Well, I should say, House.  Because this House was alive, a real, bona-fide living House.

In addition to that, this House lived in an envelope.

That’s right.  An envelope.

(It is a buyer’s market, right?)

At any rate, I’d been out of work for some time, and as a favor, the House had hired me to paint a new coat for its exterior.

Except, instead of paint, the House had asked specifically for poetry.

So, I was writing, in very large and tall letters of what appeared to be a scratchy, knockoff version of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies script the following stanza:

Find a snake in the grass,

cut him back with the lawn.

Though, he’d make a good pet

if you cut him back young.

Lovely, isn’t it, just lovely.

For whatever reason, that little stanza of near nonsense has haunted me, today, until I was finally forced to write out a full poem. If that’s indeed what I’ve written.

I mean, it has nagged, nagged, nagged me.

I finally gave in.  About an hour, ago. 

I hope you somewhat like it.  At the moment, in case you’re wondering, it remains untitled. 

Find a snake in the grass

cut him back with the lawn.

Though he’d make a good pet

if you cut him back young.

He’d feed on your whispers

at the end of each day.

If he can’t have the yard,

he’ll take the shed and the rake.

He won’t need a lot;

he’s accustomed to lack.

Just make sure he sees You

much more than your back.

And dear God, never touch him,

don’t let him curl up your arm,

don’t let him smile at your smile,

don’t let him warm

up to you or your family.

That’s an old trick of his.

Trust your eyes, first, then yourself.

And remember that this

is above all, a snake, in the grass

on your lawn,

and even if you did

cut him back while he’s young,

the whole point of a pet

is to know who is The Master.

Give a pet love with distance

or else it’s disaster.

And if, by this point, a pet

snake seems a bit much.

Do me a favor, then,

and keep your yard cut.

 I, of course, didn’t get this far in the dream. I woke up (rather, was awakened by Max, who was a rude dog this morning, if I do say so myself). I only managed to get that first stanza “painted.”

So, I, sadly, do not know if the House even liked what I was doing. I’m not even sure if I liked what I was doing.

Amanda, at least, was kind enough to say it was, and I quote, “[quite] Shel Silverstein of [me].”  I will wear that as a small token of genuine appreciation for what I know to be a true artist’s spirit, of which I possess, and in spades.

 Rhyme and meter…well, they don’t belong in the game of spades. Or hearts, or Gin Rummy, or Old Maid.

 Now, deal.

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• I am 33 years old. And I’m OK with it.
• I had a great birthday, hobnobbed with artists, all my favorite people around me, and a chocolate cake that could create world peace. And,
• I didn’t do anything I had to apologize for the morning after, although there were some broken dishes in the middle of the street before the night was over. (And none of the guests were Greek, either).

It was a weekend full of good things, good, true things. And despite this lingering head cold, I actually felt great, the whole night long. Because for the first time in my life, I truly felt like a grown-up. Well, no, more than that:  I felt like a man.

And it didn’t feel tacky or gross.

It felt…right.

For years, I’ve struggled with my sexual identity, specifically where my sex was concerned: I never wanted to be a man. Or a Man.

What I think I realized this weekend, though, is that there are many kinds of men (and Men) in this world, and my problem was in trying to be everyone else’s man, instead of my own.

But, Friday night, I became my own Man. And I like him. I’m quite happy with him, actually.

Oh, chocolate cake, what can't you fix?

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I like who I am becoming.

And saying that, aloud, is wonderfully freeing.

Because I’m not sure that many of us like who we are, at all.

I can understand that. I think we all experience that; isn’t it mandatory in order to get through the seventh grade, or something, to hate yourself?  I’m thankful that I’m coming through to the other side of it, though, because there’s not a whole lot of good that comes out of hating yourself, or keeping so many walls up.

…except poetry, I guess. But. I’d argue that it probably isn’t really good poetry.

It takes an awful lot of energy to keep so many walls standing. I used to do it, though. I waited in fear of my coming Battle of Jericho because I’d built those walls on purpose. They had a real reason for being built: to keep everyone else out.

Until, I suppose, this past weekend, when I decided, you know, if push comes to shove, I’d much rather bring my own walls down, instead of letting someone else.

That’s a big step to come to terms with, and No, I didn’t come up with all this courage in the past three days…it’s been a process for the last two years. Since becoming single.

I didn’t bring my first wall down, alone, you know. Much as I hate admitting that.

This isn't going to be good.

But, I was damn sure not going to let the rest of them be taken down without permission. And that decision is what pushed me along this sudden path to manhood. A path I think I finally found good footing on this weekend, and that’s all.

That’s all I’m trying to say.

I’m not sure, I can only guess, but I think perhaps I’ve spent this first part of my life as my mother. Now, I feel like I’m changing, and that would mean, spending the next part of my life as my father. It’s a hazardous guess, I’m aware of that, but it makes some bizarre sense to me.

