical care he had received following the accident; he had been placed in an induced coma for more than a month before much of the surgical repair could take place.  He had been driving home from a twelve-hour shift and had fallen asleep, coming to weeks after the accident had occurred; he had no idea of what had happened.  All he knew was that my wife had moved quickly enough to allow him to recover and enjoy another holiday with his family.

He had called to wish her a Merry Christmas and to thank her for helping him.  Not a big deal in the largest scale of things, but hugely important for him, for her, for his family and for ours.

Constant and kind readers will also remember that all of our dogs have been therapy dogs, trained to adapt to virtually any situation in order to be able to visit patients needing critical care in any sort of facility.  Step on their tails?  Not a problem.  Have a juicy hamburger on your tray?  Won’t touch it.  Hooked up with wires and tubes?  They find a way in for a snuggle without dislodging anything important.  These dogs have pretty much seen it all and loved it all.

They have other jobs as well as they are working dogs and often travel some distance to compete in dog agility trials or to act as ambassadors of goodwill from the canine kingdom.  It happened that my wife had packed them up and taken them to Long Beach, a considerable distance from our home.  They were to meet and greet anyone wandering by the border collie booth in the hope that those considering adopting a border collie would have had the chance to meet a couple up close and personal.  My wife was chatting with a passerby when two women approached, each teary and hardly able to choke out a greeting.  They had seen the dogs and came to give thanks.

Some years earlier, these very dogs had visited a hospital and spent a joyful half hour with an elderly woman who was particularly fond of beasts such as outs.  It was a good visit, similar to the thousands of visits they had made.  The women who had approached my wife in Long Beach told her that she recognized the dogs and vividly remembered their visit with their mother.  It had been hard for them to see their mother in pain as she neared the end of her life. She died no more than twenty minutes after the dogs had wandered to the next room, but they had seen their mother smile for the first time in months, soften, relax as the dogs competed for a place near a petting hand.  It meant the world to them that their mother’s last hour had included peace and joy.

They hadn’t known how to contact my wife or how to thank her, but thanks arrived, and those thanks matter as it happened that those great dogs died too young and too soon.  Now we remember them, and we remember the gratitude that they earned.

A few months ago I belabored the notion that it’s never too late to do better; let’s assume it’s never too late to give thanks.

The NFL Draft captures the attention of 45 MILLION viewers, draws more than 70,000 people who attend in person, lasts for three days, and occupies the hearts and minds of the nation’s most erudite students of sports from the moment the Eagles hoisted the Lombardi Trophy to the moment Roger Goodell chuffs into the microphone to kick off the festivities.

Let’s think about this for a moment … starting with the 45 MILLION, many of whom  admittedly start out watching the draft but fall away somewhere around hour five.  Still, that’s an extraordinary number of people watching what is essentially football bingo.  Just to provide some perspective, slightly more than 18 million tuned in to see the Astros defeat the Dodgers in the last game of the World Series, the Cavs and Warriors averaged about 20 million last season, fewer fans than watched the year before, when the Cavs took the championship, almost 8 million follow professional bowling, and a mere 2.4 million ponied up $100.00 apiece to watch Floyd Mayweather fight Manny Pacquiao.

There are some interesting questions in any draft season, as there are this year.  Premium quarterbacks establish the success of a franchise and there is some doubt that this year’s crop has the goods.  The top four or five this season are decidedly less promising than some in other years, but, hey, someone has to take them, and at least two will go in the first round if not in the first five picks. Case in point -Josh Rosen. Jim Mora, controversial  former coach at UCLA, tossed Rosen, one of the top two quarterbacks in the draft and his former QB, under a bus by suggesting that as a privileged intellectual millennial, his passion for the game has to be questioned.  Rosen may not be a tough-town quarterback like Johnny Unitas or Brett Favre, but the NFL has welcomed a host of qbs from snappy backgrounds, all of whom could be modeling for Ralph Lauren in the off-season.  If the charge is that Rosen is too smart to stay interested in football, which is what Mora seems to have charged, the best quarterbacks on the field right now would be Chris Leak, now in the CFL,  or Terrelle Pryor, both of whom had single digit scores on the Wonderlic test.

So that’s interesting.

Then there’s Saquon Barkley.  Barkley, Penn State’s running back extraordinaire, is a true freak of nature and the most exciting football phenom since Barry Sanders.  Picking up almost 4000 yards and 43 touchdowns is noteworthy, but anyone who saw Barkley play knows that this guy can bust into daylight with or without an opening.  Rumor has it that Penn State really only had two running plays, which, if you have a Saquon Barkley, is really all you need.  This year’s hot question is whether an NFL franchise will use a top pick on Barkley, knowing the half-life of running backs is about two years and remembering that in the last two seasons top running backs came from the middle of the draft.  Several teams could conceivably pass on the most talented athlete in the draft.

So that’s interesting.

In red-hot franchise news, The Cleveland Browns,perennial doormats of the league, have a bunch of nifty picks and could conceivably jump-start a franchise that has been mired in misery.  The NY Football Giants face the inevitable replacement of Eli Manning and may chose to use their highest pick to land one of those three quarterbacks of questionable value.  Do the Giants take a last shot at a playoff with Manning or shoot the moon for the next franchise qb?  How many quarterbacks do the Broncos need this year?  The Jets … ’nuff said.  The Cards have a plan to keep Sam Bradford on the field for 16 games next season; it involves adamantium and homeopathic treatments in which his knees and ankles will be routinely hit with soft mallets.  Oh, so they could need to draft as well.

