Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

The Widow's Laugh

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 25

"The Lord destroys the possessions of the proud but cares for widows."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

There's so many documentaries and specials and docudramas and God-knows-what-all-else is just coming out of the woodwork and out of the static and out of the screen such that it's searing into your eyes, seeping in through your fingertips and sliding into your veins.

After all, tomorrow's November 22nd.  

Where were YOU.

I don't know where the hell my parents were.  I haven't asked them, and I probably never will.  It's not that important, not to them, not to me.  There are dishes to do, you know.  She was fourteen, discovering life guards in Atlantic City.  He was fifteen, one year away from trudging through Israel's deserts with a rifle in his hands and a 60-pound pack on his back.  

God only knows.

There was a piece on the radio today about how the Boston Symphony got interrupted midway through with the announcement that Kennedy had died.  Some members wanted to not play the rest of the concert.  It was decided that they would, that they would help the audience heal through their music.  I wonder if it worked.

One of the stories I read today was about Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit's widow.  Her name is Marie.  She's still living, a great-grandmother at 85.  

"He was a Christian man," she said of her husband, whom Lee Harvey Oswald shot dead as he was being questioned on a street in Oak Cliff.  "He went to church with the family; we prayed together. He was a good police officer. He loved his children, and I always knew that I was loved."

She always knew that she was loved.  I guess, even if you do lose your husband on some Dallas street for damn near nothing in the blink of an eye, it doesn't get much better than always knowing you were loved.  

You have this idea about widows-- what they're supposed to look like and talk like.  How they're supposed to be thin-lipped and sullen, staring at the floor, or out the window-- right through you.  They look right through.  They may laugh at something, later-- later, you know.  But it's different.  It's the widow's laugh.  And it isn't phony or tinny or forced.  It's sincere as can be, but it's broken, somehow.  Like a Limoges saucer with a chip in it-- still pretty and functional, but it's not 100%. 

My sister's a widow.  She's still pretty, and functional.  But she's not 100%.  She's broken somehow.  She's always been touchy and emotional.  Dramatic.  And I want to be of use to her, not to do things for her or to clean up after her, but to make her laugh or let her know that she is loved, but I find that I'm inept, fumbling, bumbling, stumbling.  It doesn't work.  It's not clicking.  It's not happening.  Something's broken somehow, not just in her, but in us.

Her husband was appallingly ripped away from her, not by a gunman's gruesome bullet, but by ravenous, voracious cancer; unceasing and insane.  At the funeral, she stared right through everyone; it was terrifying and I knew something was over somehow.  Some part of us as a family was over.  Maybe it had ended years earlier and I was just too self-involved to notice.  I used to call my mother, absolutely panic-stricken about how "our family is falling apart!" but not that it's happened, there's no more fear or anxiety about it.  After all, fear and anxiety are all about anticipation.  That's the stuff that all comes before.  

This is after.