I know my mother believed that the unexamined life is the same as being without a man, in other words, unacceptable. My father, I would say, believes there is no such thing as an unexamined life. Which puts me somewhere in the middle of thinking that Love, and the act of it, is both life and its final exam.

Or, rather, by the time I get to the end of this second part of my life that will be my truism. At the moment, I consider Love to be that rare thing that can still exist even if you don’t believe in it.

You can have love without giving it. You can know love without believing in it. You can love without being loved back.

Sometimes, it’s a lonely thing. And sometimes, it’s like being Jesus.

I bet no less than fifteen people said this to me, last weekend: Wow, you’re 33. That’s how old Jesus was when he was crucified.

I’m not sure even Miss Manners would have an appropriate response to that.

Above all, I hope it’s not an implication re: my 33^rd year. I’m just shy of having all trees in my line of sight cut down, just in case. (I also will do my best not to befriend any one from North Africa named Simon).

I know it was meant as conversation fodder, some twisted style of joking, and I carried it off as that, up until the fifteenth time it was said to me. By then, I’d managed to work my way through half a bottle of Moscato Spumante, and the last thing on my mind was What Would Jesus Do?

I was on the very verge of trying to Noel Coward the poor young man who’d been Number 15, when I stopped. The cake had been brought out, and I was itching to get my mouth on chocolate. I’m sure whatever I had been prepared to say would have been wit-worthy.

But, though the comment has dried up and away, the residue of fifteen separate people having the urge to say the exact same thing fifteen times to me, has settled into a small corner in the back of my mind.

Jesus, whether you like him or not, or follow him or what, was still a real person, a Man, who died in a most horrible manner at the age of 33. And that shouldn’t happen to anyone. When the dust settled, the literal dust, what was left, was a life that offers us, even now in this day and age, a prime example of Love. Compassion. Mercy.

But, mostly, Love.

Start with yourself, first.

He left a legacy of words, which, in my book, is about the highest honor a Man can have. But, he also left a legacy of common sense, of humanity, of decency.

And that, I can relate to.

Instead of throwing myself into another’s arms, what would happen if I opened mine out for someone, this time? Rather than desperately seek for What I Think I’m Owed, would it be so bad to “pay off some of my debts, or trespasses, to others?” Why hold anger against those I don’t like, for whatever reason? Would it kill me to forgive? Is it out-of-fashion to be a decent human being in the 21^st Century? Out of vogue to have common sense?

Would it really be so bad to be like Jesus?

I don’t think so.

Of course, I’m probably going to have to hold onto that glass of Moscato, but that still leaves a hand free to break down another wall or two.

Hell, that’d be a good toast, so let’s make it one: Here’s to going one wall at a time.

And, maybe, two on Sundays.

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He won’t drink it if it’s not Absolute, he informs me.

Next to John is a nameless man, hands stained with paint,

who came in with him.

He’s on the phone apologizing for a septic tank that’s backed up.

He’d installed it last month.

To my left is another John, white and beardless

and old and leathered.

He’s driven a truck the last twelve years.

Half the time while drunk, he says,

but he’s never had a ticket, he says,

and that’s the trick, he says,

but he never says to what.

I’m in the middle but not in between, and

that’s  important. They’ve got the radio

on: Koko Taylor, and I’m halfway through a second beer.

The bartender’s eyes are sagged from marijuana.

Last weekend he said he jumped off a bridge

for no reason except that it was there.

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I imagine I’ve been put right on the cusp of being completely forgotten. I could hardly blame you. I almost forgot myself.

Insert appropriate Elton John song here.

First, my laptop (which oddly rarely found its way to my lap) was struck by lightning. This is not , I’m sure you’ll agree, all that conducive to a blogger’s life.

I was still able to access my poetry, scripts, musings, etc. but was unable to connect to the Internet. The techies were no help either, over the phone, as on their end of things it registered as “connected.”

Heck, even on my end, the blame thing was saying “connected.” The truth, though, was it wasn’t. Connected.

Then, as tends to happen, time gets the better of us. I got caught up in this drama camp that I direct each year, and it is a wonderful, all-encompassing event…but leaves little room for other things.

I get so encapuslated with the camp that I’ve been known to neither sleep nor eat for several days in a row: the camp occurs over three weeks, involves high school theatre students from all over the country. They write, produce, and star in their own musical. I’m only in charge of the production side of things. This year we had, roughly, nine days to stage a four-act musical with 52 campers.

Blog, anyone?

I finally couldn’t take it anymore…I mean once you start sharing pieces of yourself on the WWW, you kinda don’t know what to do with yourself when you can’t.  So, I broke down and purchased an Acer Netbook, which is both a) a novelty of great purport, and b) a new aggravation for my thick, nimble-less fingers.  Also, c) the screen is taking some adjusting to, but d) I’m more happy than frustrated…

This post might not make much sense, and I’ve avoided my typical obsession with over-the-top details and analysis…but I was too eager to wait until later…I had to post something.