That’s pretty much it, so one wonders what will draw the millions to the event once again.  It’s been a while since the end of the football season, but colleges will be playing their spring games at about the same time, the NBA and NHL are starting to shape up the playoff slots, and baseball is in full swing (as it were).  Any excuse for a party?  Makes sense, at least on the sports bar and giant tv screen level.

This may be mere cynicism, or more likely the annual squealing of a fan whose franchise will be drafting nothing but interior linemen, but I suggest that the draft allows us, the uninitiated and unpaid fans, the luxury of second-guessing the analytics guys, the scouts, the coaches, the trainers, and team doctors.  I’ve already mentioned the Browns once; their draft history is so appalling that any of us could certainly have done a better job.  Will they self-destruct again this year?  45 Million people will be tuning in to watch it happen.  Want to make a football junkie drool in anticipation of juicy controversy?  Just trot out the list of top draft quarterback flops; it’s a catnip canape for fans of all ages.

Ryan Leaf (2nd overall),  Jamarcus Russell (1st overall), Akili Smith (3rd overall), David Klinger (6th overall), Tim Couch (1st overall), Joey Harrington (3rd overall), David Carr (1st overall), Vince Young (3rd overall), Jeff George (1st overall),

There are more serious issues to be considered in these parlous times; perhaps brains could be employed in service to other more pressing humanitarian efforts, but, no. Apparently we will once again clamor to see young men, only recently mud spattered and bloody, striding to the stage in thousand dollar suits to shake Commissar Goodell’s hand, jam on the ill-fitting team cap so that ears are flattened and spread, and flap a Cleveland Browns jersey with feigned glee.

If only there were some mechanism that allowed us to check the results with a quick scan of a screen, say, or even on the phone we carry in our pockets.  It’s essential, of course, to have the results in real-time as there are only three months between the draft and the first exhibition games.  I suppose we’ll all just have to settle in for the three-day marathon.marathon starting on April 26th.

Actually not my baby , or likely anyone else’s, a fiercely independent and highly intelligent friend from my boyhood/adolescence sent on a packet of letters I had written her more than fifty years ago.  She was my best friend’s girl, but one of the few people I trusted with my secrets, and so, I wrote her, more frequently than I had remembered;.

What I find in reading the letters, almost all of which were written when I was a junior in boarding school, is that I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a friend willing to endure an endless stream of self-absorbed flotsam, and that in retrospect, I was a person I don’t like very much.

I would describe that person as jejune-superficial, naive, clueless, with an appalling insensitivity to those about him.  It seems I was also thoroughly deluded in my conviction that my letters bubbled with wit and wisdom.  The letters are abominably smarmy and self-congratulatory, and, worst of all, fatuous.  I fancied myself something of a writer but writhe now as I read my clumsy attempts to imitate the writers I admired.

Bouts of writhing arrive fairly frequently as I catch myself being myself, particularly as I  veer into grandiosity, but fortunately I experience the full-body writhe only intermittently.  I often think of a little known film, Defending Your Life, which presented Albert Brooks as a fussy, fearful advertising man killed in a car crash, stuck in Judgment City until his life has been evaluated by looking at video footage of his behavior on earth.  Now that is writhe-worthy.  Happily, footage of my life is unavailable for distribution and I am spared much evidence of my foibles and failures.

When such evidence does arrive, as it did with those letters, after the writhing has subsided, I have a chance to see myself, perhaps not exactly as others see me, but with some approximation of accuracy.  It’s not always pretty, hardly ever without some regret, but in that moment I’m given an opportunity to re-size myself, change my perspective, and fish around in the slag heap of my rarely used attributes to find a sense of humor about my inflated sense of self-importance.

OK, Humor.  Check.  This is the necessary step in moving beyond fascination with my own past to the better and more transformative appreciation of kindnesses done me by a host of folks who had lives of their own to patch together.  I am not sure where gratitude goes when it slips away, but I know that my operating system starts to run rough without it.  In my experience, there is an interesting and unexpected inversion in the gratitude self-pity formula.  Whereas it is commonly believed that we can easily absorb a thousand compliments but dissolve when encountering a single criticism, I find that the grumbleverse has little hold on me if I can muster even shards of gratitude.

My son’s middle school had a motto worth repeating.  “When in doubt, go with gratitude.”

So, I look at that pack of letters, consider the care and effort it took to read them, respond to them, save them for a half-century, and return them to me with a kind note reminding me of our friendship, and I am nudged, once again, into grateful appreciation of the people who have been so generous in their kindness to me.  Unlike self-pity, which goes nowhere, gratitude not only provides perspective but also jump-starts my resolution to pay it forward.  While I still have a reasonable idea of my place in the universe, it makes sense for me to lend a hand when I can.

It will seem I digress, but I do have a point yet to express as I remember a documentary recently aired as part of a public television fund-raising marathon.  It’s You I Like is a tribute to Fred Rogers, an authentically kind and decent man with a rare capacity for honesty and courage and an appreciation of children as children that we will likely not see again.  Any of his observations are best heard in his own voice, of course, but I’ll pass one along as the coda of this piece:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

I’m grateful to the helpers.  Even in scary times, they are all about us.  I’m feeling grateful today.  Maybe I’ll have a chance to be a helper.