So, to compensate for my usual memoir-antics, I’ll leave you with a brief story and a poem. Both of which, I’m sure, need an edit.

This afternoon, my second-oldest nephew, A.K., insisted that I take him to the church parking lot so he could show off his bike-riding skills. He just turned 5, and because of the camp, I was unable to attend his birthday party. I was more than happy to watch him ride his bike. He was thrilled, and told me, more than once, more than, like, eight times, that he no longer had training wheels…he’d been on a “real bike” now, for ten days, he said.

Close enough.

While sloshing through small patches of water that had collected in the lower parts of the parking lot (it had rained all morning), he began to get a little thirsty. I had a bottle of lemon-flavored water with me; it’s a treat-for-the-road that U.L. offers me, every Sunday. I’m not sure why it’s becoming so steadfast a tradition, but at any rate, I was grateful for having a bottle with me today.

A.K. pulled up, quick as a bee, skidded to a halt, pleased with the sound the small back tire made…and reached out for the bottle of water, claiming he was in “real, real need for gas.” That’s what he called the water.

He took a long, gigantic swig of it, handed it back to me and said, “Thanks, it tastes like the good kind of Airheads.” (A candy I was not aware he ate that often).  Then, he got back on his bike, prepared to take off, turned back to me and said, “That there’s good water. I’m going to need to get more of it. It’s a lot better than what my daddy gives me anyway.”

“What does your daddy give you?”

And his answer was one I doubt I could have ever been ready for.

“Pickled sausage.”

I tried to get him to explain in full, rich detail but all I managed to get out of him was that pickled sausage was nasty, and not on his “wake-me-up” stuff list.

Kids, huh.

And now, for something entirely unrelated, a poem:

I

Every now and then a Word pursues me.

When it does, I run — either back to bed, or

to the basement, with my books — but, feel free,

I mean this!, to go, do, whatever you can before

your Word catches up to you. Because, then,

legs will be useless, fingers cracked, hands spun.

The zeal that comes when Words pursue can

easily rend the burning white from any sun.

II

I think language is chief among Horrors. Its reach

such a precipice that it has no Scale, no Height.

And, what, exactly, can you say, without Speech?

How would you sleep, if you couldn’t know Night?

III

A few races are fine when you’re young enough–

the 100-yard Dash from his bleeding Heart –

other Words, though, won’t surrender a syllable,

unless you give up the Whole for the sake of a Part.

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Caffeine: my new frenemy.

I guess it’s just “what I do” before I teach class, to get in the “zone,” with today’s youth. I think that’s what I tell myself: it’s caffeine; you’ll need that. These students have never lived without computer access. Email was “old-hat” by the time they were born. You’ve got to keep up with them. Caffeine is your friend. 

But, I rarely get the kick I need from the caffeine in a Diet Coke. Mostly, I just get gas.

Today, right in the middle of my lecture on trochaic feet in poetry, I burped. It was so long it was almost a sentence.

It was also loud. I had no idea I had it in me to sound “like one of the boys.”

I do.

I scared myself, though. I didn’t sense a burp coming, ahead of time. I mean, somehow, this entire summer term, I’ve managed to drink a Diet Coke, every morning, and control the acquired gas that often accompanies the carbonation.

That changed, at 8:49 AM.

And so did something else: my belief that every person in this country is full of good intentions. (Well, to tell the truth, they didn’t happen at the same time. I was just being dramatic. To be more exact, the change in “my belief that every person in the country is full of good intentions” occurred, closer to, like, 7:50 AM).

I’d never noticed this before. I guess I was always more interested in putting money in the vending machine (again, it’s not really an interest of mine as much as a necessity if I actually intend on getting the Diet Coke). But, I rarely looked at the slot where your coins go other than to make sure I wasn’t dropping coins on the floor.

Because that’s a real hassle, isn’t it?  Never have I loved a nickel so much as when it has rolled out of reach, under the behemoth that is the Coke Machine in the lounge.

For some reason this morning, though, I paid a bizarre amount of attention to my ritual of depositing coin after coin down Herman’s throat. (Herman, that’s his name, I pretend I’m feeding him, and that he doesn’t like anyone else but me. I get mad when others feed him, too – it’s the little things that get me through my day. God knows, I owe Herman).

Anyway, so when I’d placed my last coin, it was a dime, into the slot, I noticed a flashing sign, if you will, underneath the slot. Right below it. Black screen with those menacing red dots that light up, you know?  I hate those flashing signs the most.

They are never consistent, those flashing signs: sometimes their shapes are a jumble of lower-case and capital letters. That drives me crazy. And sometimes…sometimes! they look like the shapes of numbers that are trying to “pass” as letters. We used to do that on our calculators, in sixth grade, on the old interface that calculators used to have, remember? You could type in 55378008 and spell “boobless.” Mrs. Cotten was never amused at that. I only did it once and never again. I couldn’t; she took my calculator. She probably still has it, too.

Yeah, she's looking at you. And she's not happy.

Now, here I am, twenty-some-odd years later and I’m standing in front of a flashing sign, with those red lights, making me think of fifth grade, which I didn’t appreciate.

It read: “Press.” I was intrigued, but not shocked.

Then, immediately after, it read: “Bend down.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen that last part. Because I wasn’t even sure what it meant, exactly, so I bought another Diet Coke, and sure enough, after the last coin, this one was a nickel, was inserted…there flashed the “instructions.” Again.

I figured out that that must be what they were. Instructions. Telling me to press and then bend down.

Press and Bend Down.

I don’t know if it was the heat (it was over 90, again, today, and we’re still a week or two away from True Summer), or if it was the fact that I’m actually adjusting to teaching at 8:00 AM in the morning – perish the thought – but I was immediately offended at this vending machine. (Herman, why?)

I know how to get a blame Diet Coke out of one, thank you. I don’t need to be told to Press and then Bend Down.

My first thought was this flashing sign was the result of some lazy idiot, one afternoon, who stood around trying to think of a way to squeeze a few dollars out of our lawsuit-riddled capitalist economy. Though, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how one would go about suing Coke for “negligence for withholding liquid despite the obvious.” I mean, surely to god, they’d know how to retrieve a soft drink from a vending machine.

They’d hear it roll down the chute if nothing else. They’d have to be deaf not to.

That’s when I finally got the full foot all the way into my mouth. Obviously, this is why the machine flashes a sign. Right? I told myself that as a means to explain away the ridiculousness of having a sign flash at all, on a vending machine.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no deaf professors in that department, either.

I unscrewed the cap off, took a long, satisfying sip, and sat down to finish grading a few papers. But, I couldn’t push my first thought far enough to the side of my brain, and trust me if you’ve already gotten idiocy on the brain, grading Comp. II papers isn’t going to help you much.

Because I knew, I had convinced myself, already, that there was another, probably more genuine and legally-bound reason for such “instructions” to be progammed into a vending machine. Poor Herman, the number of idiots he must have to put up with everyday. The ADA was just a cover; what Coke was disclaiming was the fool who would think he’d been robbed because he paid for a Coke but couldn’t find it.

There are dumb people all around us, and somebody somewhere would have found a way to take advantage of this had a flashing sign not been ready and waiting to alert the consumer that it would take just a little more than one arm’s elbow grease from putting a few quarters in the machine to get their Coke, or Dasani water.

They were going to have to bend down, too. (Is knee grease a term, as well, or is it just disgusting to think about?)

Other signs own up to this testament on every product. I know you’ve seen them. They’re both a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America today, and also, they’re funny.

Board games like Life and Monopoly, are forever warning us that game pieces are for the game not our mouths. Coffee filters are constantly reminding us that the plastic wrap around the filters is “not a toy;” toilet paper’s kind enough to tell us this, too, and further, that if we put the plastic wrap on our heads, we will probably suffocate to death. 

Baby seats are doubling up, more than ever, on their duties to make sure we read on the box that “children have to come out of the car” with us by “unbuckling the straps that have been securely placed under the child’s arms” when we get to Wal-Mart; they can’t stay in the backseat, alone, even if you’ve got a portable DVD player. Hair dryers are absolutely dead-set against the idea of blowing your hair into a perfect Farrah Fawcett, or chicken wing, while bathing. 

A hair style and supper.

My favorite, still to this day, is the simple, age-old phrase: Some assembly required. (I like it so much because it’s an equal-opportunity instruction…found on boxes ranging from Big Wheels to Lego castles to Target bookshelves that look like ladders when assembled - and it’s also a little sweet in the way it offers its suggestion. Only “some” assembly is required; it’s like they attempted to take a small amount of pity on us, the consumers, and put some of it together, but then gave up after a few minutes. Just like we do when trying to learn how to program our DVR).  

I’m not the first to ask this, I know, but I bet I’m the first to put it the whole question in bold: Where did “common sense” go?

You get 5 bonus points if you guess Corporate America…and 5 more, if you say it’s in the top desk drawer of that little man in the back corner whose job it is to design the Warning labels about the plastic wrap, game pieces, and hair dryers.

And I bet his name is Herman. It’s just a feeling I have.

Or, maybe that’s gas, again.

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It's a cabal all right. Against me.

My mind…it often goes into Mach 7 when I attempt to procrastinate (by the way, the word “procrastinate,” itself, is ironic – I mean, by the time you write the word out, you could have done something already – it’s not a word for the lazy), and the only thing I can physically do to make it stop is to sleep (even though my dreams are usually full of anger when I do that – last night, for instance…ouch!), but if I don’t stop it, from time to time, it just runs all days with thought after thought after thought, and so what I’m about to do is a little experiment I engage in, every now and again: I’m going to pause, take a deep breath, and type out every single thought I have in my head right at this moment in an attempt to empty my brain.

Because I really want to take a nap…without feeling guilty about it.

Ok? So, here I go:

How on earth do you wash a Fedora…pancakes…the way Max sleeps with one open, staring…the other day when the tornado siren went off some student in the hall asked if North Korea was attacking and I was impressed because he didn’t seem the type to be that aware of the world around him, his clothes made that suggestion…why a city has the name of Scooba…Old Man Frank came by the house yesterday to tell me I’d left the water hose on and flooded his driveway, he’s an old man with scoliosis but my god he can knock loudly…that time I brushed my teeth with Cortizone-10…my glasses are broken – well the leg fell off but still it’s going to cost money to fix it better than I did with hot glue…apple juice gives me heartburn and so do onions and so do Tums which is ironic since they’re supposed to fix heartburn…I really like sweet potato pie…why can’t I start back working on my new script, I think it has potential, and I sometimes feel guilty doing other types of writing but Gary tells me just write everyday so I do, this blog if nothing else…why won’t I finish this other script I have because I know the deadline is looming…I’ve only once seen an actual loom and the word loom makes me think of a loon…Smoking Loon is a type of red wine…I’m allergic to red wine…how is too much water bad for you…I’ve switched mayonnaise brands, U.L. is shocked…I wish I’d planted those irises deeper in the dirt…where would I put a bicycle if I had one…I hate my cell phone…at some point I’m going to need new tennis shoes…my ankle still hurts…I am still angry because this morning I was almost finished with a new blog and then I hit some button and the whole damn thing was erased…what it would be like if I could magically freeze people and take off their clothes and then move them somewhere else and then unfreeze them and laugh at how embarrassed they’d be…how people can eat warm mayonnaise is beyond me…why I don’t have any pet fish, they’d be so much easier to handle until the cats found them…why some doctors don’t use anesthesia…I’m very glad my dentist did even if now I have a new health concern called synethesia and it feels like ice-cold water is running down my chin and neck several times a day…if people could float indefinitely…what would constitute a magic umbrella…would having sex with a centaur be bestial and illegal…why John Mark Karr would lie about JonBenet Ramsey…how to love through pain, and mean it…how do I manage to memorize all my lines each play I’m in…what would happen if I could disappear…how many people would come to my funeral…why I drink so much…if we’re all hiding something, what then are we all compensating for…why trust is so hard to get and so easy to lose, and doesn’t that imply a serious flaw in the nature of trust…what does God do when he rests…do I have cancer, or West Nile, or Swine Flu, or diabetes, or RLS…why can’t I focus on losing weight…how upset I get when the media overlooks the devastation of Katrina in Mississippi, even now four years later..should I give Olive Garden another chance…why does gorgonzola taste so bad when you melt it…I cannot abide any more of the heat…I cannot stand it when I sweat without purpose…should we build a bigger fence for Max…why can’t I find a handwriting that I approve of…when did I develop this paranoia…will I ever write a good play…how much of your identity is in your name…how many people did I upset this week…what would happen if I always told the truth…why are there so many bad spellers…why don’t people read anymore…what happened to conjugating verbs…how did Latin die…why do I have to have a favorite color, or food, or anything at all really…what will my next car be…why am attached to the name Cutter…I’m still mourning Bea Arthur’s death, but I’m glad we still have Angela Landsbury for now…how can one face death…what is a timing belt and how do I find it…who was the first person to stain glass…why do I have a desire to be famous…I’m not sure there’s such a thing as compromise, one will always retain the power…does anyone ever really forgive…is my first cat, Aristophanes, mad at me for leaving her at U.L.’s…I hate doing laundry…I can’t believe I’m almost 33…I’m afraid I’m losing words…what happens if I go crazy…I don’t like orange Powerade…why don’t I speak better French…why do I always pretend everything…I take back what I thought a minute ago, I think I may be partial to blue and deep reds…I hate the word “cubicles”…a young boy yelled at me one day from across Main Street and said, “It’s raining gayness today!” and I yelled back, “Well, we needed the rain, didn’t we?”…I need to buy more nose strips, for my apnea…what is it about men in uniform…why don’t I approve of steel top roofs, especially green ones…some days are so beautiful I think to myself, if I have to die, let it be on a day like this…I do not want to be put in the ground, though; I want to be in a crypt above it…I’m glad that even in my darkest days, I still believe in God…why can’t I bathe all day…I’d like to thank everyone that I’ve ever met…I can’t stand it when I go to the hair salon and they spritz my hair instead of shampooing it, that is a pet peeve of mine…sometimes I use room spray as cologne…was Jean Harlowe a more tragic case than Jayne Mansfield…

Whew…and just think, I didn’t even get to the part where I’ve invented a new form of poetry that I call a “tri-ku.” It’s a re-constituted, inverted version of a haiku, in three stanzas, each one goes 7-5-7.  I’ll leave you an example of one.  We’ll talk about it later, don’t worry. Each one is based on my belief that there are nine universal truths.

The Ancient Art of the Written Word.

Universal Truth #1: Berth

Other people would have left.
They might have laughed.
No, no they would have, I’m sure.

And not because of your face,
or indifference,
they didn’t care how you were,

All they would care about was
that your smile had flaws
and that your bite had no teeth.

Speaking of teeth…I can’t wait to tell you about Rasputin. The Kitten Who Lived and Had Teeth.

That’ll have to be after my nap, though.

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You might find that ironic for an actor, even more so for an educator. But, it’s still the truth.

Bang, bang, you shot me down.

It wasn’t anything I ever really noticed until a few years ago. I began to realize that my Nana was fascinated by the frequency with which I used my hands to animate my conversation. She would look less at me and more at my gesturing.

Over time, I became so concerned with how I might physcially be telling my story that I began to grow flustered at the dinner table. I didn’t know how not to use my hands.

As is my way and tendency, I began to obsess over excessive hand usage soon after.

It was a quiet thing, this staring that Nana did (does; I still struggle with it) to my hands, and, as you might have guessed, it has now become a habit of my own: to notice how often people use their hands to exemplify their points, even when it’s not necessary.

Like, the man at the four-way stop, yesterday, who flipped me off.  (Although I suppose one could argue that that is necessary. But, I would have to counter with, No, it isn’t. No one ever gets the Four-Way Stop Rule, right, anymore. And on top of that, it’s actually a five-way stop. That’s right, a five-way stop).

For Nana, gentlemen didn’t need to use their hands for support. Their word was strong enough. I think she sees it as a sign of weakness, perhaps, that succeeding generations need more and more stimuli to keep them engaged. That’s a point to consider, indeed, but for some of us, it’s just a natural extension of our physical selves to use our appendages for emphasis.

She’s a picture of Victorian essence, though, and that I respect.

Even if her essence has made me somewhat self-conscious, and thus, critical.

We often hold others accountable for what we fail at ourselves, don’t we? I can’t not think less of someone who does that very thing I do, that I don’t like in myself. At least, not initially.

All this and over hands. Silly, huh?

But, not a new idea.  I’m sure there are other Nanas the world over who carry such social concerns, tucked right beneath the handkerchief kept so tightly under their wristwatch bands or heirloom bracelets.

The problem for me, ultimately, is in finding something else for them to do, when I talk, if gesturing is a weakness in men. It’s like I’ve given my hands permission to think for themselves, and that, believe you me, gets me in more trouble than I can safely admit to here.

It doesn’t have to be a significant form of trouble either (or even have to involve anyone else). What it does, though, is divide my thinking, and sometimes with less than desirable results. Today, I went home, for example, to eat lunch. I stood in the kitchen scraping out the last of that delicious olive tapenade that Amanda made for the party last night, with a cut-up tomato, fresh from the garden, and I decided to do something I rarely do.

This is the lost shaker of salt.

I decided to add salt. (If you’re going to add salt, though, it is perfectly acceptable to do so with either a slice of tomato or a piece of watermelon).

I reached, without thinking, for the white salt shaker that was sitting on top of the microwave, with a fleeting realization that that, of all the available counter space in the kitchen, was an odd place to put the white salt shaker. All the same, I brought it over to the sink and raising it above my delectable slice of tomato, I shook some salt onto it.

No salt came out.

I shook it again. Still, nothing.

I was getting more and more irritated when I realized two very important things: 1) We don’t have a white salt shaker, and 2) it was, instead, the plastic insert that goes in the bottom of the food processor, which had been washed and was sitting in the drain beside the sink, drying.

Stupid hands. Just making assumptions, and in my own kitchen. (Of course, why the insert was sitting on top of the microwave – oh, never mind). 

The fools. My hands.

Maybe I’m just too dramatic. The length of a finger, the crack of a knuckle, the ability to point, to wave, to applaud. I guess I can’t just look at a hand as a hand, I mean, not to see it as a hand…I look at it and I see the ability to know God a little closer (not just through prayer, but through creation).

I can build worlds with these hands using nothing but twenty-six letters. And judging by the sore spot on my thumb, I can also attempt to construct a 8×8 foot flat, down at the theater.

Aren’t hands often the first to show signs of age? If so, then, well, why not? Building worlds take a lot out of a person. Mine, for instance, are growing chafed and calloused. I look at them, right this second, for instance, as they skate over the keyboard, and I’m a little sad but mostly impressed. What these hands have done. The good and the bad…it’s still impressive. (Take a look at your own, and you’ll see your own history…read it and memorize it).

Because hands can do everything but lie.

After my first class, this morning, I sat in the lounge and flipped through the rest of the textbook. We’re about to begin our abbreviated, quick-speed run-through of fiction this week. I wasn’t sure, still not, of which stories I want to focus on.  Welty, O’Connor, Faulkner, Wright, those are the usuals, but maybe I could find something new?

I merely turned one page, at that point, and there, on that page, lay a story I’d not only never read, but never heard of: “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson. Can you beat that?

So, I thought, well, hands aren’t perhaps a normal topic of conversation or blogging, unless you eat dinner at Nana’s on Sundays – let’s see what it’s about. Let’s read this story.

I was immediately struck by this unique and at first glance, blandly written piece of short fiction. Not the least of which was it’s not-so-subtle homosexual overtones, especially for something written in the 1910s. Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with Anderson’s thematic oeuvre but I was compelled by his fictional design in this particular story.

How sad the life of Wing Biddlebaum was. How misunderstood; note: due to an unfortunate incident, allegedly, with younger boys at the school where he used to teach, he was forced out of town and had to change his name.

Here, read this:

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.
     The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

His hands “alarmed their owner.” That’s bizarre and captivating to me. After you read the story, you’ll see why for yourself. He hides behind his hands and tries to manipulate them into the working class definition of “manual” labor of the other men in this town. He succeeds too well, you might say.

This will make sense after you read the story.

Another captivation: several times throughout the story, Anderson keeps stalling, suggesting that the “truth” of this story can’t be told except by a poet. A poet that Anderson refers to several times throughout the piece. And not just any poet, an obscure one.

To me, this is the beauty of the contrast.

Obscurity has no use for hands. A poet doesn’t either. All he needs is “an eye.” The difference is that truth exists in two forms: exposed for the eye to see, or through sleight of hand. The deceit of Wing’s lavish use of his hands is nothing short of a subconscious effort to trick the eye. Watch his hands and you never see the desperation that is in his face. The worry that drains him of “place” and “home.”

I mean for godsakes, re-read the first paragraph, again. He lives in a dilapadating house on the edge of a ravine.  He’s headed for a meltdown, and one that’s been boiling for the last twenty years.

Talk about a slow burn.

Sigh.

I just hope that’s not what Nana sees when she looks at me.

Guess I better scratch gloves off my Christmas list.

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There’s no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that’s found some way to stick, even to this day).

What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what’s being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still, when I found out that Navratilova was an honest-to-goodness lesbian who barely got the rights to animal visitation; I’d thought she was trying to sell her dogs on national television and had been arrested for it. I hadn’t realized that what I’d been watching was a court trial, of a “divorce,” per se.

This will be the death of me.

It’s not that there’s all that many places to see or drive by in my small, Haven Kimmel-sized hometown. It just gives us time to ourselves, to draw out the necessary conversations that seem to be so much a part of this post-Sunday Dinner ritual.

I always have to do the drive, in his Cadillac, while he sits in the passenger side regaling the same stories, world without end, that he does every Sunday.  Mrs. So-and-So used to live there in that house until her nephew got high on “the drugs” and broke in and bludgeoned her to death, and then dug up that gorgoues purple clematus, for no reason at all and left a big hole in the yard; or, that house is where Old This-and-That caught fire and burned to death when lightning struck his hot water heater, he was asleep, which you shouldn’t do in an electrical storm; you know, stories like that.

It’s too, too painfully southern.

I love every minute of them, though, I really do, despite the nature of this blog. I truly relish these drives.

And every now and then, he recalls a new story, a new moment shared, a story stolen, either at a funeral home, or at Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store that he affectionately refers to as The Pig, when writing his checks there. He used to concoct grocery lists in an aisle-by-aisle fashion, so familiar was he with their layout. It certainly maximized shopping time. Gave you more time to socialize. 

I’ll have to tell you later about an incident that involved a church scavenger hunt, a cucumber, and Miss Ada Lee.

Yesterday, though, as we drove past the sod-soaked fields and yards of our neighbors, the rain has truly been remarkable and of legend, here lately – I keep anticipating animals, approaching two-by-two, gathering on the carport, staring eagerly at the Cadillac, trying to figure out how to get into it. It’s a large Cadillac, and so, somewhat similar to an ark, at least, I’d think, to present-day animals, who I imagine are about as intelligent as the rest of us in the 21st century - yet, we found ourselves taking a new road, a different route, this time.  It was only new because we usually just drive past it and not down it, it’s a dead end, but we didn’t do that yesterday. No, sir.

We drove down it, to the cul-de-sac, and there at the end was a hearse.

U.L. told me that it was an old one, from Nowell’s. And that the man who lived in this house (the one we were practically in the driveway of , so I began to turn the car around before we aroused too much suspicion), had bought it. Because he wanted it. He did not, in fact, work at Nowell’s.

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said. 

This, U.L. discovered while purchasing some Cool Whip and fresh coconut shavings at Piggly Wiggly, preparing to make his celebrated Coconut Cake, and this man, we’ll call him Frank (because that’s his name) was standing behind him, bragging about the fact that he’d gotten a good deal on that death trap of a hearse at Nowell’s. It only had 40,000 miles on it, and they took six grand for it, as is.

To which U.L. registered surprise. The town indeed must be smaller than he thought. People died all the time around here; it was a hobby. To have only amassed 40,000 miles didn’t seem right. It should have higher mileage on it than that.

I'd rather not know what's in the back.

The man, Frank, now enjoyed driving the hearse down Highway 397, fast as he could (right up to 60 mph, he said), with his two dogs, part-Beagle/part-Yankee, he’d gotten them off a cousin in Chicago, a shovel, and a plastic tarp. He’d drive up and down 397  until he happened upon some version of roadkill, and as a free service to the city, he’d stop the car, pull the shovel out from the back (it had not come with the purchase of the car, as I’d thought) and delicately carry them off to a final resting place, one less likely to be continuously mowed over by Broncos…and Cadillacs.

I trust he had very well-behaved dogs.

U.L. said a hearse was the last thing he would want to ride in. Frank told him not to worry, it would be.

Every Sunday, we do this. Dinner, small talk, a car ride, the same stories, sometimes new ones, and I love it.

And…I also hate it.

All at the same time, I amass these feelings in my bones, in my blood, my knuckles, and it’s usually with a fork of mashed potatoes, or butterbeans, or peach cobbler on its way to my mouth. It’s a saturating, obligatory, exhausting, and lovely wont.

One that I’ve often felt suffocated by, and I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true, because it seems too rote, rhetorical to matter.  I’d never been able to put into anything other than a simple series of words…maybe I wasn’t able to give it better context, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to, because it was of a higher order of thinking than I was able to get to on my own…

…until this morning.

Amanda, having been gone this past weekend to a wedding (yet another one!) in Memphis, had finally returned home, laden with Pottery Barn accessories for the den and bathroom, and this morning, she was starved for my attention, as best friends often become when separated (I starve for hers, as well, and we both ache and starve for Siciliana’s, Erin’s, and vice versa…would that we could all be thinner from such friendly famine – which is just slightly less oxymoronic than friendly fire, to the soul, anyway), she came bounding into my bedroom and woke me up.

It was noon, so I, now that I’m fully awake, have forgiven her. But, in her usual way, she had a passage she wanted to share with me.  This is something we all do, and constantly, this sharing works with each other. Usually, Amanda has more profound (and, also, published) pieces to share with me: cummings, Yeates, Hurston, et al. She is, I’d argue, far more well read than any of us, especially me.

Despite being famously non-auditory in almost anything I do, I humor her and listen. It’s a selection from Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. From page 35, she read:

The child comes home, and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. [...] But this thing in itself is not love. It’s just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation.  

I heard every word of that.

I had to look at them, actually, I had to take the book and look at the words, themselves, I was that bothered by the accuracy of his prose. Once, during my first tryst with graduate school (in English), I took a Fugitive Poets class under the remarkably affable, fatherly, likable, and slightly off-key Dr. Phillips, and had read of Warren’s poetry, along with Davidson’s and the tragic Jarrell’s, which struck me less for its poignancy and more because he stepped in front of a bus and was killed, perhaps on purpose. I’d decided, as a poet, Warren’s work was soft, if terse, and what prose we read of his, I found suggestive of needing a closer editor…I felt that way about this piece as well, but somehow it didn’t matter in this context.

The original electric chair.

I was absolutely struck by the meaning, and remembered that meaning is what the reader gets to do, gets to fiddle around with…at least, ultimately.  (I’m a Fish advocate, Reader-Response, etc.). Critics, theorists can say whatever they need to (everyone needs a job, right?), but what resonates is if the reader takes up the mallet and strikes the gong.

Nothing else matters at all.

And this passage was so captively southern, so perfectly southern, so bitterly southern, that …it finally upset me. Warren had, all those years ago, in his novel about a corrupt politician, written down so clearly what I’d been trying to say myself. I guess that’s why I couldn’t: he’d already used the words. 

And had done so, so irreproachably.

I guessed then, after the reading was over, that the only way for me to climb to this higher order, is to do what he did, what they all did…

…just, take off for the open road, and find a quiet, muted place and live out the rest of my days, a fugitive.

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